Work Faker
This tool actually did see a public release. It showed up on a MacAddict CD sometime around 1998, and was downloaded maybe a thousand times from sites like versiontracker.com.
The premise was that by putting a dialog box up on your computer (showing that it was busy), you might be able to sneak and extra break or two at work and have a copout in case someone caught you slacking off. This idea made a bit more sense back in 1995 when modal applications that would block the entire OS were common and Macs didn't multitask particularly well anyway, but I still considered it more of a novelty item than something you might actually use. I tried to sprinkle a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor in the ReadMe file, too.
You can download the application, if you have an old mac. I'm not sure if it has the "GOLD EDITION" splash screen, but you get the idea. It seems to work fine in Classic, so unless you have an intel Mac or don't have Classic installed you should be good to go. It might be amusing for a few minutes.
You can also see more screenshots from Work Faker.
Super BattleBot
This was to be a convenient tool for chatting in Battle.net channels and maintaining ownership of custom channels without needing to have a Blizzard game client open. There were similar tools for Windows, but none were compatible with Mac OS when this was being developed. The completely random splash screen was just a landscape whipped up in Bryce with an artistic filter applied.
You can also see more screenshots from Super BattleBot.
Trivia Ticker
Trivia Ticker was one of my earliest applications, and the screenshot shows off my love for early Square/Enix video game titles. Essentially you could use it to create questions with 1 to 9 possible multiple choice answers, one of which was correct. It would present the questions in a random order and tell you how well you did.
I thought it might also be reasonable to use it for studying for the kind of tests you get in K-12. It worked quite well but was never released to the public.
Christmas Counter (or Countdown)
As a kid, you can get pretty excited about a holiday like Christmas. Free stuff! It was great. Naturally, when I started writing software at a young age one of the things that seemed like a good idea was an always-on-top window that counted down until Christmas.
The first version was written in the archaic Hypercard, but I kept it updated over the years. Incidentally, Hypercard was a pretty interesting program; it let you create "cards," and navigate between them with hyperlinks. The cards were kept in a "stack" which had to be on a local medium. It predated the Web by about 3 years.
You can also see more screenshots from Christmas Countdown.
Space Scale
This was the earliest program that I wrote, starting in 97 or maybe 98. It was written in C, unlike most of the other applications (which were in RealBasic). C applications took a bit more effort to get right on the Mac, and so it's probably also more buggy than the other projects. I think I meant "units" when I said "measuements".
There's no reason to download this, even as a novelty, but it's still available. It seems to work fine in Classic, so unless you have an intel Mac or don't have Classic installed you should be good to go.
Registration Codes
I thought I might eventually be able to make some money by selling licenses to some of these programs, but obviously that never panned out. Look, a free code!
Fantasy Lord I
I was so confident about this project I gave it a "I", clearly anticipating multiple sequels. In the latest version all you could do was watch some text scroll by and drive the little guy around 6 or 7 tiny tile-based maps. I was doing all the graphics from scratch using the MacOS APIs instead of using a game sprite library because I didn't know such a thing existed. The attempt at drawing a woman is also pretty funny.
Sam wrote us up a great intro story, but sadly I just didn't have enough skill on the coding or art end to make anything worth looking at.
There's a placeholder up for a game called Fantasy Lord now. Those bastards! We are going to release first, I swear!
Others
Some other fun stuff that never got out included... QT Tools, a tool for making scrolling credits using Quicktime; Quote Generator, a utility similar to the unix fortune for displaying random quotations; Picture download manager, a tool created for creating time-lapse Quicktime movies from webcams that refreshed an image every now and again; File Sorter Plus, a tool to mass-change the metadata in the now-defunct resource fork of Mac files that told the system what application a file belonged to; Starfield, a program that displayed a view something like you would see in the formerly ubiquitous Windows screensaver, except you could also change your speed and direction with the keyboard; Virtual TV, like one of those old "virtual pets" that you would see everywhere, except it was a television; SCM Color Tool, a convenient way to add color codes to text in Starcraft custom maps; and other, even more moderately boring stuff.
