Macking 105

Shuffle Off to Buffalo
I stumbled upon Buffalo Technology's products while wandering through CompUSA's Networking department. They have never advertised in a Mac publication, to the best of my recollection, but the products work very well with Macs and they are way cheaper than AirPort.
How's this: $89 for the equivalent of an Airport Extreme base station. Although you get no built-in modem or USB port, you do get an antenna port and the antenna is only $50, compared to the one from Dr. Bott for $99 or more. You also get four ports for wired Ethernet, saving you the cost of an additional router.
Sure, Apple's units are sexier, but if you're concerned with the sexual attractiveness of networking equipment you have problems that cannot be resolved here. Economics rule, once compatibility has been determined, and the Buffalo products are certainly economical. Even so, they have an attractive design that beats the look of the more common Netgear or Linksys products.
Best of all, they offer a product not even available in AirPort: a repeater. Suppose your desired area is too large for one AirPort module to cover, even with an antenna. You can pair up AirPort base stations, at $149 each, but with Buffalo you can add products designed for that purpose for under $60 each. How much range do you need? When the systems are set up, you can cover as wide, or linear, a range as you need.
Best of all, the company has a toll-free line to help you set up the network should you find the instructions incomprehensible. Live humans answer the phone, and they are here in the Northwestern Hemisphere too! I am so impressed with this company and its products I will be recommending them to all future clients. Find them at http://www.buffalotech.com/ and buy them at such unlikely places as CompUSA and your favorite online mass marketer. I wish they would buy ads in the Mac press. More of us need to find out about them.

Netgear Unreliable
Since the Netgear line of routers are becoming increasingly unreliable, according to user reports at Macintouch, I recommend Asante and XServe as your best options to products not sold by Buffalo. Linksys are cheapest and work pretty well but the company is unabashedly Mac-hostile, and some of their products do not pass AppleTalk. That can be an issue in an OS9 or mixed X-9 environment.

Stealth Serial Port
It's "stealthy" because it isn't supposed to be there. The serial port card replaces the internal modem in every Mac from the first iMacs and the B&W G3 through the G4, and now G5 is out too. It connects any classic serial device including printers, Wacom tablets, MIDI devices, etc. and even puts out AppleTalk (under OS9 only) so you can use a pre-Ethernet laser printer. If you have broadband, who needs a modem? Find them at GeeThree. How is this possible? Because the original classic serial port support is still part of every Mac, simply because it's the best way to incorporate an internal modem. If you don't need one, then why not make use of the port?

Another One Bites the Dust
Palm, Inc. has sent all their tech support jobs to India and, of course, is now almost useless. Furthermore, PalmOne (the spinoff company that controls the PalmOS), has stated that they will drop Mac support for Palm OS6. This at a time when the company is losing market share to the PocketPCs. Furthermore, there is a greater share of Mac users with Palm PDAs than Windows users (but of course the hard numbers are much higher) so someone at PalmOne is an idiot.
Or could it be punishment? Many engineers at Palm came from Be, Inc., which finally shut down after Apple refused to release APIs that would let their OS run on the then-latest model Macs. This could be their way of screwing Apple back.
There is already a proposed conduit from Mark/Space, the company that makes conduits to link Macs to the Sony Clie, but why should we spend more? It's especially odd when you consider that Palm Desktop is just a reworked version of Claris Organizer from Apple.
Look for Apple to make their own conduits to Palm via PhoneBook, iSync and iCal. All they need to add is support for the note pad in the Palm, and a way to install various palm .prc files. There may even be an Apple PDA in the pipeline. Currently, however, both Apple apps rely on the Palm conduits to work with iSync and would need a major rewrite to work without them. iCal and PhoneBook are designed to sync with the iPod and as such are not reliable when you enter data on the Palm and try to sync to the Mac, which is how most people use their Palms.
Other options appearing on the horizon include an open-source Linux for the PocketPCs and maybe even the Palms. This does not affect owners of current Palms, but will be an issue with the new models released this coming summer. Meanwhile, some users of Palm Desktop 4.1 under Panther 10.3.x are reporting problems with the program performing bad syncs and scrambling data. I am one of the people with that setup; my Tungsten T syncs perfectly with Bluetooth and I have had no problems. Still, I recommend that you make sure you have a backup of your Palm database. It's in the Palm folder in Documents (in your Users folder) which, if you are making regular backups of, you are protected. Keep a jaundiced eye peeled anyway.
None of this will affect Mac and Palm users now, but new models released in the fall will run the incompatible version of PalmOS. In my case I will probably return to my old favorite, Now Contact/Now Up-To-Date, which operates almost identically to Palm Desktop and will be providing whatever software is necessary to keep their product syncing with Palms.

