Macking 111

New iMacs
I wake up on the morning of the last day in August and I am greeted by Apple releasing the newly-redesigned iMac. This time they got rid of the computer entirely! No... but remember how it was stored in the white domed base with the display pivoting on top? Now Apple has taken the same design used in their new aluminum displays and spooged the entire iMac - CPU, hard drive and CD/DVD drive - into the monitor case. It's even more attractive than the original design.
The entire thing is just 2" thick and is available in 17" and 20" display formats. Oh, and by the way, it contains a G5 processor! Yep, G5 comes to the iMac. You choose either a 1.6 GHz or 1.8 GHz model in the 17"; the 20" comes with the 1.8 GHz by default. Plus: you get a SuperDrive, and the hard drive is twice as big as the cheaper model.
The full complement of ports is lined up the back of the display - I mean, the computer - including a mini-VGA output with support for an optional S-Video if you want to feed the output to a TV or projector. The headphone jack is also a mini-optical port. The sound-in port can accept an electric guitar to record into GarageBand or any other sound program.
What's missing? FireWire 800 and a twin-processor configuration - they gotta give you SOME reason to want a G5 Tower, after all. You will also want more RAM: it comes with only 256Mb but supports up to two Gb. There are three USB 2.0 ports, modem, wired Ethernet, room for an AirPort Extreme card inside and two FireWire 400 ports. Price? Same as the previous models, starting at $1299 and ending fully loaded for $1899, cheaper than the previous top-end iMac. Hell, if you can afford to spend $1299, splurge for the $1899 model. You will be glad in the end. Hie thee off to Apple's web site for more details.

Sad Loss
The Portland computer community lost a good one when Gary Grossoehme died in his sleep last month. Gary was the owner of Oregon Electronics on NE Couch, which provided cables of all kinds to Mac and PC users alike; he was one on the short list of Mac-friendly PC suppliers. Goodbye, Gary, and thanks for being there.

Printing Selection of a Web Page
What do you do if you want to simply select a paragraph on a web page and print that? You notice that in no browser is there a "Print Selection" command.
But there is a workaround. All you need to do is take a screen shot of the page and print that. If the text you want to print is longer than a page and contains images then you are probably better off just printing the entire page, but only the ones containing the info you want. If using OSX, it's easy: just choose Print and then choose the Preview button. You can then see what your output will be like and you can just choose to print individual pages from within Preview.
OS9 users don't have Preview, but you do have screen shots. Take them by aligning the web page to the center of your screen, displaying as much as possible, then type Command-Shift-4. Your cursor will change into a cross-hair, which you can use to draw a box enclosing the relevant parts of the page. This will create a file called Picture 1 on your hard drive, and you can then print each of the files in SimpleText.

Laser Printer Repair
At the meeting of the Independent Mac Professionals last week, there was a recommendation that Laser Services in Aloha, soon to be Hillsboro, is a good place to get those slippery paper feeders replaced, carts recharged, and other repairs done to old Apple laser writers. I'm saving that name for when mine goes bad.

Quark Going Bye Bye
One of my clients and coworkers from long ago, writes in to tell me about disappearing interest throughout the industry in Quark XPress:
"Some news you may find interesting: I ran into a mutual friend at the grocery store recently. She and I both are in the process of switching to InDesign, and she told me that a friend who works at a PCC computer lab (don't know which one) reported that they've recently dropped Quark from all their machines due to upgrading costs and customer-service difficulties. If you want to take a Quark class, PCC isn't the place to go.
"As I contact my printers one by one, I'm getting nothing but "yes" when I ask if they can handle my InDesign CS files. I've had a few magazines that wouldn't accept ads in PageMaker or even eps, but one by one, they are saying InDesign is fine.
"I've found converting my PageMaker and Quark files to InDesign is easy, and working in the new program is a delight."
Paul

