Macintosh Software I Created

• I am working on an anagram search program for the Macintosh.

  The program helps you find anagrams of phrases or names that you type in. I was inspired to work on this by a great anagram search program called Ars Magna written by a guy named Michael Morton. My program is written in C++ using the new library functions called the Standard Template Library . I wrote it in part to get more up to date on C++ programming and the details of that new library. I plan to give this program and its source code away for free.

• I worked a lot on the Magic Cap software platform at General Magic .

  I was one of the 3 principal architects of the software; the other two were Andy Hertzfeld and Phil Goldman. I worked on all parts of the system, including the development tools and every part of the system software. Magic Cap was licensed by General Magic to manufacturers of personal communicators, and there was also a version for Windows.

• I was the technical lead for the System 7 software release at Apple.

  I helped design the Finder and various parts of the user interface. I helped a lot with various lower-level parts of the system. The system software is included with all Macintosh computers and you can buy it separately as an upgrade.

• I wrote the MacVenture game system.

  It has a cheesy name, and it is the basis for the adventure games Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True, Uninvited, ShadowGate, Deja Vu II: Lost in Las Vegas, and other games, along with Todd Squires and Steve Hays. These early Macintosh games were influential in the adventure game world. They were among the first games to use the click and drag user interface to drive the whole adventure. This is now the standard for such excellent games as Full Throttle, the Monkey Island series and many, many others. The games were eventually ported to other platforms besides Macintosh, but I didn't help with that. ICOM Simulations sold the games through the retail channel.

• I wrote a desk accessory called SkipFinder that let you go from one application to another without returning to the Finder in between. At the time I wrote this, there were a lot of similar programs, but they had technical problems. I wrote my own because of that. I gave away the software for free, but asked people to send me money if they liked it. That confused a lot of people, who thought it was "shareware" and sent me money they called a registration fee. It was hard for me to decide whether to cash those checks, since I wasn't offering to send them a new version like some shareware authors.

• I wrote a tiny part of a Unix utility called xbin.

  The utility converts files from the Macintosh BinHex format to the MacBinary format. The part I wrote was just a CRC calculation that was missing from the original version, but I still sometimes see my name mentioned in this context.

• I wrote a desk accessory called Mouseometer.

  The desk accessory shows the mouse position and it was pretty much the first program I wrote for the Macintosh. I'm still proud that I made it so you could copy the mouse coordinates onto the clipboard and you could also past coordinates into the desk accessory and the mouse would move there. I gave this desk accessory away for free.

• I wrote a system extension that I called ReverseScreen.

  I met a guy at The University of Texas at Austin named Gordon Watkins. He liked the Macintosh but he told me he couldn't use it because it was black-on-white. His eyesight was good enough to read white-on-black computer text, but no good enough for the black-on-white Macintosh text. I figured out how to swap the colors. I didn't tell him that he was the inspiration for the extension until about 10 years later, but he told me that he did use the extension so he could work with Macintosh computers. I gave this extension away for free.

• I wrote an application called Text Ranger.

  It looks at all the text files on a disk and helps you change their application creator type to the text editor of your choice. It also has a feature that will delete the resource forks of the text files, since that saves some disk space and the resource formats are often editor-specific. Later, I made a similar utility for PICT files, calling it Pict Ranger and then a general version I called Ranger. My friend Fernando Alves made a cool Lone-Ranger-style mask for the icon. I gave this application away for free.

• I wrote a desk accessory that I called Saviour.

  It was an auto-save feature that would learn the save commands for various applications and automatically save your files. I liked the way "save your files" rhymes with "Saviour." I gave the desk accessory away for free, but I don't think many people got it.

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