Macintouch August 27th.
Matt Gough
With reference to the problem with Canvas expiring soon, the response
from Deneba (now ACD Systems) is utter nonsense.
The System clock on the Mac flipped over to a 'negative' value on
Wednesday, January 19, 1972 at 3:14:08 am, and so has been negative
since long before the Mac existed.
I have been debugging Canvas here using the venerable Macsbug and
have determined that it will deliberately expire at 12:30pm on 31st
August 2004.
Thankfully this expiry date is stored in a resource within Canvas,
and so anyone with a copy of ResEdit can fix their Canvas to alter
this expiry date.
Instructions:
Download ResEdit
Make a copy of Canvas in the Finder in case you make a mistake below
Launch ResEdit
In ResEdit, open the copy of Canvas you created earlier
A window will show up in ResEdit with lots of icons with names under
them.
Double-click the icon whose name is 'toly' (without quotes)
Another window will show up with a one item list in it.
Double-click the item 1011
A window will show up with a load of hex values in it.
The first line contains '07D4' - (07D4 hex is 2004 decimal)
Select the 'D4' portion of this number
Type the characters 'f7' (without quotes - and NOT the F7 function key)
What was 07D4 should now be 07F7.
Quit ResEdit, saving your changes to Canvas
This patched Canvas 3.5.2 will now run happily until 12:30pm on 31st
August 2039.
I wonder whether the expiry date was a marketing decision or a lack of
trust by the developers that their code would still work after all
this time.
Hope that helps
