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ALM Version 3.2 --- Alm.Editor 3.2 & ShowAlm 3.2
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ENGLISH INSTRUCTIONS.                                                                
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Do you have a problem remembering peoples birthdays? And how many
years they celebrate. I had, and that's why I made these two programs.
Now, I have used ALM in over 6 years, and I never miss a birthday
or anything else important any more!!!

----------------------------------------------------

ALM is a program package, including ALM.Editor and ShowALM.
These programs may be distributed freely, but can not be sold for
profit.

ALM needs an Amiga Classic - AmigaDos 2.0 or better.

The whole thing works as a kind of calendar. You type in important
days in ALM.Editor and are then warned of future birthdays etc. by
ShowALM. Put ShowALM in your startup-sequence or user-startup

With ALM.Editor you edit the file S:ALM.data

ShowALM is a Shell command that loads ALM.data and displays the
next important day(s) in the shell window. You can also search for
a specific day or a word, for example determine how many days there
is to christmas day, and what day of the week that is etc.



ALM Editor V3.2
----------------

You edit as said the file S:ALM.data. This file is not formatted as a
standard ASCII file, but is divided into all the days of ONE year. The
date for the day you are editing is shown in the information bar, top
left in the window. (white on black with the standard colours). It can
for example show 1998-Aug-02 or something like that... You change day
by clicking on this date. If you only want to change the day, then just
click on the day in the date. There is two other buttons in right of the
date. "<-Prev" and "Next->". You can click on these to jump to the next
day containing text (If you not have changed the search word. But more
about this later.)

Note:  Its not possible to edit more than a screen full of text on
       each day. It's also not possible to have lines longer than
       the windows width.

Watch and Edit mode.
--------------------

There is two different modes in ALM.Editor: "View" and "Edit".

In edit mode you edit the text, and in View (or Watch) mode, you
can see how the text will look when displayed by ShowALM. This is
necessary as you can type in birth years in the text, and then
get the age of the person in question from ShowALM.

If you for example write (in edit mode):

----------------
Andrew is *1973 years old today!! Happy Birthday!!!!¶
¶
----------------

(The ¶-signs is end-of-line markers, nothing to care about)

Then this will look like this in View mode: (If it now is 1998)

----------------
Andrew is 25 years old today!! Happy Birthday!!!

----------------

In View mode, ALM basically takes todays year minus the value typed
in after the star (*). In this case: 1998-1973 = 25.

ALM also removes the negative-sign if there is one. You can say that
ALM shows the difference between the year and the value after *.

You can therefor for example write (in the same day as the example
above):
-----------------
In *2023 years, I will be 50 years old!¶

-----------------

Which will show:

-----------------
In 25 years, I will be 50 years old!

-----------------

As 1998-2023 is 25


Note: The value after the star MUST be 4 digits!




Temporary Notes
---------------

Temporary notes was a new feature of ALM2.2, made on request from
a faithful user of ALM: Fredrik Sörensson.

The whole thing is that you have two types of notes. Temporary and
resident ones. Resident notes is the kind as in the examples above:
Birthdays etc. Temporary notes is the kind like: Go to the dentist,
Math test etc. Notes you only have use for at one time, not several
years. These temporary notes is preceded by a "<"-sign.

Example:
--------------
I am today *1973 years old.¶
¶
<Clean my room¶
<or something....¶
--------------

These "<" is used so that ALM.Editor easily can delete the temporary
notes and leave the resident ones without deleting them. The "<" must
be written in the very beginning of the line, else ALM will not
recognise it as a temporary note. Then, some time later when the days
with the temporary notes has passed, you don't want these temporary
notes to come back next year. Therefor, there is a date layed in
ALM.data that indicates when you last deleted your temporary notes.
You do this with the menu "Edit:Clear past temp.notes". This command
starts to search for temporary notes from the latest delete date.
If any temporary notes was found, ALM will display the day in the
window and ask if you want to delete the temporary notes on this
day etc...

You can also let ShowALM to automatically remove old temp notes by
using the "AutoRem" option. See futher below.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
ALM EDITOR 3.2, menu by menu.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

The FILE menu:
--------------

New:

All the data is deleted.


Load:

With this function you can load an ALM.data file. This is the file you
are editing. As default you should use S:ALM.data. This file is loaded
automaically every time you start ALM.Editor, so you probably don't
need to use this function much.


Save:

Save the ALM.data file you have in memory.


Load ASCII to day:

Loads an ascii text and overwrites the day with this file. As you only
can edit a window full of text, this is olny what will be loaded.

If the text contains any ¶-signs, then these will be replaced with
#-signs, as ALM uses ¶-signs as end-of-line-signs


Save day to ASCII:

Saves the day to an ascii file.


Exit: (You can also press ESC)

Ends the program. If you not have saved the current ALM.data file,
any changes will be lost.


Save & Exit:

Saves the current ALM.data file and then ends the program.


The GO menu:
------------

Next: (or F2, or the button on the information bar)

Looks for the next note containing the search-word. (See below)


Prev: (or F1, or the button on the information bar)

Looks for the previous note containing the search-word. (See below)


Search-word: (or F3)

Change the search-word. Current search-word is allways shown
in the information bar. It is also displayed in the GO menu
under "Search-word".

You can choose:

*, nothing, or a text string.

If you choose *, (the default search-word), the next day is
searched for, containing any text at all. (The next note,
you can say)

If you choose "nothing" (just press return), the next day is
searched for, even if it not is used.

If you type in a text string, for example: "Andrew is", the next
day containing this text is searched for.



The EDIT menu
-------------

Clear day:

Yep, exactly what you think: Delete the note for this day.

When you have done this, it's not possible to find the day
with * as the search-word.


