GENIE & LAMP 9/12

[norman.dodge@techall.wa.com]

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year, and be renewed each Christmas to come.

God bless us, every one!

Charlie and Betty Hartley


                                 [*][*][*]


    While on Genie,  do  you spend most of your time  downloading
files? If so, you may be missing out some excellent information in the
Bulletin Board  area.   The messages  listed above  only scratch  the
surface  of what's available and waiting for you in the bulletin board
area.

    If you are serious about your Apple II, the GenieLamp staff
strongly urge  you to give the  bulletin board area a try.   There are
literally thousands  of messages  posted  from people  like you from
all over the world.



[EOA]
[HUN]//////////////////////////////
               THE TREASURE HUNT /
/////////////////////////////////
Yours for the Downloading
"""""""""""""""""""""""""
by Douglas Cuff
       [D.CUFF]



                       >>> IT'S BEEN EDUCATIONAL <<<
                       """""""""""""""""""""""""""""

     Welcome back to the Treasure Hunt.  This month, we look at some
files from the education library (#51).

                                 [*][*][*]


                 File #8819:  LIFESTYLES.BXY (71820 bytes)
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     Operation Lifestyle by Dr. Joel S. Retholtz adapts the Canadian
Heart Association risk factor analysis scheme to administer a quiz about
your lifestyle.  It will ask you about your diet, your indulgences
(smoking, alcohol, drugs), whether you exercise, your behaviour behind
the wheel of a car, and so on.  After you finish, it will rate your
lifestyle in one of four categories:  hazardous, risky, good, or
excellent.

     This DOS 3.3 disk archive uses graphic routines from the Beagle
Bros disk "Apple Mechanic" (later Shape Mechanic).  Unfortunately, it
doesn't use them to good effect:  the font used for the questions is
about the same of 40-column mode text, and the font used for the answer
is larger and in color.  Except for a short animation when reporting the
results--lifted straight from the Beagle Bros disk and largely
meaningless in this context--the program might just as well be
text-based.

     This archive is a natural for updating to ProDOS.  If you'd like
to see the FILE MECHANIC show you how to handle it, write to GenieLamp
A2 and say so.  If you'd like to try this conversion yourself, you'll
find the necessary files are #11547, SHAPE.MECH1.BXY and #11546
SHAPE.MECH2.BXY.

     Freeware for any Apple II.


                File #16235:  PING.PONG1.BXY (82688 bytes)
                File #16236:  PING.PONG2.BXY (89728 bytes)
                File #16237:  PING.NOTES.BXY  (2560 bytes)
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     "The Great Ping Pong Ball Experiment" by Phil Shapiro (art by Ron
Evry) is a sort of electronic storybook about the idea of dropping a
ping pong ball at the source of the Nile to see if it will make it to
Cairo.  It was created using the Slide Shop toolkit from Scholastic
Software, a program that I had never heard of until now (despite its
availability in 1991).  This kit allows for attractive screen wipes of
the hi-res screen, plus music.  The software would seem to run on any
Apple II, even those with no lower-case nor 80-column screen, and yet is
aware of the Apple IIgs and the mouse!  (It doesn't quite know how to
handle a mouse and a joystick if both are plugged in simultaneously.)

     The fanciful story by Phil Shapiro takes two disk sides to tell.
While well told--I particularly liked the occasional light touch--it
takes a little too long to get going.  The art by Ron Evry ranges from
adequate to attractive.

     Freeware for any Apple II with 64K.


                File #17286:  PT.SCHEDULE.BXY (50048 bytes)
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     Scheduler v2.1 by Patrick M. Gormley is designed to help schedule
parent-teacher conferences.  It allows for a maximum of 64 teachers, 3
conference days, 24 appointments per day per teacher, and 18
conferences per parent per day.  It was designed for school secretaries
to use.  In this demo, certain features of this program have been turned
off until you pay the $25 shareware fee.

     You begin by selecting up to three days of the week when teachers
are available for consultation and the times they are available.  You
then enter the names of all the teachers.  You can also choose to enter
a brief letter to parents--10 lines of about 75 characters.

     With this done, it's possible to start slotting parents into the
teachers' schedules.  You are asked for the parent's name and the
student's name.  You then get to choose a day of the week and a time.
Finally, you choose the teacher to be consulted.

     I happen to think there's too little scheduling software for the
Apple II, and practically no _good_ scheduling software, so I was
thrilled to find Scheduler and prepared to love it.  Unfortunately, I
couldn't.

     Never mind the weird coloring of the desktop interface--that's
minor. Never mind the fact that Scheduler is badly programmed--instead
of checking to see if data files exist, it hangs when it doesn't find
them.  Far more serious is how poorly Scheduler handles scheduling
conflicts.

     If a parent--Colonel Mustard--is scheduled for two conferences at
the same time with two different teachers (Mr Blonde and Mr Pink), the
program doesn't warn you about the problem.  When you print out Colonel
Mustard's "parent" schedule, only the appointment with Mr Blonde is
mentioned.

     If a teacher--Mr Blonde--has two parents (Colonel Mustard and Miss
Scarlett) scheduled to see him at the same time, the program is a
little better behaved, but not much.  What happens is that the second
parent, Miss Scarlett, is given the next available time slot for that
day.  There's no warning about this--it just happens.  What happens if
there are no more slots for that day?  When you print the schedules for
Colonel Mustard and Miss Scarlet, _both_ parents are told that Mr Blonde
is not available. Notice that this only happens at the printing
stage--there's no warning before you get to this stage.

     The author concludes his brief documentation with the notation:
"This is a good program, it saved our school secretaries about 70 hours
of work the first time it was used (November 1988)."  I can only assume
the secretaries adapted their work habits to the vagaries of this
program.

     Shareware demo for any Apple IIgs with 512K ($25).


                 File #11763:  RATIONAL.BXY (69300 bytes)
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 * 2qwk! 2.03 * The first full-featured QWK reader for the Apple.