Shading A Rounded Region
Imagine using LisaDraw and four line segments and an arc to construct a square object with three right angle corners and one rounded corner. You group all of the objects (in an attempt to form one region) and ask LisaDraw to shade the result, only to find that the rounded corner is the only part of the object that is shaded. Because individual line segments have been used as boundaries, LisaDraw cannot recognize that the object is one enclosed region. How can the object be shaded?
One solution is to define a more or less congruent polygon using the same endpoints, but with the lines defined white instead of black. Then shade the polygon, position it to overlap the original region, and send the polygon to the background.
The final result will look like the desired region, shaded in the arc by the foreground object, and shaded everywhere else by the background polygon.
Quote Of The Month
"We ripped apart Apple's Lisa and found it limited by limited software." That claim appeared as a caption under a small picture of a disemboweled Lisa in the two-page ad by Fortune Systems in the July issue of Computer Dealer.
Lisa Day: August 11th
Apple is sponsoring a week-long Independent Developers' Conference during the week from August 8th to 12th, with Thursday, August 11th devoted to the Lisa product (although all attendees are required to register for the entire conference week). The conference will be held at the Dunfey Hotel in San Mateo just south of San Francisco, and is intended to provide "marketing and technical direction and strategies" for all Apple product families, using discussions, presentations, and hands-on workshops. Contact Hazel Holby at 408-554-5090 for more information. See you there!
Where To Plug That Printer
The Lisa installation instructions don't make a fuss about which port on the parallel interface card should be used for the dot matrix printer, but note that you can't use the option-shift-4 keys to print the screen unless the printer is on the upper connector of a parallel card in slot 2. (See pages D48 or D75 in the Owner's Guide.)
Are Passwords Possible?
Lisa users who require some level of confidentiality while using their machine quickly discover how easy it is for anyone to walk up to an idle Lisa and to begin perusing all documents.
The obvious solution to this problem would be to allow users to assign passwords to documents and folders to prevent unauthorized access. Are passwords possible? A few minutes spent skimming the Operating System Reference Manual reveals that passwords are already supported (but not used) at the device and volume level. We predict that it won't be long before accessible passwords appear in a future release of the Office System.
A Programmer Cries Out
Speaking of the Operating System Manual, its most interesting TYPE declaration is the array of pmByteUniqueForAllTheDamnCryBabies found on page A-8 of the first appendix in the Beta release.
Establishing A Backup Library
1. Organize all Profile folders and documents into one final folder called, say, Master.
2. Label six diskettes, one for each day, Saturday through Thursday. Label four diskettes, one for each Friday, from the 2nd through the 5th Friday of each month. Label twelve diskettes, one for each month, for the 1st Friday of each month.
3. At the end of each day, copy the Master folder and move the duplicate to the appropriate diskette for that day.
4. Send each Friday's diskette off site to a safe place for one month.