Title: Mac Page 2001 Date: 2001-12-31 13:28 Slug: mac-page-2001 Category: technology

December 2001

A sad day…last Friday my Mac refused to power up :-(( . I tried a shops power supply , ‘hoping’ that that was the problem, but alas, it still refused to work. It’s not quite a funeral yet! I’ve spoken to AppleCare Japan, and will be shipping it off to them this week to see if they can repair it within a reasonable cost. I’m amazed that it’s been trouble free up until now - coming up to it’s 3rd birthday of being dragged all over the planet, and being constantly abused in the process. OK, news as I get it. I’m looking forward to getting it fixed so I can put it on my router/ADSL system, and I’m sure I’ll love it even more…I wish I had the cash to go wireless now!!

November 2001

It has to be said that using MacOS 10.1 is an absolute pleasure to use. It’s only when I go into Classic that I realise just how much better it is to look at the Quartz rendered text as opposed to the old traditional look. It’ll be interesting to play with Office X when it comes out, as this could see the Mac get into offices more - especially I notice into the ‘public access’ areas of several shops and businesses I notice…must be something to that styling after all! Not much else new on software, just nice to keep the old thing plodding along. I’ve mentioned it before, but if you really are looking for a quick and simple game for OS X, check out Airburst - a lot of fun.

October 2001

I HAVE MAC OS 10.1 INSTALLED!! I have to say that much is forgiven, as Apple has really delivered on it’s promises - certainly the main thing which has to be said is: 10.1 is much, much, faster. The OS is indeed much faster that 10.0, but there’s so much more - here’s my main thoughts after a couple of days usage:

• Some shadowing seems a little lighter now, which makes Aqua seem a little lighter, which is good.
• The battery indicator for laptops is back near the clock - and out of the dock - another good thing in my opinion.
• The brightness and volume control buttons now work on my Powerbook - iTools works much better now - the ‘GO’ function now works correctly through a proxy. Indeed the whole iTool/iDisk feature has been revamped recently with slide shows, index pages, passwords and counters.
• It now comes with iMovie 2.1, Mail 1.1, SMB client, and Quicktime 5.0.2 which actually plays quite well now (the original shipped version sucked).

All in all a vast improvement, and yes, as all the pundits say, this should bring OS X into the mainstream. It seems to bring a bit more ‘Mac-ness’ to OS X - now all I need is spring loaded folders! Nice one Apple, a certain amount of faith restored.

September 2001

Well, I’ve sent off for my OS X 10.1 free update…don’t know how long it will take, but I’ll be sure to let you know. Of course the main reason for me to get it now is the ’lowly’ hardware I’ll be running it on - a G3 233 - so any speed improvements would be welcome. I guess I’m currently running X about 75% of the time, if only because all my mail etc. can be done through that. Still missing? I need Avantgo/Palm in X, and of course MORE DAMN SPEED!! One thing I have been playing with is DropOgg for converting AIFF files to Ogg format - an open source version of MP3 (whose codec is owned by Thomson-Fraunhofer (sp?)). I have to say that under my test of encoding RunDMC’s “Crown Royale” CD, into both MP3 in MusicMatch and Ogg in the DropOgg, and I have to say that Ogg was better - much closer to the CD. Now I know the MusicMatch encoder isn’t a great encoder, but compared against a few iTunes encoded tracks, Ogg still won out - and it’s still beta.

August 2001

Well, kind of looking forward to 10.1, just hoping it brings the speed increase it promises. Not much in the way of new software on the Mac, and don’t expect to see any hardware changes for a while! Having read through previous months notes, one could be forgiven for not realising that the Mac is the real beating heart of this website. I have in the past attempted co-development of this site on either my Windows machine, or Linux, but it’s never quite worked. Certainly my other 22 machines do their work - Windows for games, internet finance site and such (if only because it’s on my Mitsubishi monitor), and my linux box for my Apache/MySQL/PHP experiments, and as a MP3 storage hold and player (so I can use my Windows PC and when it crashes, I can still listen to music). So I guess the message of this month is, ’nothing new, but the Mac gets a daily hammering of web stuff and e-mail’. Wait till I get that G4 desktop…

