Macking 146-B

Actual Mac Trojan is Loose
We waited for it, we "asked" for it, now we have it. There is a Trojan waiting to spread to us. All that's needed is to visit the wrong site (porn sites, for now) and see the message "Quicktime Player is unable to play movie file. Please click here to download new version of codec." That will start a download of a file called ultracodec1237.dmg. Safari will give you a warning that it contains an application and do I want to continue downloading it. Click the Cancel button and leave the page pronto. A script is installed called plugins.settings and is located in the /library/Internet Plug-Ins folder. It sends false DNS into to servers which can vary. One of them directs traffic to servers located in the Ukraine.
These servers will then send you to fake sites when you type in real URLs for banks, Amazon, PayPal, etc.
Under Tiger, you can't see that the DNS settings have been changed, but under Leopard there are more advanced settings and it is possible, but difficult to read. Just watch out for this thing and do NOT accept an offer to download and install an unfamiliar codec, especially from porn sites.
You will have all the codecs you will ever need if you download and install the WMV player from M$, the WMV Converter from Flip4Mac, and the RealPlayer. You don't need the paid player; look for the free ones. You should also get VLC, a player that is the only way to play those .avi files based on the xvid format. Then you are done and ready for any video that can be played on the Mac. Find the current version on VersionTracker.
Time to go shopping for an anti-virus program. Do NOT consider Norton; they are the weakest, yet most intrusive, of the lot. Intego.com makes VirusBarrier X4 for OSX and costs $79.95 for a single user license. A 5-Mac license is $249. There are other products, more extensive. An alternative is ClamXAV which is free but donations are encouraged. There are others you can read about on VersionTracker, but I will be installing Clam. The web site does not say if it works under 10.5; there are separate versions for 10.3 and 10.4.
"The bad guys are taking Mac seriously now," Bojan Zdrnja of Internet Storm Center observes on the organization's website, pointing out that DNSChanger exploits are not unfamiliar to Windows users.

Dot-Mac Dropping Older OSX Versions
October postings on MacFixIt discuss changes to Apple's services in the anticipation of Leopard's release, and what will happen to some of their dot-mac services for users of 10.3.9 and 10.4.9.
One thing they did on Friday was to require 10.4.10 if you want to continue to access backup services to dot-mac using their Backup program.
(Their Backup program is terrible. It's counterintuitive and compresses files in a proprietary manner that cannot be recovered from if you have problems or accidentally delete the wrong part. You can still use your iDisk for backups if you manually drag files to it and store them in folders clearly marking what is in them. Me, I gave up my dot-mac account a couple of years ago and have never used their Backup program once I discovered what a toad it was. Maybe some day it will be worth it again; I can only wait and see.)
10.4.10 is still causing problems for people after they install it, but they are usually caused by other programs loading at startup that are out of date. If you have not updated (which I still recommend) then make sure all your software is up to date, especially those listed in Login Items under the Accounts section of System Preferences.
10.4.11 is also due out shortly, but don't even THINK of letting Software Update install it for at least a week. I will be reporting on it, but since I am installing 10.5 right away, I won't be able to test 10.4.11 myself. (Wrong. See next month's column.)

Leopard Install Went Flawlessly
Saturday morning the deed was done. I used the most conservative process possible: First I made a clone of my internal drive using SuperDuper, then restarted from that to make sure it worked. Then I inserted the 10.5 DVD and restarted, unplugging the backup drive. I chose Erase and Install as the Option, and in the next window unchecked all the boxes for languages I had no intention of running the Mac in, and printer drivers for printers I don't have. That saved me 2 gigs and some time.
I usually skip the "Verifying the installer DVD" part but since this was the first run I let it go. Verifying the integrity of the DVD took almost an hour. The rest of the installation took about 40 minutes. If you follow the same path I did, you can skip the Verify part because if the installation fails you have your cloned backup and you can restore it while you take the bad DVD back to the store. If you don't care about the extra hour, let it run.
After the Installer finished and my MacBook restarted, the setup window asked if I wanted to use the Migration Assistant to move my old data. I clicked Yes and plugged in the FireWire clone drive. It read and understood and migrated over all my documents, non-Apple programs, user account info, and everything else. I then reinstalled my printer software; the only thing not brought over by the Migration Assistant.
You do have two alternatives: Upgrade, and Archive and Install. Both work with your existing data and drive, and do not require a clone. Do not, repeat, DO NOT attempt either unless you have a cloned backup! Are you ready for a failed install to destroy everything on your Mac - documents, email, bookmarks, everything? If you have backups only of your documents, did you remember to get your email too? If you have such a backup, have you verified that the documents are, indeed, there and readable? I have had people think they were backing up, but when they were needed they discovered they had nothing but aliases and the originals were gone.
If you don't have an external backup drive, don't spend the $130 on Leopard at all. Go and spend it on a backup drive, and download SuperDuper to clone your drive to it. Then you can budget for Leopard next month. I will again hammer in the same point I always make: How unhappy would you be if your Mac woke up to a blinking question mark and I was unable to repair the drive for you? How ready are you to reinstall all of your non-Apple software, and reacquire all of the iTunes music and the pictures in iPhoto that may not reside anywhere else? If you feel that brief flush of guilt and fear, don't suppress it. Now is the time to protect yourself. Go to the nearest Mac dealer and get that external FireWire drive, even if it's one of LaCie's Yugo drives.
If you do get such a drive, plug it in and it mounts on the Desktop, go to Disk Utility and choose Erase. Choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the option. If you don't, and you leave the disk in Microsoft format (which it WILL be if it mounts on the desktop, even if it comes from a Mac dealer) then you do NOT have a bootable backup and you might find all of your files have been shredded and are unrecoverable. I have seen it too often so heed the warning. I have been badgering the dealers to place a large red sticker right on the box, WARNING: MICROSOFT-FORMATTED DISK. YOU MUST ERASE AND FORMAT AS A MAC DISK BEFORE USING, but they won't do it. At least LaCie is including an instruction sheet telling you this, but it isn't red, it isn't large and bold, and it's easy to ignore if you are accustomed to not reading the paperwork that comes with your purchases.
/End backup rant.

