Macking 34

MacOS8 Error 41
I had a problem with this just last week. After going through the startup procedure (the "march of icons"), a Mac would crash with a Type 41 error. It blamed a particular extension. Well, I removed that extension and the Mac passed the blame to another.
I restarted with the Shift key down (extensions disabled) and there it was again. Aha, a dead Finder, I thought. To fix it, I restarted with the OS8 CD that had been used to upgrade that Mac just recently, and copied the Finder from the CD's System Folder to the one on the Mac, throwing away the original first. For good measure, I deleted the Finder Prefs file from the Preferences folder as well. Problem fixed. I noted the experience down for this month's column, and then today, March 25, the MacFixIt page covered the same topic.
Expanding on the issue, the article said that a clean reinstall of system software was NOT necessary, and the problem could possibly be prevented by locking the Finder in the GetInfo window. "...However, be aware that a locked Finder will cause some system software installations to fail. Upgrading to Mac OS 8.1 may help prevent one cause of this issue." The data is available at Apple in their technical library.
Moral: Keep a CD handy to restart your Mac from so you can do this, or if you don't have a CD, get an external device of SOME kind (Zip, Syquest) and copy your System Folder onto it. Then you can start your Mac from that and replace the offending Finder file.
New users, save this keyboard combination: Command-Option-Shift-Delete. If you hold down your keys right after starting up the Mac will ignore the internal hard drive and scan the SCSI chain for any other functional system folder, and start from that. This would be the only way to start from an external device if the system folder on your internal hard drive becomes corrupt. On PowerMacs and some Quadras, simply holding the "C" key down will force it to start from a CD-ROM.

SCSI Devices On
Another writer, the MrMac page, claims that ALL SCSI devices must ALWAYS be turned on BEFORE the Mac is started, and then left on at all times when the computer is being used. I have seen this before and I always violate it. I seldom have trouble.
SCSI is voodoo. ("You just have to know where to stick the pins." --Alan Olsen) This means that what works for you may not work for me, even when the configurations are similar. But if you have problems like long waits after clicking before a menu drops, or typing display that cannot keep up with your fingers, you may have a problem on the SCSI chain. Check to see that all your devices are powered on, and properly terminated. External devices from APS, among others, have active termination. That means that if termination is needed it switches itself on. Zip drives have an on/off switch for termination, which is usually set to On at the factory. For most users this is satisfactory, but if you plug a scanner into the Zip and plug a terminator into the scanner, you need to switch the Zip drive's termination to Off.
It is not enough to simply shut down and switch this slider switch to off, either. You also have to unplug the power cord going into the Zip. This is also true if you want to change the SCSI ID from 5 to 6. Due to a bug in some versions of system software on some models of Mac, you should always leave the #5 slot unused until you have used up all the other SCSI numbers. If upon switching the Zip ID to 6, plugging it in and restarting the Mac, SCSIProbe or some other SCSI-identifying utility says that the Zip is still at ID #5, then you have a bad Zip drive. There are a lot of them around and they will continue to work otherwise, but if you find you have one of these, try to get it exchanged for a good one.
The giveaway test is if you unplug all your devices from the Mac (it must be shut down and OFF, please) and restart and find that your problems go away, the problem is in the SCSI chain. The more devices, the more chance for problems. Use the shortest, thickest cables you can buy because thin, long cables have problems with interference caused by poor shielding. Do not bend cables at a sharp right angle (to fit your Mac close to the wall, for instance), because that can stress and break one of the 50 thin wires in the cable.

