|
Hunting for a job is a nasty, depressing, exhausting, and confusing business. If you don't keep track of what you are doing, you will soon send ten resumes to the same place or forget to follow up or even lose an all-important phone number. So one of the first things I did upon hitting the job trail was to make a stack to keep track of these things. Naturally I had a lot more fun making the stack than I did filling it!
Although it does have SOME apparent redeeming value, I am including this stack because A) it's cute as the Dickens and B) Yumi is also on the job trail and might just appreciate it.
WHAT IT DOES
I tried to keep this stack as simple as possible. Thus, there are only five fields: Type, Source, Date, Description, and Actions Taken. When you create a new card (by pushing the baby-faced button) the date is automatically entered and the current Type is placed and selected in the Type field. Thus you can hit the new button, and within a few keystrokes enter all the essential information.
The date field is automatically updated any time a field is modified, but you can override this if you wish. It is also possible to mark any and all cards by clicking the checkbox between the two browsing arrows. Marking cards is useful because you can get print-outs of marked cards only and skip directly to other marked cards by option clicking the arrow buttons. Option clicking the checkbox lets you mark or unmark all the cards at once.
The four primary buttons on each card are Sort, Print, Find, and New. Each is simple. You can sort the cards by type, source, or in reverse chronological order. You can print some or all of the cards in one of two formats. By pressing the Find button you can immediately locate any word or phrase in the stack; just hit return to keep searching. And the New button makes it easy to add a new card for each new lead.
All of this is summarized in a convenient Help Screen (which gives way to a futile shareware notice). I have found this stack invaluable (my copy now has nearly fifty cards). On those rare occassions when I have an actual interview, I can quickly find the appropriate card and produce a printout to take with me. At any time I can trace the sorry history of rejections from any given institution. And when I'm in the mood to send ANOTHER resume all I have to do is browse through my stack and see which leads I haven't followed yet. If nothing else, all this activity makes me feel as if I have accomplished something.
HOW IT WORKS
Amateur stack-heads may find several features of interest. First, the print button. This stack was my first experiment with HyperCard 2.0's new report capabilities. At first glance, the reporting features seem as feeble as they were before. But on closer examination, I discovered that the new Hypercard can actually produce a wide range of report formats, and can store multiple formats for any given stack.
For some reason none of this is documented very well, so I was forced to learn by trial and error. The two report formats used here are quite simple (and rather crude, actually) but the potential is there for more complex and elegant reports. Perhaps a future Mr. Wizard stack will exploit this potential.
The other interesting technique can be found in the script of the Help button. Recently, a friend of mine on AOL who had received a copy of this stack sent me an e-mail message with this poignant question: "Your stack has only one card and one background. So where's the help screen?"
A fair question. As I explained to this fellow, there are usually at least a dozen different ways to accomplish a given effect in HyperTalk and this stack employs yet another variation on a theme. This time I use a new command: "Picture."
The picture command displays a PICT resource in its own separate window. It is possible to display only part of a very large PICTure and automatically scroll across its surface. It's even possible to display color pictures. Those interested in the mysteries of picture display need look no further than the script of my help button.
The only remaining mystery is how to get the PICTs into the stack in the first place. This is done with the ResEdit program. Simply make a picture using any graphics program, copy it into the clipbard, open your stack with Resedit, and paste. You can then give the PICT resource a name so that it can be invoked from a HyperCard script.
Job Search is a simple but functional stack. I have added the standard Mr. Wizard home button to the first card only - push it to return. Even if you already have a job, please play with it and pass it on to other friends. The stack has a shareware notice; who knows? Maybe I can get ten bucks out of someone!
[As always, push the Push Me button to examine this stack...]
|
