Winds of Change

written by Charles DeVore

from Mouse Tracks December 2003

For those of you who thought about attending You Don’t Know Mac and decided not to, you missed a heck of a show. Andy Ihnatko put on a fine performance, reading the questions and giving us tidbits into Apple’s past. I’m really not sure how long the show lasted because I never looked at the clock. Every time there was a problem Andy stepped up the patter while we restarted equipment. There were a total of five PMUG members there, counting Janet and myself; we all had a great time. I must say Seven Feathers Casino was a great place to have the event. The co-hosts, nicknamed JARmug, worked their butts off getting the event and equipment set up and running. Chris Kiltz, the Apple NW Regional Liaison, was heading up the effort and I must say all the team members were all on the same page. Two of the very bright spots were a couple of 16 year old boys who rewrote the YDKM program twice. Once in a program called Metal, which had problems with the screen sharing program from Apple. Then again, in less than two weeks, in the Cocoa language (that’s one 16 year old working five hours a day). Final tweaks and questions were being programmed in as the User Group leaders’ summit was in session.

If you missed the coming out party for Panther at the Portland Mac Stores or MacForce, too bad. The Mac Stores were giving out free pizza and soda plus live demos of Panther. MacForce had sodas, coffee and finger food with Keynote demos running. The PMUG members who I talked to said both businesses were looking good. PS: If you missed the costume party at the Mac Store then you missed several PMUG members enjoying the event in full Halloween dress.

THE PANTHER LEAPS
Panther and all of its new goodies and bugs are here. Some folks with FireWire drives lost all their data. However, most of those drives were the FW 800, with Oxford 922 chip sets installed in them. There are updates for those chip sets from the people you bought your case from. As usual, there are the people who have problems with their scanners or need to reinstall their printer drivers. Some anti-System 10.x users jumped all over the upgrade calling it damaged or not well-tested. The only thing I can say to those folks is you must not remember 7.5 or 8.5 systems. Both of those were loaded with bugs and problems. So as I have always said, give it a month or two to work out the bugs, then install it and the updates.

Some of you will remember the comment I made about people who state that some specifi c model or make of some product is the only one to buy. Then fi nding out that the Oxford chip set is not as great as it was before Panther appeared. Many of us assume Apple contracted out the programming for the FireWire devices in Panther just because of all the trouble that has happened. Seems that Apple, of all people, should have realized that changing the code for FireWire devices would put users at risk. Maybe Apple isn’t as smart as we wish they were.

THIS AND THAT
The new G4 iBooks are shipping but don’t look for one with a DVD burner in it. Apple is keeping that for the PowerBook line. It seems Apple is afraid that if they update the iBooks too much they will lose PowerBook sales. So if you want to burn DVDs your only choice is a PowerBook with the DVD burner installed.

The cost of blank DVDs appears to be coming down; even the Ritek brand we buy in spools of 100 are dropping in price. Just be sure that you are buying DVDs that are meant for your burner. Be sure you are buying DVD-R and not DVD+R media. The brand-new G5s should not care which you use, but I tend to err on the side of caution.

Toast 6 from Roxio has been updated. You should be able to download the update by going to the Roxio web site and looking for the 6.0.3 updater for Toast. The web site is located at www.roxio.com.

Macromedia has been having problems with both System 10.2.8 and 10.3. It seems if you updated your old system or updated to Panther, the Macromedia files that need to be moved, aren’t. You will need to delete the /Library/ Preferences/Macrovision folder, then restart and reactivate the product. If that does not work, you will need to reinstall and activate the product again. This sounds simple until you find out you only get two installs with this product. After that, you have to contact the company in order to reinstall, due to their copy protection. I don’t know about you folks, but I am getting tired of being treated like a thief. We pay a lot, and I do mean a lot, of money for this product. We should be able to install it wherever and as often as we need to get our projects done. Right now Macromedia is right behind Quark on my “treats customers with no respect” list.

Apple has released Apple Backup 2 to all the .Mac users. If you are a .Mac user, sign in and download this freebie to your computer.

How do you know that iLife is about to get a update? You find it on the web for $32 when Apple is still charging $49 for it. This means Apple is dumping its current inventory in order to bring the new rev on line.

Apple seems to have made an impression in the PC world with the introduction of iTunes for the for the PC. Apple currently has the hottest music store on the web. With the announcements of deals with Pepsi and a possible deal with McDonalds for giveaways, Apple may be looking like the 10,000 pound gorilla of online music.

Steve Jobs has put to rest a rumor about moving to the Intel chip set. Says Apple is perfectly happy with the IBM chips that power the new computers. (Just a note here that Steve also said it would be a cold day in hell before iTunes ran on Windows.) Just want to make sure everyone knows the rules.

Apple has just released a memo about not using FireVault with Final Cut Pro/Express, unless you move the media and capture preferences outside of your home directory. For best performance, capture to a drive other than your startup volume. Apple warns that any media inside your home directory can cause dropped frames on playback if FileVault is active.

Remember, as always, to back up your data. Too many of us wait until the damage is done and then try to get back what was lost. It’s much easier to back up your work onto another hard drive or a CD or DVD than it is to try and recover it. Just the other day at a client’s house I had delivered a Beige G3 and loaded her software when she asked me to also load a piece of software on her four month old PowerBook 17 inch. Sure, I said, then sat down at her machine and restarted it after asking when the last time she had restarted. She replied, two weeks ago. Upon restart the machine went to a soft kernel panic which nothing could bring it out of. Even trying to start it up with the DVD startup disk from Apple resulted in the soft kernel panic. After trying every device I had with me to get it past the problem, I left her with the names of local Apple dealers, as it appeared to be a hardware problem and the computer was under warranty. After a week, Apple has returned the unit with a new logic board and all of her data intact. However it could just have easily been hard drive failure, meaning she would have lost all her data. That four months of vacation pictures and work, with not one backup. Her fi rst words to me were, “guess I better get that information backed up.”

As one last tidbit: remember that these ramblings are my opinions and not the feeling or beliefs of PMUG in general. You may feel free to agree or disagree with any and all of them.

You can reach me at charles@cdevsol.com.

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