View As Buttons
New in OS8 is the View As Buttons option. Coupling this with the Tabbed Window feature, you can now get many features free with your system that used to require 3rd party applications and extensions.
Apple's Launcher has been around for ages, but it always seemed a poor implementation of the idea, improved upon by various utilities like OneClick and PowerBar. To make best use of tabbed windows and Buttons, create some folders called, for example, Primary Apps, Primary Documents, and Internet Access. All three of these folders should be at the root (first level) window of your hard drive.
Open the Internet Access folder. Then open your Control Panels folder and drag an alias of PPP into the Internet Access folder. Use OS8's auto-alias feature by holding down the Command and Option keys before grabbing the control panel. When you release the mouse over the Internet Access folder, instant alias.
Do the same thing to your copy of Netscape or Exploiter, and Eudora or Emailer. If you use Fetch or any other internet apps, make aliases of them, too.
In the Internet Access folder, shorten the names. Eudora, Netscape, etc. Then hold down the Command key while dragging them into alignment with each other. The command key turns on the invisible "snap-to" grid in the window so the items line up. Then, go to the View menu and choose View As Buttons. Finally, click the grow box in the upper right corner, next to the window shade box. This sizes the window to fit the buttons.
Finally, grab the window by the title bar and drag off the bottom of your screen. The title bar becomes a tab. Click once on this tab to open the window, click once on a button to launch the application as it closes to a tab again.
Next, go to the Primary Apps folder, open it, and repeat the above process for the applications and control panels you use frequently. Last, place aliases of the current documents, folders and templates that are most important to you in the Primary Documents folder.
Always use aliases. That way, you can be sure that you can empty this folder without affecting the original documents. The number of folder tabs you can have is limited only by the length of the folder's name and the width of your monitor. And remember that those tabs are actually open folders, folders that are located on the main window of your hard drive.
Should you ever open the main window and then click on the down arrow (in View as List) to display the contents, that closes your tabbed window at the bottom of the screen, and the tab goes away. To get it back, you have to double-click the folder and drag the window back to the bottom of the screen.
This is actually more difficult to describe in text than it is to actually do it. Next time you are at a Mac User Group event or in a store where there is a Mac running OS8, have someone show you the trick. Once learned, the drag-to-create aliases and the tabbed windows are pure simplicity.
Want to align your buttons in a manner that lets them fit closer together but find you can't drag them? Just grab by the button's name and you can move it anywhere you want.

Tip from Tipworld (Contributed by Chris Breen)
With OS 8, Apple plopped a new item into the Apple menu - the Connect To script that, when selected, pops up a dialog box containing Apple's URL (http://www.apple.com). Let's suppose for an instant that you'd prefer to have another URL appear by default. Here's how to make that very thing happen:
[The Usual Warning: Because you're going to muck with an important characteristic of Connect To, work on a copy.]
Although Connect To is an AppleScript, Apple altered it in such a way that you can't immediately edit it with Apple's Script Editor. Before it can be edited you must change its file type. To do so, use a utility such as Snitch, ResEdit, or FileTyper to change the file type from APPD to APPL. Once you've made the change, drag and drop the altered Connect To script onto the Script Editor (found inside the AppleScript folder inside the Apple Extras folder at the root level of your hard drive). After the script opens, look for the line of the script that reads: set defaultURL to "http://www.apple.com" To change the default URL that appears in Connect To, enter a new URL here - something such as http://www.macworld.com perhaps?
Save the script and you're done - no need to change the file type back to APPD.

Letters
"fillard" writes: I was reading an article on Mac OS 8.1 recently, and I noticed it referred to the "tight integration" of Internet Explorer. If I may ask, I'm curious: do you use 8.1, and does it have any problems for you as someone who objects to Microsoft?
I use 8.1 and there is nothing it does that can’t be done by Netscape. I do not install Apple’s Internet Access module when upgrading or installing 8.1 unless there is no other way to get PPP. I immediately toss IE and Claris Emailer, and also toss the AppleScripts “Connect to” and “Mail” and “Browse the Web.”

David Brook writes: I enjoy your column in Computerbits each month. In addition to being useful, I appreciate the tone - it strikes a nice balance between the affection Mac users have to their machines (operating system?) and chauvinism!
As a non-technical user, here's my question: How come when I launch Netscape it will launch my PPP connection but when I quit, I have to close the connection manually. Am I missing something?
Actually, Eudora will do the same thing, but when you quit it will disconnect, too. The setting in FreePPP's "Disable auto connect" or OT/PPP's "Allow Applications to Make Connection" is why both Netscape and Eudora (or any other Net program) can launch the PPP connection.
It is also why After Dark can sometimes initiate a PPP connection, even when you are not in the room. Other programs that call certain AppleEvents can do that too. I have never had that happen to me since switching to OT/PPP, but it happened so often with FreePPP I just disabled AutoConnect and did my connection manually, before launching Netscape.
Netscape will stop auto-connecting if you open its General Preferences and click Blank Page instead of Home Page. But before you do that, you might want to put in the URL for a site YOU would rather go to when you click the Home button, instead of Netscape's page (or Apple's, or whatever). If you want to get to Netscape's page later, just click on the N icon.
Of course you can Disconnect from your IP while Netscape is still running, and then read visited pages by clicking the Back and Forward buttons, but nothing else. You can also print the pages.
If Eudora's New Message window has a Send button instead of a Queue button, you need to change the settings. Eudora is set up this way for people with a permanent, 24-hour Internet connection, but us dialup folks should use Queue.
Where it is depends on the version of Eudora you are using, but in most cases you go to the Special menu and choose Settings. Scroll down to the Sending Mail icon and uncheck "Immediate Send." Now you can read, write and reply to mail while offline, and all mail is Queued into the Out mailbox, waiting for the next time you connect. When you Check mail it will also Send Queued Messages, unless you have turned off the option "Send on Check." If you have done that you must also select Send Queued Messages from the File menu.

