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Suggestive Remarks!

Mike Kerslake is a happy stamper...

One of the my office tasks is to despatch all the overseas copies of Atari Computing. We take advantage of the Royal Mail franking service for UK addresses but each direct mailed overseas copy requires stamps.
To help me figure out the combination of stamps needed for the various destinations I started to compile a table but it all got too much so I gave up and made a Suggestive Remark to Mark Baines. Mark had just finished the latest Profile release and was looking around for a new project to get to grips with. A week or two later the result is Stamp Values, a Control Panel eXtension (CPX), ** Italics on ** [Ed: See review in PD/Shareware pages and it's also on the Reader Disk] ** Italics off ** which does all the thinking and leaves me to concentrate on licking the stamps!

With my intended Suggestive Remark already taken care off (I'm delighted Atari programmers are open to suggestions and respond so quickly) I've come up with a couple of alternatives ideas to kick around.

To recap, the idea of this column is to make suggestions which programmers can use as a starting point to develop from. The software must have a GEM interface, be compatible with both singletasking and multitasking OS's and should be both resolution and colour depth independent.

A-Z sorter
I often have to make up lists of names or items and, as I don't have a particularly tidy mind, I tend to add to these lists ad-hoc. Eventually I need to get them into some sort of alphanumercial order and I currently use a TTP program which works, but you have to type in a filename and it's just a bit crude. A nice GEM utility capable of manipulating ASCII files would be a useful addition to our global software arsenal.

Port Activity Monitor (PAM)
Most of us connect printers, modems and other peripherals to the ports on the back of our machines but often, due to lack of space or convenience, these are positioned so their activity lights are not visible.
I've lost count of the times I've forgotten I am online or printing stuff (the downside of multitasking!). What I need is a little window or something placed in the menu bar to monitor the status of all my ports. Similar modem utilities exist for the PC platform - a tiny modem icon flickers during send/receive. Something similar for our favourite machines would do be great - except I'd like all my ports to be monitored!

Those are my Suggestive Remarks this time around but I'm sure I haven't got the monopoly on ideas and I would really like to hear yours. Please write to me, preferably in ASCII format on a floppy, at the usual editorial address!