Macking 14

Extensis Gives Good Plug-In
Extensis Corp., publisher of 1994's PageTools for PageMaker 5.0, has released a new suite of extensions for Quark XPress (see review by Dinah Gail elsewhere in Bits), Intellidraw for Freehand and Illustrator, version 2.0 of PageTools for PM5 and 6.0, and Intellihance, a wonderful set of filters for Photoshop. (I will be writing more about the PageTools product later, but I was extremely happy with the earlier version and recommended it to every PM user I knew.)
Missing from all Mac and Windows keyboards is the Do What I Mean key. This product is as close as anyone has ever come to such a thing with a Photoshop filter that simply displays a Make It Better button (it actually says simply "Intellihance"). Once you have an open document you simply call up the filter and click the button. In most cases, this is all you need to do. It does its magic through settings that call on Unsharp Mask, Contrast, Levels and Brightness. It does in one click what the user had to do using all those filters and a lot of Undo-ing.
For the most advanced and particular uses, all of the default settings can be tweaked to satisfy the most demanding professional. Do you get that I love this thing? I threw ten different images at it and eight of them required no further modification at all. The ninth was a picture that I had already created using neon edges and other "artistic" tricks so it was asking too much of the program to do anything with it, and the tenth was a very bad scan of a newspaper halftone, scanned at 75dpi (instead of the more normal 600 used to get rid of the screening), just to see what it would do. When I scanned the same picture at the proper high setting, Intellihance did just fine.
There is a QuicKeys macro included in the installer that lets you batch process an entire folder full of images. Since batch processing is not that common in Mac applications, this is an especially desirable feature. Each of the products is $99 list, and you can get a suite of three (based on either the Quark or PageMaker product) for double that. For sale through any good local outlet or national catalogue.

