AnyMessages? 2.0 & ClockFix 0.0d1 AnyMessages? 2.0 fixes a long-standing bug with Newton alarms: Now if you miss one and your Newton goes to sleep, the alarm will not be hidden. Alarms will now play longer, and at maximum volume, even if youve turned sound off elsewhere. Version 2.0 can also be operated manually, like version 1.0; click on its icon in the Extras Drawer to see the last four messages your Newton displayed. ClockFix should diminish the Newton clocks gradual loss of time. Usually when your Newton restarts, it remembers the time in minutes, but forgets the number of seconds, so your clock will generally be slow. ClockFix tries to set your clock ahead by its estimate of how much time your clock loses; this won't solve the problem, but may nearly take the square root of it. AlarmPak by Allan Marcus was released after I wrote AnyMessages, and has more features, though it lacks ClockFixs functionality. AnyMessages is simple; I try to do as little in system patches as possible. AnyMessages should work if installed on a card, though this would let you miss a message when the card wasnt inserted. ClockFix will probably be inaccurate unless installed internally. Remember: always have at least two independent backups of your Newtons data, even if youre not running my code. This is delayed nagware: Its free until the end of January 1995. In February, it will nag you to send me money each time you reboot your Newton. After that, the alarm fix will not work, and it will still nag you. A non-nagging version via electronic mail costs $10. There are two ways to get it. You can pay by credit card or cyberdollars for this and other Newton packages with my program, Register. You should have received Register with AnyMessages; the latest version will be on my Web home page and various bulletin boards. If you have it installed, you can begin registering AnyMessages by pressing the '$' button in AnyMessages. CompuServe members may instead register in the Shareware Registration Forum (GO SWREG). The ID is 3558; my address is 72540.1731. What the Packages Do (Mostly for Programmers). AnyMessages? has two parts. One part is essentially version 1 of the program, a display of the Newtons last four messages, with the times at which they occurred. The new part is a patch of the system :Notify method. If the message is important enough, rather than using the system notification dialog (which disappears when the Newton goes to sleep), I put up my large message window, which doesnt disappear until you tell it to. In addition, if the message is an alarm, I beep five times at maximum volume. (This means you can safely turn the sound volume all the way down, which will save battery life and may speed up typing.) ClockFix tries to set your clock ahead by its estimate of how much time your clock loses. The first part of the guess is that, on average, you rebooted your Newton at thirty seconds past the minute. This guess means that at best I can reduce the problem from a linear progression away from the correct time to a Drunkards Walk around it, which is a substantial improvement. This is trickier than it sounds, since I'm not allowed to set your clock to a specific time, and setting the minutes ahead also loses the number of seconds. ClockFix tries to wait until the true number of seconds is zero, and then set the clock ahead. But your Newton may be busy then, which introduces more randomness. (Jim Schram of Apple, in his infrared synchronization sample code, uses a more sophisticated technique, but his code knows what time it is; without a trustworthy clock, my code can only guess. And at startup time I try to do as little as possible, since things can get weird then.) Another new complication: Packages which do an extremely clean reboot don't seem to lose the number of seconds, but there's no way for ClockFix to know this. This is not too big a deal for two reasons: Many, perhaps most, reboots seem to be unclean, and even after a clean reboot ClockFix will make your Newton about thirty seconds fast, which is generally better than thirty seconds slow. My Newton seems to gain a little bit of time running ClockFix, which is a lot better than losing a lot of time. Note to users of my Disabler: ClockFixs technique is slightly more sophisticated, so Id recommend turning Disablers time adjustment off and using ClockFixs. Note that ClockFix is an autopart; these were invented after I wrote Disabler, and arent disabled by it. The nagging has two phases, and starts at the end of January 1995. After March 1, the notification patch wont run, and at reboot time a little blinking icon will appear in the upper left corner of your screen. You can make the icon go away by tapping on it, at which point it will tell you to send me money. During February, everything will work, but youll have to tap on the icon twice, and then you get asked for money.