DeskTop Utilities 3.3 review
By Dennis Carrington
Copyright (c) 1992 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
AUG GS Disk 130
Desktop Utilities was written by Robert Mueller (alias Allan Kilmore) and Tony Morton from Melbourne.
When I opened DeskTop Utilities 3.3 I was surprised to see an init file of 38K and a text file of 79K. This could mean one of several things, the guy who wrote the documentation loved to type, the manual was very comprehensive, or the program was so hard to use that we mere mortals need all the help we can get. Thankfully the manual is very professional.
Desktop Utilities is not just a few Finder or System enhancements but a great heap of very powerful utilities in one very compact package.
Installation
DeskTop Utilities requires System 5.0.4 or higher. You will need 38k on your boot disk for the init file and more for the configuration file. To install the program, simply copy the file named 'DTUtils3.3' onto your boot disk in the System:System.Setup folder, and then reboot. DeskTop Utilities will initialise and activate itself every time you boot your system.
Features:
- Allows you to add NDAs or CDAs at any time under (almost) any desktop based program that supports DAs without the DAs having to be present in the System:Desk.Accs folder of your system disk.
- Allows you to remove either CDAs or NDAs under any desktop based program that supports DAs.
- Allows you to configure a list of 'Virtual DAs' that appear as normal DAs either under the Apple menu, or in the CDA menu when you press Ctrl-OA-Esc, but aren't actually loaded into memory until they are needed.
- Allows you to configure a list of keys that in combination with the OA and Shift keys will open a specified DA without having to select it from either the Apple or CDA menu.
- Allows you to add an initialisation file at any time without the init file having to be in the System:System.Setup folder on your system disk.
- Allows you to add a font any time the Font Manager is active (that is, within any program that supports fonts, a word processor for example) without the font being in the System:Fonts folder of your system disk.
- Provides a full-featured application switcher that allows you to quickly launch programs from within any other program, by selecting that program from a menu or pressing a predefined key. You also have the option of specifying document files which will be automatically loaded when the program is launched.
- Provides various small but useful utilities: a screen blanker that blanks the screen after a user definable number of seconds in either GS/OS or ProDOS 8, and a clock that appears on the menu bar of the currently running program and/or on the text screen. Clicking on the menu bar clock will display various other useful system information (Clock, Date, Free memory, Largest block of memory, Mouse X and Y coordinates, Stopwatch).
- Provides powerful 'wide menus' that allow you to open an NDA or CDA, select a font or run a program by clicking on an icon that appears on the menu bar of any program. Unlike the normal menus which scroll downwards when there are too many items to fit in one column, the wide menus provide up to 3 columns of items, and scroll sideways when there are more items, thus allowing extremely quick selection of items with the mouse.
- Provides some powerful predefined 'Hotkeys'. Pressing certain keys on the keypad together with the OA and Shift keys, or any other combination of modifier keys you specify, causes certain predefined actions to occur.
If you love utilities as I do then you will enjoy this. As I have not tested all of the features yet (I am working my way through the manual) I can not say that they all work, but this is the first time that I have had a clock on the menu bar without the system going down.
Other Goodies
The disk has a stack of other programs mostly written by these same authors.
Scrapbook V1.1 - An NDA that allows you to cut and paste graphics between the clipboard and 10 pages in the scrapbook. Also allows you to save the clipboard or pages in the scrapbook to a file on disk for later retrieval.
Rescomp V1.1 - An application that allows you to compile resources from a specially formatted data file (information supplied) in resources contained in another file. Easy yet powerful for the programmer to use.
Boing Demo - A very simple and old demo that has a bouncing and rotating apple going around the screen.
Alarm Clock - An NDA alarm clock that displays the current time in both digital and analog format, displays the current date, allows the use of a custom digitised sound as the alarm sound and includes a stopwatch.
Calculator - A full featured calculator NDA with scientific operations and a hex mode.
Solitaire - An NDA that allows you to play the classic game of peg solitaire.
Sound Studio - This BASIC program allows you to record and play digitised sounds and store and load them from disk in either raw, or ACE compressed format.
The Amper range - These are a series of small assembly language programs which add commands to AppleSoft BASIC that allow one to do various GS-type things that are normally
impossible under AppleSoft. These include drawing shapes to the Super Hi-Res screen and playing digitised sounds.
A-Maze-Ing - A maze program with a 3D front view, and a real 3D maze that allows you to go up and down, instead of being stuck in one plane.
Capture - A program that allows you to take a graphics screen, cut a piece out of it and save it as either a shape or as an icon for the Finder.

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