It is my belief that the only truly useful on-line help system is a graphical, interactive system where you can point to something and get instant information about it. Some programs do this by simulating a HyperCard stack. With the advent of Balloon Help, however, this has become obsolete. Balloon Help is a graphical, interactive system where you point at something with the mouse in order to get information about it.
Tester is therefore fully equipped with Balloon Help. You can turn it on at any time by using the Balloon Help menu in the upper right-hand corner of your menu bar.
Of course, Balloon Help can’t fully explain every nuance, and it is probably impossible to design a perfectly self-explanatory interface for any useful program.
I have therefore added this on-line manual to describe the concept and features of Tester. Pull down the Help menu for a list of topics.
This on-line manual is even “smart.” While editing or practicing a test, select “Help...” from the Apple menu (or press the “help” key on extended keyboards) to automatically select this window and display the section relevant to what you are working on.
If you have questions about how to use Tester or suggestions for improvements, please contact me. If you experience problems while using Tester, please contact me. My e-mail address is:
jafl@alice.wonderland.caltech.edu
I will usually be able to answer you within 24 hours.
Or you can send me regular mail at:
John Lindal
P.O. Box 4092
Point Dume, CA 90264
USA
If it is urgent, you can call me at (818) 795-4996 between 9AM and 6PM Pacific Time.
Ordering
If you haven’t paid for this program, please do so. It is always an immense task to write a program from scratch. The price is US$25 for a single copy and is negotiable for a site license. Please send your payment (check (paper, not rubber) or money order) to:
John Lindal
P.O. Box 4092
Point Dume, CA 90264
USA
and please let me know if you have an e-mail address. I won’t discriminate, so if you don’t have e-mail, I’ll send you Tester via regular mail. But it will be much easier for you if I have your e-mail address because I can then send you updated versions of Tester as soon as they are ready, and I can more easily answer any questions and deal with any problems you may have.
In addition, if you intend to let students use Tester over a network, please let me know so I can send you the network version (no extra charge).
Future Versions
If you have any suggestions for improving this program, please let me know. The program was, after all, written to help you. If you want to know how seriously I mean this, just consider the fact that I threw out Tester 0.10 (which ate one Christmas vacation) and spent three months re-writing Tester from scratch so that it could do what you need it to do.
Credits
Thanks to all those who patiently reported bugs and suggested new features. Thanks also to Martin Charest for designing the icons.
Disclaimer
I have tried to debug this program on all the common Macs. However, I can’t guarantee that it will work with all systems. If the program does crash, let me how it happened (the last thing you saw on the screen before the crash, error messages, and error numbers are very useful!), and I’ll do my best to fix the problem.
