zapToFront is a FreeWare application with one purpose in life - to bring another application to the foreground under System 7. Since this is something that can be done from the menubar already, this may not seem to be a great feat, and it’s not really. I do find it useful however as the last item (alphabetically speaking) in my Startup Items folder so that I'm always in the Finder when I start. (If you want to rearrange the order of the other “Startup Items” try renaming them - but you can’t do that for the Finder).
How do I use it?
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To use it as I do (to leave a startup item in the foreground) just “set the target” (see below) and put it in your Startup Items folder inside the System Folder. If you want to use it otherwise, then anytime you run zapToFront it will search for the “target” application and (if it is running on your Mac) bring it to the foreground.
What is the “target” and how do I set it?
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The “target” is the application that zapToFront brings to the foreground when it is run. To set the target in the System 7 Finder, drag its icon over to zapToFront and “drop” it on the zapToFront icon (very similar to dropping an icon into a folder). The default target is the System 7 Finder.
The target’s name can be found by selecting zapToFront in the Finder and using the “Get Info” command from the File menu. Note - if you rename the target, the old name will remain in the Get Info window, but zapToFront will continue to find the program. (The name is updated when the target is reset - and due to the way the Finder works you may have to open and close a few windows or restart the Machine before the new target name shows up.)
Note: zapToFront is not picky about its target and will let you set it to any file - however if you set it to a document, you will get complaints from zapToFront when run that it cannot find the target - since documents are almost never run. (Exceptions include Think C projects running under the Debugger - but then zapToFront will bring any project to the foreground since it memorizes the target by file type/creator and not names...)
What do I need to run zapToFront?
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System 7.0 or later and a Macintosh with at least 32k of free memory (64k is preferred). [zapToFront has been tested on a Mac II running System 7.0 + TuneUp 1.1.1
and on a Mac IIsi runnning System 7.0.1 + TuneUp 1.1.1]
What are the technical details behind zapToFront?
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For details on finding and foregrounding processes, see the “Process Manager” chapter of Inside Macintosh, Volume VI (or I assume it will also be in the “Processes” volume of the New Inside Macintosh, which I haven’t actually seen a copy of yet...)
The target is stored as a type code and creator code in the 'Zot!' 128 resource of zapToFront. (If the 'Zot!' 128 resource is missing, the target becomes the Finder.)
The name of the target when it was set is stored in the 'vers' 2 resource.
What are the legal details behind zapToFront?
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zapToFront 1.0 is copyrighted by Alan Coopersmith. All rights are reserved by the author. The zapToFront 1.0 package may be copied, used, and distributed by anyone
You can also try e-mail to the Internet address alanc@soda.Berkeley.EDU, but I currently log in about once a month, so don't expect fast turn around time.
(as you may have noticed, Ogden, UT is about 800 miles and a good bit of long distance modem time away from Berkeley.EDU....)
