Macking 79

The New iMac
We knew it was coming; by now most of you have seen it, and it looks like Apple hit another home run with this design. What a looker! A 10.5" dome with a pivoting 15" flat screen above it. G4 chip. 20 gig drive or more. SuperDrive (which writes and reads both CDs and DVDs). AirPort antenna in the screen and the whole thing for only $1800. This same power cost $4500 last Macworld! This is probably one of the most beautiful computers ever made and they will sell even better than the original record-breaking iMac.
Even though you would never know it from the speech, Apple is going to continue to make the traditional iMacs available for under $1000.
As usual, Apple leads the pack.

iPhoto
This will be the killer app for OSX. Everyone who has taken digital photos has had to deal with various utilities to import the images, some way to organize and categorize them, another way to edit them and finally having to print them out.
Not any more. iPhoto (I assume everyone is getting a little sick of appending an "i" to everything, even if Apple did start it) handles the whole thing, from importing and organizing each camera-load, providing enlargeable thumbnails to sending them out for printing over the Net. Want to make a family album? Built into the program is a page-layout program that you can use to caption your photos, group them on each page, and finally send them to a Kodak provider who will give you a hardbound book for $29.99 (for ten pages; each additional page is $3).
This answers the question on MY mind: how are all these digital photos going to be around in the future? Out of the billions of snaps taken, only a tiny fraction will be around three years from now, let alone 25 years when people who use them for family history will want to show them to their grandsprogs.
Now, photogs will be able to simply and easily organize, save and print. This will work in OSX only, and is another reason to switch.
Find out all of this and see pictures, specifications and all the rest at http://www.apple.com/.

Other Stuff
Apple upgraded the iBook as well. Now the $1800 model is $1400, with DVD reader and CD-ROM writer. The $1299 model is now $1199 (CD-ROM only). The new top-end model, for $1800, has a 14.1" screen, an even bigger battery (6 hours claimed, probably 5 in real use, an hour more than the smaller units, and a combo drive that reads and writes CD-ROMs and reads DVDs. It weighs but a pound more. All have the same screen resolution (1024x768) and the top two sport a 100 MHz bus.
Adobe demonstrated their product line as well. The countdown to Photoshop X has begun, but they aren't saying when. Office is already out, and Quark is coming. It is now at the point that many of you can start using OSX and using Classic Mode for your older apps.
As of this Macworld, all new Macs ship with OSX set as the default startup, but 9.2 will be available for those who prefer OS9 or have incompatible printers. That number of printers is dropping, too. The last software update included drivers for all current Epson and HP printers.
Jobs commented that at the Apple stores, 40% of all sales are to people who never had a Mac before. Their focus is now on the "other 95%" who use Windows and Linux. Linux/Unix mavens are getting excited by the capabilities of OSX, and Microsoft users are getting ever more fed up with the company's buggy OSes, intrusive registration schemes, network insecurity, uncountable viruses and sloppy design. All are potential Apple customers, and, especially with the powerful and capable Virtual PC to run their legacy Microsoft-only applications, have even more reasons to switch.
Welcome aboard.

Alias Management
I find that a lot of my clients don't really get aliases. Getting yourself more familiar with how they work and how useful they can be will enhance your Mac experience.
Think of aliases as pointers, icons that represent items you need frequent access to, like programs, for instance, such as StuffItExpander and DropStuff. If you are a user that sends and receive stuffed files fairly often, then having the icons where you can get at them quickly is a useful thing.
But some applications do not run correctly when removed from their folders. Photoshop, Netscape, Quicken, Quark and even the StuffIt products should be left where they belong, so an alias lets you put an icon of the desired program on the desktop, under the Apple menu, wherever.
So where do you get aliases? First, go up to the Apple menu and look for a folder called Recent Applications. Drag down to that folder and release the mouse. Don't drag over to anything in that folder. A window will open that contains aliases of the last ten applications you launched. Also under the apple menu will be Recent Documents.
You might notice that these folders also contain odd documents and applications you don't remember ever seeing. These are unavoidable; some applications launch themselves when asked by others; temporary documents are created by other programs linked to or embedded within the apps you do use. Even though the temp file is gone, the alias stays around until replaced by more recently opened files.
This reduces the usefulness of the Recent Items folders, so the way to get more of your history retained is to go to the control panel called Apple Menu Items. In there you will be able to increase the numbers of folders and files tracked by just typing in 20 or 30 to replace the default 10.
The Recent Items folders will also track other computers on your network. Each time you select AppleShare in the Chooser, you create aliases for whatever hard drives or temporary volumes you access in the Recent Servers folder. Moving these to the desktop or the Favorites folder will keep them available and accessible without having to open the Chooser. Double-click on any of these and the Mac will ask you for a password, just like when you use the Chooser.
If you are not on any network, then setting the Recent Servers number to 0 will make the folder go away.