Another Reason to Dump AOL
Every time they upgrade the Windows version they screw something up on the Mac version (which is never upgraded). This time it's the spam filter. According to a Macintouch article, Mac users have NO ability to change or disable the spam filtering that affects their account. One of the worst form letters I've ever seen blithely suggests finding a Windows AOL user and logging in as a guest on their account and managing their spam filter settings from there.
Until you do this, count on legitimate email being routed to your spam folder without you being able to do a thing about it.
The only question remaining is, did this incompetence come over from Time/Warner, or did AOL generate it themselves? My answer is simply that they don't want Mac business any more because they have all the money they need without us. Before you dump AOL, be sure to send the usual complaints, death threats and positive suggestions to AOL's customer support department. The more they get, the more they might be motivated to care.

Quark Diminishes in Importance
Every day, the graphics industry's favorite whipping boy shrinks further into irrelevance. Anyone who has ever had to deal with the company on a personal level tends to agree: they'd rather have their fingers chewed by newts than call the company on the phone for any reason.
In spite of the ascendancy of InDesign, many have had to stick with Quark because of managed workflow: a document could be emailed between multiple offices in different states during the production process, and all of them had to have the same version of XPress running on their Macs (and in some cases, PCs).
Now a new product from Adobe called InCopy CS will simplify the process of editing and markup. According to CreativePro Weekly, this new software will let you receive an InDesign document, and edit the text, make notations and pass on for further edits, without owning InDesign! No more having to own Acrobat 6, making and modifying PDF files, or modifying IDD originals. From the newsletter:
"I'll send my editor the InDesign document which she will open in her version of InCopy -- even if she doesn't have InDesign! Using InCopy she'll be able to see the page in a layout view and edit the text in galley views. She'll even be able to make annotations about the text. Then, she'll send the edited document back to me. I'll be able to accept or reject her changes as I want as well as read her annotations. This will eliminate the need for PDFs.
"... the download version of InCopy costs only $249 ($259 for a boxed CD). So I can buy two copies of InCopy for less than one copy of InDesign ($699). In fact, InCopy is even cheaper than a copy of Acrobat Standard ($299)."
If I were still in the page-layout business I would be extremely excited about this.
I have this nagging fear that Adobe could become too successful and, without competition, become just as customer-hostile and arrogant as Quark. Mitigating against that possibility is the fact that Quark has always been that way and even slightly improved over the years. Nevertheless, Adobe so completely dominates the publishing industry they are in danger of becoming a little Microsoft. Fortunately there is still an alternative to Illustrator in Freehand, and an alternative to Photoshop Elements (if not Photoshop itself) in GraphicConverter. Now we just need a new page-layout program that is OSX-native... what, did someone say "Ready, Set, Go"?

Another Random Microsoft Bash
This item from Risks Digest was too hilarious not to pass on:
"Bug in Windows-operated toilet system
"I was at a press conference on Thursday with PalmSource at One Aldwych, which is one of those hyper-modern London hotels. One of its features is a airplane-style vacuum-operated toilet system. One of the Palm execs told me that while they were staying at the hotel this system failed, and any time they wanted to use the bathroom or take a shower they had to call the reception desk and get escorted to the corporate headquarters in the building next door to use the facilities there. For a couple of *days*.
"It transpires that the entire plumbing system is run by a Windows-based computer system and whatever went wrong with it was so obscure that they had to get a technician from the company that supplied it on a plane down from Scotland to fix it and reboot.
The Blue Screen of Sewage?"

Sorry, I couldn't Resist
Subject: [fwd] MS licensing terms get bolder
From the license agreement for Microsoft's "Email caller ID" system designed to help fight spam.
"Microsoft and its Affiliates hereby grant you ("Licensee") a fully paid, royalty-free, non-exclusive, worldwide license under Microsoft's Necessary Claims to make, use, sell, offer to sell, import, and otherwise distribute Licensed Implementations, provided, Licensee, on behalf of itself and its Affiliates, hereby grants Microsoft and all other Specification Licensees, a reciprocal fully paid, royalty-free, non-exclusive, worldwide, nontransferable, non-sublicenseable, license under Necessary Claims of Licensee to make, use, sell, offer to sell, import, and otherwise distribute Licensed Implementations."
In English:
Microsoft claims they own the rights to the general concept and specifications for this system. You may use their concept without charge so long as any software you develop using that concept may be sold by Microsoft without compensation to you.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)