NVMUG eNews Meeting Reminder
REMINDER: Paul Haskell from Ram Design will speak to us about Filemaker Pro.
NVMUG Meeting
12 Noon - 2 PM
Saturday, May 20, 2000
Community Bank Building, St. Johnsbury
Paul Haskell has given presentations on Filemaker Pro at past MacJams. He knows the subject and presents it clearly. Filemaker Pro is the leading database on the Mac, and popular on PCs, because it is both powerful and relatively easy to use. The meeting will be in the St. Johnsbury Community Bank Building conference room, on Route 5 next to Price Chopper. This is your chance to get the answers to your questions about Filemaker Pro, and to decide whether it is for you or not.
Midge, NVMUG President, believes we will have guests from MacChamp and Wired Women, Burlington, and MUG of Stowe at the meeting. This should be a great opportunity to meet them.
Richard and Midge are going to set up an ethernet at their office. It might be interesting to see one being set up as the program for our next meeting . What do you think?
The theme was, "The train is leaving the station. The time is now." as Steve Jobs talked to 3500 Mac developers about porting their software to Mac OS X. More than 200 developers have committed to delivering products for Mac OS X since early January. Developer’s Preview 4 was distributed on CD with a DP4 manual, a full Carbon version of Internet Explorer 5, and 50 other “programs.” That’s in quotes because I don’t usually think of the Finder as a program.
The Mac OS X release is being delayed, and a public beta release will be made widely available this summer. The schedule is:
Developer Preview 4 - May 15, 2000
* Public beta of Mac OS X - this summer
* Version 1.0 - January 2001
* Option to install on new computers - January 2001
This means that you may be able to try out OS X in a beta version for free or for the cost of a CD. As a result of this testing, Version 1 should have fewer bugs. Instead of it being installed on all Mac’s in January 2001, buyers will be given the option of OS 9 or OS X.
Apple has listened to the reaction to Developer Preview 3, and the new DP4 is more like the Mac we like. Classic applications, like we run under OS 7, 8, and 9, will not run in a separate “blue box” environment. Classic applications, in DP4, run alongside native applications. You can tell them apart because they don't get the Aqua interface. Run together with native apps is an improvement.
While the delay in the release pushes the death of Mac OS 9 further out to some unspecified time, Jobs made it clear that days of OS 9 were numbered. Several times during his talk, Jobs implored developers to stop developing for OS 9 and to start "Carbonizing" their applications.
Carbon is the Mac OS X API environment for current Mac OS applications. "Carbonizing" an application gives it all of the new features of Mac OS X, including protected memory, access to the Quartz display model, and the Aqua interface Jobs unveiled last January. Carbon applications can also run on Mac OS 8.x and 9.x, a big incentive for developers to stop developing pre-OS X software. (The other native-OS X development environment, Cocoa, gives users the same features as Carbon, but does not run on OS 8.x and 9.x. It does, however, offer developers more powerful object oriented tools.)
Mac OS X is designed to run on all Macintosh computers using PowerPC G3 and G4 processor chips, and requires a minimum of 64 MB of memory. I am guessing that you will want more memory than that to do real work. There is a reason why dealers are offering memory upgrades to sell new Macs.
I just looked, and it costs more to add memory to my Performa 6400 than it does to add the same amount of memory to an iMac, G3, or G4; and OS X is not designed to run on earlier PowerPCs like the Performa. So, while the Performa will run the Carbon versions under OS 8 or OS 9, it makes no sense for me to think of upgrading it. Our Mac Classic II will not run the Carbon versions. Before long we will have two different Macintosh operating systems in the club, and probably in our house. That should complicate things!
For more information on OS X, check <www.Apple.com>. A Mac OS X tab has been added to the top of Apple's navigation bar. It takes you to a brand new Mac OS X section with more information on the new OS.
The most highly anticipated part of the developer’s conference was the demonstration of an impressive dual-G4 MP system running Mac OS X. This system, which was nothing more than a technology demonstration intended solely for developers, was part of an Apple push to get developers to multi-thread their applications, and to show the current robustness of Mac OS X today. These machines were running more than twice as fast as current G4s. Apple made it very clear that this was not a product launch, nor even a product promise, but that Apple is working diligently on getting MP systems ready for deployment. Apple indicated that machines could be ready by next year's WWDC in May 2001, or even earlier.
I am having trouble even thinking about trying to justify a G4, but two CPUs? But, I can see where they would help in a place like Silver Mountain Graphics.