Iomega Needs to Spend Some Money
In the never-ending competition for the Worst Tech Support award, Iomega, the maker of the staggeringly popular Zip drive and the new Jaz drive, seems destined to be the year's winner, at least if my experience is any indication.
My Zip drive died 7 months into the 1-year warranty, so I tried but failed to get a live human at their tech support line. Instead of pursuing the matter, I called the vendor (Computer City) and asked if they had any thoughts. They simply exchanged for a new one, which is why I always call them for a bid whenever looking for new hardware. I did not try contacting Iomega again until I discovered that three of my 15 Zip disks were starting to die.
(Symptom of dying disk: Very slow reads or writes, with the sound of the head mechanism resetting repeatedly with a soft slamming sound.)
I try the tech support line again and the first thing I discover is that they have no provision for those few remaining people who are not using a pushbutton phone. Normally, when encountering a phone robot, if you wait and do nothing, eventually a human voice comes on the line. Not Iomega. They just keep repeating the opening speech until you punch something or give up.
I finally get to the right area of the system: what to do with bad disks. They tell me to dial another number! All this is, of course, long distance. So I dial the other number and again a voice robot takes me through the options, and finally to a waiting room for a live support worker. But I am not allowed to even wait! After another two minutes, the robot informs me that there are too many people in front of me (at 7:45am) and I am to call back later. And it hangs up.
During the menu options I waded through earlier, I was informed of a fax-back option that lets me receive a form to fill out in order to get a Return Authorization number for the disks. Okay, I can do that, but why did the robot make me call back? It could have returned me to the menu options for this and saved me a redial.
I punch up the proper buttons for the RA form and the robot dutifully calls me back and my trusty GV Platinum faxmodem receives the fax. Well, it is a form to fill out, as in write on, and the cover sheet tells me to be sure to write clearly because sometimes faxes are hard to read. Uhhh, Iomega, you may not be aware of this, but a lot of people with Macs and faxmodems do not bother getting a real fax machine because they get along quite nicely with just the faxmodem and their word processor. How do you expect me to print, fill out, and fax this thing back if I don’t have a real fax machine, or even a scanner? Do the words "Too bad, sucker" come to mind?
Well, I am quite the power user (smiley) so I just save the fax as a TIFF file and import it into PageMaker, where I can fill it out in Helvetica 18 Bold. I ask you readers, how many of you would have thought of this, and also have the necessary software to do it? PM, Quark, Illustrator, maybe Draw or old MacPaint would work, but I know many people who would just be stuck at this point.
To make things worse, the cover page they sent me said that I could expect my RA number to come back, by fax, within the next 48 hours. Oh, ducky. Suppose I am not here to type cmd-shift-6 and receive it? Of the many people with faxmodems, not all of us have a dedicated line with the unit set to auto-answer. My answering machine would pick up instead and the send unit at Iomega would probably not try again.
And as a final farewell kiss, their fax receiving system shut down at 5pm and would not answer the modem's attempts to send until the next day.
I wrote all of this as a page 2 appended to the fax form and gave them my email address to send the RMA number to, and to their credit, the number showed up in my mailbox within 48 hours as promised, even though it was a Saturday. (But not a comment regarding the attached letter/rant.) If you want to attempt a shortcut, here is the email address from which I got that RMA number: CHRIS PARTRIDGE and yes, it was in ALL CAPS (not that it makes a difference to the mail servers).
(Four days later) Well, Mr. Partridge is on the ball, at least. The next goofup in the saga happened when I received a package from Iomega. All the forms, and the label on the bag, said "3 disks enclosed." But in the bag? One lonely cartridge. So I emailed Chris again to tell of this next problem and got no reply. After two days I faxed Iomega a copy of the email message (and once again the fax machine refused to accept an evening fax) and later the next day I got an apology from Chris, saying my mail was mixed in with the horrendous amount he gets every day, and that the disks would be on their way next week. He gets inundated because Iomega does not have a dedicated email handler in their customer service department.
I contacted SyQuest, maker of the EZ-135 (and other cartridge drives) a product I have denounced as a cheap me-too knockoff response to the Zip, to discuss these issues and find out how they handle their tech support and customer service. I was also curious about their newly announced 230-meg drive. They passed all the customer support tests: they have toll-free numbers active 7am - 5pm Pacific time, and if you wait without pressing buttons, you get an actual human to talk to. They also claim longer shelf-life for their carts (30 years to Iomega's 10), faster access and lower per-meg cost for the cartridges.
About their $30 loss for ever EZ-135 they sell? That is true, but the claim is that they make it up in profit on cartridges. (The old cheap razor and profitable blades trick.) The new drive has been re-engineered for higher capacity but the primary difference between it and the older but still popular 270 drives is that the 270 has two heads and uses double-sided media; the 135 does not. Both Zip and SyQuest can be made bootable if you put a System Folder on the cart and use the Startup Disk panel to choose it, but I was astounded to hear from SyQuest that Iomega claims that their carts are not bootable. I had not heard this before, so I have been booting from my Zip ever since first getting it! Now that I have heard this, I wonder if it will continue to work... for both me and all the clients who I have set up with similar bootable Zips.
Will I continue recommending the Zip and Jaz drives to my clients, and to you? With a very qualified yes because I have used the Zip since it came out and like it a lot, but be aware that if you ever have to contact Iomega, you may not have the equipment necessary to do so. I will be taking a long, hard look at the new SyQuest, and their next product to follow, the 1.3-gig SyJet drive, a dual-platter drive that will cost $500 and use $100 cartridges (and also 650-meg carts that will cost $65). Because Iomega has such awful customer service I could not recommend their products to any beginner, but both the Zip and Jaz drives are nice enough that a user with experience that never needs to contact the company should do just fine. Also take note that people are predicting $99 Zips and $299 Jaz drives within 6 months.
The sad thing is that Iomega could afford to run an excellent support system; their successful products reversed their fortunes and they are certainly flush enough to do better than they are. They could at least afford to contract their tech support to a third party, which leads me to:

