I'm Fine
Last month I mentioned my heart surgery. Well, I came through with flying colors and am amazing myself how quickly I am up and about again. Home only five days afterwards, walking around the block after only ten. By now I should be running laps. Lesson learned: physical exertion, regularly, is an absolute must! At least I can still drink alcohol and eat ice cream and other toxic foods as long as I'm moderate about it!
8.5 is next
According to Henry Norr, columnist for MacInTouch, the next version of the system software will add some interesting and useful new features. However, Apple's priorities are very clear: Stability first, then speed, then features. This is exactly as it should be! My experience with 8.1 is that it is so stable that any crashes I now experience are my own fault: throwing too many fun, silly and strange system extensions at it.
Improvements coming in 8.5 include a new, fast, find-by-content feature to the Finder. It will add such refinements as relevancey ranking, a "find similar" command, savable queries and an extensive "search the internet" option.
The Appearance Manager will be enhanced to include many new visual themes, which some of us have been using Kaleidoscope for now, but will also include live scrolling, proportional thumbs (one of the few Windows features that makes brilliant sense), and the ability to move an open file from one folder to another.
Settings that are scattered across multiple panels will be added to the Appearance Manager, and AppleGuide will move from its current proprietary format to HTML. This will eliminate some of the cool tricks like "coach marks," (little animated do-this-now marks on menus and dialog windows), but it will make it much more capable. More developers will support the new AppleGuide and hot links to Web sites will also be simple to include.
Finally, those pesky Open and Save dialogs are going to change. Confusing to new users, they are woefully inadequate to the more experienced. Now it will incorporate some of the features of Super Boomerang and Default Folder, such as favorite folders, outline-view triangles, recent items, and immediate access to AppleShare volumes, even if not yet mounted.
The dialogs will be non-modal, which means that you will be able to switch applications without closing them first. They will be movable and re-sizable. About bloody time, I'd say!
The only down side is that applications will have to be updated to take advantage of the update. In the interim, however, 3rd-party utilities will be available to provide alternatives to standard dialogs under 8.1. Default Folder and ActionFiles are two examples; I just acquired a demo of the latter and will see this month if it is better and at least as stable as Default Folder.
According to MacOSRumors, also added will be support for 3rd-party printers in Desktop Printing. This has been one of the primary reasons not to use Desktop Printing; hope it works as planned. If you have only one printer, however, there will still be no reason to use this feature, except for its advanced queueing and timing capabilities.
The New iMac
Doesn't the new iMac look cool? Even though most current Mackers are not in the target market for this unit, it certainly has its attractions. Steve Jobs finally got to build his all-in-one "appliance" Mac with enough horsepower to satisfy the average user no matter what they need it for. And for only $1299! Make that $1249 or less once it makes its way into the stores and catalogs. Want to bet you will see a network iMac with no CD or modem and a smaller HD for only $999 by the end of the year?
As of only ten days after the announcement, CompUSA had received 70,000 advance orders for the iMac. This for a product that hasn't even been manufactured yet!
If you have been stumbling along on your LCII or Quadra waiting to see what to upgrade to, or if you have been wanting to get away from Wintel without having to give up all your favorite applications, here is the cheap, powerful box you have been needing. Just install VirtualPC and run anything you have been using on your Pentintel, at the same speed!
Peripherals are linked via Universal Serial Bus (USB), which is slower than SCSI, therefore not a replacement. The internal HD and CD are IDE. But for connecting to digital cameras, keyboards, game controllers and the like, it is preferable to ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) and is an increasingly popular standard.
Some Wintel laptops use USB and there are a few non-Mac peripherals available now; all that's needed to make them run on the iMac is new drivers. By making USB standard in the new units there will be motivation to serve this market. The nature of USB is that you can connect up to 127 devices, some of which can act as hubs for others.
Users who will be needing high speed connection will be looking to FireWire, which has been langushing due to lack of demand.
More info on USB and Apple's FireWire standard may be found on the Macintouch Special Reports page, and a site that lists available products is at http://www.usbstuff.com/.
