Janice Weber wrote: > Hey Tony > How about giving us a presentation at a future meeting??? > Jan > How about I give a presentation now Jan, since I live in New York and don't know if or when I'll be in the neighborhood. If anyone's interested and has a copy of AppleWorks that supports macros or ClarisWorks, the following instructions give a quick introduction to making animations. When I first started making them, I was using a 25 MHz Performa and the speed was much slower than my 350 MHz iMac. Now everything is much faster, so any of you using the latest models may not see any movement at all.
Start your program and open a blank Draw document. Select the circle tool and draw a circle (it doesn't have to be exact and size don't matter) and color it if you want. Pick a starting point for the circle and remember the location, because you will put it back in the same place at the end. Choose Macros from the File menu and then choose Record Macro. In the dialog box that opens, you have three choices for the macro. 1. You can give it a name. 2. You can assign an F key to it. Use the default key (F5) if you click that radio button. 3. You can assign a key combination (Command-Option-Character key) For this trial run use either 2 or 3. Click the checkbox for "Document Specific" Click the Record button or press the Return key to close the dialog box. The macro is now recording. It's waiting for you to do something. It don't matter how fast you do things, so don't rush. Place the pointer over the circle, hold the mouse button down, drag the circle to a new location and release the mouse button. Repeat the previous step as many times as you want. The last time you move the circle, put it back to the original starting location. Choose Macros from the File menu, then choose Stop Recording. If you want, you can save the document. If you press the F key or key combination you chose, the macro should move the circle around the document like you recorded it. Since you ended it at the starting point, you can press the F key or key combination several times real fast and the macro will play that many times. For those of you unfamiliar with macros, you can use a macro to record any combination of menu commands. It's great for opening dialog boxes, making a selection and closing them back up again. This way you only have to press an F key or key combination instead. If you download this document, ftp://members.aol.com/easyapps/psslib/chart.sit , and press the F5 key, a macro opens the dialog box for making a graph, then fills in all the necessary info to make a bar graph, and produces a completed graph faster than you can say Peter Pan. After you become familiar with macros, you can read the Help file to see how to make shortcut buttons for your macros so you don't have to remember which F key is assigned to what macro. When you really get familiar with AppleWorks, you can get very fancy, like this document ( ftp://members.aol.com/easyapps/docslib/logo.sit ) of my Mac groups call letters (SSMUG). All sorts of AppleWorks tricks went into making this one. It's a repeater, so if you press the F5 key more than once, that's how many times it will play. If you also give this macro a name, you can make a simple AppleScript script to have it repeat over and over again. A handy little item if your group is setting up a booth and wants to show off their call letters or group name. Thanks for the invite anyway. -- Tony LaFemina When you want to do more than just buy software http://hometown.aol.com/visitmacland/index.html mailto:remacs at optonline.net | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be January 27. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>.
