Macking 77

Taking screen snapshots
One of the more useful built-in features of all versions of the MacOS is the ability to capture all or part of any working screen and save to a file. The most basic, and the one that has been with us the longest, is simply typing Command-Shift-3. This captures your entire screen and saves it to a file called Picture 1 in the root (first level) of your hard drive. The second is called Picture 2, etc.
Far more useful is the two options available when you type Command-Shift-4. If the Caps Lock key is NOT down, your cursor turns into a cross-hair, with which you can draw a box on the screen, enclosing that part of the picture you want to capture, leaving out the rest. The picture naming convention applies as above.
If you push the caps lock key down first, your cursor turns into a target icon, and whichever window you next click in is captured as a picture, including frame and title bar.
Why would you want to? Well, the primary use most of us make is when we are writing manuals, instruction sheets or the like and want screen dumps to illustrate the text. They are also useful when writing to someone and you want to show a dialog box or other odd screen appearance.
But have you thought of when you buy online? Those who have see a message in the confirmation-of-sale window that suggests you print out a copy of your order. Don't bother: a screen capture of the window will do just fine for your records, until the order arrives and the picture can be thrown away, saving paper and ink.
Another use for this feature is when you want to remove images from a PowerPoint document. PowerPoint is the Roach Motel of software: once an image has been embedded in a document, it can't be exported without Herculean efforts. If, however, you have a big monitor - needed if you want to extract images for printing - you need to simply enlarge the page until the image fills the screen. Then do a Command-shift-4 without caps lock and enclose the picture. As soon as you capture it, switch to your hard drive window and immediately rename the picture, moving it into an appropriate folder you created for this purpose.
All screen shots are mapped at 72 dots per inch (DPI). This is too small for printing in any detail, but many times the PowerPoint image can be enlarged 300% without losing detail. This is because most PowerPoint documents are assumed to be for printing as well as on-screen viewing. You can easily tell if this is true of your document, because as you enlarge it, the resolution does not decrease (pixelate) and just shows ever more detail. A 400% increase makes it almost to 300 DPI.
To best do this on a 17" monitor, you should be able to increase the resolution to at least 1024x768; the higher the better as long as your color depth remains at Millions of colors, or at least Thousands. What you see on the screen is what you capture, so if you reduce color depth down to 256 colors, you will not get a good printable picture.
Screen captures are saved in the PICT format. This is an older format, going all the way back to the original Mac. Longtime users will even remember that Command-Shift-4 would send a screen dump directly to the Imagewriter, but never worked with the LaserWriters.
For best printing, you need to convert PICT to TIFF (Tagged Image File Format), the preferred format for Quark, PageMaker and InDesign. You can also convert to JPEG format if you choose High (75% or better) quality so you don't lose data to the compression process. That way you can email the JPEG to someone, who can then convert it to TIFF for printing at their end, or just print from their image viewer. But don't use PICT in your documents or you will occasionally get poor output.
For file conversion, if you don't have any image-manipulation software, I suggest you acquire a copy of the shareware program GraphicConverter. This is like a mini-Photoshop with amazingly powerful features. It runs rings around the horrid Adobe PhotoDeluxe, and can even be used for scanning and editing. At $30 this is a true bargain and it can be downloaded free from Kagi, where you can also pay the fee after deciding that the program is worth keeping. To read all about GraphicConverter, visit the Lemke Software site.
Note to OSX users: The screen capture commands still work, except the caps-lock option doesn't.
Try this a few times. Get used to taking a screen shot, then moving directly to your hard drive window and renaming the Picture file. You will find more uses for the trick than you thought you would.

Internet Telephone for Mac
Haxial's NetFone is a $15 multi-user telephone application that gives you the ability to use the Net for telephoning computer-to-computer to someone who has a compatible version (Mac or Windows) of the same application. It also provides for conferencing.
You can also send sounds in real time. More info at the NetFone site.

G5 is Coming
One of the limits of the G3 and G4 chips is scalability. It hasn't been easy to boost the speed into the gigahertz range. But the new processor will start at 1.2 GHz and go up from there. Expect announcements of this and other major hardware announcements at Macworld SF in January, with the next round coming at Macworld Japan in March. In short, hold off your major desktop purchases until we see what is coming down the pike.

OSX Future
Why did Apple use BSD as the microkernel on which to build its new operating system? (Cynical answer: Apple preferred the license for BSD over the license for Linux, which would have required them to release more of their OSX code than they would like.) Official reason for going UNIX at all: Apple desperately needed the improvements in memory management and multiprocessing of a modern OS. Besides, there are all those special capabilities in UNIX that are making their way Macwards. For instance, there is a plug-in called Zilla that will be used on a network of Mac client machines with a server. Zilla takes unused processor cycles from each client Mac and makes them available to the server to apply to tasks that would normally require a much larger and more powerful (and expensive) machine. The users on the network would not percieve any change in performance, and the server would be scaled up considerably in power.
Scientific and university applications will be able to take advantage of Clustering. This allows multiple Macs to act as one. Forty $799 iMacs all strung together with Gigabit Ethernet will have the power of full-blown mainframes at a fraction of the cost and complexity. Although the Macs in such a setup cannot be used for anything else, the option of Distributed Processing will offer most of the power of Clustering while allowing each Mac to be used as a desktop machine as well.

