Welcome the Balloon Browser+, a simple utility which does several unique, and maybe even useful, tasks.
This program has been available for several months and I have not heard of any major problems. I am always a bit surprised when my programs do what I want them to, but every once in a while they seem to. But maybe the reason I have not heard of problems is that no one has used it.
(In its first version, this program was named Balloon Popper. I have found that someone beat me to that name and am changing the name with this version.)
First some background. Several years ago Apple introduced a technology called Balloon Help, a very neat and useful way to give users help in applications. Unfortunately, cheap tools to implement this help were never developed very well, and as a result, there are a great many applications which do not have balloon help. (My applications have almost no balloon help because I have never been able to figure out how to do it.)
The simplest sort of balloon help, and one that I have been able to figure out, is a balloon help for the Finder. If one has the Finder running, and turns on Balloon Help (under the question mark on the menu), and then points at applications, they will have little balloons drawn above them with a message. This message is very easily customized with the addition of a 'hfdr' resource. (If you do not program, this may not make any sense to you--but do not worry--the details are not important.) As a result, lots of applications, especially those written by people who know what they are doing, have a little message in them that tells what they do.
The normal way to get this little message is with Balloon Help. However, it seemed to me that presenting this message in a different form might be very useful in some cases. If I have 100 applications, I do not want to go through and point to each of them to see what it does. I would rather have a list of them with a description. And that is what Balloon Popper does. It goes through a folder or a drive (including CD drives), finds all the applications on it, and sees if they have a finder balloon. If one does, the program tries to read it. Then the name of the application and its description, if any, are put into a list which can be saved.
Obviously such a program is most useful when the applications have finder balloons. But even if they do not, you may get some information. Well-written apps are more likely to have finder balloons than poorly-written apps, and the absence of a finder balloon may tell you that it is likely the application is not worth your time.
The original version of Balloon Popper was very simple with only one command, the Tabulate-Balloons command under the File menu. But then I found some other things I wanted to do that were very similar to what Balloon Popper did, and I added them to the program, changing its name to Balloon Browser +. The Plus parts of the program are described near the end of this help file, right before I tell you about the shareware fee I would like you to pay.
When you issue the command to Tabulate Balloons, you will get a dialog which asks you to select a folder. Select one, and the program will search though all the files in the folder trying to find those Finder balloons.
This program was written to help explore CD-ROMs, which can have hundreds or thousands of programs. I have written a number of other programs to help manage CDs, and as a result, most of the code for this program was already written, but it still was a challenge to get to work right. That is, assuming it does work correctly. It may have bugs, and there may be files which will crash it. I would like to know what files give you problems, though there is no guarantee that I will be able to fix the problems.
The program displays what it finds in an edit field, and this field is limited to 32,000 bytes of information. If the program needs more room than this to hold what it finds, it stores it in invisible edit fields (up to about 100K). You can not see this from within the program, but you can see it from a word processor if you press the save button and save it as an external file.
There are dividers before and after applications with finder balloons. If you see a ---***--- before and entry, it has a finder balloon. If there is a --------- before an entry, then the previous entry had a finder balloon, but this one does not. If there are a series of applications found without finder balloons, they are simply listed with no dividers.
Now for some technical stuff. Finder Balloons can have their help messages hidden in a number of different places: in the hfdr resource itself as a string, as a PICT (which Balloon Popper will not be able to read--but that should be obvious), as a STR# resource, as a STR resource, or in a TEXT resource.
The Plus or Bonus parts of the program:
After completing this program, I had a use for several additional and very similar features, and I added them onto Balloon Browser, which accounts for the + after the name.
The first addition was to peek into vers resources, which contain version and copyright information. Some of this information is displayed in the Get-Info window of the Finder. (You can see it by selecting a file and pressing CMD-I while in the Finder.) There are two vers resources that are of any interest, those with IDs of 1 and 2. The second string of vers 1 is shown in the Version line of the Get-Info window, and the second string of vers 2 is show right after the name of the file in the second line of the Get-Info window. I am not sure what the first strings are for, but you can set the vers options to see them if you want.
To read the vers information for a group of files, use the command Poetic-Bonus under the File menu. (Reading vers = reading poetry; thus poetic bonus.)
The Read-Signature command under the File menu is a second addition to the program and it requires some explanation. Each Macintosh file has a four-lettertype and a four-letter signature identifier. For an application to properly display its icons, it must have a resource with the same name as its four letter signature identifier. This resource usually has a copyright notice, but it can have other information (or have nothing in it at all). Moreover, any file can have this resource, and if the file does not have a vers resource of id 1, the Finder will look for information in the signature resource and display it in the Version line of the Get-Info window.
I added this feature because I wanted to look through a font CD I was given to see the copyright notices of the PostScript printer files, and that information is usually stored in a signature resource. I must say that it was a highly revealing exercise. Try it sometime on one of the cheap, shareware font CDs. (You can also try on one of my font CDs--I spend more time on font design than on programming--but you will not find much of interest there--everything is legal and ethical, which is not the case with many (most?) of the cheap shareware font CDs.)
So once again I started with a nice, clean program and messed it up adding stuff that was only semi-related. I hope that you will find these additions useful, but apologize if you are offended by the clutter.
Legal and Money Stuff:
This program is copyrighted 1996 by Robert Schenk. Report any bugs in the program, suggestions for improvements, or other comments to him at:
bobs@kagi.com
No warranty is given that this program will do anything useful for you or that it will even work as it is intended to work. All the standard software disclaimers apply to this program, stuff like if this program destroys your computer, do not blame me.
This program is shareware ($5). See the Register program which should be with this program for instructions on how to pay. $5 is not much, but I am not sure that the program will be of great value to a lot of people. If it is of value to you, vote for future improvements by paying the shareware fee. I have many shareware programs, not to mention commercial typefaces, and cannot afford to upgrade those which no one pays for (unless of course I find the upgrade personally useful).
I hope you enjoy this program and have fun with it.
Robert Schenk
August 1996
Acknowledgements:
Balloon Browser + was written in FutureBASIC from Staz Software. Icons were designed by Matthew Schenk.
