No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.
This month I cover a few useful free and shareware system extensions.
Some long-time Mackers take a perverse pride in how many rows of extensions and control panels display during the "march of icons" at system startup. I have 73 that load, some of which are application-specific or print drivers, but most of them are optional, third-party items I load to make my machine run better. Takes up only 1.8 rows, but I have a big monitor; on my old IIci I had 4.5 rows. A few people in PMUG would call me a dilettante....
To touch briefly on the subject of speed: all these extensions may dramatically, or just subtly, slow a system down but increase productivity because they simplify an operation or add functionality that is just plain missing in the first place. My system is a PowerMac 7100 with 17" monitor set at 1024x768; 24 megs RAM doubled to 49 with RAM Doubler.
RAM Doubler by Connectix, Inc. is the first extension I recommend for every Mac, 68020 or higher. Whether you have a 4-meg PowerBook 145 or a full-blown 9500, this little trick, the hit of the 1994 Macworld Expo and now in version 1.5.4, lets you run many extra applications by stealing RAM from the programs running in the background (sort of--actually it is a complex combination of tricks and paging operations). You still have to limit the RAM assigned to any individual application to the amount of physical RAM (less that used by the System) you have, but you can open so many more applications at one time (Fig. 1). There are very few known conflicts with RAM doubler, but I occasionally turn it off when running Typestry, a 3D text rendering program, and certain Director-produced multimedia files. There is a slight penalty in speed but since RAM Doubler pages memory out of background applications instead of just writing to disk (like standard Virtual Memory does), the drop is barely noticable. Wonder of wonders, this has been ported to Wintel machines.
First and primary advantage it gives you is a shorter menubar. Fig. 2 shows the PageMaker 5.0 menu in both Chicago, the standard system font, and its Menuette equivalent. Such a dramatic saving of space makes a real difference on a standard 640x480 monitor (14"), especially if the right side of the menubar is beginning to get crowded with icons from PopChar (see last month), PGP, CE Toolbox, menu clocks, eyeballs and whatall.
The next thing Menuette lets you control is the font displayed in the menus. Personally, I hate Chicago. It's an ugly, chunky font that is all verticals and no horizontals. Substitute any font in your Fonts folder for Chicago, or even dump the icon option entirely and just use it for font-replacement.
The Menuette control panel (Fig. 3) lets you import icons from applications or create your own. You can change any menu title's icon for any other, or delete one if you want to see an English title in with the icons. Menuette does this on its own when you load an application that has not had all the menu titles specified; it substitutes icons for any common title like Window, Tools, and of course File, Edit and View. As an added benefit, it becomes difficult for the casual office browser to mess with your system if he can't understand the menus. Plus, it just makes your Mac look cool!
Download Menuette. (128K)
Move the trackball on a passive-matrix Mac and the cursor "submarines," that is, disappears only to reappear when it stops moving. But where is it? On a large monitor with a complex PageMaker, Illustrator or Photoshop document, it can get lost in the background image. Just look at the eyeballs, however, and they are looking at the cursor. Follow their line of sight and there it is. But really, let's not fool anyone; Eyeballs is just fun. The difference between the two? Eyeballs is black and white; MyEyes also has configurable options for color of the pupil and the eyelids. It costs $10 shareware and was developed in Italy.
Download Eyeballs (2.5K)
Download MyEyes (57K)
Current version is 2.3.0 and costs $10 shareware. 2.2.0, however, does not expire after being used awhile but works with all Macs.
Download ColorSwitch 2.2.0 (67K)
Helium, now in version 2.1.1, turns the balloons into useful items by temporarily toggling them on when a specified hot key combination is held down (Fig.5), disappearing when released. Apple should immediately buy this and install it in all Macs. It may be too late, however, as most developers have largely abandoned help balloons (Eudora is a notable exception) in favor of AppleGuide, which is overkill for all but beginners.
Download Helium (39K)
Beware; these INITs (Apple's original term for extensions) and panels can become addicting. Never load a whole bunch in at once; if you have a conflict between any of them you will get a lot of crashes and it will be a bear to find out which is causing the trouble. Add one at a time and live with it for a while before adding another.
Plan on purchasing more RAM if you want a lot of these. RAM Doubler won't help a bloated system heap, which should never be larger than half the size of your physical RAM. The basic rule: You can never have too fast a processor, too much RAM or too large a hard drive.
No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.
email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)