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Tidbits from Corvallis' Mouse Droppings



Author: from Mouse Droppings
Date: September, 1989
Keywords: tips tricks hints virus DTP desktop publishing word processing
Text: For all those times when you want to move a graphic or a text block just a wee bit, with great accuracy, try Easy Access. It lets you move selected objects one pixel at a time in any direction. Command/Shift/Enter puts you into Easy Access mode. Now use the keypad to nudge the object one pixel at a time. * * * Do you know what a ''pull quote'' is? It's a phrase from an article which is enlarged and displayed in the middle of a column or a page as a graphic element to heighten interest in the story (and to break up the gray of the type. H.L.S.) For easy pull quotes in PageMaker, select and Copy the desired phrase or quote. Paste it in the pasteboard white area outside the page. Change type size, style and font as desired. Cut the quote. Paste it into the Scrapbook. Now, using the Place command (not paste) position the quote. Since it is now a graphic, you can wrap text around it, resize it, or distort it. * * * Locked disks do not get viruses. * * * If you have one of the new 1.44 meg SuperDrives, do NOT use those yellow plastic inserts to protect the drive in transit. The SuperDrive has built-in safeguards and the yellow inserts can actually damage the drive. * * *
Here is a quick guide to graphic objects and patterns in HyperCard: * Card buttons and fields hide, or are on top of, card graphics * Background buttons and fields are hidden by card graphics * Card graphics cover background objects * Background graphics cover nothing, since they are the bottom-most layer. * To show objects, you must work around them when using graphics on the card layer. * * * Apple reportedly spent $7 million in 1988 on promotional T-shirts. How many faulty power supply boards could Apple take care of with $7 million? Nah! They'd rather pass out T-shirts. * * * In a contest at Argonne National Labs, a Macintosh completed a problem consisting of 700,000 arithmetic operations in less than three minutes. Never mind that a Cray did it in .004 seconds, since you already own a Mac and definitely have three minutes to spare. * * * Every time I pick up a MUG newsletter I read more weeping and wailing about the demise of MACazine. People liked it because 1) it had a better ratio of ads to copy, 2) it dared to damn Mac products when they deserved it, and 3) it was more for ''the rest of us'' than for the Fortune 100, 200, 500 or 1,000. Folks that is why MACazine failed. To recap: 1) it didn't get enough ad revenue, 2) advertisers wouldn't advertise in a magazine which might bit the hand which fed it, and 3) advertisers are aiming more and more at those Fortune XXX companies, not ''the rest of us.'' Let's hope MacGuide will beat the odds and give us what we want while maintaining a good base of fearless advertisers. * * * I know of a newspaper which just switched to Macintosh. They bought 12 Macs. Then the salesperson proceeded to sell them WordPerfect to run on them. Poor babies! Anyone know another Apple salesperson who would advise a client to stock up on WordPerfect? Boo! Using WordPerfect on a Macintosh is tantamount to punishment. * * * When thieves stole $30,000 worth of Macs at SmartMac (Mensa) offices in Minneapolis, the only thing they didn't steal was an IBM-PC. What did you expect? * * * Fifty-nine percent of MacWeek subscribers say they are buying Macintosh ][ cx computers this year. SE/30s will be bought by 51 percent. Mac ][cx buyers will purchase an average of 11.4 computers; SE/30 buyers will get 16.7 apiece. * * * What LaserWriter driver are you using? The current standard is 5.2, but 6.0 is now available for those who 1)use a lot of fonts or 2) want to output halftones on a PostScript printer, or 3) want to print text- only documents a bit faster. The 6.0 driver is on the Apple Color Disk, along with some other new System files. Apple says use 6.0.3 not 6.0.2 with the contest of the Color Disk. The disk is available from (Capital Business Machines or the Known Users editor). * * * Your first speed-up investment should not be an accelerator board. The best way to work faster on a Mac is to know your application and your computer perfectly. That is a better way to work faster than any accelerator board ever devised.

Copyright © september, 1989 by from Mouse Droppings


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