Macking 9

Apple Stock
It's time to buy Apple stock. Plan to make a killing by buying now and selling when the rest of the world wakes up in a state of flushed embarrassment at all the Apple-bashing that's been going on -- all for naught.
I'm kidding.
By now, the stock HAS gone up and things are back to normal. The most embarrassing incident of January was the "End of an Icon" cover story in Business Week, that hit the stands just as Apple had fired its old CEO and replaced with a new one, resulting in a stock boost and upgrading of its bonds, which had been classified "junk" for a few days. We can all have a good laugh at Business Week's expense. Other news, outdated by the time you read this, thanks to monthly deadlines:
On TV Jan. 19, Dataquest analyst Joel Meyer said some good things about Apple. In response to the direct question "should customers be concerned about buying Apple products because of the financial & management weakness of the company?," the analyst said very positive things about them. He could have been a presenter in an executive briefing... identifying strength after strength after strength. He said that Apple is already on the road to financial recovery, and current problems are bumps in the road that they can, are, and will manage. He said that their current woes should not impact purchase decisions whatsoever. (Macway)
In MacWEEK magazine (Online version at http://www.ziff.com/~macweek/) that same week, Don Crabb wrote that the best sign that things are looking good for the MacOS happened at Macworld Expo: clones and geeks. He related the news that the Power Computing exhibit area was "awesome," which is not a word Crabb uses lightly.
He also stated that thanks to the Web, the Internet, OpenDoc and Copland (the next iteration of the MacOS), the "geeks" are back. "This time, they're younger, smarter and more savvy than we were in 1984," he stated. He saw more clever, cutting-edge applications from small vendors than in three previous expos combined. He especially noticed Casady & Greene's Solutions, an application to make mathematical calculations obvious, elegant and simple without you having to be a programmer or mathematician. While not an Excel-killer (sadly), it does give Mac users who need to do calculations an alternative; by making them a simple drag-and-drop formula, you get more consistent results and it's easier to share models across a department or whole company. If you are using Excel to perform calculations, you need to contact Casady & Greene. (Mail to: c&g@casadyg.com; Web page at http://www.casadyg.com/).
So hold high the blue light of Macintosh after the great darkness of Q1 '96, wavering not in the face of gloom and doom pronouncements from those whose personal and spiritual investments are tied up in the Wintel world. Whatever troubles Apple is facing these days, the Macintosh OS has a great future.

Web Weaver
Since I am not a programmer, and have only barely mastered the intricacies of HTML, I was looking forward to the release of Adobe PageMill, which was to take over the coding by letting users create Web pages through simple editing, drag and drop, and graphics importation, like a word processor program. It would then export the HTML text file for upload to your Web site without your ever having to type a single line of {A HREF=IMG SRC"twitimage.jpeg"} code in your life.
Well, I was disappointed in the extreme. I do already have some idea of how to code my pages, and Robert Best's program "WorldWide Web Weaver" has been the way for me to do it with a minimum of pain. I converted one of my existing pages into PageMill and it looked great. Then I opened the output code in WWWW because I wanted to change a page color, and discovered it had made an utter mess of my neatly coded page! In short, PageMill has its own ideas about how to break paragraphs, space headers and align images. I am glad I had a backup of my original.
Web Weaver, however, uses Netscape as its page previewer. Its own pages colorize the HTML markup codes so they stand out from the actual text without overwhelming it. It has clickable windows that you can configure yourself, adding easy access to the most common items. There is built-in help both locally and via the company's Web page, and a manual arrives in the mail about a week after he gets your check. As you build your page, you can check your work by clicking on a View icon, which switches over to Netscape so you can see your changes with each update. Through a series of dialog boxes, you can build tables, import and annotate images, create buttons, add links and do all the things any expert HTML programmer can do. If you want to start from zero with the goal of becoming an employable web-master in a few months, this is the best program I have seen to help you do it. Of course if you have no sense of design it will let you produce positively horrible pages, just like the arrival of the LaserWriter and PageMaker enabled the whole world to produce bad typography.
WWWWeaver is available as a full-featured demo. It runs for a full month and restricts you in no way. (If you have to, reinstall the program and trash the Prefs file after 30 days to buy yourself another month.) My guess is that you will love this program and be sending off the paltry $50 within the first two weeks. You can download a copy of this from the PMUG BBS, from CI$ or AOL, or from his Web page at http://www.northnet.org/best/. Avoid the shareware version (called HTML WebWeaver), though. I used it initially, but I had to put up with repeated crashes, a problem fixed in the commercial version.