July 2001

Well, NY MacWorld was..er…interesting. The new Quicksilver G4s were of course welcome as was the OS 10.1 announcement, if only that it will actually be here in September. I must admit though, I’ll be a bit annoyed if it costs money, and won’t be a free download, as an .ISO image or something, akin to Linux distros. Certainly, I bought OS X the day it came out as a kind of support, and I just hope for myself and others that bought this new OS that Apple will continue it’s tradition of free .x releases. However, with no Cube now, I’m just wondering what options for desktop Macs I have - I think that the new Quicksilver’s will be a good deal, but I’m still looking for a cheaper G4… It’s good to see more OSX software coming out, including a few good games - check out the addictively simple ‘Airburst’.

June 2001

Well, apart from Bali, not much else to report, although 10.0.4 update has been released and seems to be continuing the trend of the these updates to making things a little bit quicker and adding a few bits here and there. Certainly 10.0.4 feels much quicker than 10.0.0 did. I guess the next stop is the rumoured 10.1 update coming at next months MacWorld New York show. I’m also hoping they’ll confirm whether they’re killing the Cube or not, and if so, what they’re going to be replacing it with. Classic OS 9 of course is still going strong - I found something interesting last week too - on 9.0, you couldn’t pre-programme the function keys from the OS unless you had a Mac with built in USB (I kid ye not), and of course my Wall Street PowerBook doesn’t have that ability, but in 9.1, I am able to programme the F-keys directly from the keyboard control panel, which makes me very happy indeed.

May 2001

We’re up to 10.0.3 now! I give Apple credit for these updates, even though they only give ‘barely perceptible’ improvements, although the Finder does seem a little faster, although to be honest, that could just be me getting used to it now. I’m sure Apple is working towards 10.1 for the July pre-install phase. I’m thinking of buying that Cube still, but I just want to see what is done with it (and other models) around July too. It’s also amazing the increase of stuff now available for Mac OSX which wasn’t for OS9 - especially open source stuff - GIMP is here, Samba and OpenOffice is due soon too. To me, this is the real excitement of X - all the tools I like on Linux I can use cross platform on the Mac (& Windows) too. Nice. Also, now that OpenGL (which did ship with OS9) is hard wired into OSX, there seem to be a lot more games available - I just wish they would bring Bridge-Builder across :-) . What else? Well, on OS9, I’ve been playing with the 2.x version of Disk-Surveyor, a utility which in it’s last incarnation, I was a big fan of.

April 2001

Well, a month living with Mac OS X, I find myself using it more and more. A lot of this has to do with certain factors, whether Apple think these are good news or not depends on how you look at it; more of the apps I use are coming on in either Carbon, or Cocoa versions. DragThing 4 is available, as is GraphicConverter, but now BBEdit for MacOS X is available, and indeed yes, I’m using it to write this page! It works the same, but now I can do the whole of my web creation in X…just a shame I need the Classic to actually upload it - come on NEC, get your finger out on an X / USB / ISDN driver chaps! On the bad side, it’s difficult to express how disappointed I was with SETI X. Slow, ponderously slow. Perhaps 4 times slower than under 9. Also, it’s the GUI version - no command line option - why? I was looking forward to that on X! Ah well, maybe in version 4! 10.0.1 is the first official Mac OS X update and I have to say that I haven’t noticed any difference - but at least it didn’t break anything. The Finder still feels slow, especially if you swap between a Classic session and X, and back (go figure). Still, after a month, I actually like/use it more than I thought I would, and still more than I use Windows 2K, so I guess that’s a good sign for Apple. How about some cheap / faster G4s then guys?

