Now we all know the Mac is a really nice computer, but sometimes those
not ?in the know? criticize it because it doesn?t have true this-or-
that or a nifty Turbo switch or a price tag as low as they can find at
Kurt?s Klones (some assembly required). It is necessary to communicate
with these critics in a language they understand. Enter Das Blinken
Lights.
Truly great computers, some reason, aren?t the kind that sit idle on
desks, but the kind that crack secret codes on the silver screen or
pilot the starship Enterprise. In short, the better the computer, the
more blinking lights it has.
Das Blinken Lights is a small application that puts up a window
containing, yep, a bunch of blinking lights. You can change the size
of the window by clicking in its lower right-hand corner (the grow
region) and can move it by clicking and dragging any other part of the
window.
Das Blinken Lights is very friendly as a background process and is, I
think, unique in the way it uses the Mac?s processor. I have designed
Das Blinken Lights so that the amount of processing power it hogs is
in proportion to the number of lights in its display (default is 25 X
16). That is, the smaller you make the display, the less processing
power it uses; the larger you make the display, the more processing
power it uses. This pseudo-priority will most likely be altered in
future versions of Das Blinken Lights, but I?d like to see a few
?real? programs offer some similar kind of user-controlled priority
(like Word, for instance, which can use up 79% of the processor even
while it?s hidden in the background).
DL #1 Das Blinken Lights v1.0
Compatibility
Architecture: 68k
Das Blinken Lights was written and tested using Think C on an SE/30
running System 7 and tested on an SE running System 6.0.7 (Finder
only).
