This little utility will look up birthdays in the BIRTHDAY.ASC file and warn you of a birthday which is coming up in the next few days.
It is a little hack and just a few days old, so please don't start flaming me if something went wrong. It shouldn't do anything harmful. Any bugs, comments or suggestions, etc ... can be sent to my home address which I included at the end of this message or to my E-mail address. If you like it, you could send me a postcard.
BTW: you can also manage other important dates with this application. Because it is a text file a conversion of dates from one program to the birthday program shouldn't be hard to do. Send me a note if you have found other useful things to do with this little program.
1. The look-ahead time can be set by changing the number of days in STR resource 401.
2. The First message which is displayed can be changed in STR resource 400.
3. The font used can be changed by setting the font ID:
id font
---------------
0 systemFont
1 applFont
2 newYork
3 geneva
4 monaco
5 venice
6 london
7 athens
8 sanFran
9 toronto
11 cairo
12 losAngeles
20 times
21 helvetica
22 courier
23 symbol
24 mobile
of course there are many more fonts of which you can find the ID's by using ResEdit and looking in FONT resources of the system or font files.
4. The birthday coming up sound can be changed by replacing the SND resource 400 with something else.
5. The birthday today sound can be changed by replacing the SND resource 401. The currently used sound has been sampled from the coffee break bell at our control laboratory. (I work two floors lower so this is the best way to keep in touch :-)
6. Adding & modifying Birthdays:
you can add birthdates and names to the text file.
Keep in mind that European date format is used which is day-month in numbers.
The first two lines are ignored by the program; for humans only ;-)
Remember to add a colon : behind the date and to type in a name.
Put an alias of the Birthday application in the startup folder and keep the application plus data file in (for example) your utilities folder.
For system 6.x or older users:
Put the Birthday application and the data file in a folder. Select the Birthday application and select the Set Startup dialogue for the Special menu in the finder.
Important:
Always keep the data file BIRTHDAY.ASC together with the application Birthday and don't change the name of the data file.