OSX Present
I have been living with OSX.1 on my iBook for over a month now, with OS 9.2.1 for Classic mode. I finally get the stability and performance I needed since X was released. I can use Eudora and Netscape in Classic mode while running other X-native programs and switching back and forth at will.
It is especially entertaining when a background application wants my attention. As you know, icons in the Dock will bounce up and down as a program is launching. Well, when a background application wants attention it also bounces until you switch over to it and deal with the request. I have my Dock hidden below the bottom of the screen, popping up only when I move the cursor to the bottom. When Eudora has finished checking mail, the little Eudora icon bounces up from the bottom of the screen, looking like an enthusiastic kid in class waving his hand and jumping up and down for attention, or a Whack-a-Mole in a cubicle farm popping up to see what is happening. Click!
While I am getting pretty good at understanding the new file structure and how to locate items in windows using the column view mode, I can certainly say it has not been easy. New users will actually have a much simpler time of it, since they don't have to unlearn all the tricks and shortcuts of earlier systems.
There are so many, many freeware and shareware applications out now it is nearly impossible to keep track of them. New clocks, button bars, menu additions, launcher substitutes and graphical utilities to let the non-UNIX-savvy people (like me) take advantage of some of the more obscure features otherwise available under the command-line interface in the Terminal application. Spend some time on the Net looking for them, on Apple's page, on MacNN.com, VersionTracker.com and others. More than enough to keep you from performing any useful work for weeks.

iPod
That leads to Apple's newest device, a Mac peripheral called the iPod. Maybe you have already seen the ads for this and wondered why one would spend $400 for a pocket MP3 player? Simple - it is a lot more.
Besides having the best user interface for such a player on the market, its internal 6-gig drive can serve as quick data storage for someone who needs to carry their files around with them for use on other Macs.
The iPod is powered by a 10-hour battery that is recharged through your Mac's FireWire port. When you plug it in, an icon appears on your desktop that looks like an ordinary external hard drive. You can copy your data onto it and then take it home or to another office and access the data there.
You can install a basic System Folder onto it, which can be used to start up an ailing Mac that won't run from its own drive any more. You can then run a disk repair utility to get the internal drive working again.
Finally, of course, is the fact that your iTunes folder will synchronize with the iPod by merely plugging it in, copying any newly-ripped CDs to itself for later playback. Those, in turn, can be copied to any other Mac that is also running iTunes 2.0 (which was released Nov. 14 with the iPod).
Treating the iPod like a normal Walkman gives you up to 1,000 songs (depending on length and bitrate) at excellent stereo sound. You can play it while you work, and while it is plugged into the Mac serving as a data storage device. Six gigs is a lot of data for a drive only 1.8" in size!
Sure, you say, there are MP3 players out there that hold 20 gigs and plug into the USB port for a lot less money. But have you timed the pokey USB port against the FireWire? A CD will copy in seconds, not fractions of an hour. And none of the others get that much play time on a charge (recharging to 80% capacity in one hour).
Apple's promotion is to make the Mac the "center of your digital universe," and with the iPod it looks like they are on the way. Remember that this is a Mac-only device, so it is being marketed to Mac users and is not dependent on competing in the consumer market. With millions of FireWire-enabled Macs out there, that's a pretty healthy potential segment to sell to.

Corrections
David Nelson writes,
I enjoy your column in ComputerBits and I'm a huge Mac OS X fan. I'm currently a U of O student and have a part-time Mac support job there. I am also a forum moderator and "Mac Specialist" at The Mac Observer.
I have a few corrections for you in the Mozilla section of your Macking 75 article (not to be unnecessarily critical, but just for your information.).
First, you say that the latest version of Mozilla is 0.9.7 when in fact the latest version is only 0.9.5. (Fixed on the web page for Macking 75.)
Second, you say that Mozilla/Netscape and OmniWeb are the only OS X alternatives to Internet Explorer. Actually, Opera and iCab are out for Mac OS X as well. Granted, these are not final versions, but then neither is Mozilla. Also if you want to get really picky, lynx and links (both text-only, Terminal-based browsers) are available for OS X.

Nits
A couple of issues ago Ted Middlestaedt, another columnist in Bits, got a bit pissy about my claim to the longest-running author. This is my response, deleted last month due to space considerations:
Wake up that morning sweating nits, Ted? I stated in my claim that there are authors still writing for Bits who began before I did, but did not write continuously, every month, between then and now, including Ted. He claims he lost some columns over the years to editing, but I did not. Every month was an original, written for that month, and although I may have been edited for space, I usually put back the missing segments in the following month. I have never rerun a column although I have re-used older material because I wanted to reach newer readers with what I considered important information.
So, Ted, if you did indeed start one month before me and never skipped a month, congratulations on being the longest running columnist. I asked the Editor if I was the one, and he agreed, not mentioning you. Blame Paul if you must.
As far as your snide comments about Apple claiming to have invented things that they did not, how about Wintel apologists claiming that the first Personal Computer was invented in 1981?? Apple has more than two years on that, having produced the first mass-marketed, general-interest personal computer that anyone could buy and use, and for which there were 3rd-party developers producing software. We all know about the Altair, and PARC, etc. but the Apple II really set things going.
IBM just made the first Microsoft computer, which has continued to be made by other manufacturers ever since, and which has had the capability of running non-Microsoft OSes up to and including BE and Linux, among others.
It could be argued that ProDOS, Apple's implementation of the command-line interface, was better than MS-DOS, but since I never had an Apple II, I will leave that argument to others. And while they are at it, be sure to bring up DRDOS and what Microshaft did to it.
Microsoft was so desperate that they even had to resort to stealing others' code, and were caught copying QuickTime (without even removing the copyright message!) and had to pay an "unspecified" settlement along with the $100 million in stock that they bought back in the mid-'90s. Now, with a gentle kiss from the Injustice Department and a plaintive beg to please don't be a nasty monopoly any more, they are free to run roughshod over the rest of the industry.
Except the States are not accepting the settlement, and the European Union is even angrier at them. M$ is definitely not out of the woods yet.

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.)