March 2001

Wow. So much has happened in the last week. I guess the big 3 were buying MacOS X, (which came with) OS 9.1, and a new 10GB hard disc for my PowerBook. But that’s just part of it. As this new OS is such a big thing (I think), I’ll write a page just to deal with it, and its ramifications. In this diary section, I’ll try to not rant on too much, and just keep it to a summary. For one, installing the new IBM HDD was simplicity itself - took the old 2GB one out, slipped the new one in and booted straight away into OS9.1 from CD, formatted the new disk and installed 9.1/X. Sweet. The new drive is quieter than it’s older brethren, faster, and obviously big enough to whack all those MP3s on there I’m needing - as well as being able to handle all the other stuff I was being forced to stick on my Windows 2000 box for the sake of room. OK, OS 9.1 - this seems to have got lost in the blaze of OSX, but don’t be disturbed, this is an OS upgrade in it’s own right, and does bring new features, for one, the language packs have been updated, and slightly improved for speed. Also, for some reason, the battery indicator on my PB-G3 which used to be next to the clock, is gone now… Anyhow, OS9.1 also brings a ‘Window’ menu item to the finder, meaning that when you have hundreds of windows open at once, this can let you select the one you want. OK, enough, let’s talk OSX - this thing kicks arse and then some. It solves all my gripes about MacOS (‘Classic’) and blows me away with new features. Sick of crap network support? Say hello to a true UNIX backend in BSD, and even AppleTalk goes over TCP/IP now. I’ve been blasting files between Windows 2000, Linux and MacOS X all week with FTP at a healthy 10Mb/sec. No more DAVE NetBIOS speeds for me. This is how it should be. Aqua, I must admit bugged me a little at first, and I would love to turn down some of the shadows, but it does grow on you, and the Quartz 2D rendering engine (which replaced QuickDraw) is awesome, such a pleasure to use, even on this LCD screen. Icons - look beautiful in 32-bit at 128*128. It looks better in the flesh than it does on the web. Anyway, enough rant - check out my rant-tastic page on it. Other things included updates of some of my favourite apps - Dragthing goes to 4.0 for Carbon, and BBEdit Carbon is on it’s way… more ranting next week.

February 2001

Well,the MacWorld show rolled into town again, and this year was just as impressive as last year. I suppose the highlight for many ardent MacFans was the selection of machines running Mac OSX (mainly MP-500-G4 :-) ). I had a good play on one for about an hour and I have to say that the new OS looks and feels much better than it did a year ago - and Apple have definitely listened to feedback. Also of interest to me was that you can now buy ‘International English’ OS based Macs from the Apple Store Japan online. The new iMacs were there of course, for their debut, and it’s important to say that they look better in real life than they do on the Apple Website. The hardware shops were there again as usual, but I definitely think there were more bargains this year - I managed to buy 256MB of RAM for my Wall Street for 15,000-en. A nice deal. Another good thing to see was the GeForce 3 card running Quake 3 on a G4 - certainly it looked way better than on my Athlon 800/GeForce…but for considerably more money. Finally of interest to me, but something lowly publicised was the CD-RW Cube, which bumps the DVD Cube down in price. It’s hard to see where Apple sees the Cube in it’s line-up now, but I certainly still see the cheaper Cube as a good stating base for MacOS X come July. Apart from that, I’m currently testing MT-NewsWatcher 3.5.1 - review as I decide whether or not it can beat YA-NewsWatcher which is my standard Usenet favourite…a hard act to beat.

January 2001

Of course January is always a real fun fest for Mac owners - the G4 Powerbook Titanium looks like a real winner, the newest launch since the ill-fated Cube (a fine idea, but too expensive really). They also (finally) speed bumped the G4 lineup, but reduced the dual-processor range to one model. Ah well. On the whole, this was a hardware show, which should please a few people in preparation for Mac OS X in March. However, there was also a bevy of new software apps and upgrades to things like OpenGL. One thing that interested me was iTunes which is an MP3 player, encoder and ripper. I must admit, I thought the ‘i’ motif was going to mean this was a watered down offering for ‘consumers’, but I’m happy to say that it’s pretty impressive, coming with visualisations and a good play list setting. For the last 18 months, I’ve been using ‘Audion’ for playback and N2MP3 as an encoder. Right now I’m pitching iTunes’ encoder with that N2MP3, though I think I’ll be using iTunes for the lot - it’s free - download it!! I think I’ll look into getting a G4 desktop 667 around June for Mac OS X, just have to sort my taxes out first!

