A Look At "Best Of Fish Disk 84"   

			      by Mitchel Hopping


   Ed: Here's a review of a typical PD disk - Mitchel ordered it for a
  particular program and found himself browsing through the rest of them with
  some interest.


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   The MegaDisc catalogue reveals that Leon Jarvis has culled the Fish
  collection of disks to leave only the most useful programs. Those programs
  become Best Of Fish Disks. Having recently acquired No.84 in the Best Of
  Fish series from MegaDisc I should like to say a few words about it.

   The disk contains eight programs, not all of which are of interest to me,
  and I will describe them to the best of my ability. The programs are fully
  iconised and all run from the Workbench.

 BUTEXCHANGE:  This program reverses (exchanges) the functions of
  the mouse buttons so that the left button operates as the right button and
  vice versa, making it possible for people who use the mouse with their left
  hands to make selections with their forefinger, the more instinctive
  finger. When the program is invoked, a neat window opens with advice that
  ButExchange has been installed. ButExchange appears to have no effect upon
  the middle button of my mouse which continued to function normally in
  moving the Directory Opus window back and forth.

 FREECOPY:  This program's document file explains that FreeCopy
  will strip the copy protection from copy-protected disks so that they can
  be freely backed-up and perhaps installed on a hard disk. The method of
  operation is that you make a copy of the copy-protected disk with your
  favourite copy program, then run FreeCopy to remove the copy-protection
  from the copy you made. The documents do not tell you which programs
  FreeCopy is expecting from the user but upon running it, FreeCopy presents
  the user with a list of names, at least seventy in number and almost all
  games. When the user chooses one of the names, a requester pops up asking
  for that disk to be inserted. I don't have any of the named programs, so,
  for the sake of testing, I made a selection and put in a disk of a
  different name, but, as expected, FreeCopy rejected it.

   GENESIS: A demo version of a commercial program for generating
  and rendering fractal landscapes. It looks as if it could be very
  interesting to someone interested in such things.

   INPUTLOCK: Does the patter of paws on the keyboard interfere with
  your work as soon as you leave your desk? If so, this program may be your
  salvation. When InputLock is installed, the keyboard and mouse can be
  locked by pressing three particular keys. Unlocking is achieved by again
  pressing those keys. Mouse-pointer and screen blanking by Zoom!, a blanker
  I have been using, is not affected by InputLock although the screen cannot
  be un-blanked while InputLock is locking mouse input. Something to note is
  that the computer can be re-set while the lock is on.

   NOERRORS: Don't throw away those floppy disks with hard errors
  that cause read-write error messages. Make them usable with NoErrors. It
  is not for nothing that its icon makes one think of Lazarus rising from the
  dead (or the grave, the icon is a tombstone being thrust aside from below.
  On selection, the image becomes a floppy disk). Better still, check your
  new disks before using them.

   NoErrors will format the disk and check it for errors. If an error is
  found NoErrors writes to that specific area of the disk so that no other
  program can use it, thereby saving you from the normal consequences of hard
  errors on your disk. The documents warn that writing put on the disk by
  NoErrors can be lost if the disk is formatted again or copied to by a means
  other than file by file. NoErrors' screen provides a choice of four disk
  drives, four hard disk partitions and four other choices the significance
  of which escapes me but are perhaps intended for those with more than one
  hard disk.

   PICSAVER: This is a screen grabbing utility. It will allow the
  user to save a screen, a window or any rectangular part of a screen as an
  IFF-ILBM file which can be used in most paint programs. Another use to
  which I have put such a saved image is to save an extract of a document
  file to later refer to it with a reader such as FullView (which displays
  IFF files). The screen saving program which I have been using to date
  gives no indication that it has been loaded successfully. Its documents
  say that you just need to trust that it has loaded and proceed. That trust
  is not called for with PicSaver because a small window opens to tell the
  user that PicSaver is installed.

   The means of operation is, once the screen contains that which is to be
  saved, hold down three qualifying keys and a letter key ("s" to save the
  whole screen, "w" to save the chosen/active window), or if you wish to save
  only a portion press the three qualifying keys and a cross-hair appears on
  the screen. Place the cross hair at the corner of the chosen segment with
  the mouse, press the left mouse button and stretch the rectangle. When
  satisfied, release the button. A requestor appears in which you name the
  file (e.g. Df1:Text) and it is saved for posterity. There is a screen
  flash to let you know things are O.K. and Bob's your uncle.

   PWKEYS: This program has a lot of functions and it is the program
  I had in mind when ordering the disk. It will take a little longer than
  the others to describe.

   All functions of PWkeys are fixed but the keys that call them can be
  re-defined by the user. I am using it with the default settings as they do
  not clash with any other program I am using. As it comes, PWkeys is a
  mouse-pointer blanker and screen blanker without options within the program
  to turn these functions off. The default times for the blankers can be
  altered in the configuration program (supplied) and the action of blanking
  can be turned off there.

   There is a mouse-pointer accelerator which can be toggled on and off by
  key presses. Different key presses toggle the "sun mouse" function,
  meaning that when toggled on, the function makes the window beneath the
  mouse pointer the active window without the need to click the mouse. An
  unexpected (to me) benefit of this function is that when I return to a
  screen after doing something on another screen, the old screen is
  automatically activated when the pointer is on it. In case that last bit
  is as obscure as I fear it might be I give an example: Suppose you are
  entering information in a word processor and, needing to check on
  something, you click the gadget in the upper right corner to return to the
  Workbench, open a document file and after finding what you want, click the
  gadget to return to the word processor. You now have to click the mouse in
  the window to activate it. You will probably find that the cursor is not
  where you left it so you must now move it back. With this "sun mouse" (I
  don't know why it is usually shown in inverted commas) function, as soon as
  the pointer is in the window the cursor starts blinking right where I left
  it.

   A further function of this program is that it will move the active window
  on the Workbench to the top, bottom, side, etc. of the screen by your
  holding qualifier keys and one of the numeric keypad keys. If, instead of
  the keypad keys, you press the cursor keys, overlapping windows are moved
  forward and back. There is also an anti-cat input lock and an ability to
  add a bit-plane to the screen. (I don't know what a bit-plane is but it
  has made my text change to green as I enter this).

   Perhaps the most intriguing function of PWkeys is the ability to make the
  active window (provided it has a sizing gadget) larger or smaller by key
  presses.

   TAPECOVER: This program lets you print paper inserts for audio
  cassette cases. Usage is to enter in the requestor provided by the program
  the name of the recording and the titles of the tracks and print the
  result. Provision is made for entering each side separately, one line at a
  time. When the tape cover is printed each line is numbered by the program,
  there being twelve lines in all per side. The size of the text is quite
  small in order to fit the details in, making it a little difficult to read
  with the naked eye of one who needs reading glasses. Additionally,
  TapeCover prints the name of the recording in larger type such that it will
  fit in the clear end of the cassette case. There is a save function and
  what the documents describe as VCR controls at the bottom of the screen to
  move through the saved (or within the same session, unsaved) covers. It is
  very neat and works well, if one makes allowances for apparently
  unavoidable restrictions in line length. The Maximum length of side titles
  is about thirty characters and of track titles about twenty seven
  characters. By turning the paper over and re-inserting it in the printer
  you can cut four cassette covers from a sheet of A4 paper. Scissors are
  not supplied.

   C: DIRECTORY: The c: directory contains IconX, Most and Xicon.
  For these programs there are neither icons nor documents.



						Mitchel Hopping
						April 1993


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