Macking 45

by Michael Pearce
From the April '99 Computer Bits

Pentium III Hype Alert
Be prepared: Intel is throwing $300 million worth of Madison Avenue's finest hype at the American public and it is going to be difficult for Mackers to watch TV for the next several months. But hold this thought: It's still Windows. Pathetic, badly conceived, overdesigned, poorly implemented Windows 98 and its fellow non-Y2K-compliant NT 4.0.
Dancing drones, sexy models and zooming 3D graphics are all being coordinated in an effort to feel that if you only buy an Intel product your life will become wonderful and all the mistakes of your childhood will no longer haunt you.
But we know better, don't we, Mackers? We know where Microsoft gets its ideas and whose designs it copies. You like the Pent3 commercials? Well, go ahead and dump the full $3 grand into one of the new Mac G3s and you will get a 400 MHz screamer with full Rage 128 implementation that will still run rings around the Evil One when you throw the most demanding games at it.
Also rest secure in the knowledge that neither the G3 chip nor the G4 to follow has a hardwired, traceable serial number embedded in it that announces who you are to the entire Net. No programmer will be able to write a Java application, ActiveX module or other hack that will turn on the identifier and transmit your web surfing history, serial number, installed software or any other info to the world. Intel cannot make the same claim.
Sure, the processor ships with the identifier turned off. The only reason for that decision is because of the hue and cry that went up when the original announcement was made. But neither Intel nor Microsoft can guarantee that the identifier cannot be turned on by an external third party. Yet that is not the true threat presented by this microprocessor.
The real threat is the banks, credit card companies, online vendors and others who will require you to have an activated Pent3 chip before you can do business with them. Already plans are afoot to develop web sites that will not be viewable by any other machine. Or some will contain features exclusive to WinPent users.
Intel owners who want this machine but eschew Microsoft for Linux or other Unix flavors might also ask if they are going to be left out of this game. Mackers can install MKLinux and then use apps designed for Linux, and they can write their own. But will companies try to exclude both Motorola- and Intel-using Linux operators, or will everyone using anything but the Microsoft-blessed OS with this $300 million hype be excluded?
All Mackers will need to become activists in the face of this new product. Be prepared to tell anyone who asks why they are still better off with Mac/Motorola than Win/Intel 3. Be prepared to tell any company on the Net that you do business with that you use Macintosh and you spend money. Make sure that no one you deal with online is free to exclude you without serious protests, public and private.
And you Linux users, even though Intel is publicly on the outs with Microsoft right now, be aware that they could just write you off without having to cut back on their coffee budget. You have a lot more in common with us than you may think.
I'd be willing to give up one of my three wishes to have the MacOS run on Intel machines. While many at Apple and in the Mac community don't agree, I think it would be good for us all and sufficiently profitable for Apple so they could keep up the design and R&D that has made the MacOS the world leader in ease of use and application interoperability.

Better iMac Mouse
If you really wish you could get your hands on a real mouse instead of the little finger toy that came with your iMac, the best deal seems to be from MacMall (888) 965-3282. It's an ergonomic mouse adapter from Macsense Connectivity called the "iCatch" that shrouds the standard mouse with a proper oblong shape to grip.
I haven't had my hands on it (Update: I have, and it it works just great!), but it's only $10 + shipping from MacMall. Or try the MacSense web site.
If you have never used anything but the original iMac mouse, you should know that the standard Apple Ergonomic Mouse was designed by one of the best ergonomic engineers in the industry, an Apple Fellow who has since left to do other work. While he didn't have anything to do with the iCatch, it brings the unit as close as possible to the original design, cheaply.
If you want to replace the round mouse entirely, the one from MacAlly is $25. They also make a full-sized USB keyboard, and a trackball.

PowerBooks
I got mail after last month's issue asking why I didn't include powerbooks in my suggested systems. Part of the reason is lack of experience with the units; while the specs look good and the current line is as good as any desktop machine, there hasn't been any really new information on them in months, except that some new Spring models will have USB and FireWire ports.
Sure, I have clients with them and have been called to fix problems, but nothing happens to them that doesn't happen to any Mac under normal usage: Disk Doctor issues, extension compatibities, running obsolete applications, the usual. They are all happy with their systems, and if they have any limitations, they are an acceptable trade for the portability.
Besides, the fourth shoe is waiting to drop - the final piece of Apple's strategy, the consumer level portables.
There is zero information out there. Jobs certainly knows how to keep a tight lid on unannounced products. No pictures, no screen dumps; a couple of rumored images on the Web a few months ago, but we really have no idea what is coming.
If the new PBs are as hot as the iMac, though, expect ripples through the industry. You know, the kind of ripple you get when you drop a meteor into the ocean.
All I can suggest is that you wait until May, when the announcement of the new portables is expected at the WorldWide Developers Conference. But if you need a full-featured portable now, go ahead and get one of the G3s. Price buys you features; maybe you don't need or want DVD capability or the fastest processor. Then when the new cheaper units come out in spring you won't feel bad because Apple is not going to release machines that will make the pro powerbooks obsolete; they are going to release machines to fill the niche left when they abandoned the Newton, the iMate and the Powerbook 2300. I can hardly wait.

How Fast is Fast?
eMedia Weekly (out of business as of 2/4/99) printed a chart recently of just how fast, in megabits-per-second (Mbps), the various formats are in transferring data. The numbers are theoretical maximums; real-world performance is somewhat less. To calculate what the numbers mean in megabytes (MBps), divide by eight.

Eudora update
It's official: Now Contact/Eudora Planner is history, but the good news is Qualcomm has rededicated their efforts to Eudora. The program will continue to be published, developed, updated. We can release our breath now. Now Contact fans can take another breath, though. Rumor is that someone will take over the project of making this a modern, integrated application. We can but hope.

InDesign is Out Soon
Adobe's direct attack on Quark's customer base, InDesign, was demonstrated at Seybold in Boston last month. Ironically, and of direct importance to Mackers, the NT-based SGI machines crashed so often they had to return to demoing it and their other products on new blue&white G3 systems.
A report on this by Rick LePage, writer for Macintouch, was posted to their site and can be read, assuming they leave it up long enough for you to read this.
To summarize, the long rumored compatibility with Quark XTensions was not included. A converter utility, however, will import Quark documents with guides, formatting and frames intact. A Quark XPress keyboard shortcuts set will be included with the program so you won't have to learn new key commands. Many XTension publishers at Seybold declared their intention to write plug-ins for InDesign.
Many basic editing functions to Photoshop and Illustrator documents will be part of InDesign, allowing changes to clipping paths, adding fills, etc. without having to revert to the other applications.
The program will ship this summer, simultaneously on both platforms, for $699 list. PageMaker owners will be able to upgrade for $299; decisions on a competitive upgrade for Quark users have not been announced.
Audience reaction to the demo was "extremely positive," and Macintouch interviews with audience members showed a "huge" pent-up demand for an alternative to Quark. Macintouch feels that if the shipping version is as solid and clean as it appears, within two years the professional publishing market will remember Quark as nothing more than a bad smell coming from under the couch.
PageMaker will continue to be published and supported as a "business-oriented" page layout application. A minor update, PageMaker 6.5 Plus, will also ship this summer.

End of the Microsoft Era
The San Jose Mercury posted a great editorial on their site that detailed why Microsoft is losing power and influence and will eventually fade into the background. The press is focusing on weakness in MS just like they nipped at Apple at its weakest. The difference is, MS isn't weak right now, and it is still raking in hedges o' money. But their arrogance is finally becoming public, thanks to the trial, and the rest of the world is waking up to what we Mackers already knew.
What is amusing is that MS took the Macworld magazine's annual awards for Office, Explorer 4.5 and Outlook Express. Their somewhat-unbiased editors liked what they saw. Doesn't mean I'll be using their products any time soon!
The Mercury predicts the downfall of Windows just as their Mac division is beginning to produce products pleasing to some. It is to laugh.
The decision to incorporate the BSD Unix kernel into OS X may turn out to be Apple's smartest move yet.

Architects using Macs website
BritasMedia, a Cambridge, Mass. startup is announcing a new site devoted to architects and related-design professionals using the Macintosh.
BritasMedia, the site's publisher, believes it is the first site of its kind on the Internet. The mission of the Architosh site is to bring together the best online resources for architects on the Macintosh, including links to CAD and modeling/rendering software, design software, AEC software and general business applications. In addition, there are daily Mac news links and press release stories from important software companies.
The site also features ArchitoshBooks, an Amazon.com associate bookstore featuring key books on CAD, design software training, and general Mac books. There are also ProMac links, key links to important Apple sites, A Mac OS X page, A PowerPC page, an Architects page and an area for Opinion essays.

ClarisWorks User Group
Warren Williams writes,
Did you know that the world's largest user group is dedicated to a single Apple product? The ClarisWorks/AppleWorks Users Group has over 15,000 members in 51 countries.

More on the new G3s
At the end of January I attended an Apple dog-and-pony show featuring the new machines. I had a lot of my questions answered and nagging doubts put to rest.
Whether you like the new color and design of the box or not, these are truly hot machines. The benchmarks beat anything out there in the Intel world, and the real-world tests agree with the benchmarks.
Apple has licensed OpenGL, the industry standard for games, so it will be easier for developers to write Mac versions. The 128RAGE card has the highest frames-per-second count, so you will get fast, smooth play from the most demanding games. QuickDraw 3D will be going away in favor of GL.
This month, LaCie will be releasing a FireWire external hard drive, six gigabytes in size, physically no larger than a paperback book. In June, they will have a 6-gig drive the size of a Palm Pilot! Price is not yet set. The best thing about these new FireWire peripherals? They will get their power from the FireWire bus! So you will have this really tiny drive, capable of running on any FireWire-capable Mac, that can hold all the data you could probably need!
This is why Apple is forcing the technology. FireWire is fast, so easy to use and free of SCSI voodoo problems. Can you imagine starting up a big QuickTime movie from an external hard drive, then in the middle of the movie, pulling the SCSI cable off? Probably fry your SCSI controller chip! But with FireWire you just plug it back in and the movie resumes!
If you need SCSI, you can use up a PCI slot for a SCSI card, either fast or standard, and keep all your existing SCSI devices.

No 6-slot Macs
Apple officially declared that they will not be making a G3 version of the 9600, the last Mac to have six PCI slots. This news, while disappointing to the professional audio and video market, does not mean the end of support for this industry.
One of the PCI slots is a double-bandwidth bus, capable of carrying 64 bits instead of the standard 32. This means that an expansion chassis, a "black box" that is fed from a PCI card that goes in that slot, will give the high-end user up to 8 PCI slots at no loss in performance. The problem with chassis boxes in the past has been that cards plugged into them could not offer the same performance as cards plugged directly into the CPU. No longer true.
Apple decided not to build a six-slot box because the price would have had to be around $5,000. An expansion chassis containing six slots is $1295. Plug that into a $2,999 Blue & White G3 and you do the math. No one would buy Apple's machine for 5 grand!
The video card shipped with the G3 is plugged into that slot to give you fast graphics. But if you remove it to plug in the chassis, you will need to plug the card into the first slot in the chassis, not the nearest PCI slot. The claim is that there is no loss in performance if you do that.
The only problem reported to me so far (besides the expected software conflicts) comes from fellow consultant Charles DeVore. His G3 mysteriously shut down and wouldn't come back up one day. The fan motor started, but no chime, no spinning hard drive, and the CD drive door wouldn't open. The problem? The processor (a zero-insertion-force chip) came loose from its ZIF socket. He had opened and closed it many times, and the card wiggled loose over time. Since the entire motherboard is on its side when the door is closed, vibration and repeated closings allowed it to work loose. If that happens to you, says Charles, make sure that the ZIF processor (concealed under the clipped-on heat sink) and all the cards and S/DIMMs on the board are properly seated before returning the machine for repair.

OS X Server
The server software will ship soon, too. This was demoed at Macworld and the performance is amazing, as is the price. $995 gets you the entire software package, and unlimited clients. A G3 server with the software pre-installed can be up and serving web pages in -5- minutes, and if not preinstalled, from 0 to serving in 30 minutes. Those of you who have set up and configured UNIX and NT servers will appreciate the time savings.
The package is robust enough to host 50 domains, with 18 million hits per day. If you get more hits than that, get another G3. The ease of configuration and the power makes it the best value out there. The server software includes WebObjects and Apache, the most popular Web hosting programs on the Net. WebObjects, inherited by Apple when they acquired NeXT, is being made available on Macs for the first time. And the kernel of OS X is BSD Unix. Experienced Unix hackers will find access to the full power of the command-line interface; those who know nothing about Unix will never even know that is what they are running.
How powerful is it? They showed a video of 50 iMacs all running a different QuickTime movie, all hosted on the server. You need control over your network? OS X is network-bootable. One system folder will launch all iMacs on the net. Each user can have a login that will display their own desktop, with all personalization preferences and all applications they use. They would not even know that they were on a machine with no internal hard drive until they looked for one. Now THAT's Network Computing. I can hear the snapping of the heads of school and corporate network administrators from here. Down side: The IT department will not need as big a staff to administer the network, which is why so many IT departments have been converting to NT. Nobody likes to lose staff and budget, except the owners of the company (or the school board).
But as far as the individual user is concerned, the new units, running 8.5.1, will be the fastest, best Macs to date. They just need to be savvy enough to work on the leading edge of the technology and avoid using obsolete, incompatible software. As the months go by, problem programs will either be eliminated or updated. And as of this month, 1,332 new developers have signed on to produce Mac applications. Apple has had 5 profitible quarters, almost $2 billion in cash, and the largest selling single computer (the iMac) ever. The future indeed looks bright for Mackers.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

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