2. Silver Mountain Graphics
My wife, Dona, needed to print some handouts for AARP volunteers to use at the Lyndon Home and Garden Show. Silver Mountain Graphics was able to make copies directly from the light pink original she had. They made 250 very bright dark pink copies. The next day Dona needed more copies. She no longer had the original light pink copy, so she took one of the very bright dark pink copies. The copier could not distinguish between the paper’s color and the type. So they put it on a computer, a Mac G4, using PhotoShop. Even with a G4, it took a few minutes for each scan. They were able to adjust it to the point where all the text was readable, but it would have taken a long time to edit it well enough to make it presentable. Dona suggested that maybe I could type it. They put AppleWorks 5 up, and I keyed in the document with formatting similar to the original. Dona suggested using the Extended style which I had never used before and it was effective. Then Dona did a little more formatting. The kind people there printed it on a laser printer, and Dona drew in the outline of a box around some of the text. They printed another 300 copies. The result looked fine, the price was reasonable, the people were nice as you might expect in a Macintosh shop, and I had the experience of actually using a Macintosh G4. The mouse and keyboard are not an improvement in my opinion, but the speed is definitely overkill for using AppleWorks 5.
Silver Mountain Graphics is a Macintosh copy shop on Railroad Street in downtown in St. Johnsbury. The people are nice and went out of their way to help us. The price seems reasonable and the quality of work looks good. Call them at 748-1170.
3. AppleWorks 6.03
AppleWorks 6 was undoubtedly developed on G4 machines. It ran so slowly on my Performa that I stopped using it. Then I experimented, and found that most of the problem was connected to the new Macintosh standard Navigation Services. Internet Explorer 5 uses this new standard to Save files, but the problem is in the software to Open files. I found that if I deleted the copies of Recent Files, and turned off use of Recent Files in both the Apple Menu and in AppleWorks 6, it was useable. There were other problems.
Apple listened to the complaints, and must have worked very hard to release an update, AppleWorks 6.03, on May second. I saw it on Macnn, and downloaded it on the first day. I have been using it ever since. It is faster - fast enough to be useable. It does not crash, at least not often. It even has a display of the font and font size at the top of word processing pages. But it still has some bugs and problems. As an example, using Dataviz MacLinkPlus to save a document as a Word 6 Windows document only converts it to a ClarisWorks 4 document. Then you have to convert that to get it to Word 6. I am studying it, and trying to develop a demonstration, possibly for August.
4. 500 Mhz beats 1 gigaHertz
One of the things that we run into from time to time is the misconception
that the clock speed of a processor is a true indication of the real-world
performance of that chip. This is becoming more of an issue now that Intel
and others are producing processors with clock speeds of up to 1 gigaHertz.
With the PowerPC currently at 500 MHz doesn't that mean that Macs with a
500 MHz processor are 1/2 the speed? Well, no, according to a recent article
in the San Francisco Chronicle by Henry Norr. He states that the PowerPC has
always been able to get more work done in each clock cycle than Intel and
AMD chips, and went on to do some comprehensive testing of the gigaHertz
machines versus Apple's 450 MHz G4 with Velocity Engine. He stated his
conclusions pretty bluntly:
"This time, there was no ambiguity: the 450 MHz PowerMac blew both gigahertz
PCs out of the water... In short, Mac partisans have no reason to panic
about the PowerPC's current clock-speed shortfall, and graphics
professionals who rely upon Apple have no reason, at least in terms of
performance, to doubt their choice of platforms: the Mac's resounding victory
in this particular test is strong evidence that the PowerPC remains more
than competitive with the best Intel and AMD can produce." (from Small Dog) 5. Virex
In one of his computer columns in the Caledonian Record, Jan Newpher hit it right when he said you buy anti-virus programs to protect against yesterdays viruses. They react as quickly as they can when a new virus comes out, but then you have to download the upgrade to protect against it.
Well, when Small Dog had a special sale of Virex 5.9 for $15, and there was a free upgrade to the latest Version 5.9, I bought it. Then I found out that to get further upgrades, after the first free one, it would cost about $30 for a year. Now I know how they can afford to maintain the program.
Among the things you are not allowed to do, is to write a review of the program without their permission and preview of the review. So I won’t. I will only say that I ran the program. It said that I did not have any viruses. To my knowledge, I have never had a virus in 17 or 18 years of using Apple and Macintosh computers. Do you think it is worth it for me to spend #30 a year for protection?
6. www.chiatday.com
Todd Wellington took pictures of some of the NVMUG members. We are now waiting and watching for his article in the Caledonian Record Fun, Food, and Fashion section. It should be “very interesting” as they used to say on Saturday Night Live.
When Todd called to get some more information for the article, he made a contribution to this newsletter. He asked if I had ever looked at http://www.chiatday.com
There you will find some interesting stuff about creativity, and some creative ads. When I looked there were three new iBook ads, and in the Archives you can download a Quicktime version of the classic: Why 1984 won’t be like “1984.”
