Clicker 1.0:  A key-click commodity

REQUIREMENTS

  An Amiga running at least release 2.0 of the OS (KickStart V36 or better),
  a keyboard, and a loudspeaker to hear the sounds through.


COPYRIGHT

  This program is in the Public Domain.  That means you can legally create and
  publish an improved version and claim full copyright over it;  in fact I would
  probably help you do so in any way I can.  Even claiming copyright over my
  unmodified work would technically be legal, but you would make yourself look
  like a complete arse if you did.  In fact I would probably help you do so in
  any way I can.

  I'm serious.  Take a look at the sources, they're quite clean and readable if
  you are familiar with C.  It's pure ANSI C and not (too) dependent on any
  particular compiler.


INTRODUCTION

  This program makes a clicking noise each time you press a key.

  Call me crazy (I mean really, go ahead, everybody's doing it) but I hate to
  use keyboards that don't click.  Why?  Well first of all I find no
  encouragement in a machine which just doesn't seem to care.  The Amiga is a
  caring and personal system and it should give you some kind of happy feedback
  --just to show you that it's listening.

  Second I like to type without having to look intently at the screen all the
  time.  Whether it's because somebody is talking to me and I have to pretend
  to listen patiently while I'm really still programming, or just because the
  A4000 keyboard doesn't have a reassuring clonk to it so you have to press the
  keys all the way down to make sure that it got the message.  Clicker lets me
  type lighter and faster because one gets to know exactly how much pressure
  the keys require.

  Oh and third of course, it annoys the hell out of everybody in a five-meter
  radius so they have something to talk about and can stop worrying about their
  own problems for a minute  (it's an odd thing really that so few people at
  university appreciate what I'm doing for them).  Try it!


INSTALLATION

  This is the simple part.  Just drag the program icon anywhere you like.  If
  you want Clicker to be started automatically when you boot your computer, drag
  it into the WBStartup drawer on your system disk.


USAGE

  Double-clicking the Clicker icon or typing its name from the shell will start
  the program.  Once Clicker is running, double-clicking the icon or typing the
  name again will bring up the program's preferences window.  This is still very
  primitive (no loading or saving yet), but at least it lets you alter volume,
  pitch and duration of the clicks.

  The window can also be brought up by selecting Clicker's entry from the
  program list in the Commodities Exchange window and clicking on the Show
  Interface button.  You can also disactivate and reactivate Clicker from there,
  or quit the program altogether.

  Here's an overview of the controls in the preferences window:

   * Click Mouse Button: If you want Clicker to make its key-click noise for
     mouse-button presses as well as when keys are pressed, select the "Click
     Mouse button" gadget.

   * Pitch:  You can pick any tone from the musical scale for the key-click
     noise.  The frequency in Hertz is shown next to the Pitch slider;
     Drag the slider to the  left to get a lower tone, or to the right to get a
     higher one.  Unfortunately there's only a very short range of useful
     pitches at the moment.

  (For the musically literate user:  In a vain and deluded attempt to not offend
  anybody's ears the tone of the clicks can be selected over a 9-octave range of
  the equal-temperament tuning based on the 440-Hertz A)

   * Length:  This determines how long the noise of every click should last.
  Because the duration of a key click is typically very short, the Length
  setting does not regulate the number of microseconds the sound is played, but
  the number of times the entire wave-form sample is played altogether.  This
  means that with the same Length setting you will get longer duration for low
  pitches than with higher pitches.


OPTIONS

  Shell command-line template:  PITCH/N VOLUME/N LENGTH/N CLICKMOUSE/S

  Icon tooltypes:
        PITCH=<frequency in Hertz>
        VOLUME=<loudness between 1 and 64>
        LENGTH=<length of click>
        CLICKMOUSE=<YES or NO>

  See USAGE for an explanation of these settings.


AUTHOR

  Jeroen Vermeulen, currently still a Computer Science student at the university
  of Leiden, The Netherlands but soon to be unleashed upon an unprepared outside
  world.  It will be hard for life to adjust itself to me again, but I'll be
  damned if I'm going to work with Windows.  Got a position open by any chance?

  Mail: jvermeul@wi.leidenuniv.nl / jtv@xs4all.nl
  Phone/Fax: +31.20.6258990


THANK YOU

  Martijn van Hasselt - for using this program and not calling me mad, even
        behind my back (yes Martijn, I *have* been tapping your phone).

  Manfred Schmitt - for walking into a shop and saying "I want to buy Commodore
        Computers"... and not responding to the question "how many?"


REVISION HISTORY

  (lots of 0.x versions that you don't want to know about unless you're one of
  my beta testers, but they inexplicably insisted on remaining anonymous)

  1.0 - First public release