Q/A
Why am I getting a low-on-memory message when I have plenty of memory? (20 mb of RAM, 16 unused). Yet when I try to use Grammar Check in MS Word 5.0 I get the message "Low on memory. Close windows & save your documents." I have no other programs open.
It does not matter how much RAM you have in this case, it's how much RAM is assigned to Word. Quit the program, open the folder containing it, single-click on the program's icon and select Get Info from the File menu (cmd-I). At the bottom of the window are three boxes (Systems 7.1 and 7.5) that tell how much RAM the program may use. Increase the Preferred Size box and leave the others alone. If the Preferred box matches the Suggested or the Minimum size, then change Preferred to double the Suggested. That should put an end to application out-of-memory messages.
When calculating how much RAM to assign to a given application, take the total physical RAM you have installed, subtract what the system is using (see About This Macintosh, the first item under the Apple menu when you are in the Finder) including an extra megabyte for slack, and the remaining amount is what's available for your applications. This especially applies when using RAM Doubler; don¹t give an application extra RAM beyond what you really have or your machine will slow to a crawl. Only programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, Director and other high-ends can use all the RAM you can throw at them; most will get by just fine on 125% to 200% of the recommended RAM. This is especially true for small apps with low RAM requirements like Stickies. If you really use this program heavily, give it 512K.

This next one thanks to Michel Saucier via the newsgroup sci.crypt:
Is it possible to recover a lost ACIUS 4th dimension 5.2.5c password?
Quite easy, with MacsBug installed.
Launch 4D. At the password dialog, press the interrupt button (Clover-Startup Key on modern Macs).
You are now in the MacsBug debugger. Type: ATBA SysBeep ';ATC ;T ;G PC+4' ;g
You are now back to the 4D password dialog. Type any password. You are now into your database. I suggest you use the Passwords menu to give you a password you will remember this time.
(MacsBug, the programmer's debugging tool, runs in the background and can also help you recover from crashes. When your Mac bombs it will drop into the MacsBug window, very code-looking and intimidating to the average user. Never mind the appearance; when this happens type es (exit to shell) and hit the return. That will, if possible, quit the insulted program and return to the Finder. Do a normal restart at that point as you have corrupted memory and need to clear it out. The benefit of this process is if you have other programs open with unsaved documents, you will have an opportunity to save them. If the crash was severe, however, you will fall immediately back into the MacsBug window so your only option will be to type rb (reboot) or rs (restart) and your unsaved work will be history. Moral: Never switch out of an application without saving first. Everyone learns this lesson after losing a few, but it is much nicer to learn it now, before disaster strikes.)

I want a new CD-ROM player but I have read about a new format coming out. Do I want this or should I wait?
You are going to have to wait in either case. The new format, which will be able to store as much as 17 gigs on a single CD-sized disk (current CDs are limited to about 650 megs), will be able to play all your old music CDs and CD-ROMs so your existing investment is safe. The first consumer models (for your TV/Audio system) will be shipping in spring, with CD-ROM drives to follow. Expect to pay $500 to $700 for the first ones. I will be an early adopter, so watch this space for a report. If you need a player now, however, scan the ads for a used unit, like Apple's or NEC's double-speed player for under $169. It will carry you through until summer when the hype for the new drives will be hot and heavy. I would not expect to see much software for the new drives, outside of commercially released movies, for at least a year. But imagine just how much multimedia you can do in 17 gigs! What will be really hot will be the read/write drives for the new format. All those old radio shows, live concerts and other audio tapes you have been saving? The ones that are decaying in their cases that you'd better copy off soon? At last, this will be the way to preserve that aging analog data.

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.)