About Tips

Built to learn the basics of Pascal and classic Macintosh development, Tips is a toy that displays tips. Drag it to your Startup Items folder if you want tips every startup, like Windows 95 did. It is compatible with all classic Systems/Mac OS versions from 6.0.5 onwards.

Tips was written in THINK Pascal 4.0 (Symantec), after initial prototyping with AppMaker 1.5.4 (Bowers Development Corp), provides a lot of the boilerplate. It was developed in the emulation environment Infinite Macintosh (Mihai Parparita), and with the help of THINK Reference (Symantec).

Public domain, questionable polish, etc.

Known bugs and infelicities.

• On Macintoshes (a) running Systems less than 7, and (b) with a 512 x 342 display (e.g. compact Macs), the title text "Welcome to System 6" cuts the 6 short.
• Since we use the Gestalt Manager to obtain the System version, compatibility is limited to System 6.0.5 onwards. Despite being a very simple application.
• Closing the app on 68000-based Macs takes a long time. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's AppMaker's boilerplate.
• A lot of AppMaker's shell boilerplate remains to handle documents, that Tips doesn't use.

Contents

This repository contains

• A Stuffit file with the built application.
• A '.dsk' disk image with the application source, and all of its dependencies: THINK Pascal and AppMaker's libraries. Use this to develop.
• Partial source in plaintext for your online viewing pleasure -- that is, leaving out THINK Pascal and AppMaker source code, resource forks, etc.

Setting up development

Mount the disk image in System 6.0.5 onwards. The THINK Pascal project is at the path Tips ƒ:Tips.π. With luck, because THINK Pascal is distributed with the development disk, you should be able to double-click Tips.π to get started.

Adding your own tips

The current set of tips exists in two places:

• hardcoded, in TipsResources.p;
• and the working copies of all of the tips exists in the 'tips' resources of the app.

The cleanest way to add new tips is to edit, in TipsResources.p:

• NumTips, the constant;
• DoReinitializeTips, the procedure, which clears out all of the working 'tips' resources with the tips hardocded into this function.

Then recompile the application, run it, and click the menu item Files > Reinitialize Tips and Quit.