The Meeting Watcher is a HyperCard stack that allows you to track the elapsed time and overall cost of business meetings. You first enter the names and hourly wages of potential meeting participants. You can then select any number of them to form a meeting. The stack takes care of computing the elapsed meeting time and the cost of the meeting based on the wages of those in attendance.
The Meeting Watcher is a shareware stack. If you keep and use it, please send the modest $5 shareware fee to: Doug Moxley • P.O. Box 17166 • Salem, Oregon 97305. Please feel free to make comments and/or suggestions about the stack as well.
You may freely copy and distribute The Meeting Watcher to others. If you do, please make sure that this Read Me file is bundled with the stack itself.
Using The Meeting Watcher
The remainder of this Read Me file is broken into categories which describe the various features of The Meeting Watcher…
• Running The Meeting Watcher
• Adding potential participants
• Forming a meeting
• Operating the meter
• Other features
• The Meeting Watcher menu
• Technical information
Running The Meeting Watcher
To run The Meeting Watcher, you'll need…
• HyperCard version 2.0 or later
• Macintosh system software version 6.0.5 or later
To open The Meeting Watcher, double-click on its icon from the Finder, or open it from within HyperCard using the Open… menu item.
Adding potential participants
On the Meeting Watcher opening screen you’ll see the Participants… button. Clicking on this button takes you to a card that lets you to enter information about potential meeting participants.
The scrolling field on the left side of the screen is where you keep a running list of everyone you might want to include in a meeting. You can make this list quite long—up to 30,000 characters or, on average, 1,000 to 1,500 individuals.
There is a tiny padlock above this field. The first time you use this stack, the padlock will probably be locked; you’ll want to unlock it before going on. The padlock works as a toggle. If it’s locked and you click on it, it will unlock and vice versa. Unlocking the padlock allows you to enter new names and hourly wages in the potential participants field.
If you unlock the padlock and move the cursor into the field, it will turn into an I-beam. You can now click on the next available line in the field and enter a new potential participant. The Meeting Watcher requires a simple format for the entry of potential participants: name, followed by a comma, followed by the hourly wage. You should not include a dollar sign (or other monetary symbol) in the hourly wage. It doesn’t matter if the comma is followed by a space or if the hourly wage runs right up next to it. Because the comma is used to separate the name from the wage, it’s important not to use a comma in the name. For example, you wouldn’t want to enter the people last-name-
first (Jones, Johnny) because the extra comma would throw off The Meeting Watcher.
When you enter a potential participant and press the return key, The Meeting Watcher will do some minimal error checking to make sure your new record is structured properly. It checks for dollar signs, extra fields, and the like. If it finds a mistake, it will highlight the line and bring up a dialog box explaining the problem and the solution. Errors are checked only in the last line of the field, so it’s a good idea to add new names at the very end of the list rather than somewhere in the middle.
You can enter as many names as you wish in the field. Each potential participant must be on a single line, be in the format above, and end with a return. When you’ve finished entering potential participants, click on the padlock and lock the field.
The Sort button allows you to sort the potential participants so you can easily find them when you want to form a meeting. Just click on the Sort button and the participants will be sorted alphabetically by name. If you have individuals you meet with frequently, put a space before their names. This will cause them to rise to the top of your list when it’s sorted.
Forming a meeting
Once you have a list of potential participants from which to draw, you can form a meeting for The Meeting Watcher to keep track of.
On the right side of the Meeting Participants List card is the current meeting field. You add meeting participants to the list by clicking on the name in the potential participants list (which highlights them) and clicking on the Add button. The participant’s name and hourly wage are copied from the potential participants list into the current meeting list.
To completely erase the current meeting list, click on the Clear button. This eliminates all of the individuals in the list.
You might also notice that the Remove button turns black when a name is selected in the potential participants list. Clicking on the Remove button when a person is selected will remove that person from the list.
The current meeting field is always unlocked. If you wish, you can manually add participants to a meeting (rather than unlocking the potential participants field, adding the person, and relocking the field). This is handy when a meeting involves someone you’re not likely to meet with very often. If you manually add meeting participants, be sure to use the next available line in the field (don’t skip any lines) and be sure to end each line with a return.
Operating the meter
When you’ve finished entering potential participants and forming the
meeting, click on the Done button. This will return you to the meter card.
There are two simple buttons which operate the meter: Start Meter and Reset Meter. The Start Meter button does what you might imagine: it begins ticking off seconds and calculating meeting costs based on the hourly wages of the participants in attendance. When the meter is running, the Start Meter button is grayed out; you must stop the meter before it becomes active again.
The Reset Meter button simply sets the elapsed time counter to 00:00:00 and the meeting cost to $.00 (or £.00 or ¥.00, depending on the current currency symbol selected). This button functions only when the meeting meter is not running.
The Meeting Watcher meter is a cumulative device. That is, you can stop and start it many times and it remembers its original starting time. Only when you click on the Reset Meter button does the counting start from zero. This means you can actually leave The Meeting Watcher, launch another application, and come back to The Meeting Watcher; the counters will continue where they left off and will “catch up” to the correct elapsed time and meeting cost.
Other features
On the meter card there is a button which toggles between “Hide Participant’s Wages” and “Show Participant’s Wages.” This allows you to hide the wages of meeting participants. This feature was included because of the sensitivity which sometimes surrounds pay scales.
A small instruction box (located just below the elapsed time meter) gives brief instructions about the use of the meter. The instructions are not nearly as detailed as these, but they serve as a reminder about the various options available in The Meeting Watcher.
The Meeting Watcher menu
There are several useful items in the Meeting Watcher menu that’s available when The Meeting Watcher is active: About Meeting Watcher…, Meeting Watcher Help, Sound Effects, and currency symbol choices.
The About Meeting Watcher… menu item displays a small window with copyright and shareware payment information.
The Meeting Watcher Help menu item displays a very abbreviated summary of the various features of The Meeting Watcher. You can use the scroll bars to find the help information you need.
The Sound Effects menu item is a toggled item: choosing the item alternately turns a clock tick on or off. A check mark indicates that the sound is on. The tick is only heard while the meeting meter is running.
The currency symbol choices allow you to customize the symbol that is placed before the monetary values displayed by The Meeting Watcher. You can choose between the dollar sign ($), sterling (£), or yen (¥) symbols.
Technical notes
The Meeting Watcher makes use of several specialized fonts which are included as resources in the stack…
LED Numerals (24 point) for the elapsed time counter
Chicago Hollow (12 point) for the greyed-out button effects
Helvetica Numbers (96 point) for the meeting cost
This is mentioned because most of these fonts have been heavily modified for use in this stack. To save space, all of the characters except the numbers and necessary punctuation marks in the large Helvetica font were removed. Be warned that copying these font resources may not give you all of the characters you expect!
The About… and Help windows make use of HyperCard 2.0’s new picture command. They are actually PICT resources which are stored in the stack. If your Mac is running low on memory, HyperCard may not be able to display these windows. If you’re using the Finder (as opposed to MultiFinder) and have two megabytes of memory, there should be no problem.
Shareware reminder
Please remember, The Meeting Watcher is a shareware stack. If you keep and use it, please send the modest $5 shareware fee to: Doug Moxley • P.O. Box 17166 • Salem, Oregon 97305. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
