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The BIGSKY MACEZINE is produced by the Big Sky Macintosh Users Group (B-smug) in Billings, Montana. As you might expect, this a group of down-to-earth, easy-going folks who are "smug" about their platform of choice and like to trade tips and downloads to freeware, shareware, and other things related to the Macintosh OS. As with most Mac Users Groups (MUGs) they also have a direct line to the people at Apple Computer who want to hold onto the user-base the Mac still has and so they get clues on the niftier "toys" coming down the pike.
More on that "smug" thing: They say, "The Big-Sky Mac User Group (B-smug) was formed Nov.1993 in Billings, Montana, U.S.A. According to Webster... the word 'smug' means 'self-satisfied'. We are a number of self-satisfied Macintosh users who want to share our satisfaction with other Mac users. We'd love to have you join our group, or at least peruse our Web-Site occasionally..." (They provide a nice little unobtrusive link at that word "join," too.)
There was something very "down-home" about their Web site, I thought, and I found that inviting. They provide tips as you scroll down the page so that you can easily find what you are looking for and multiple links to their archives of back issues.
Here's a snippet from a recent back issue that I looked at on my visit so you can get a sense of the flavor here. I clicked on the "Freeware" link for issue number 40 and found this:
"FreeWare Goodies ...
"Very few programs on the Mac sort numbered items properly. Usually they look like this list of numbered folders when we choose view "as List" from the View menu choice..."
(NOTE: Big Sky provides an graphical image here, which I won't. You'll find me use the "[Image]" note in the rest of this snippet.)
"We've found a free System Extension that changes this and presents them in proper order, like this:
"[Image]
"Let's see what we can find out about it by looking inside the folder we downloaded. Let's open the ReadMe file and peruse it.
"Here are a few items of info ... we won't include them all.
"Natural Order ©1996-1997 Stuart Cheshire
"How to use Natural Order
"Drop Natural Order into the System Folder and Restart your Mac.
"How Natural Order works
"Natural Order works by overriding the System's IUMagString and IUMagPString functions.
"Natural Order only overrides the sorting of the numeric parts of strings. It still uses your System's built-in sorting function for the textual parts of strings, so if you have your system set to some non-US sorting order, that order will still be honoured by Natural Order.
"Natural Order uses the following rule to sort strings:
"1. The space character sorts before numbers; numbers sort before non-numbers.
"2. Numbers sort in numerical order; leading zeroes and spaces on numbers are ignored.
"3. Non-numbers sort in the Mac's System sorting order.
"Stuart, thanks for this helpful creation. We're using it with the latest Mac OS, at this time anyhow, Mac OS 8.5.1 ... and it works great!
"Natural Order can be downloaded from the MacDownload site..."
Recommended.
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