Which End of the Stream are You On?
Stream, International, formerly known as Corporate Software, is a company that contracts with many producers, including Netscape, Adobe, Now Software, and Microsoft (Win95), to provide tech support. (Add to the list: Berkeley Systems' After Dark and all their other products; CompuServe, Hewett-Packard, Symantic, Palindrome, Total Entertainment Network, Merril/Lynch.) Their employees are forbidden to divulge the fact that the caller is not talking to the actual company they thought they called.
Now this could be a win/win situation for all involved, because a company can get a large, well-trained and experienced team of supporters who have familiarity not only in their products but many others and who are aware of interactions and conflicts. Companies can get all of this for a fee much lower than trying to hire those people themselves. It's a nice theory.
But in practice, Stream engages in truly idiotic behaviors, like telling their people that they have two weeks to become intimately familiar with programs like Director, many times while they have to take phone calls for other products. Other times a new hire will just be thrown to the phones without any familiarity in the product they are supposed to be supporting! There is a set of stock answers that they are expected to give the caller (as opposed to actually trying to deal with the problem) which assumes that the caller is an idiot who is not capable of even beginning to do their own debugging and testing before giving up and calling for help. While in many cases, the caller is a clueless idiot who needs to be told to check to see if the cord is plugged in or the software is actually installed on their drive, it is insulting to assume in advance that every caller is like this. Far better to assume intelligence, uncommon sense and experience and work your way down from there. But a Stream employee risks being fired if they try too hard to help a caller, and the calls can be monitored by a supervisor at any time. Quoting one: "Unfortunately, this is very accurate. Stream has managed to take a profession and reduce it to a factory shop. Give them time, and they may end up successfully introducing unions into the high-tech industry." But a better story came in from another:
"Mention that some upper management thought it would be more effective if you pay 2 people 20 hours of overtime/wk each, then hiring another person. Or as long as there are people willing to work as a temp, there's no need to hire someone.
(rant mode)
I call it Streamnomics -- the theory that as long as the supply of labor(1) is greater than demand(2) _AND_ the flow of incoming employees(3) is greater then or equal to the flow of out-going(4) employees, AND the service level(5) is within contract, everything is fine.
(1) Anyone who can answer the phone, with or without any technical skills.
(2) A level that is determined some 9 months earlier and does not reflect current trends.
(3) Regular and temps
(4) Regular only
(5) Number of calls answered in the first 3 minutes
Some might question the logic of this theory (yes, I know there are many holes in it). Such as (4), temp employees do not have any impact in staffing models, but do count in the number of techs answering the phone. Another, (5), is not influenced by wrong answers (due to improper training), call-backs (didn't have answer, 'I only take messages, someone will call you back,' 'you need to call MS on that.')
I hear many stories like these from the ever-growing legion of ex-Stream employees about life in hell and the latest insanities. Is it any wonder that Stream is always hiring? You could run a rather large generator off of the turnover in that company, a place that seems to make Dilbert sound like an optimist. (To be fair, one friend who works there says he likes it, but is glad he does not work on the CompuServe team, cutting back because CIS is pulling out.) Stream also hires a lot of temps, who aren't trained at all.

Beware of Strange SCSI
Pinnacle Micro makes a line of magneto-optical drives, an alternative cartridge format (to Zip and SyQuest) that uses optical technology and can hold more data than the standard magneto-only. But beware: some models, notably their Tahoe 230, used the smaller SCSI-2 port because the drive is too small, according to Pinnacle, to fit the standard 25-pin ports used in the Zip, Jaz and the back of every desktop Mac since the Plus.
That begs the question, why did they not design a case large enough to use a standard plug instead of an incompatible one? A new user would have no way of knowing that they were buying something that could cause them trouble unless there were a large red label on the front: "Warning: Non-Standard SCSI Plug. Beware!" Quoth Monty Python: "Sales would plummet!"
None of the other Pinnacle products use the odd plug, but there are a lot of these 230s around and one could turn up for sale at a local used outlet, looking like a bargain. If you are shopping for any external SCSI device, make sure it uses the industry-standard 50-pin sockets or, at least, the 25-pinners used on the back of the Mac, and the Zip/Jaz drives. Where you are liable to find these odd birds is in products ported from the Wintel side, where standards are many and diverse, or handheld scanners and special controllers. 50-pin Centronics: ask for it by name.

Microsoft Bash of the Month
Have you been lusting after one of those supercool Timex DataLink watches? The ones that let you keep your contacts on your computer and download the data via a strobing pattern on the screen? Been wondering why it is taking them so long to come out with a Mac version, which should be a simple port and a profit-maker, given Mackers' tendency to buy cool add-ons? Well we are going to have to wait forever because guess who wrote the software, under contract with Timex.
As usual, Microsoft can't do anything right: the software displays an image of the watch face and the time, but when the transfer is finished, and the automatic correction of the Timex clock chip complete, the watch is still eight seconds off.
Oh, and my programmer friend who showed me the watch was busy writing scripts for the Windows NT server. He tells me that it is very poorly designed compared to the Netscape server (let alone a proper UNIX system); the MIME type settings are almost impossible to configure and he just told the client to dump NT for Linux. "Microsoft is nothing but NT promises." (his sigline)

URL of the Month
(from an Apple press release via MacWay)
Apple Computer Launches Small Business Website into Cyberspace
SMALL BUSINESS WEEK, WASHINGTON, DC.--June 4, 1996--Underscoring its commitment to the small business market, Apple Computer today launched an innovative home page aimed at small businesses seeking information and assistance for running and growing their businesses. A few keystrokes to the new website address -- http://smallbusiness.apple.com/ -- transports the small business professional into an online expanse of helpful resources provided by Apple: information on product and technologies from Apple and third-parties, tips, hotlinks and access points aimed specifically at small business professionals.

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.)