December 2000

A few notable events: the Oni demo finally came out and I’m told it’s pretty damn good, except my G3 is a little underpowered as a laptop with 96MB. However, it does run OpenGL rather than RAGE/QT3D as far as I know. As for the game, well, I played it on my PC and as a few people said - it’s great, but it doesn’t look like something 3 years in the making, and so far there’s no net play… Barebones continue their commitment to BBEdit updates, with 6.0.2 patch, which is actually worthwhile. I wish more companies would document their updates as well as those guys do. Panic Inc. also released the much anticipated Audion 2, which adds a whole host of features, including built in MP3 encoding, and more skin features such as user hue control, and even visualisations. For me though it isn’t worth the upgrade sadly. I have an MP3 encoder I’m very happy with, and most of the updates don’t warrant even more expenditure. However, If you don’t own Audion 1.5, it may be worth while. I guess all Mac users are waiting to see what Mr. Jobs says next month at the big Mac show, and whether we’ll see faster G4s at last, a decent graphics card and reasonably priced Cubes.. oh yes…and that small matter or MacOS X :-)

November 2000

A bit of a quiet Mac month really; OK, Netscape 6 turned up, although it has ‘wait for the 6.1’ update. What else? Well, GraphicConverter 4.0.1 rolled in, and yet again, these small upgrades keep adding functions. I’d be surprised if there is any app which comes close to this one. I’ve all but finished the Missing Manual book now - yes, I know it’s taken me 2 months, but I’ve been a bit busy OK! Definitely worth the money if you’re new to MacOS 9, and you can’t see yourself going MacOS X soon (which I can’t - seems to really need a G4 to go). Also, I’m sending the folk at Sonosoft, writers of my favourite e-mail package, with a wish list for version 4. News as I get it.

Late October 2000

Another big upgrade for the Mac - Office:Mac 2001. It now comes with Word, Excel, Powerpoint and a newbie Entourage, a PIM/e-mail thing (kind of like Outlook). The first two have been improved upon - more detachable tool bars, more Mac like and got rid of some annoying features. Powerpoint still sucks and I will always hate it until I get paid to use it. Entourage seems like a good deal to start with except that, it isn’t. Let me explain. Entourage is a bit like Outlook, part e-mail, part PIM, whose big point is Palm integration. And that’s fine, except that if you’ve got Palm Desktop (a free download), and an e-mail package like MS’s own Outlook Express (also free), it makes you wonder where the drive is coming from. Certainly, it’s all in one, but it doesn’t improve in many areas, and annoyed me in others. I tried it for a few weeks, and I’m back to my old separate set-up. Also, if Palm integration is such a big thing (OE can do it too for contacts), why do you have to install it as an extra? Sorry MS, like the first two for power users, but you can keep the other two. To be honest, I’ll still keep with AppleWorks 5 for that desktop stuff.

October 2000

Microsoft finally get round to updating Office for Mac, except now, it’s called ‘Office:Mac 2001’. It contains Mac versions of Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Entourage, the latter being a bit like Outlook for PC. I’ll do a review of it after a bit more usage, but initial use leads me to believe that if you’ve already got 98, there’s not much to upgrade for generally. The best thing we can say about Entourage is that it’s Outlook Express with better Palm integration. This all kind of disappointed me, seeing as Appleworks 6 was a bit disappointing too. Any, more info as I see it. Also, a small new page - what I’m running.

September 2000

Well, this month sees an upgrade I’ve been looking forward to - BBedit 7. This is the upgrade to one of my favourite pieces of Mac software, and the software I mostly use to write these pages. Eventually I’ll do a full review. Basically, many features are enhanced, it handles, WML and XML much better, integrates well with Panic’s Transmit FTP software (my review [transmitrev.html] here), and of great interest to me is that finally, it handles double byte characters such as Japanese natively, which will make adding more Japanese to this page much easier. It really is a great upgrade, and is only $39 as an upgrade from my 4.5, which I think is a great deal. The feature set of this software is huge, check out the website. Also, take a look at my [Mac shareware review].