Many long time Macintosh users may know of a Control Panel called DoubleScroll, which places double arrows at the top and bottom of your scroll bars. But what many Mac users may not know is that DoubleScroll is now Mac OS 8 compatible and that a few new features have been added with the new release.

DoubleScroll lets you have double arrows at both ends, or only at the bottom right of your scroll bar, greatly limiting the amount of mouse movement required to scroll up and down in a window. In addition to the double arrows, DoubleScroll enables live scrolling and many modifier key shortcuts. Option-clicking the arrows will act as a page up/page down, Command-clicking the arrows will act as a home/end feature, and Shift-clicking in the elevator region of the scroll bar will automatically cause the thumb to jump to the location you clicked and start tracking from there.

DoubleScroll has a filter feature that will let you tell DoubleScroll which applications are incompatible with DoubleScroll, and which features to enable in them. DoubleScroll also supports on-the-fly preference changes (all changes are made active upon closure of the Control Panel, instead of on restart) and a scrolling throttle which lets you change the scrolling speed and the scrolling delay.

Sleeper is another veteran Macintosh shareware program, and it has been greatly improved in version 3.0. Sleeper is a Control Panel that allows you to spin down your hard disks, power down your monitor, shut down your computer, activate a screen saver, and much more.

Sleepers' main feature is disk sleep, which lets you spin down your hard disk(s). It is compatible with both internal and external, IDE and SCSI hard disks, and removable drives such as the Zip from Iomega. You can also power down your Energy Star-compatible monitor and shut down your computer when it is idle for a certain amount of time. There is also a screen saver that lets you set the delay time, brightness, and hot corners for dimming your monitor.

You can configure Sleeper to request a password upon wake up, and enable a hotkey or hotkey combination for each of its features. And what if your computer needs your attention while you are away? You will know because the LEDs (the lights on your keyboard for number, caps, and scroll lock) on your keyboard will flash.

Better Edit Keys is a Control Panel that allows you to use the shift, option, and control keys with the arrows, delete, forward delete and clear keys in any standard text editing field, including basic text editors such as SimpleText. This makes it much easier to work with text without reaching for the mouse.

Better Edit Keys enables nine key combinations that are as follows: