Winds of Change

written by Charles DeVore

from Mouse Tracks July/August 2002

Having used both Apple's CD burning software iBurn and Roxio's Toast, I would always pick Toast over the Apple product. iBurn gives you basic burning ability but nothing much past that. Because it creates a disk image even if you don't need one, and it has three whole choices for what kind of CD you want to burn, it is a lightweight product only good for folks who haven't the need for any special features–like burning a VCD (video) or a Hybrid Mac and PC CD or even doing a simple disk copy from one CD to another. I have grown used to all of these features in the Toast program. However even all of that is not as maddening as the length of time it takes to burn a CD using Apple's software. Using iBurn first you create a disk image, then you copy everything into the image, and tell it to burn. Then it has to check the image, next burn, then it has to verify before it gives you back your computer. Using Toast on the same files, I simply tell Toast what kind of CD I want to create, select the files and tell it to burn the CD. Toast burns the CD in about half the time iBurn takes after you tell it to burn. The really interesting thing is that the people that wrote iBurn used to work for a company called Asarte who wrote the code for Toast back before Adaptec bought the Toast program and spun it off under the Roxio logo.

Software updates
FileMaker has introduced FileMaker Mobile 2 for your PDA–a free upgrade for anyone owning Mobile 1 and running FileMaker Pro 5.5.2. If you have a FileMaker Mobile 1 serial number you can download the Mobile 2 from the FileMaker web site. Here is the web site address http://www.filemaker.com/. Be sure to pay attention to which version you download as there is a choice between OS X and OS 9. Sure is nice to have the whole PMUG database on my PDA and to sync it by opening the database on my Mac and hitting the Palm sync button.

Aladdin is offering discounts for User Group members and all you have to do is know the password and the web address to get there, which is http://www.aladdinsys.com /support/usergroups/ugvalid.html and entering our group's name (Portland Macintosh Users Group) and this code: UG2002. So if you are interested in buying their products it might be well worth checking out. I recommend Stuffit Deluxe to every Mac user I know.

It's amazing what can happen when a company announces on the Internet that it will no longer support a product that it has sold to thousands of people. The makers of Virex announced they would no longer support 6.1 once 7.0 came out. 7.0 is a Mac OS X product which is all fine and well but there are millions of Macs out there that will never run System X. Most folks expressed their anger by emailing the company saying they would never buy their products again. Then out of the blue comes the announcement that it was only a misunderstanding and of course there would be virus defs for their older product. Sure is nice to see the light come into a company's eyes when it sees thousands of people ready to buy their competitor's product.

Apple has just released Mac OS X 10.1.5, an update that delivers improved reliability to Mac OS X applications, improved networking, security, support for PC Card serial communication devices, and expanded peripheral device support. The update is available via the Software Update utility. As always, back up important data before you do updates. If your machine works fine the way it is, maybe you don't need or want an update so use a bit of common sense and only do those updates you choose to do.

With this newest update, we are working our way to a major update to OS X (Jaguar) that may be out as soon as Macworld NY in July. However I'm very interested in what Apple is going to introduce at Macworld. They have updated just about everything in the last six months so that only leaves new products that Steve wants to save as a surprise. Let's all hope that the rabbit up Steve's sleeve has the correct amount of Oh Wow.

eMac for all
The educational eMac in its 17-inch mode was just released by Apple to be sold as a consumer item. This means that anyone can buy one. That's great news for those people who like the standard CRT monitor and want their Mac G4 cheap. At $1099 that's a lot of computer for the money. The only thing you don't get is the DVD-R drive that is offered in the upper level models of the iMac G4. So for many buyers who just needed a little lower price point to make them jump in, your machine has just arrived.

Hardware notes
Many Mac users are trying to use a FireWire drive to boot their Mac and are having problems getting it to work. Well many of these machines will never be able to boot from a FireWire drive because the FireWire port has to be built in. If the FireWire port is not native to the machine it requires loading a piece of software (extension) before it even knows there is a FireWire drive attached. So by the time your machine loads that software, it's already started up under your machine's System. Even some of Apple's early FireWire machines, such as my blue and white G3, can't boot from a FireWire hard drive due to the fact that the Startup firmware wasn't finished when it went into production, so the firmware ROMs from the factory won't let me. If you own an iMac with built-in FW or almost any machine made after the blue and white G3, it will probably work.

It used to be when you wanted to start up from a CD to do an install or check out a problem with Norton or DiskWarrior you held down the C key with the CD in after you restarted. Now I have run into several machines that will not boot from the CD while holding down the C key. So if you encounter this problem, try the DOCS command: restart your computer and hold down the following keys until you get the smiley Mac face. The keys are Delete-Option-Command-Shift; most likely you will see a flashing folder with a ?, slowly replaced by a folder with Mac System icon and then the Finder smiley face. You can now let go of the keys you were holding down.

While we are beating around the topic of keys to hold down during startup, here is another reminder. Every once in a while you should rebuild your desktop database. This is the invisible file that tells the Finder about the files you have so that it can link documents to the proper application. Restart your computer and hold down the following keys Command-Option do not let go of the keys until you get the dialog box that asks you if you really want to rebuild your desktop. If you don't get that dialog box, then you didn't do something right or your keyboard is not plugged directly into your computer. Lots of users try plugging the keyboard into a hub because it's more convenient to do so. The problem there is that as your computer starts up it looks out there for a keyboard and only sees the hub; this causes the machine to not rebuild the desktop.

More new news
As always there are people who have to have the latest update Apple puts out the minute it hits the net. I used to call these people the "bleeding edge." Someone out there has renamed it the "upgrade blues" but it all means the same thing. Those who choose not to wait and find out what it does to other users' computers before installing it on their own are the ones who cry the loudest when they have to reinstall their whole system. I'm sorry but if your System was working fine before you got this wild hare to update then don't complain about how terrible it was to have to reinstall everything.

Public betas like QuickTime 6 should be used and installed with the knowledge that they will expire and need to be uninstalled or removed from your System. Several of my clients were bitten when QuickTime 5 expired and you couldn't install over it, you had to remove it. Fairly easy to do under System 8 and 9, but this could be a problem under System X. In fact, Apple has just posted a fix for this problem. Apple has posted a QuickTime 5 Reinstaller for Mac OS X, which removes the QuickTime 6 Public Preview from any Mac OS X system, and restores QuickTime 5.0–the latest release version of the QuickTime component. Are we having fun yet?

Mike Bombich author of Carbon Copy Cloner 1.2.2, has released an update to his OS X-only cloning utility developed with AppleScript Studio. It assists users in backing up or moving OS X installations from one partition to another as easily as possible. Version 1.2.2 adds "Authenticate" to the File menu, sets the target disk to be the startup disk when finished, and fixes a permissions problem that affected items copied to the root level of the target disk. This is important for all those folks who need to back up their Systems on a weekly or monthly time frame. You can find this product on the versiontracker.com web site.

The one thing I really have a hard time understanding is that if OS X is so easy to convert to, why are all those people writing hacks for it? It makes my head hurt to think about all of them. If fact some of these hacks give us back great functions Apple has taken away. Like ASM­ it's the reincarnation of the application switcher menu. Its highly customizable and offers some nice extra features, such as "Classic Window Mode" (orders all windows of an application to the front when it becomes active) or "Single Application Mode" (automatically hides applications other than the front-most one). Then there is a haxie (hack) that totally redefines your standard Apple Menu, called FruitMenu. Do you ever wish to put all your hard drives and files in the Apple Menu like you could in Mac OS 9? Do you wish the control over the Apple Menu contents was in your hands and not in Apple's? This small and useful haxie will help you build your own Apple Menu, the way you like it: Assign hotkeys to your favorite files and folders; use Recent Items implementation that is faster than Apple's default; see your IP Address in Apple menu and more. I'd like to thank Bill Trent for pointing these little jewels out to me. You can find all of these on versiontracker.com.

People connection
Every Tuesday night World Without Boarders has an online chat with User Group members and leaders. They want to extend a welcome to anyone who would like to participate. The chat starts at 6:00pm and lasts an hour. You get to know other user group members and see how the rest of the UG world does things. You can get to that chat using the following web address http://wwbchat.com/login/index.shtml. It is best to get there a few minutes early because you will need to sign in with a user name and password that you pick.

Due to being a space cadet I misspelled Erick Laabs name when thanking him and The Computer Store NW for networking at MacCamp. Erick was our network manager and The Computer Store furnished two AirPort hubs. Michael Pearce and Michael Minamoto also furnished AirPorts so the Camp was covered in all the cabins. Thanks again, everyone.

You can reach me at charles@cdevsol.com.

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