Macking 78
by Michael Pearce
Macking 78
Macking 78
by Michael Pearce
From the January 2002 Computer Bits
Costing Microsoft customers
Tew K3w1! is all I can say about Panergy Ltd., a software publisher in Israel. It is probably the physical distance from Redmond that allows this company to keep producing their products, because Panergy makes products that let the user avoid having to buy Microsoft Word and now Excel, too.
Their products, icWord and icExcel, will open and read, and print, Word and Excel documents! You can even export them to AppleWorks, or copy and paste the data into another application. All for $20 each or both for $30. Now if they can only come up with icPowerPoint, then they will conquer the world!
Read all about them and collect your copies at http://www.icword.com/ and http://www.icexcel.com/. They both are freely downloadable and run as a full-featured demo for 30 days before you must pay the fee. Thanks, guys!
You Don't Know Mac
November 17 was the annual trivia competition between Oregon user groups to see which team knew the most about Apple and Macintosh history. For the 3rd year in a row the Portland team, which consisted of me, Barry Sumo and Ian Schray, won the trophy and a new iMac for our club classroom. This event, held at Clark College in Vancouver, WA, was the biggest yet, with five participating vendors (PowerMax, The Computer Store, PowerMacPac, MacForce and Hewitt-Packard) along with displays from PMUG and the other two team groups, Eugene Mac Users Group and Apple Blossom Computer Club from Winston, Oregon. The latter was the oldest group there, having begun as an Apple II group in 1980. They came in 2nd in the competition, followed by Eugene, which beat PMUG in birthdate, having started in February, 1984, mere weeks after the release of the original 128K Macintosh.
The vendors and others, including Apple, donated dozens of prizes which were claimed by each group in turn, with the winner having the right to claim the first item, the iMac. Over a hundred people attended the event and a good time was had by all.
Since Portland can't compete again for a while, I will be joining the committee that comes up with the trivia questions. I'm gonna have me some fun!
Mystie Mess
Watch out for the new version of Myst, Myst III: Exile. Depending on which version of the OS you are running and which monitor you are using, this popular game could get you in trouble.
I had a client who installed it and somehow lost half of her extensions, with some winding up in folders that they should not have been in. I was not able to reproduce that problem, but I did discover that the developers screwed up the install process by not taking into account that there would be a newer version of QuickTime released by Apple some time after Myst was released. As a result, they made it too easy to install version 4 on top of version 5, killing both.
Worse, after I fixed everything and ran a proper install, I discovered that there are incompatibilities with QT5 that left artifacts from previous windows on the screen, chopped up the music and dialog (this on a Quicksilver G4) with dropouts, and failed to correctly display the game cursor, leaving both the standard Mac cursor and theirs on the screen at the same time, in different places!
Finally, they made it difficult to quit the game, having to wait through tedious credit sequences before getting keyboard control back (command-option-control-escape was blocked so I couldn't Force Quit) and when the desktop returned the icons had been moved around because the game had changed screen resolution improperly, something you should never do on a flat-screen (TFT) display.
I mentioned these troubles to a friend who knows Linux and Windows and he said that the Mac version isn't the only one suffering from problems during installation. Myst has been around for years so you would think that they at least would have figured out how to deal with differences between Macs and OS versions; the Windows environment offers an order of magnitude more complexity.
Bottom line: make a backup of your System Folder before installing the new game. Do not choose the QuickTime install option unless you know for a certainty that your version is older than 4.0. And do not get it if you have one of Apple's new monitors. Otherwise enjoy it; the reviews in other publications are quite favorable.
G5's A'Coming
If all goes according to rumor, you will soon be able to order a G5 Mac. In late November, the rumor sites were all discussing Motorola's capability of producing an average of 4.5 G5 chips per wafer, and that Apple has seeded major developers with 1.2 gigahertz models.
The goal is to have enough in production to fill all orders for medium to high end Macs after the official announcement in January at Macworld Expo.
This is also supposed to be the time Apple announces the long-awaited flat-screen iMac. One clue that this is coming is that the order channels are finding it difficult to get their hands on current model iMacs. This is a sure sign, almost a guarantee, so hold off your iMac purchases until the rumor is proven true or false. The next opportunity after January that Apple usually uses to release new product is Macworld Japan in February or the Worldwide Developers Conference shortly afterwards.
Mac Designs Xbox
The Xbox web site shows a picture of a designer using a G4 Mac to design the graphics and the interface of the Microsoft Xbox. When you want to do the best possible job, you use the right tool.
Apple Wins Maine
In the midst of the unbelievably self-serving offer of Microshaft to provide $1 billion worth of computers and software to schools (running guess which OS), it was heartening to read that Apple won the low bid to provide 30,000 laptops to the schools of Maine. Almost every middle-schooler will be eligible for one.
I wonder if AOL will still be so eager to drop support for the OSX version of their client software now that they are excluding themselves from all of those future potential customers?
Speaking of AOL, it is a very good thing that there has not been a Mac upgrade from AOL 5.0 to 6.0 and beyond; the Windoze upgrade no longer allows the user to send plain text mail. It's all HTML mail now, which plays havoc with email lists.
There remains only one good reason to keep using AOL any more: local numbers in out-of-the-way places not served by any other local or national ISP, including other countries. Participants in special-interest AOL areas or chat rooms can get a proper ISP in their city, if available, and then access AOL through their provider. That way, they don't have to use the embedded version of IE for web browsing, and they can switch their email address over to the provider and not use AOL's pathetic email client at all.
Avoid LinkSys
Sure, they make the cheapest routers, but they consistently make life difficult for Mac users by leaving out the necessary two or three pages that would be all that's needed by a Macker to set one up. Worse, they now exclude AppleTalk from their routing capabilities. It used to be that some would and some wouldn't. So we'll have to pay more for an Asante or XSense router/firewall, but I am always happy to give my money to a general-computer-product company that supports Macs. Both those companies make routers that include wireless Ethernet and they save you the cost of buying both an AirPort base station and a firewall router.
If, however, you want trouble-free wireless Ethernet, you are still best served by the AirPort. It has no problem routing AppleTalk as well as TCP/IP protocols between laptops and a network of wired Macs. It's super-simple to set up.
Just remember that if you are using your computer for critical data that you absolutely need secure, the wireless protocols that AirPort uses (802.11 Ethernet) have been cracked like an egg and are now poaching on the sidewalk. Anyone with a Linux laptop and a copy of Snorter can station themselves within range of your network bubble and monitor traffic until they have your passwords, then enter and browse your network to their heart's content. Maybe YOU aren't linux-savvy enough to do this - I know I'm not - but there are plenty of people who are.
Not everyone needs to worry about this, but suppose you are a lawyer pursuing a high-profile and expensive case against an organization that can easily afford to hire private security crackers. Anything on your Mac that could hurt you would become available. Most of us don't have to worry about this because all the volunteer crackers and script-kiddies do their mucking about in the Windows world because it's so cheap, easy and common. But if someone wants at you badly enough, they will expend the effort. Are you valuable? Don't use wireless Ethernet!
No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.
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