Macking 86

by Michael Pearce
From the September 2002 Computer Bits

Macworld NY Notes
Well, Apple caused quite a firestorm of protest at Macworld NY last month when they announced that all free mac.com email accounts, included as part of the free iTools that have come with OS9 and later, would now cost $100/year! The very name iTools has been changed to the Microsoft-soundalike .Mac (dot-mac). Existing iTools account holders will get a first-year discount of $50.
The general comment I am reading is "What were they thinking?". Many people have become dependent on that email address, which Apple had promised would be free forever - except that it appears that those precise words were never used. The "forever" part was just implied but it sure seems like a bait-and-switch operation has just been performed on the loyal user base.
Okay, I can understand that it is not cheap to maintain the mac.com mail servers, especially as it grew ever more popular. But doesn't Jobs understand the value of maintaining this as an advertising medium? Even if they don't pull a Yahoo and append ads to each email, the very existence of a "mac.com" service that comes free with all new Macs is a great selling point.
Hopefully this fact will eventually sink in before the end of the service on September 30.
It isn't that you don't get a lot for your money. Virex 7 is included in the package, which will save you the $49 purchase price, and avoid the headache of trying to actually find the product, which doesn't seem to be available for purchase anywhere. Storage space on the dot-mac server has been bumped to 100 megs, and the download limits have been raised as well, eliminating the annoying service shutdown that users discovered when too many people tried accessing their iTools web pages. Many features of the new OS have been folded into dot-mac to make it valuable, but if you never need anything but the email service there is no way it's worth the money.
Here's Apple's value analysis:

Feature                                  Value

Industry-leading virus protection         $50
Complete personal back-up software        $50
Web page building and hosting services    $60
15MB IMAP email with no annoying ads      $40
100MB of online storage space             $60
       Total:                            $260

But suppose you find the price and components acceptable, they still have you by the User Agreement. Macintouch found these interesting segments:

Apple reserves the right to delete, move or edit any item (email or other Content) that Apple, in its sole discretion, deems abusive, defamatory, obscene, in violation of copyright or trademark laws, or otherwise illegal, inappropriate or unacceptable [...]
Apple reserves the right to terminate your access to .Mac at any time, with cause or without cause, in the event of any breach of this Agreement by you (or anyone using your account or any sub-account), your infringement of Apple's or .Mac's or others' content, or any other circumstances which, in Apple's sole discretion, merit termination. [...]
If there is excess usage on your account or any sub-account, Apple reserves the right to temporarily disable access to information available from your account through a URL, or to "bounce" emails back to senders. [...]
Apple reserves the right to monitor all .Mac features and Content, including but not limited to a use of his or her account and any sub-accounts, in order to detect violations of this Agreement. As a .Mac member, you agree to comply with the terms of this Agreement, and acknowledge that Apple has the right to monitor your use of .Mac.

Personally, I think that Gates has actually taken over management of Apple and nobody is admitting it.

The other protests are about the fact that the new OS 10.2 Jaguar (pronounced Jag-wire) will cost full list price to upgrade. Maybe that's fair; they are claiming that it is a significant jump, on the order of 8.6 to 9.0, which also cost money to get. Those who buy a new Mac between Macworld and the release date of August 24 will be able to buy it for $19.95, but if you bought 10.1 in the box, or a new Mac, before July 16, tough luck. Oh, and the offer expires October 31, when the price goes back up to $129.

The protests are mounting so maybe by the time you read this Apple will have gotten a little sense. If not, I am hearing comments from all over that people will just pirate the damn thing and if I were in that select excluded group I would too. Of course you couldn't use any of the dot-mac services, and it is possible (but not stated) that Apple could tell a pirate installation existed as soon as you hit the internet (like Microsoft does with XP), resulting in a huffy letter from Apple Legal.

The Good News

What you do get for your $129 is quite a lot. Sure, there are bug fixes and speedups aplenty, but also included is an enhanced Mail program with spam filtering built in, that can learn your own preferences. Now you won't need Spamfire, and the Mail program is almost as good as Eudora, and a lot prettier.

Quicktime 6, already available as a free download, includes MPEG-4 and AAC audio compression from Dolby Labs. Instant-on streaming video eliminates the wait time (assuming you are on a high-speed connection, of course). To see full-screen movies using QuickTime (not DVDs) and to save movies from the Web will require the Pro version, $29.95. Unless you are an extremely casual and occasional user of QT, this is a good buy.

A new Address Book, which will be accessible to other applications, has what they call smart editing, a great-looking interface, compatibility with Bluetooth and support for the mostly-useless vCards. With Apple's new iSync, you can synchronize your address book with your PDA and with Bluetooth-enabled telephones as well. It can link to MapQuest and your Mail program, and if you have Caller ID and a phone line plugged into your modem it will pop up the person's listing in your Address Book, much like the long-abandoned but incredibly useful Yo-Yo used to do. I have one client who is so dependent on Yo-Yo that he is dedicating an older Mac to nothing but it.

If you go ahead and buy the $99/year Dot-Mac, you can also sync with your account and access it from any Web browser. Companies who are now using Now Contact/Now Up-To-Date's somewhat quirky distributed server system to synchronize calendars and contact lists will have a reason to abandon Now. But of course everyone on the network will have to be running 10.2 to use it. Apple calls the included calendaring program "iCal" which sounds more like a diet drink.

Rendezvous is a new kind of networking technology that scans and auto-configures remote computers and devices via FireWire, Bluetooth, AirPort, Ethernet or USB. Any device that is Rendezvous-enabled, which will be part of the preferences for each device (such as Sony/Ericksson bluetooth phones) will be instantly "discovered" and linked to by Rendzevous. Security may be an issue here, especially if the user of the phone and PDA leaves this enabling on all the time - bad idea. Printers will instantly auto-configure themselves and just show up in the Print dialog boxes as a selectable option.