Favorites Folder
A lot of longtime Mackers like to use the Launcher. The Launcher is an alias manager that has been part of the MacOS since the earliest days. It always seemed clunky to me, because so much space is wasted around the buttons. There are 3rd-party launchers I have written about before, but the simplest way to build a conveniently accessible launcher is through the Favorites folder.
Since 8.5, Apple has included a menu listing "Add to Favorites" under the File menu. With OS9.1 it also has a keyboard command: Cmd-T. Selecting any application, document or folder in the Finder (click once to highlight) enables the Add to Favorites menu, which immediately adds an alias to the folder. You can then access any of the items within from the Apple menu.
But if you release on the folder, opening it, you can make the window into a popup tabbed window using the View menu's "as Popup Window." That puts the window at the bottom of the screen. Click once to open it, double-click on the alias to open the item within. The window can be resized so you can see everything within, and it can be viewed as List, Icon or Button.
Viewing as Button makes it like the Launcher. One click on the button and the item opens as the Favorites window becomes a tab again. Further, you can go to View Options and make the buttons smaller. Shorten the names and you can fit lots of buttons into a small window.
An alias can be renamed anything and it will still call up its original item. Put an alias of a remote hard drive opened with AppleShare in Favorites for easy access. Or just drag it from the Recent Servers folder into the Favorites folder. Thus if Steve has named his hard drive "Thoth" and you can't remember whose it is, rename the alias for Thoth to "Steve's HD."
The real Favorites folder is inside the System Folder and should not be moved out, or the System will create another, disabling the one you removed.

CD Copy Protection Scheme Excludes Macs
As reported in a Dec. 19 article in MacCentral, the vile and horrid record industry is trying to roll out a copy-protection scheme (called "Cactus") that will prevent music CDs from ever being played on Macs.
Universal Music Group, one of the largest publishers of music in the world, is planning to employ copy protection features that prevent the music on the disc from being duplicated on another CD or ripped to an MP3 player. affected releases include "Fast and Furious - More Music," a soundtrack CD, and the new Tori Amos record.
The scheme that they employ totally excludes Macs. It won't play on the Apple CD Player at all - a legal use of the product - let alone be usable on the iPod or in MP3 format.
Of course the Linux community has already broken their scheme but they don't seem to care about that. What is really interesting is that it doesn't affect all Macs: those of us with CD/DVD drives don't have a problem reading and ripping the disks. Apparently the UMG and developers of Cactus never tested it on DVD drives.
Universal Music Group refused to talk to MacCentral when they requested comment. A reader of the article then posted a proper set of steps to take to make retailers put pressure on the industry to drop this format. It is worth reprinting here in its entirety:
1. Go into Walmart or BestBuy and BUY the cd, OPEN the cd and RETURN the cd, especially if you normally never shop there. They have to process this and it ends up costing them money. Also, if enough people do it, this will have the major retailers screaming at Universal and Universal will listen.
2. Call up your local authority dealing with illegal imports/consumer products. Here are some instructions from Fatchucks for US residents:
Call the FTC at 1-877-382-4357 from Monday-Friday between 9am-8pm Eastern Time. After it answers, hit 1. Wait a couple of minutes (I waited 2 minutes).
When they answer, they will you ask you for...
The name of the company - RIAA (Record Industry Association of America)
Company address - 1330 Connecticut Avenue N.W., Suite 300
Company city, state and zip - Washington, D.C., 20036
Company phone - 202-775-0101
Person you dealt with - unknown
Then they will ask you for your name, address, city, state, zip, phone number and your complaint:
Your Complaint...
A). Record labels of the RIAA have been releasing at least 100s of 1000s of "copy-protected" music CDs into the United States. Proof:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6604222.html
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9999998
http://www.modbee.com/24hour/entertainment/story/183508p-1775112c.html
B. The record industry is not labeling which CDs are "protected." These CDs should be clearly labeled, because once we buy these CDs, we cannot return them to get our money back. Record stores will only let us exchange them. This is unfair and deceptive.
3. Ring the FTC or your local authority OFTEN, especially if it's a toll-free number
4. Email Universal and complain to them ("I'll never buy any of your CDs again if they're not Mac compatible etc., etc.")
5. Go to Amazon and CDnow and click to their contact page and inform them that you will buy NONE of their products unless they remove the Universal Copyright Protected CDs.
6. If you want to go further, write to your Minister + Shadow Minister for IT and for Trade informing them that you believe that an enquiry is necessary into the importing of unmarked copyright protected CDs, which under a lot of countries' law is in fact an ILLEGAL practice.
7. Most Importantly EMAIL THIS TO FRIENDS. Only email people who would be interested in taking action, don't spam but still get the message out.

Letter
Michael, when I send items to the trash, either desktop or email, do they fully leave my hard drive or are they still lurking in the background somewhere? If the latter, is it possible to fully eliminate items that have been trashed? If trashed items don't fully leave the hard drive, aren't they taking up space?
--Devon O'Brien
When you Empty Trash in Eudora the old Eudora Trash mailbox is replaced by an empty mailbox (much smaller) ready to receive new deleted items. The original Trash mailbox is still sitting on your hard drive, along with every file you delete normally, waiting to be recovered with a disk utility program. What's removed is their listings in the directory (the DesktopDB) and the space on the drive becomes available for new documents to overwrite. Sometimes documents are quickly overwritten, others hang around for months. It all depends on where they were on the disk.
Norton SpeedDisk includes the option to overwrite all free space during its optimization process with blank 0s and 1s. Takes longer, but your disk winds up pretty clean. It isn't military grade file removal, but it's close. There are shareware and freeware utilities that do the same thing.

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.)