Macking 13

Alert of the Month
Are you using Aaron, that Apple-released, but unsupported, extension that makes your 7.5.x Finder look like Copland System 8 will look? Take it out at the first sign of trouble. It patches so many little segments of Finder code to do its trick, it becomes the prime cause of hangs, freezes and outright crashes, especially if you use any other extensions or panels that change the look or operation of windows and menus. Even though it has been updated three times that I know of, it keeps causing problems for many people. Since it's pretty but useless, save yourself some headaches and commit Aaron to the Trash.

A Lazy Compendium
Spending so much time on the Net, and email lists mentioned here before, I come across more useful tips, sites, humorous stories and general Mackish weirdness than any column has room for. Besides, I am supposed to generate stuff like this myself, right? Well, I'll compromise a tad by rewriting some of these pieces while including all necessary attributions so you can get the full story yourselves.
From TidBITS: Info-Mac Web Site -- The Info-Mac team has finally assembled an "official" Info-Mac Web site in cooperation with Pacific HiTech. The volunteer-run Info-Mac archive has been a staple of the online community for over ten years, and the new Web site should serve as a central location for finding information about Info-Mac, mirror sites, search engines, the Info-Mac digest, and more. Even better, when you tell people about Info-Mac, you can now give them a single URL.
A Forrester Research report says that businesses that force workers to give up their favorite software tools in order to conform to a company technology standard may be shooting themselves in the foot. "Out in the business trenches, people need to solve problems yesterday. They will grab the tools that work to get the job done. Flexibility and responsiveness are more important than a corporate-wide infrastructure policy," says the report's author. He warns CIOs to go slow in adopting technology standards, particularly when it comes to the Internet, because "no one knows how the Internet market is going to shake out." (Investor's Business Daily 15 May 96) Pay attention, you CIOs, who think you are accomplishing something by making people give up their Macs for Wintel boxes. This excerpt from a letter in New Media magazine hammers that point in quite nicely:
"Our once-inspired work force has been reduced to Microsoft robots. Employees who used to do outstanding work because it was fun feel that they have been sold out and now do mediocre work because they have to.
"Mac users are different from Windows users. Windows users like Windows and they do their jobs. Mac users love their Macs and they love to use them! They also expect Mac performance.
Keeping your work force happy is very important if you expect productivity, but it's especially important if you also need your work force to be motivated, imaginative and inventive."
The author works for Northrup, which switched from an all-Mac network to a Microsoft network. Up side (if you can call it that): the MIS got a significant raise and the in-house support department quadrupled its staff to handle the problems.

Q&A
See Macking 12.

Need flight planning software? The only company making this for the Mac is Mentor Plus Software. Their packages are FliteStar and FliteMap. They can also be reached at (800) 628-4640. Be aware that sometimes the server won't let you in, so strip off everything after ~criteria/ and hit return, then follow the link to Mentor Plus.

Windows Bash of the Month (this from MacWay):
Viruses? 35 Mac vs. 5000+ PC -- Examples from the back of the box of McAffee's VirusScan software.
Windows: "Consistently detects over 96% of the more than 5000 known viruses maintained by independent testing labs."
Macintosh: "Consistently detects over 99% of the more than 35 known Macintosh-specific viruses and their variants maintained by independent testing labs."
That means that the software MISSES more PC viruses than EXIST on the Mac! Tell that to your MIS-manager next time they talk about "standardizing on Wintel."
Also from Macway: "While browsing in a bookstore the other day I noticed the definitive book about Windows: Uninstalling Windows Applications by James McCord. Yep, an entire book to tell you how to remove programs from Windows. As Dave Barry says, "I swear I am not making this up."

URLs of the Month
(As if this column didn't have a lot of links already!) MacSource is a page with links to over 1,000 Mac-related sites, including 800 companies producing products for the MacOS. Next time your Win-leaning supervisor says "There's no software for Macs," fire up your browser and point it to http://www.macsource.com/links.html, which is a civilized front door to http://www.macsource.com/links_all.html. If you choose the latter it will load the entire 1,000-strong list at once! Use that one if you want to impress someone. The site belongs to ComputerWare, one of the larger and best retailers of Macware in Northern California. Lop off the /links.html and you will go to their own web page and maybe you will find something to buy. Good people.

This tidbit is from MacWay via David Sytsma:
Since I haven't seen very much enthusiasm towards Control Strips lately, I set up a web site dedicated to keeping everyone up-to-date on all the Control Strips out there.

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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.)