Coolest New Feature
Now all Finder windows have a 4th option: Cover Flow, the same design used in iTunes. Choose this and the bottom third of the window is a list of contents, and the top third is a large view of the items - pictures, text files, PDFs, whatever can be visualized. Applications have huge icons. But here is the best part: Fonts in your Fonts folder display in their own font, just two letters, but enough to clearly see what it looks like. You see them in every view, including tiny ones in the alphabetical list.
Much wailing, however has been shed on the semi-transparent menu bar. I have to admit that it looks pretty cool, displaying a faded version of the desktop picture top underneath it, but when a photo cycles by that does not completely fill the screen, the menubar takes on the red edges of the background color. On a small picture, it looks quite strange. Other times it ignores the picture and becomes light pink (my non-default desktop background color is dark red) for its full width. You will never notice it unless you use a changing set of pictures of different sizes for your Desktop.

Leopard Runs AppleWorks
This column is being written in AppleWorks right now! I just read on Macintouch that it won't load on some machines, but others have fixed it by deleting the AppleWorks User Data folder in Documents and letting the program create a new one. I didn't have to do any of that; after starting up right after the Leopard installation I just launched AppleWorks and continued writing. No problems with it at all.
Software Update issued two updates to 10.5 within the first week. One of them, a set of updated drivers for Canon printers, weighed in at 232 megabytes! This is getting ridiculous. Granted, the update covers all Canon printers on the market but still, a quarter gig just to update your printer? Better to just go visit Canon and download the driver for your particular model.

Other Programs that Don't Work (as of 11/07)
Digital Performer by Mark of the Unicorn (music notation software) only works on existing projects; creating new ones causes kernel panics. ProTools users are explicitly warned on their website not to upgrade.
Photoshop 7, which I still use, dies with a program error and cannot be launched at all. Unsanity's products, WindowShade, ceepeeyou and ClearDock don't work. I really depend on ceepeeyou to tell me how busy the processor is. As of 12/07, they have issued an update for WindowShade and APE.
PithHelmet, the ad blocker for Safari, no longer works, although it did work on the beta 3 version under Tiger. I can launch Activity Monitor to find out what I used to learn from ceepeeyou, and right now it's telling me that the animated Flash ads on an open web page are taking up between 49 and 79% of the processor to keep this window open. PithHelmet always prevented those ads from loading. Plus, The Web is simply less enjoyable with all those annoying ads flashing and zipping at me, where there used to be nothing but the page content and a few blank holes. (New version released 12/07 now works.)
SuperDuper and SilverKeeper, the two primary programs for making cloned backup with smart updating (not recopying the entire drive with each backup) both fail under Leopard. Not only that but I get a Net Retry error from Retrospect, which is my main daily backup program. This is so serious I just decided to remove 10.5 and return to Tiger until these programs are updated.
Disk Utility now has strange behavior when repairing permissions. Instead of showing a progress bar while it's checking, I get the blue barber pole and no other response for about two minutes, and then it switches to the progress bar which runs from start to finish in about a second. It found only one permission to fix. (Fixed, sort of, in 10.5.1.)
Flash has an incompatibility that prevents some web sites from working. This affects people who use LiveBooks or other sites that use Adobe Flash to upload files. Until a fix is issued, do not upgrade if you are dependent on Flash. The problem does not affect viewing most flash sites; I can see YouTube and Motherload video sites, and most any other page with Flash that I have visited has worked correctly.
Safari was displaying a horribly bold font for headlines and bold text on some web pages. It took 90 minutes and a bunch of restarts to find that the Helvetica family in my home library fonts folder were causing the scrambled text. Now I have to find functioning versions of those fonts. The System-installed Helveticas are fine.

