Get Info: #shareware

Quick Paths

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 16 Nov 1998 15:56:00 +0000

Whenever you want a file, you first have to find the folder it is in, which is a faff if that folder is nested several levels deep. Quick Paths lives in the system tray and jumps you to a favourite folder with one click: into the topmost file selector, into Explorer, or into ZipMagic’s Archive Manager. If none of those are open, it launches a new Explorer window. About 56k of RAM.

This is the sort of thing Windows later grew for itself. In 1998 you had to write it.

Version 1.38: support for Windows 98’s new-style Explorer. Unregistered limit is three paths.

Featured in PC Answers issue 48, Winter 1997 (Future Publishing, UK), and in Windows Magazine (ASCII, Japan) December 1996, with a screenshot. Also on Hot Shareware (Hobby Press, Spain) several times as it went from 1.31 to 1.35.

Archived page: gingerbeardman.com/archive/tektonix/qpaths.htm

Fuji Bar!

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 20 Sep 1998 19:10:00 +0000

Fuji Bar! is a system-tray shell for the PaCifiST Atari ST emulator under Windows 95. Serious use of PaCifiST means editing .ini files a lot; this lets you change the usual settings through a GUI and launch the emulator in one click. About 76k of RAM.

Version 1.34. New: Laptop, Parallel and STe directives, plus the Image directive’s drive qualifier. Works with PaCifiST 0.47 final. Double-click .st / .msa images to load them. Multiple TOS ROM images from one folder (TOS*.*). Atari ST icon library included.

I wrote this as a third-party companion while PaCifiST was still moving fast.

Archived page: gingerbeardman.com/archive/tektonix/atarist.htm

SaveAble!

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 27 Apr 1998 12:00:00 +0000

SaveAble! adds hot corners to Windows. Shove the mouse into a corner to kick the screen saver on immediately (leaving your desk, sensitive stuff on screen), or to stop it coming on at all (a long compile, a download, anything the saver would only hinder). Plus version includes a system tray icon.

This is the first hot-corners implementation I know of on Windows, years before the OS grew one of its own.

Version 1.38. Display Properties shortcut, new executable. Saver enabled by default on program exit. Windows 3.1x and 95/NT (not Windows 98).

Featured with Quick Paths in PC Answers issue 48, Winter 1997 (Future Publishing, UK), cover CD and magazine.

Archived page: gingerbeardman.com/archive/tektonix/saveable.htm

Wobble!

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 27 Apr 1998 00:11:00 +0000

Wobble! shakes the screen until it looks like jelly. Severity from a slight judder to near-earthquake, optional colour invert / screen flip, slow motion, desktop preview, password, and context-sensitive help.

Version 1.40. New: wobble a custom picture, severe slow-motion option, multi-tasking-friendlier, settings dialog tweak. Recompiled with Visual Basic 5 (SP3).

Earlier 1.32 was featured on TECH Win (ASCII, Japan), November 1996–January 1997.

Archived page: gingerbeardman.com/archive/tektonix/wobble.htm

WINotes

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 26 Apr 1998 23:32:00 +0000

WINotes is a Post-it-style sticky notepad for the Windows desktop. Multiple notes at once, each with its own size, colour and typeface; sticky or not; load and save (optionally as plain text); file association; spawn another note; load back from the previous session; optional on-screen hotkeys; choice of alarm sound.

Version 1.73. 16-bit and 32-bit. Recompiled with Visual Basic 5 (SP3). Exit menu removed (use the close box). Load-back and Windows 98 behaviour improved.

Earlier 1.6x builds were featured on TECH Win (ASCII, Japan) and Hot Shareware (Hobby Press, Spain).

Archived page: gingerbeardman.com/archive/tektonix/winotes.htm

Stars!

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 21 Aug 1997 12:00:00 +0000

Stars! turns your monitor into a portal to another galaxy. Eight directions of travel, configurable star count and parallax levels, three star shapes, desktop preview, context-sensitive help, and Windows screen saver password support.

Version 1.14. Visual Basic, Windows 95/NT. Uses about 60k. Pairs nicely with SaveAble! if you want hot corners.

1.14: password support, three star shapes. 1.13: desktop preview no longer stops when you change settings. 1.12: always on top of the taskbar.

Featured on TECH Win (ASCII, Japan) and Hot Shareware (Hobby Press, Spain) as version 1.12.

Archived page: gingerbeardman.com/archive/tektonix/stars.htm

Day

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 24 Nov 1996 22:00:00 +0000

Day is a day-by-day alarm and reminder. It sits on the taskbar (or hide it with Ghost) and pops up when you asked it to. Alarms can repeat once, daily, weekdays, weekly, monthly or yearly, with an optional five-minute early warning.

