Softdisk G-S issue 80

Softdisk G-S issue 80 © 1996 Softdisk Publishing

Contents:

The Deep Blue
Explore The Deep Blue and learn about pirates and shipwrecks of the Caribbean. The simple interface and easy-to-use format will make it a snap to use. Read about salvaging shipwrecks, Black Bart, Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, the HMS Winchester and more! Then, for fun, try out the built-in quiz.

Icon List
Icon List scans all your disks to find Finder icons and prepares lists of available icons sorted by file type. You can select the type you are interested in and open a window displaying those icons. A most impressive utility——reminiscent of the Bryan Zak style of programming.

Jam Break
Jam Break is based on the principle that you should be able to make, yourself, awesome-sounding music by pounding away mindlessly at your keyboard. When you open the NDA, you might be tempted to just start the music and then randomly hit keys and see what happens. So do that. It’s a lot of fun.

WhatchaPress
The extended character set is cool. It lets you use fancy stuff like “curly quotes”, foreign characters, the trademark symbol, the copyright symbol, and all those other cahracters that give your writing that stylish professional look. The problem is, of course, remembering how to get those characters to appear. You know it’s the option key plus SOMETHING… but what? Is the copyright symbol option-c? No. Is the curly quote option-quoation mark? No. What are they, then? Well, you could hunt around inside your cluttered desk drawers for some chart to search through… or you could use the WhatchaPress NDA.

MightyQuotes
Curly quotation marks (like “this”), curly single quotes (like ‘this’), and curly apostrophes (somethin’ like that) are cool. But they can also be a pain. If you are typing in a word processor such as ShadowWrite that doesn’t support “smart quotes,” you have to remember the special option-keys for the curly quotes and type them in. Even if your word processor does support smart quotes, what if you import an ASCII text file, which can only have straight quotes? Or you want to change your document to use a font that doesn’t have curly quotes? Or you want to export your document as ASCII text? Well, here’s where “MightyQuotes!” comes to your rescue.

Clip Art
Dogs: This month we’ve gone to the dogs – literally! Check out our dog pound full of lovable pooches ranging from a dachshund and a poodle to a golden retriever and beagle, ten dogs in all! They’re sure to win a place in your heart!

Spencer’s Corner
Drummer Boy: I guess you probably think that this graphic is of a bright-eyed but none-too-astute boy whose hat is on fire (I suspect this because my wife came in as I was finishing it up and exclaimed, “My God! Why’s his hat on fire”). But the fact of the matter is – as you’ll be able to see when you view the page as a whole – that what you have here is the traditional drummer boy symbol standing in front of a candle (so we may properly say, perhaps, that his hat is not yet on fire). In any case, I hope you’ll find him a worthwhile spokesman for your Sunday School Christmas pageant, your annual Christmas Party at the local firehouse, or maybe, at least, a winter convention of Pyromaniacs Anonymous. Use your imagination. If that doesn’t work, try wracking your brain.

IIGS’s on the World Wide Web
Using AOL and Netscape, we’ll search all over the Web for interesting SDGS information. Surf over to this article to find the latest sites that might strike your fancy.