Daylight Savings Time and HFS+
It's too late now for those who have done it, but if you reinitialize your hard drive to use HFS+ (aka Mac OS Extended) between now and the return of Daylight Wasting Time, do NOT use the Daylight Savings Time checkbox in the Date & Time control panel.
This is because all creation and modification date info is recorded in GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), and the offset from GMT is stored in PRAM. This will result in the Mac changing your volume's creation and modification times by one hour, causing some aliases to lose track of their parents, and Retrospect backup to think that every file on your drive has been modified. That would initiate a Full Backup instead of an incremental backup. If, however, you just use the clock adjustment in Date & Time to change the time, nothing else will change and backups will continue as usual. (Non-HFS+ users are not affected by this; go ahead and use the Daylight Savings Time checkbox.)
Dantz (publishers of Retrospect) recommend using this as an opportunity to change your tape media and do a Full Backup anyway.
If you have not specified your time zone in the Date & Time (or Map) control panel, then time is measured assuming that you are off the coast of Africa, at zero longitude and zero latitude. (Bet you always wondered why the Map defaulted to that particular point on the globe, right?) So if you are changing the time, this will also be a good time to change the location. If you do not use Retrospect or DiskFit to back up your system, these changes will not affect you. But losing all your data in a crash will affect you, so isn't it time you start doing regular backups???
More details on Apple's tech library. Thanks to Macintouch April 4 (the day before time change) for this info.

Another Quark Crime
Microsoft isn't the only arrogant oligarchy in this industry. Kiss goodbye to a well-designed multimedia authoring tool called mTropolis, scuttled by Quark last month. According to an article in Upside magazine, poor management decisions gave right of first refusal to Adobe Ventures, the investor who bankrolled mTropolis after the success of version 1.0. In trying to maximize profits, they undervalued the company and refused buyout offers until Quark came along and paid only $2 million for a company worth at least 10 times that much. Then they put in their own mismanagement team who drove off the original programming talent until just a few diehards remained, struggling to finish version 2.0. Just before release, Quark told them that the company was being closed and 2.0 would not be released.
It all stinks of a complete lack of accountability to the users, if not outright contempt. Quark is notorious for contempt of its customers, with wonderful but unprintable tales of arrogance and hostility on the part of Quark management. That's why I would rather use Microsoft products than Quark's, and I still maintain a Microsoft-free zone.
Multimedia development is a small market, especially compared to page-layout, but if the Mac community keeps holding Quark's feet to the fire, maybe they will release mTropolis' license and technology to the developers so someone else can run with it. Otherwise they will just selfishly sit on it and let it rot, and users be damned. If this is what happens, I encourage everyone to pirate the hell out of version 2.0 until Quark gets the message, and then buy the program when the new owners release it.

Clever phone number
In the May MacAddict magazine is an ad for Earthlink, a national Internet Service Provider (allegedly owned by Scientology) that wants AOL users to give up and move to Earthlink. Their phone number? (888) QUIT-AOL. I wonder how much they paid for that!
Seriously, I have no information on how good they are, but the fact that they are willing to advertise in MacAddict means that they must have some MacCluefulness. And practically anyone is better than AOL. While I still encourage Mackers desiring Internet access to favor a local ISP (such as Imagina or SpiritOne in Portland), if you travel and need access in more than one city, Earthlink wants your business.
I would like to hear from gruntled and disgruntled users, to find out if Earthlink is any improvement over AOL or any other national provider.

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.)