Virtually every article ever written about ResEdit warns you to always work on a copy and to keep backups and so on. This warning has become somewhat cliche, but we're going to do it anyway: only work on a copy of the file and keep backups

If you don't have an fmnu template (see below) and you want to change or add a command key to a menu item, you have to poke around until you find the text of the menu item's name (e.g

The System 7 Finder has been completely rewritten in C++, so none of the old ways to customize the Finder with ResEdit work anymore. There are, however, a couple of things you can do with ResEdit in the new Finder, too

Sometimes it's nice to quit the Finder. This frees up a little bit of memory (not as much as you would think) but, even better, it lets you edit the Finder or rebuild your desktop without rebooting (you can hold down the Command and Option keys when the Finder restarts and it rebuilds the desktop)

When the Finder opens or closes an item, it shows an animation effect usually called the "ZoomRect" (zooming rectangles describes it pretty well, so that's what those innovative programmers called the procedure)

When the amount of free space in the Finder is more than one megabyte, the Finder displays the free space in megabytes. I like it to keep displaying in K

The rename delay is tied to the setting for double-click speed in the Mouse Control Panel. The slower the double-click speed, the longer you wait for the Finder to enter edit mode after you click on a file name

One of the new features in Finder 7 is that it can substitute one application for another, assuming the second application can open the first one's documents

This is our last weekly issue for 1991, although I hope to release a special issue about ResEdit tricks that you can play with your System 7 Finder later this week

As you have probably heard, Borland International has taken over Ashton-Tate, makers of dBASE. What most of the press surrounding the affair has ignored is that Ashton-Tate also published several pieces of Macintosh software, most notably FullWrite Professional and Full Impact

Despite being extremely cool machines, the PowerBooks have not been immune to unpleasant hardware quirks. We wrote some time ago about the possibility of destroying your PowerBook's motherboard if you opened or closed the case for service while its power was turned on. Unfortunately, two new problems have cropped up, one with the floppy drives and primarily on the PowerBook 140, the other with the hard drives on certain models of the 140 and 170

I had hoped to write about more games in this article, or even to do an issue on games, but it just isn't going to happen. Partly I haven't had time to play too many games (I never do, it seems), and partly I didn't receive responses from companies like Spectrum Holobyte and Maxis

I'm great fan of making your computer more fun to use. After all, if you spend a lot of time on the Mac, it becomes part of your working environment. Most of us hang pictures in offices or keep photos on our desks (I have a Wall of Fame above my Mac where I tape the outer boxes to all the programs I'm sent)

Mark H. Anbinder informs us, "AppleShare 3.0 has finally shipped! It replaces both the AppleShare 2.0 file sharing and print sharing software packages with a single $1199 package

Anyone who doesn't consider themselves an expert on configuring memory for the Macintosh should take a look at a small booklet from Connectix called The Macintosh Memory Guide