Caches
Paul also asks, "What about Caches -- how many of them are there, when to clear them, how big do they get? (I do backups to DVDs and I don't want to back up huge cache files if I don't need to.)"
Oh, there are several, Paul. To start, clearing the caches from Safari and Netscape is easy. Under the Safari menu just select Empty Cache. In Netscape you must open Preferences, then Advanced, and click the Clear Cache Now button. It was easier under OS9: Just find the folder Cache located in the Mozilla or Netscape Users folder and throw it out. A fresh one is created the next time you use the program.
In Explorer there is no folder of caches, just one 10-meg cache file into which the items are written and removed, changing and updating but never going away.
In Eudora there are several you can clear. Open the Eudora Folder in Documents (not the Eudora Application Folder that contains the program) and look for the Cache Folder. That fills up with little inline images, including ads and siglines from free webmail programs like Hotmail, that are not needed after you finish the message. If you have inline images (not attachments) in messages that you archive, though, you will lose those images if you clear out this folder. There is also some dross in the Parts Folder as well. The Spool Folder contains other inline graphics, and some attachments that are somehow treated differently from regular attachments, which are by default stored in the Attachments Folder. That should be searched and the contents filed elsewhere or deleted. The Spool Folder is a mystery to me; it seems that those items should be deleted when the message is deleted. Or maybe it is... since I never empty my Eudora trash, I wouldn't know. (I archive all my mail, even the Trash but not the Junk, to CD every year.) To test this, open your Spool folder and see if there is anything there. Then empty the Eudora trash. If the Spool folder also empties, there's your answer.
In Outlook Express and Entourage the inline graphics and the attachments are part of the general database, which expands exponentially the more mail you save. Even if you delete messages, the file grows and grows. The way to compact it and clear out the empty holes is to quit the program, then restart it with the Option key held down. That will take you to an intermediate window that will ask you if you want to compact the database. Go ahead and say OK, but it wouldn't hurt to have a backup of this - it's in the Microsoft User Data folder - in case now is the time the Microsoft program decides to munge your email database for good. It does that occasionally, so beware.
Other caches are more system-related and are best left alone.

Security
"What are the best anti-virus programs available and how necessary are they? Is it true that Macs get very few viruses? What about those radio ads that say 'spy software is on your computer right now?' Is there a Spybot for Mac?"
Nope, no spybot. Aladdin Systems makes a Cleaner program that looks for some of this stuff, as well as managing some of your caches. But the traditional spyware that plants itself in desktop buttons, browser toolbars, "cool" cursors and the like are exclusively the joy and privilege of Microsoft victims. None of that stuff runs on Macs. As to viruses, most of the early ones stopped working in OS9, and there are no new ones for OSX at all. Cross your fingers! The exception is Word macro viruses (Microsoft again, yep.) which can be a nuisance to Mackers and a little more destructive to Windows slaves. Macs can harbor those in Word files received from PCs and then passed back to them, but unless you have a twinge of guilt about it, you don't even need to own a virus program. Just be prepared for an unpleasant surprise some day and keep your backups current! Fonts
"Yet another topic to consider: fonts. Don't know how many of your readers are graphic designers with big font collections. I'm one, and at the moment I'm trying to manage my fonts without a font manager except my old ATM Deluxe, which only manages OS 9 apps. Now that I'm in InDesign, I'm leaving OS 9 behind, and ATM is less useful. (I currently use the method of putting all fonts in the OS 9 fonts folder.) There are tons of fonts on my computer that have been installed by I-don't-know-which-app, and which I'd like to nuke if I knew it was okay.
"Check out this interesting article at Apple in their Knowledge Base area on the subject that I found referenced in MacInTouch."
That is a good article, Paul. It says enough that I don't need to repeat it here. Personally, I use Suitcase X1, the current version compatible with 10.3.5. If I needed to manage only a few dozen fonts like most people, putting them in the OS9 System Folder is a good place. Simple, straightforward, not requiring much thought. For those of you wondering why you would want to keep the Classic System Folder around when you aren't running any Classic apps at all, this is a good reason. Otherwise you should create a folder called Fonts for Suitcase in your Documents folder, get Suitcase X1, and let it load the ones you want to use.
Thanks, Paul, for your thought-provoking questions. Gave me fodder for almost an entire column!

Image flaw pierces PC security
Robert Lemos, writing in CNET News.com, 5 Aug 2004, notes:
"Six vulnerabilities in a common code that handles an open-source image format could allow intruders to compromise computers running Linux and may allow attacks against Windows PCs as well as Macs running OS X. The security issues appear in a library supporting the portable network graphics (PNG) format, used widely by programs such as the Mozilla and Opera browsers and various e-mail clients. The most critical issue, a memory problem known as a buffer overflow, could allow specially created PNG graphics to execute a malicious program when the application loads the image.
"Among the programs that use libPNG and are likely to be affected by the flaws are the Mail application on Apple Computer's Mac OS X, the Opera and Internet Explorer browsers on Windows, and the Mozilla and Netscape browsers on Solaris, according to independent security researcher Chris Evans, who discovered the issues. Apple and Microsoft could not immediately be reached for comment. Evans did not test every platform to check which vulnerabilities work, he said."
Apple will be issuing patches in forthcoming security updates, if they haven't already done so by the time this hits print.

Letter
Michael Minamoto writes from PMUG:
"Thanks for mentioning that PMUG is a source of software updates (for those w/o broadband for those multi-megabye downloads)! Anything we can do to promote awareness and membership is good.
"You might also mention that we have a DSL line in the office, and the office is open to all comers on Tues. nights 7-9pm." You just need to be a member to plug in. Best $42 you will spend this year.

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.)