Veil is ⌐1992 by Brian D. Davison. It is not in the public domain, but this version of Veil is being released as FreeWare. Thus there is *no* requirement, either moral or legal, to pay me for using it. I encourage you to give away copies of Veil, as long as it is accompanied by this document. I reserve, however, the right to change the conditions of future releases of Veil.
About Veil:
==========
veil (vt): to cover, obscure, or conceal with or as if with a veil.
Veil is a screen-saver init (extension) that blanks the screen after two minutes of user inactivity (i.e. no keyboard or mouse activity). It does not provide any cute graphics or swirling patterns while preserving your screen, nor does it run on shutdown. Because of all this, it is quite small (<3K). It is also free.
Contents of Veil package:
=======================
There are four files that make up Veil.
Ñ Veil - The main screensaving INIT.
Ñ Veil_Panel - An optional control panel (currently not implemented) that also displays Veil startup icons. (Thus, Veil_Panel is essentially superfluous in this release.)
Ñ About Veil - The file that you are reading now.
Ñ Release Notes - List of changes, updates, and bug fixes in each version.
How to use Veil:
==============
System Requirements: System 6.0.4 or later.
To install Veil, drag it onto your System folder icon. If you wish to install the optional Veil_Control, do the same to it. Then reboot your Mac. If you have installed Veil_Control, it will display a compact mac with an empty screen which will then fade quickly to black.
The control panel in Veil_Control is currently non-functional, thus the two minute setting is not user-configurable [at least in this version], nor are the startup icons [except by removing Veil_Control]. Also, if you want to turn Veil off, take it out of your System folder or use something like Extensions Manager to move it for you. Note that since it installs a patch into your system, you will have to reboot to really turn it off.
Known Bugs:
===========
Veil is known not to work correctly on machines with multiple monitors. This bug was reported in version 0.1, but I don't believe that this has been fixed in this release. If you have a suggestion about what to do about this, I'd be glad to hear it.
There are certain items that will be written to the screen, even when Veil is blanking everything out. This happens, for example, when a disk is inserted - if the finder was visible before blanking, then the outline of the disk that was inserted (and probably all other mounted drives) are redrawn, and are visible, even though the rest of the screen is black. To prevent this from staying on, the screen is blanked every time the code for Veil is run, so in this version of Veil you will see the disks appear, but then they are erased (from the screen).
Also, under certain conditions (Print Monitor comes to mind) the cursor is sometimes not hidden when the rest of the screen is blanked. I don't have any ideas about how to fix this for now.
Veil has also been reported to rearrange (non-disk) items on the desktop when the screen is redrawn. Since I have not been able to reproduce this effect consistently, I am unable to provide a fix for this problem.
I have also noticed that when using an Apollo keyboard short-cut to switch between applications, Veil is disabled. This does not occur when using the System 7 application menu to choose a new application to be brought to the front.
Disclaimers:
===========
My employers and the university I attend have no connection with this project.
The author makes no warranties, either express or implied, regarding the fitness of this software for any particular purpose. Use it at your own risk. The author claims no liability for data loss or other problems caused directly or indirectly by this software.
Credits:
=======
Veil is based substantially on Blanket, by Christopher Tate at the Pennsylvania State University. His code is ⌐1991 but gives anyone the right to freely modify the code and use it in other programs. I thus give credit to him for the code which I have quite liberally used in Veil.
Veil_Panel uses Ken McLeod's CShowINIT, which is a C translation of Paul Mercer's ShowINIT routine to display the startup icons. Thanks to both of them for this useful routine.
Veil was developed using Symantec's ThinkC 5.0 on a Macintosh Classic.
And thanks to Veil's beta testers: Mitch Blumenfeld, Jeff Kline, Roland P. May, David S. Pieczkiewicz, and Tom Smolko.
Other Notes:
===========
As you may notice by the version number, I do not consider this to be a final release. Veil currently provides very basic functionality but does little else. I am working on adding a control panel as well so that Veil may be turned off, its startup icons turned off, and the timeout for inactivity may be changed. In addition, I am considering suggestions for adding sleep and wake corners, Veil activation on shutdown, and drawing some kind of simple graphics to show that the Mac is on, etc. In any case, I plan to keep additions and options separate from the main screensaver, so that users will continue to have a simple, very small screensaver available. I also expect that more bugs or incompatibilities will be found (and hopefully fixed in future versions).
Thus said, the heart of this code has been tested on several machines under a number of versions of the system, including System 7.0.1 w/ TuneUp 1.1, and appears to be fairly stable. However, I do not recommend using it on machines with anything older than the 128K ROMs.
Lastly, the signature 'Veil' has been registered with Apple, so I would be interested in hearing about any conflicts.
In any case, I would appreciate any suggestions, comments, complaints, feedback, and of course, donations are always accepted.
I can be reached:
Internet:
davison@paul.rutgers.edu (prefered)
or, US Mail:
Brian D. Davison
Dept. of Computer Science
Hill Center for the Mathematical Sciences, Busch Campus