But if you have a collection of serial or SCSI printers, scanners, external drives and the like, then ignore the iMac and spend another $200 for the all-in-one G3 being sold through the colleges and high-school education market, or get a standard desktop G3 like I did last December. The difference is yours will be at least $500 cheaper than mine was!
Flat monitors
Lustworthy technology II: Apple's new 1024x768 LCD monitors. Believe me, if I had $3800 to spend I would put a pair of these beauties on my desk to replace the 17" multi-scans I have now. The future is here and my bet is that these will be available for less than $899 each by 1/1/00 and within two years you will simply not be able to buy a new conventional CRT monitor at all. If you doubt that, would you have believed anyone who told you in 1993 that in five years no one would be making $200 hard drives smaller than 2 gigs? Just watch. Already ViewSonic has a 13.8" panel for just $995. If you are currently satisfied with your 14" monitor but your desk space is at a premium, it may already be time for you get one of these skinny little displays. But be aware of multi-sync issues: Only the Apple Studio Display can display resolutions other than 1024x768 without distortion. Since these are LCD displays, it takes serious and expensive tweaking to make the other settings clear and sharp.
Read Macworld
And the other Mac mags, too, like Mac Home Journal and MacAddict. It was in the June Macworld that I learned that Toshiba, inventor of the "SmartMedia" postage-stamp sized storage devices used in some digital cameras, has solved the problem of getting those images into your Mac. Before, you had to have a PCMCIA card reader, and a SmartMedia card adapter for it, but now you can buy an adapter that uses your Mac's floppy drive! The media cards, available in sizes from two to 12 megs in size ($25-$89) and soon in 32 as well, just snap into the $99 adapter and then slide in like a floppy. See what you can learn from the Mac press?
Ease of Use
We all know about ease of use, especially those who use Wintel at work and Mac at home. But remember that these particular features, some still dreamed of by Wintel users (and suggested by Carla Schroder in her column last month), are part of the Mac right now:
Cheap Portable Word-Processor
I have been trying to unload my Newton 130 for around $250 including all the software I bought for it, but it seems the market has driven the price even lower. Yet for those who want a really cheap, simple, portable note taker, there is a plethora of old Newtons around that, after adding a $79 keyboard, are perfect for taking notes at meetings or in class, writing on mountains or at the beach, calculating Quicken data and other useful features. It does all this on just 4 AA batteries, which can last as long as a month under heavy use. (Mine usually lasted 3 months.) The last two models, Newton 2000 and 2100, are uncompromisingly fast, too, but more expensive.
To get data into your Mac requires nothing more than an AppleTalk or Serial connection. Wish I could do that with the Notes feature of my Pilot (but am perfectly happy with the database from Now Contact). PC users can also connect to their Newtons through the serial port.
I also read about a smart keyboard that contains a 3-line LCD screen and can act as a portable word processor, using AA batteries, that can download your work to your Mac after plugging it in. Unfortunately I have not been able to find the article by deadline time. Stay tuned.
About that Pilot/Now Contact
If you discover you have a hard time syncronizing the Pilot to your Now Contact database, it is because the practical upper limit is somewhat lower than the 2,000 advertised. In real use, each category should hold no more than 300 contacts, and you are limited to 12 or 15 categories. So reorganize your Now Contact (now being sold as Eudora Scheduler with Now Up-to-Date folded in) database on your Mac to the 300 maximum and you should have easy synchronizations.
MacDraft Still Around
Remember MacDraft? This ancient application for accurate 2D drawings is still being published. The current owners are Microspot USA and according to a report, it runs just great on a G3. So if you need this kind of drawing environment, visit their page for more information. Current version is 4.3 with a special upgrade price for registered users of the older versions.
The Justice Dept. vs. Microsoft
Fry the bastards. (Hey, I root for the little guy! How can the over-politicized and under-funded Attorneys General possibly stand up to the Goliath in Broken Glasses?) (They couldn't.) This whole thing may be over by print time anyway, and it is not even relevant to Mackers except to give Windows users another reason to switch. Come on board, folks, the future's fine!
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.)