Faraday is a simple application for monitoring the status of your Powerbook battery. The display has three sections showing the current battery voltage, the current CPU speed and a counter which displays how long you have been running without your Powerbook plugged in. You can also use it to make your Powerbook sleep and to turn Appletalk on and off.
About the Menus.
There is only one menu. The File menu which has four items. The first 'Display' lets you choose what you want Faraday to display. You can have the voltage alone, the voltage and the CPU speed, or the voltage and the CPU speed and the timer. The second item 'Sleep' will send your powerbook to sleep by sending a sleep event to the finder. The third item 'AppleTalk' will toggle appletalk on and off. The last item is the 'Quit' item. This causes Faraday to switch to a little known mode of the power manager which causes the battery to reach meltdown :-). No seriously it just quits the program, after all we are conforming to Apple's user interface guidelines.
The best way to use Faraday is to put it into your startup items folder and let it start up when you reboot your Powerbook. It takes up only a very small amount of desktop real estate and is fully multifinder friendly, so you can leave it running all of the time. It only requires 40K of RAM and a meagre 18K on disk. Now that's what I call small.
About the display.
The only part of the display that really needs explaining is the first section showing the battery voltage, charging status and three small icons.
The first icon represents the amount of battery life remaining. Faraday does its best to mimic the battery DA so that you don't need that open too. The next two icons are used as alternatives to the menu itmes for putting you powerbook to sleep and togglelink Appletalk. The leftmost icon showing Zz is the sleep button. Press this to send your mac to sleep. The second icon shows the current status of AppleTalk, hitting this toggles the Appletalk status. On-> Off and Off-> On. Note. Faraday will not be able to turn Appletalk on if it wasn't loaded at startup. To help prevent this Faraday always turns on Appletalk when it is Quit. This means that it should load the next time you restart your Mac unless you turn it off in another application.
The current battery voltage is shown and then following this is a character showing the status of the power adapter and battery power level. If the charger is plugged in you will see '•'. When the charger is unplugged you will see '°'. If the battery level falls so that you are running on reserve power the '°' will change to 'º',( this can also be thought of as a sideways lo :-). After these symbols you will see the word 'HI' if the battery is charging at the high rate. You can sometimes also get this even when the charger is unplugged. This is not a bug in Faraday but maybe one in the PowerManager? . The final symbol that you might see is '*' this will follow the HI and indicates that the battery is failing to charge correctly. This symbol will also be accompanied by a system beep sound.
About the counter.
The counter is reset each time you plug in the power adapter, even for a short time. If you put you powerbook to sleep while it is unplugged then the time it is asleep is not added to the counter so the counter represents the duration of your battery only session.
How to contact the author.
If you find any bugs or problems with Faraday then please let me know. If you have any suggestions for improvements then I'd like to hear them, but I cannot promise that I will be able to implement them. If you like the program please take the time to let me know. A postcard will be most appreciated
Send Reports & Postcards to:
Peter Hardman. Email phardman@ssci.liv.ac.uk
Redpoint Software Tel +44 (0)61 275 4640 (week-days)
Faraday is free. Please feel free to distribute it provided that this documentation is also included and that no charge is made for it other than duplication costs.
This may be included on any CD's or collections of Shareware software.
Application History.
v.1.0 First Release. (21-April-94).
v.1.1New features: The ability to put the Mac to sleep and also to toggle the status of Appletalk.
Bug Fixes: None :-)
v.1.1.1 Bug Fixes: Fixed a problem with the counter that stopped it from working correctly. I had left some of my development code in place :-(
v.1.2 Released (11-August-94)
The other versions 1.1 and 1.1.1 didn't make it to info-mac after getting lost in the post!
New features: Added an icon showing the amount of battery life left. This tries its best to mimic the Battery DA.
Bug Fixes: None :-)
P.S If anyone out there with a colour PB fancies trying to design a colour icons then I'd be glad to see them.
