Welcome to Fiend.app, V1.0.

This program is essentially a dock and shelf extender, with a few (perhaps several) nice frills.

What does it do?  Well, it has two basic functions: first, it creates a shelf that covers the entire desktop.  Second it provides you with a multi-level, extensible dock.  I have endeavored to make both of these pieces approximate the default interface behavior as best I could, without spending so much time on it that I'd have to charge for it.  Oh, it also incorporates BackSpace (see the main menu), which Alex Cone demanded.

It started out as "a couple of minor enhancements" to MonsterShelf.app, written by Brian Pinkerton  (whose address is [bp@cs.washington.edu]).  

Several weeks of  continuing "minor enhancements" later (as well as feature requests and demands from my friends Alex Cone [abc@object.com] and Ed Wright [address withheld], both of whom, practically speaking, made the app what it is today) resulted in (among other things):
     A multi-level, resizable dock
     Pasteboard support
     Multiple file dropping
     Image backgound with tiling
     Backspace support
     Autolaunching
     App launch status tracking

You can find brief instructions by using the "Info->Help" menu - it's not real NeXT help, but it's better than no instructions at all.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
I would like to thank Brian Pinkerton for placing his code in the public domain, and providing the inspiration (and some of the underlying structure) for Fiend.

Huge thanks to Ed Wright and Alex Cone for their unrelenting feature demands, as well as their tolerance of being given incompatible file formats with every alpha release.

Thanks to Alex Cone also for providing the button images for the Fiend Dock icon. 

LEGALESE:

This program and the associated code come with no warranty of any kind.  You assume full risk and responsibility for their use.  Permission is hereby granted to freely redistribute the Fiend program and source code, and to use it for any purpose whatsoever.

FINAL NOTES:

I hope that you find this app useful and/or entertaining.  If you publish this app or its code on a CD-ROM, I think that it would be courteous to send me a copy of the CD-ROM, but you are not bound to do so.  I have really worked hard on this app, so I'll be taking a break on it for a while (except for fixing truly egregious bugs). If you really like it, or if you want to inspire new features or enhancements, you may feel free to send me ten bucks. |[;->  

Peace.

David C. Lambert, 9 June, 1994
dcl@homer.uu.panix.com
(NeXTMail, of course)