Softdisk G-S issue 52

Softdisk G-S issue 52 © 1993 Softdisk Publishing

Contents:

Blackjack Tutor
The card game of Blackjack, also known as 21, is popular in casinos throughout the world. Many books have been written on developing strategies to beat the house, and some claim it is one of the few casino games in which skillful players can actually turn the odds to their favor. Blackjack Tutor allows you to create strategies and have your Apple IIgs test them out for thousands of hands to determine the weak and strong points. Once you’ve settled on a winning strategy, Blackjack Tutor will help you learn it. This is probably the finest implementation of blackjack ever done for the Apple Iigs.

SmartRestart
SmartRestart is a Finder Extension that helps you alter the way your GS shuts down and restarts. Exactly how it works is up to you! Options SmartRestart can give you include adding a new item to the Special menu called Restart, changing the standard ShutDown option to automatically shut down your system (instead of asking you what to do), changing or eliminating the “hot key” choices for shutting down or restarting, adding another “hot key” for automatically quitting to another application, and more. You decide how you want to use the Finder ShutDown options to suit the way you work. Simple and easy, this is a great item for any serious Finder user!

Roomer
This Finder Extension will be a godsend for anyone who ever does much file copying with Finder, especially you hard drive users. Have you ever tried to copy something to another disk, only to get the message (after several minutes) “Disk is full.”? I don’t know about you, but we find this very annoying, especially when we’re not sure what copied and what didn’t. Well, Roomer will add peace and contentment to your life. Okay, it may not be a Yoga substitute, but it will help you reduce your frustration level by figuring out before any file copy operation whether there will be room on the target disk. This is a faster, more efficient version of Roomer; the first version appeared a while ago here on Softdisk G-S, but those of you using the old version will find this a noticeable improvement.

AppleWorks GS
Fund-Raising: This AppleWorks GS database was created to aid people or organizations who engage in fund-raising activities. It also contains the basic elements of a good, solid mailing list template which could be applicable in many other situations. This database is ready for immediate use, so no knowledge of database construction is necessary unless you want to make your own modifications.

NiftyCalc
Occasionally, we do a little bragging around here. This month we have an excuse to do it again. NiftyCalc is far and away the best calculator NDA that the GS world has ever seen. That’s not too haughty is it? Try it——you’ll be amazed at its power, and wonder how you ever got along with any other calculator NDA. This sucker has everything—— full memory functions, sine, cosine, tangent, inverse functions, binary, decimal, and hexadecimal modes, plus more. Everything you could want out of a full-featured calculator. Indispensible for both everyday uses and programmer tasks.

Spencer’s Corner
The BattleAxe: Aside from Spencer’s usual array of common sense advice and neat tricks for users of IIgs paint programs, Spencer has given us another IIgs graphical masterpiece——Mrs. Conroe, the avatar of that universally known figure of the “old battleaxe.” Mrs. Conroe is guaranteed to get anyone’s attention and strike fear into the hearts of slackers everywhere. What fun!

WordFinder
WordFinder places letters on a 19 by 15 board with words hidden vertically and horizontally——both backwards and forwards. Take your pick from three different difficulty settings and watch as the clock ticks away. Beat the clock and move to the next puzzle! Can you solve all the puzzles?

WordWorks Pro Updater
We hope you’ll forgive us. When WordWorks Pro 2.1 shipped on issue #50, we thought we had not only completed the best IIgs word processor to date, but that it was as solid and bug-free as anyone could ask. Unfortunately, one little problem slipped by us just before we shipped the issue. The WordWorks Pro Updater will update WordWorks Pro 2.1 to version 2.1.1, fixing a bug that occasionally caused system crashes when importing raw ASCII text files with special or odd characters embedded in them. The circumstances under which this would happen are quite rare and rather esoteric, but it was serious enough that it warranted an update. So, just run the WordWorks Pro Updater, tell it where your copy (or copies) of WordWorks Pro are, and let it make the patch which will fix it. Then you can be sure of having the most bug-free and up-to-date version of WordWorks Pro there is!