Macking 90

Netscape 7 Actually Works
I have been using both the OS9 and OSX versions of the new Netscape and I am happy to announce that, finally, AOL got it right.
It's much faster and more stable than Mozilla 1.0 (I have not tried the newly-released 1.2), and it works with almost any web site that is properly written (excluding a lot of horrific products from MS Front Page). Mozilla is the open-source version of Netscape, created as part of the negotiations that allowed AOL to take over Netscape's code and assets. Missing from Netscape but part of Mozilla, however, is the option to block pop-up and pop-under windows. Can't imagine why AOL would want to do that...
It is still not recommended as a serious email program, though. It is so much better than Netscape 6.2 that they can hardly be compared at all, and more capable of juggling a lot of mail than 4.7.x, but the metaphor of a 1976 Datsun pickup loaded with a cord of wood trying to climb Mt. Hood still applies. Only now Netscape 7 is a sleek new Nissan pickup with a turbo and more capable than before, but it should not be considered for anything more demanding than Grandma's mailer for communicating with the kids twice a week.
You want horsepower and reliability, use Eudora. OSX users running the Apple-supplied Mail app need to beware of a problem that is starting to appear on the Mac repair and news lists: it sometimes destroys all its mail and settings and appears as a fresh install. The problem is not fixable; if you haven't backed up your mail folder then it's gone.
I realize I am beginning to sound like a broken record here (any of you ever heard one?) but I have never run into a Eudora problem I couldn't fix.

My Favorite Error Message

I got this bizarre dialog box when trying to open an image of an Apple logo that I had downloaded from the Net via Google's Find Image function. PNG is a new format that has been introduced as an alternative to JPEG and GIF which have licensing issues. I contacted Adobe's press relations department to ask just what it meant and who is Brendan. They said they would get back to me but it's been over a week and they never have. I can't believe I am the first to point this out so they must have been ordered into silence by their legal department, just like Apple.
Or so I thought.
When I sent this query to the Net, I got this letter from Paul Bergsagel in Canada.
"On the VersionTracker page, sfish wrote this comment about the free SuperPMG plug-in from Fnord, a software publisher in San Francisco: "Got an interesting error from this plugin from within Photoshop 7 that said, "Could not open [filename] because Brendan's an idiot." That's gotta be worth a star or two. It doesn't preserve the layers saved by Fireworks in PNG format, so I don't really see much improvement for me over the Adobe-supplied plugin. I'll hold off on rating until I research a little more and the author's had a chance to get past version 1.0."
Then I heard from Brendan himself!
From: Brendan Bolles
Heh, well that's me. I wrote the plug-in (SuperPNG) and used that message in development to report any errors when reading or writing PNG files. I didn't know how to get real PNG error messages at the time.
But by the time it was released, I wasn't getting too many errors anymore, so I never changed it. I think it's sort of funny anyway.
In practice, that error message could come up for reasons having nothing to do with my intelligence, like if the file was corrupted.
Brendan

Regarding Apple and Shut-up Orders
All new Macs are still being shipped with "severe" fragmentation, according to SpeedDisk. This has been happening since the first models came with OSX preinstalled, and there has never been an answer forthcoming.
Software is installed on multiple hard drives at a time by a giant cloning machine. A master drive with all the desired software is inserted into a slot and data is fed to a bank of new drives so that every bit is recorded in the same place on each. The master disk must be fragmented due to a screwup in the mastering process so the problem is duplicated on to all the new drives.
Directories get fragmented when a huge amount of data is written to a drive all at once. The OS makes a guess as to how much space to reserve for the directories, the invisible "Desktop DB" and "Desktop DF" files that tell the system where all the files are located. When that space is used up, the ever-growing directory starts writing to a different place on the drive. When that space is filled, it goes on to write another fragment somewhere else.
Files are fragmented when a drive is already chopped up with small bits of free space surrounded by data segments. Defragmentation is the reorganizing of all that data into contiguous streams so the drive head can read the entire file, application, or system software into RAM without having to keep returning to the directory to locate and assemble fragmented sections.
Every attempt I have made to get Apple to explain this has been ignored. The only answer they will give is that "Unix treats fragmentation differently from OS9 and that fragmentation is not a serious problem under OSX." That is only partly true, because Unix systems use a different formatting scheme for their hard drives, while Apple must depend on HFS Extended for a few years more and HFS+ IS sensitive to fragmentation. Requests for further information and clarification have been ignored; most important, they will not explain why the problem isn't simply fixed on the master drive so future Macs are shipped unfragmented.
Since they aren't talking and nature abhors a vacuum, here is my theory as to why it is happening and it will have to stand as Truth until Apple finally spills all.
Their legal department has ordered the people not to talk about this subject because to admit that there is a problem would make Apple liable for a $100 copy of Norton SpeedDisk purchased by every Mac owner since OSX started shipping. Furthermore, to even fix the problem would be an admission that there was a problem in the first place, also increasing their risk of liability. Can you imagine how much Apple would lose if it had to pay every Mac owner $100?
This is corporate-think at its most obvious, yet there it is. Believe it, tell all your friends, publish it in print until Apple finally admits what is really going on and why they cannot or will not fix the problem. If Apple ever tells the real story I will print it here but you will probably have heard it by then because it would make headlines.
Meanwhile, if YOU have a new Mac, you need to go buy a copy of Norton Utilities and defragment your drive. It will work without doing this, especially if you never boot into OS9 or use Classic mode, but it will not be capable of recording a video stream from a digital video camera until you fix the fragmentation. And send the bill to Apple.

