Sean's download station
Here you can find quick links to download free chapters from books written by Sean McManus, as well as other free downloads from my website. For more information, use the navbar above to visit my main website at www.sean.co.uk.
Download free book chapters (PDFs):
- Web Design in Easy Steps
- Microsoft Office for the Older and Wiser
- The Customer Service Pocketbook (co-authored)
- University of Death - a novel about the music industry
- Social Networking for the Older and Wiser Cheat Sheet
- Small Business Websites That Work
Download my free Amstrad CPC disc
The Basic Idea disc includes all of the utilities and demonstrations used my online tutorial, together with the games and utilities I wrote for Amstrad Computer User and Amstrad Action magazine. It includes a sprite package, sound envelope definer, colour swapping demos and machine code utilities. The games include clones of Breakout and Pacman, the machine code platform romp the Further Adventures of Fred (75%, AA January 1995) and arcade game Alien Intervention (78%, AA, same issue). The Bugs is a three part adventure game, pitched at children.
Sean's CPC Collection 2005
(zipped, 72K)
Recommended links:
Rainbow: the websafe colour picker
Want to create a new colour scheme for your website that you can be confident will render consistently between browsers and hardware platforms?
Use Rainbow, a freeware program for Windows, to pick your colour scheme. You can display up to nine colours side by side on screen and edit them to see how they will look alongside each other. Two of the boxes include text so you can see how the colours contrast with white and black text. There's also an option to create a palette of random colours for you to start mixing the red, green and blue in.
Rainbow is freeware. You can distribute the unmodified program for free from your website, on your CD Rom or by copying it for friends. The program includes adverts for my books, but there are no unrequested pop-ups, nags, delays or other irritants and there is no connection to the web (the adverts are all stored in the program).
The installer program will install Rainbow and the Visual Basic 5 runtime library. It will also create an uninstall option that cleanly removes every trace of Rainbow from your machine.
It's a litigious world we live in, so I have to make clear that you install this software at your own risk.
Note that with modern displays, this software is largely unnecessary now. For more information about designing colours for your website, see my web design book Web Design in Easy Steps.