OS9 Classic Compatibility
Gone. Won't load or run. Already dead on Intel Macs; this is just the final nail in that coffin.

So, Stay In The Past
Now more than ever you have reason to own multiple Macs. If you want to keep using an OS9 program that will no longer work (because Leopard does not support Classic) then you should have an old G3 or G4 around that you can use for that purpose.
If you buy Timbuktu, a program that lets one Mac control another over a network, the CD includes a version that will install on OS8 and OS9 machines. Then you can stash your old Mac under the desk (not advisable due to dust issues) or somewhere else out of the way, remove the monitor, and just invoke Timbuktu when you need to run it. A Mac can start with no monitor, keyboard or mouse if it just has a power button. Once running, you can use Timbuktu to shut it down when finished. Don't get rid of that display/keyboard/mouse, though. On the occasion of having to run a disk repair utility Timbuktu will not work. With 17" VGA flat displays running as low as $100, you can afford to keep one in the closet, or use it as a 2nd monitor on your main computer. There is a way to do it with any older Mac capable of running 10.3.9 or later, according to a post in Macintouch, but I have not yet figured it out.
Old Macs are staggeringly cheap now. Want a Blue&White G3 tower in good shape? Stripped, $25. Loaded, $75. With a three-thousand-dollar (in 1998) display? $300. I tried to sell one for a client and had no takers. How about a Beige G3 Desktop? $25 at FreeGeek, or some thrift shops. Pre-PPC Macs are just giveaways, if you can even find them. Perfectly good G4 towers like the one I use as my media and backup server are $80 at FreeGeek.
Many of you are still dependent on programs that no longer exist or have no current equivalents. WordPerfect 3.5 was the standard of the legal industry and since legal documents stick around forever, so must a Mac that can run it. MS Word has never tried to include the clean and effective functionality for lawyer-specific needs and no minor Mac word-processor developer (hello, Mariner Write and Nisus Writer?) has stepped up to the plate. Too bad - if they would institute the necessary functions as needed they would find enthusiastic support from MacLawyer.com and Mackers everywhere. Word would spread and sales would skyrocket. Besides the specific line codes and markup needs, you would need to import and export Word and WordPerfect (both Mac 3.5 and PC later versions) documents. Why is this ball not being picked up? The only choice you have is NeoOffice, which is free and can read WP documents but probably not preserving the text line-for-line number as in the original.
One correspondent still uses HyperCard to file forms with his government provider. Only alternative: Windows. The Feds are notorious for pulling little tricks that force people to use Microsoft, so fight however you can. If it simply means shuffling your workspace around to make room for another Mac, and buying Timbuktu, it's worth it. That old Mac under Timbuktu can be a perfect server for WordPerfect, too.

iPod Nano Video
I did, however, get one of these new little gems. The video was so clear and sharp that it sold itself immediately. There are some gotchas, though. None of the available iPod-to-TV cables would work! Instead of $20 for the existing cable, I had to wait a few weeks and pay $49 for a "special" cable which used the main iPod slot instead of the video/audio jack and included a USB charger.
I wanted it so I could carry my favorite video shorts to show other people, right through their TVs. I never buy from the ITMS so I need to find a codec that will convert the more common .avi (XviD) formats into H.264 that iTunes uses. I've had several recommendations for that.

Office 2008 for Mac
An engineer from the Microsoft Business Unit came to the last PMUG meeting to demonstrate Office 2008 for Mac. Loath as I am to admit it, I'd say it's a good-looking program. Its integration with iPhoto and more object-oriented layout appears to make it an adequate page-layout program. The presenter said that they took a lot of the ideas behind Pages to make it a more competitive program. (In English: They followed Microsoft's long-standing policy of copying what Apple does in their own products. Too bad for them that they have done such a miserable job with Windows itself. Good for Apple, though.)
The student/teacher version is now called Home and Student version. It sells for $149 to anyone. You don't have to lie any more, he said. There are two other versions with more costly options, but the best deal is for those who buy Office 2004 now - save your receipt and you will receive a free copy of the $500 deluxe version when it's released for sale after Macworld on January 15. That is an unbeatable deal, because if you wait you will get the simpler version for the same $149. I'd go for it, then turn around and sell the 2004 version and get some of your money back.
The new document formats, .docx, pptx and .xlsx, are compatible with the Windows Office 2007 version and all can be exported to the older format so you can send them to users of the older programs. There will be a free converter that will allow Office 2004 to open the new format directly from within the application. The beta version of that converter is available from Microsoft now. There is no support for Office for X (2002) however. More info at the web site devoted to this.
The Macintosh Business Unit of Microsoft is staffed by dedicated Mackers, many of whom are former Apple employees. He states that they are dedicated to making great Mac software. I believe him because I believe that much as Microsoft would like to see the Mac disappear, they would rather have us buy their software than not buy it. Oceans of contempt are still heaped upon the company for what they are doing in their consumer and media divisions to keep Mac users out, but I give credit where it's due.

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.)