Edit mode:

Change to edit mode (see above)

You can also press any key (except F1 etc) to enter edit mode.
So, you can just begin to type in your message to enter the
edit mode.

You can also click with left mous button somewhere in the text.
Then you are entering edit mode, and the cursor is placed where
you clicked.


Watch mode: (F5)

Enters the watch (view)-mode. Look above in this doc.


Delete temporary notes:

Deletes all lines preceded by a "<"-sign in the currend day. The
"<" must be put in the very beginning of the line. (See above in
this doc). If the day after deleting the temporary notes only consists
of spaces and EOL-signs, then the whole day will be deleted.

Tip:
If you want to delete some lines that not are temporary, you can
simply put a "<" in front of the line, and then choose this function.


Clear past temp. notes:

Every time this function is used, todays date is saved to the ALM.data file.
So, first, it looks in ALM.data to see when you last deleted your temp.
notes. Then all days containing temp.notes are scanned for, and the
previous function (Delete temp. notes) is used on these days. After that,
todays date is saved to ALM.data, so that ALM.editor will know when
you deleted your temp. notes last time.


Copy day to buffer:

Copy the current note to the copy buffer.


Copy buffer to day:

(Paste). Copies the buffer to the current day. If the buffer is empty,
then the day will be cleared.


The ABOUT menu:
---------------

In this menu you can find some information about ALM.Editor, ShowALM,
ALM.data and Temporary Notes.



--------------------------------------------

The shell command SHOWALM 3.2:

--------------------------------------------

This is the program that warns you of comming birthdays etc. You
should put it in your startup-sequence or user-startup. If you
don't want to edit these files, you can put the file "ALM.show"
in your WBStartup drawer. It's a shell script that is executed
by iconX. But don't forget to put ShowALM in C: first.

The best thing to do is probably to put showalm first in user-startup



There is many different options.


Try:

ShowALM ?

, and you will see them.


But you probably don't want to do that now, so I write them here:

Usage: ShowALM [Next n] [Find "word" / all / all*] [Svenska]
       [From name] [Echo "string"] [Echo* "string"]
       [Date YYYYMMDD / MMDD] [SP] [NL] [NeverMiss] [Wait [n]] [AutoRem]


Next <n> :
----------
<n> is the number of days you want to see, for ex:

Showalm next 3  ;shows the next 3 days containing text. (The 3 next
notes) (Like searching with * in the editor 3 times.)

Find "word" :
-------------
The equivalent of changing the search-word in ALM.Editor
If the Find option not is stated, you can say that the search-word
is *

The search always begins "today". Even with Find all and find all*
(See below)

If you for ex. write:
showalm next 2 find "Andrew is", then the next two days containing this
text is shown. If there only is one day containing this, then the
second search will display the same day, but one year from now..
(365 days more, or 366 if it's a leap year.)


Find all :
----------
shows all days, even the ones without text.

Find all* :
-----------
Searches for all days (like "find all") but displays only the once
containing text. For example:

Showalm next 3 find all*       ;If there is any note for today,
tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, then this/these will be shown.

From "name" :
-------------
Load ALM.data from the file "name". If you don't use this, then
showalm loads S:ALM.data.

Echo "string" :
---------------
"string" is written as a heading, for ex:
ShowALM next 7 find all* echo "My ALManac, one week ahead"

Echo* "string" :
----------------
The string is printed if the option FIND don't find anything, for
example:
Showalm next 5 find all* echo* "Nothing to worry about!"

Svenska :
---------
All text will be in swedish.

Date YyyyMmDd or Date MmDd :
----------------------------
Begin the search from specified date. You can never go to 29.Feb
regardless if it's a leap-year or not.
Ex:
showalm date 0212 find all     ;Shows february the 12:th
showalm date 20100430 next 2   ;Begins the search April the 30:th
year 2010 and shows the next two notes from there.

SP :
----
Gives an extra space line between the date line and the note.

NL :
----
The lines (-------------------) marking where a day starts and ends
is not printed.

Wait :
------
The program asks you to press return before it ends, but only if
a note has been shown.

Wait 3:
-------
The program asks you to press return before it ends, but only if
a note for a day that comes within 3 days has been shown. So, for
example "wait 0" will only wait if a note for todays date has been
shown.

Please note that "wait [n]" only waits ONCE a day (for the same data file)!
Before, you had to press return every time. But if you rebooted the
computer many times in the same day, it was quite irritating to press
return every time. If you have pressed once, you have seen the notes for
today and don't want to be delayed again. Now, you don't have to do
that any longer.

NeverMiss :
-----------
If you don't use your computer every day, or maybe if you not are
home for a week, it can happen that you miss some important notes
in ALM. But if you use "NeverMiss", you will not miss anything, as
the notes you should have missed without "Nevermiss" is shown before
the usual notes. ShowAlm asks you to press return before the usual
notes are shown.

AutoRem:
--------
ShowALM will automatically remove old temporary notes that not are
needed any longer. So, if you use AutoRem, you won't need to use
ALM.Editor to remove them. AutoRem removes old temp notes about
once a month.


MULTICOMMANDS :
---------------
You can perform several searches or command sets by putting a "|"
sign between them. This way, you don't have to load ShowALM and
ALM.data many times to get the right result.

Ex:
ShowALM next 2 | date 1225 find all     ;Shows the two next notes and
christmas day.


The options: [Svenska], [NeverMiss], [Wait] and [From name] are global
and has only to be stated once (in one command set).



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Every time ShowALM shows a day, it also shows how many days it's
left to the day and what day of the week it is.

Leap-years are programmed to eternity.

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If you find any bugs or have any smart ideas for these program,
then send me a letter.

Kind Regards,
Anders Persson