Speaking of Bad Attitudes
Carri Bugbee forwarded me an outrageous report from MacDailyNews published at the end of November, which has Quark telling Mac users to give up and switch to Microsoft. An excerpt:
Dissatisfied with Quark’s Mac commitment? Quark CEO says 'switch to something else'
"Publishing professionals who attended a Quark-convened 'executive summary' in New York last week are still abuzz over the performance of Quark CEO Fred Ebrahimi... [who] told his squirming guests that "the Macintosh platform is shrinking," and that "publishing is dying." He suggested that anyone dissatisfied with Quark's Mac commitment should "switch to something else," although he insisted that making the move to Adobe's long-Carbonized InDesign package is 'committing suicide.' 'Everyone was stunned, and most folks left by noon,' one attendee reported. 'It was awful,'" reports MacEdition.
The entire article is in the Naked Mole Rat report.
Adobe is offering a coupon for the full version of InDesign 2.0 software, a US$699 value, when you purchase a new Power Mac G4 before December 31, 2002. More info here but you have only a day or two left in December to do this so hop on it. Besides, after Macworld, all new Macs will be unable to boot into OS9 at all (but will still support Classic mode) unless Apple changes their mind at the last minute.
Adobe's 'Converting to InDesign' page, including info on switching from Quark to InDesign is here.
Since Quark XPress won over the entire design community from Adobe (formerly Aldus) PageMaker almost a decade ago, Quark users have all had one thing in common: they would rather have their eyes sucked out by eels than have to contact Quark by telephone. Stories of insulting comments instead of useful answers and horrid support problems abound. One example: a fire destroyed a company's Macs and their original program CDs. Normal procedure in such a case is for the software publisher to look up the customer in their database, determine that they had a legitimate copy or copies of the program, and supply them with new CDs and their serial numbers back for free or a nominal charge. But Quark's answer? "Buy a new copy and bill your insurance company."
Reports of CEO Fred Ebrahimi stomping around the office ranting about how "all my customers are pirates..." have been circulating for years. If Adobe had managed to release a Quark killer with InDesign 1.0, Quark would already be out of business and Ebrahimi bumming for booze on the street corner where he belongs. But Adobe failed and it has taken two major revisions of InDesign to get it to the stage where a designer could switch to it without having to compromise their capability or suffer a severe drop in their work flow.
So do it, folks. Make the switch, but don't just do it quietly. Send a personal message to Ebrahimi thanking him for giving you the motivation to finally kick your Quark habit and wish him well in his new life on the Bowery.

Dependency on Old Macs
I have a client who has been using Macs in computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) since the SE days. His company, Sierra Instruments, is the Langlitz of steel guitars: rated the best in the world. All are made here in Portland using software developed for him and running on a IIci.
Last week his old Mac gave up the ghost. They have newer models for other office functions, but the old program did the job so well that they were never motivated into upgrading it so that it could run on newer models and newer OSes. I couldn't fix the IIci because I did not have any of the necessary parts and he needed it fixed that day. I sent him to MacForce and hopefully they were able to help.
The way to prepare for disaster in this instance is to haunt the garage sales and thrift shops for models similar to the one you depend on, so you can replace the power supply if necessary, move the hard drive over to one with a working motherboard, etc. The best way is to pay your developer every few years for updates. Even if it costs a few thousand dollars a crack to do this, imagine how much an indefinite shutdown of production could cost.
Because of OSX, we will start seeing more CAM developers moving back to the Mac, both to get away from the unreliability of Windows and the economics of the stable MacOS. Once this meant a migration to Linux, but now you can stay in the fold. But until then, start ferreting out old models. The cost has fallen through the floor for pre-PPC Macs, even for pre-G3 Macs. Once the $5,000 center of the print publishing revolution, the Mac IIci can be found for $10 at Goodwill.

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.)