Inkwell is advanced handwriting recognition technology included as part of the system. All applications can take advantage of it (if the developer so chooses) so that the user can use an input tablet instead of a keyboard, where appropriate.

The new Finder will now actually Find things. The search feature is being removed from Sherlock and put into a field in any Finder window. Just click in the field and type what you are searching for and the Finder will Find it. Finally, after 18 years, the Finder lives up to its name. Also returning is a feature I found a nuisance but many people loved: spring-loaded folders.

The new Sherlock will have greatly expanded internet capability and largely replace the usual search engines like Ask Jeeves, MapQuest, Yahoo and even Google, while still allowing access to them and their distinct capabilities. Sherlock will be able to display stock quotes, maps, and a lot more - searching on Sushi will display a map and list of sushi restaurants sorted by distance from you.

For those of you who use online instant messaging, Jag-wire will include iChat, a chat program compatible by contract with AOL (a first for them) as well as the chat capabilities of the former mac.com.

Desktop pictures are now able to run as a slide show at any desired interval; zooming and keyboard control of the mouse now integrated, especially important for people unable to use their computer in the normal manner.

Finally, for those forced to live in a Windows-centric environment, 10.2 offers SMB browsing and built-in PPTP VPN security making it easier to connect and share files with a Windows network. The VPN capability is something that has been needed for some time.

Other Macworld news
Now available for those migrating away from Windows is Move2Mac - an app that runs on Windows and connects via USB to your Mac. It moves all your documents and preferences to the right places on your Mac. Maya 4.5 for X is out. Releasing the X version resulted in an immediate 25% jump in sales.
RealAudio is now available for X in beta form. It offers super-smooth playback with the new NVidia video chip and much-needed normal playback with other Macs running X.
iTunes 3 links to Audible.com so you can play, download and import audio books and get track information when ripping CDs; tracks bookmarks, personal rating of files in your library. Smart playlists are created by rules you set up. Creates the playlists and dynamically updates them, including a count of how many times a particular track has been played. Sound Check equalization analyzes your entire library, important because so many times the correct volume settings for one track will leave the next one blasting holes in your ears. Runs on 10.1.5 or later and is a free download available now.
iPod now offers a 20-gig model. It links to iCal and Address Book, reducing your need for a separate PDA. The 10-gig model is thinner (18mm) and is $399. 20-gig is $499 (21mm thick) and the original 5-gig model is $299. The scroll wheel is now solid-state: no moving parts. A remote control and case is bundled with the 10 and 20-gig models. You can browse by composer as well as performer; a feature long requested by classical music fans. Play count and track ratings is synchronized with iTunes.
17" iMac
The new top-of-the-line iMac sports a 17" screen with a resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels! This costs $1995 and includes SuperDrive, 80-gig HD, the NVidia GeForce4 MX graphics chip, which delivers 1 billion textured pixels per second. The resolution of this screen is just shy of the $2500 Cinema Display screen, at 1600 x 1024 pixels. The original high-end iMac has been reduced to its original price of $1799 but why would you want one of those when you can get the HUGE new screen for just $200 more? Quantities are limited for a while so get your order in early.
Finally, Apple quietly dropped all of their original G3 CRT (cathode-ray tube) iMacs except a 600-MHz model for $799.
Other Free Email Services
C-net recently reviewed four free and formerly free Web-based mail services and declared the winner to be Yahoomail. Yahoo offers more storage for your accumulated messages and attachments (4 megs, as opposed to Microsoft Hotmail's paltry 2 megs) and they run a virus scanner on all incoming mail (which doesn't really affect Mackers anyway).
But the bad news is that they now charge $30/year if you want to use Eudora to collect your Yahoomail, using the Personalities feature of Eudora to check multiple accounts. To stay free you gotta go to their web site and interact directly with it, and of course put up with all the ads. Best news: They don't sell your address to spammers and do a pretty good job of filtering out existing spam.
The losers, AOL mail, Hotmail and Mail.com, all have their problems. The worst is Mail.com. It's filled with ads, charges for premium services, collects all kinds of personal info that they sell, and lets in lots of spam. Only up side to Mail.com is that they offer a bunch of interesting alternate domain names as part of the service such as mad.scientist.com or annoying.twit.com. When the service is down, you lose all incoming email.
AOLmail is for AOL subscribers only, but can be accessed by web from anywhere.
Microsoft Hotmail, of course, favors Outlook users, allows in lots of spam and can't stop viruses very well. Mail is deleted (as are all the services) if you don't log in at least monthly.
All the services are Mac compatible to a greater or lesser degree.
For more information review the article.

EverQuest coming to Mac
Sony announced that Sony Online Entertainment is bringing the massive online game EverQuest to OSX. EverQuest is managed by The Station and costs $12.95 a month to play.

Sun Pushing StarOffice for OSX
More good news: Sun Microsystems, developer of StarOffice for Unix, Linux and Windows, is working with Apple on a port of this MS Office-compatible suite to OSX. The success of this project would mean that an important Microsoft clamp on Mac users would be eliminated.
While the free open-source OpenOffice has already released a developmental version, it's for experimental purposes only. StarOffice would be a full-blown productivity suite that would meet all the needs of the MS Office user. For more information see the CNet article or visit Sun. (No Mac content.)
There is a risk here, of course. If this agreement produces real software then Microsoft might just start "revising" their file formats to make them incompatible. It wouldn't be the first time.

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

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email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)