Version 1.33. New: Dawn, a tiny starter you put in Startup instead of Day itself, so you get a yes/no prompt at boot.

Written in Visual Basic for Windows 3.1x. Featured on the TECH Win (ASCII, Japan) cover CD as version 1.32, November 1996–January 1997.

Archived page: gingerbeardman.com/archive/tektonix/day.htm

Ghost

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 12 Oct 1996 18:51:00 +0000

Ghost hides and shows any running Windows application. Pick a task from the list and click Hide or Show. Hiding Program Manager clears every desktop icon in one go, which is a quick way to tidy a messy desktop.

Version 1.10 for Windows 3.1x. You can also launch it with a command-line prefix to pre-select a task, e.g. GHOST.EXE Ti.

Archived page: gingerbeardman.com/archive/tektonix/ghost.htm

Messages

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 06 Oct 1996 16:42:00 +0000

Messages is a small utility for leaving notes for other people who use the same PC. Handy if you are sharing a machine with Windows 95’s multi-user password facility. It manages multiple message files and uses Notepad to edit them.

Version 1.11, 16-bit and 32-bit builds. Visual Basic. Windows 3.1x and 95/NT.

Archived page: gingerbeardman.com/archive/tektonix/msgs.htm

MsgBoxer

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 06 Oct 1996 16:30:00 +0000

MsgBoxer generates Visual Basic MsgBox code to your exact specification. Pick the icon, buttons, default button and modality in a dialog, hit Test, then paste the snippet into your app from the clipboard. Now with context-sensitive help.

Version 1.11b, 16-bit and 32-bit. Windows 3.1x and 95/NT.

This is a tool I wrote because I was tired of looking up the MsgBox flags in the help file every time.

Archived page: gingerbeardman.com/archive/tektonix/msgboxer.htm

Light!

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 13 Jun 1996 17:36:00 +0000

Light! is a screen saver that passes a trailing beam across the desktop, illuminating whatever is behind it. You can change the size and speed of the light, and whether it inverts the screen colours.

Version 1.30 is a rewrite: faster, smaller, and with a password. Written in Visual Basic for Windows 3.1x.

Featured on the TECH Win (ASCII, Japan) cover CD, November 1996–January 1997.

Archived page: gingerbeardman.com/archive/tektonix/light.htm

Tektonix Menu 2

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 05 Oct 1995 12:00:00 +0000

Tektonix Menu 2 is a tiny, fully customisable menu system for MS-DOS. It uses less than 8k of memory when fully utilised, which makes it ideal for launching games and other memory-hungry DOS programs. Works in a Windows 95 DOS box too.

Version 2.01. Also in the zip: a mouse prompt helper, a PCX viewer, a reboot utility, and a small DOS paint tool.

Archived page: gingerbeardman.com/archive/tektonix/tekmenu.htm

Paint

by Matt Sephton — Wed, 20 Jul 1994 12:00:00 +0000

A simple paint program for children, for the Atari ST. One colour for each mouse button. Sixteen-colour ST-low, a two-row palette, fill, shift, line, box, circle, spray, a couple of picture buffers, and load/save of .MAT files.

Shareware, developed 1992–94. This is version 1.02 from the nostalgia pack I later put up for PaCifiST. The pack includes a sample picture, SKY.MAT: a chunky city skyline and a little plane.

Archived page: gingerbeardman.com/archive/tektonix/atarist.htm

REview

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 04 Jan 1994 14:00:00 +0000

REview is a small ASCII file viewer for the Atari ST, written in GFA BASIC 3.5. It exists because the desktop’s built-in Show is not enough once you have a stack of coverdisk docs and want to search, bookmark, or print a paragraph.

Find and repeat-find, ten bookmarks, goto line, block start/end, print block or whole document, toggle scan rate, and a 24-line display with an info line for filename, page, and size. Not as good as Revenge, but not as big either.

Archived page: gingerbeardman.com/archive/tektonix/atarist.htm

Chaos Calc 2

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 04 Jan 1994 12:00:00 +0000

Chaos Calc 2 is my GEM-based Mandelbrot explorer for the Atari ST, written in GFA BASIC 3.5 and compiled. Zoom (almost) into infinity, cycle colours, swap palettes, and save plots as compact Chaos Definition Files or uncompressed Degas pictures.

Shareware. Registration is £5, which unlocks Julia sets, extra CDF saves, colour-cycle direction, and desktop accessories. I received zero registrations, plus one phone call from somebody who wanted to be certain their fiver would get them a floppy disk in return. They never sent any money.

This is the 4 January 1994 shareware release. An earlier build from May 1993 later turned up on DiscMaster.

Archived page: gingerbeardman.com/archive/tektonix/atarist.htm