061224 13:28 by iDRMRSR

There's an Apple store near me. This I knew long ago, but I saw an add in the paper that they were open on Xmas day, and were serving a complete turkey dinner with all the trimmings, prepared with the new iCook device they were planning on launching in 2007. How could I resist.

I went into the store and they had moved all the computers to the side and put in a completely white banquet table with about 50 white chairs surrounding it. I took my place and paid the $249 dinner fee, which I thought was excessive, but they promised to take ALL the hassle out of dining for me, so I figured, what the hey.

On the plate in front of my there was the iCook device. It had three things that looked like electrocardiogram electrodes, shiny chrome bullets on the end of a very thin white wire connected to the cigarette sized iCook itself. One wire was about five feet in length.

061222 15:01 by iDRMRSR

On the OSX front, I've been doing some studying, and here's the torture trail for Windoze folks, the things that will cause US to rip out our hair more than the Linux command prompt:

1. Copy a folder to a folder with the same name elsewhere. OSX destroys the old folder (instead of merging the files). INSTANT coronary for a Windows user.

2. Closing windows does not stop the application. Slow death for a Windoze user.

3. Dragging a file to a blank CDR to back it up just puts a LINK to the file on the CD. Like Polonium 210 for us Windoze folks.

4. Cannot MAXIMIZE a window. WTF?

5. Many applications open SEVERAL small windows at once. WTF?

6. Only one FINDER open at a time. Kill me now, before I buy a Mac Mini.

7. CTRL DRAG to actually copy a file's contents. AIEEEEE.

8. Hidden .DS_store files splattered all over your disk.

This is a weird little thing I started writing in HyperCard over a decade ago. It began as "Toon Master," since it was to support running a session of the Toon rpg. Its central engine was a scheduler (with a one-second resolution) that could make table rolls, play sounds and talk. I removed the Toon-specific stuff and imported it into Runtime Revolution, which claims to be a cross-platform development package. But currently, I can only build for Mac operating systems due to the "student" license I have for RR.

The "project" link, below, is for anybody brave enough to try building it for Windows. (Since it uses speech, linux might not work at all.) The .sit files are standalone builds of it. Update: A few years later, and I've finally tried this under Mac OS X, on an Intel Mac, and it WORKS as well as the OS9 version!

This software was used to create material that has been used in the Hour of Slack radio show!

The Runtime Revolution project -- 633 kb

The "FAT" runtime version, for Mac OS 8/9 -- 1557 kb

The Mac OSX runtime version -- 1860 kb

No warranties or such are made regarding this thing; proceed at your own risk.