Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!crdgw1!galen.crd.ge.com
From: leue@galen.crd.ge.com (Bill Leue)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: System 7.0: Interesting Times
Message-ID: <19656@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Date: 17 May 91 16:36:01 GMT
Sender: news@crdgw1.crd.ge.com
Organization: General Electric Research & Development
Lines: 55

Thanks to all the thousands of people who have already sent me email
explaining what the Startup Folder is for in System 7.0.  You can
stop now! :-)

(For those who, like me, are too groggy from an all-nighter with 7.0
to focus on the Manual, the Startup Folder contains resources that
you only access on system startup (makes sense) like sounds that get
played on startup, StartUpScreen images, and applications to be
launched automatically on startup.  (Obviously, you use an alias here,
and not the real application).  

Now that I've had my fourth cup of coffee, I remember a few other
interesting tidbits.  In my conversation with the Claris rep yesterday,
I mentioned that the Hypercard 2.1 that comes bundled with system 7.0
doesn't have any documentation describing the changes from 2.0,  She
replied that this is, after all, the APPLE release of HC 2.1 (complete
with crippled Home Stack), not the Claris release.  She further said that
Claris will mail HC 2.1 to all registered owners of the Claris version
of HC 2.0 by the end of May.  The Claris upgrade will be free and will
contain documentation about the changes since 2.0.  Maybe Kevin Calhoun
will post a comprehensive list of the changes in his spare time :-).

Also, in my discussion of creating a color icon (CICN) for MS Word, I
forgot to mention that the icon which finally was produced came out with
much darker colors than the ones in the ResEdit CICN editor.  This was
in spite of the fact that I was only using the 39 or so "canonical"
colors.  This is a bit surprising to me -- I thought that if you only
used the standard Apple colors you were pretty much assured that they
would be compatible with the color lookup tables that the Finder and
other apps used.

Another item: with system 6.0.7 and earlier, I used to use the Layout
utility to customize the desktop look and feel.  System 7.0 does away
with the need for most of the things that Layout used to do -- stuff
like always gridding drags, staggering icons, changing Finder fonts, etc.
However, there's at least one thing that Layout did that 7.0 doesn't:
Layout had an option to give you "solid" colors for icons.  System 7.0
gives you "pastel" colors (looks like they're dithered with white).  I've
kind of gotten used to garish solid colors and might like to change back.
Also, I wonder what new options are available in the Finder LAYO
resource that aren't yet tapped by the user interface.

Yet another item:  I notice that System 7.0 has some new Finder beep
sounds but not the 4 old standbyes.  The System 7.0 installer is kind
enough to copy those resources from your old system at installation time.
Unfortunately, in the process of recovering from my disaster with
Suitcase and dragging fonts, I lost the original System 7 and had to
reinstall.  Can I open a floppy containing a System 6.0.7 system file
and copy the sound resources using System 7.0's capabilities?  Or
should I use ResEdit?


- Bill Leue
leue@crd.ge.com