Who remembers to look at calendars? I have to put something on the Mac to make sure I'm going to see it.
Yes, there is already software available to do this, but again, if you are like me, you can’t afford an expensive product that you will never use 90% of. Thus, the Notify system, which uses a Control Panel for a user interface and, for posting messages, uses the same Macintosh Notification Manager that most people first met as “Print Monitor has a problem printing. Please bring Print Monitor to the front.”
Since it depends on the Notification Manager, Notify will run only in System 6.0 or later. In order to use Notify, it must be placed in the System Folder for System 6.0.x or the Control Panels folder for System 7, and then the Mac must be rebooted.
When the Notify Control Panel is first opened, the display looks like the above. The “Edit” and “Delete” buttons are active only when a message is selected in the list, in which case the “Edit” button is the default rather than “New”.
If there are any messages in the list, they may be selected either by clicking on them, or by typing the up or down arrows.
To enter a new message, select the “New” button.
The “Show startup icon” checkbox controls whether the Notify icon will be displayed as Notify is installed at system startup time.
Keyboard shortcuts—
<Return> or <Enter> selects the outlined button, either “New” or “Edit.”
<N> (without the Command key) will always select the “New” button.
New Messages:
Upon selecting the “New” button, the above dialog is displayed. “Date” and “Time” designate the first time the message is to be displayed. The time may be entered in 12 or 24 hour. (Seconds are ignored if entered.)
Note that messages are restricted to 240 characters. This is because the Macintosh Notification Manager will only display 255 characters, and Notify reserves some of them to display the date and time of the message.
The Return key is significant within the message text. <Command-X>, <Command-C>, and <Command-V> have their normal clipboard interaction of Cut, Copy, and Paste. In System 7, these commands are also accessible from the Finder’s Edit menu.
The rectangle labeled “Don’t Repeat” is a pop-up menu with the choices “Don’t Repeat,” “Repeat Daily,” “Repeat Weekly,” “Repeat Monthly,” “Repeat Annually,” and “Repeat Every…” Selecting an item on this menu designates how often the message should be displayed. If “Repeat Every…” is selected, new text items are displayed to allow the the exact repeat interval—in days, hours, and minutes—to be typed in.
The two radio buttons in the upper right corner, along with the list below them, designate the sound that will accompany the message when it is displayed. Selecting the “Default Beep” button uses the default system beep sound, or selecting any name from the list will use that sound. Selecting the “Silent” button uses no sound at all.
Messages are ordinarily displayed at the exact time for which they are scheduled, but when the Mac is powered up, there may be a backlog of messages overdue to be displayed. The “Timeout” checkbox designates that a message that is too old to be of significance should be discarded instead of displayed. The items to the right of the checkbox allow the meaning of “too old” to be specified.
Clicking the “Cancel” button discards the message and returns to the Control Panel.
To store the message, click the “Save” button. For convenience, when the dialog comes up, “Date” and “Time” will contain the current date and time, but the Save command will not exit the dialog unless they are changed to designate at least one minute into the future.
If the “Save defaults” checkbox is checked when the message is saved, the selected Repeat interval, Timeout interval, and sound will be saved as defaults for subsequent new messages.
Keyboard shortcuts—
<Command-Period> or <Escape> selects the “Cancel” button.
<Command-S> selects the “Save” button.
<Command-T> toggles the “Timeout” checkbox.
<Command-1> selects “Don’t Repeat” from the pop-up menu.
<Command-2> selects “Repeat Daily.”
<Command-W> selects “Repeat Weekly.”
<Command-M> selects “Repeat Monthly.”
<Command-A> selects “Repeat Annually.”
<Command-E> selects “Repeat Every…”
Editing Existing Messages:
To edit an existing message, or just to view the entire text of the message, select the message in the Control Panel display, then click on the “Edit” key. The same dialog will be displayed as for the “New” command, except that the “Delete” button will be active. To store the changed message, click the “Save” button. Clicking “Delete” (or typing <Command-D>) will remove the message from the system. Just as in the “New” command, checking the “Save defaults” checkbox will save information in the defaults.
The Edit command is also invoked by double-clicking on the message in the Control Panel.
Deleting Messages:
To remove a message, select it in the Control Panel display and click the “Delete” button (in System 6.0.x, <Command-D> is equivalent to this button). Or you can look at the entire message, then use the Edit dialog’s “Delete” button as mentioned above.
Notes:
1. The maximum number of messages that can be in the system at any one time is 64 (up from a previous 32).
2. Message text is stored in the data fork of the Notify control panel file. The application “Copy Notify” will copy messages from one Notify file to another.
How much would you pay for a program that does all of that? $19.95? But wait! That’s not all! It’s compact and efficient too! It only consumes 28 to 35K of your disk and 5K of your System heap, and steals virtually no time from other programs! Now what would you pay? $29.95? Or $44.95 with Ginsu knives?
No way! This is freeware. (And sorry, but the knives are not included.) That means that I don’t intend to make any money on it, but I retain copyright and don’t want anyone else making money on it either.
Personally, I would think that having someone to remind me of every little thing would be worth mega. [Hey, we ARE allowed to dream, aren’t we?]
Steve Stockman
1325 W. Bewick
Fort Worth TX 76110
817-924-9256
CI$: 76507,2646
Source code available for anyone who cares. (122K normal, 41K Stuffed. Please send CI$ ID, or a dollar, or a blank disk with SASE.)
Version History:
1.0 Original. (Lightspeed C 3.0)
1.1 Worked some bugs out.
1.2 Moved from 7-crashy to 7-friendly, including Balloon Help on Control Panel. (Think C 4.0.5)
2.0 Added sounds, added Repeat menu, associated timeouts with individual messages, restructured message scheduling so that it steals much less time. (Think C 5.0)
2.0.1 Got Balloon Help working in the Message Editor. (Think C 5.0.1)
2.1 Restructured message allocation so that it is much easier to change the maximum number of messages, now at 64. Also pulled some things out of resources and into program data to cut down on system heap usage. Built “Copy Notify” utility application. (Think C 5.0.1)
2.1.1 Fixed the delay so that Notify will be touched every five minutes. (Think C 5.0.1)
2.1.2 Invoked International Utilities for handling dates and times in accordance to local preferences. Also fixed two bugs: a) deleting the last message in the file could cause an end-of-file error later; b) display update sometimes got Address Error bomb on 68000 Macs. [Hey, I’ve only had 020’s and 030’s for five years! No such animal as Address Error.] (Think C 5.0.2)
2.2 Added “Save defaults” checkbox to Message Editor. Also, fixed a problem with preferences sometimes not being saved. (Think C 5.0.2)
