I caught issue #49 from http://www.applelinks.com Cool e-rag. Sign me up...please. I like your writers. I just finished reading Pete Miner's column. I am in the same boat, kinda-sorta. I am in between careers, and currently studying graphic design. I should be studying ti-ping. Anyway, I too own a Performa (6214CD), and run Photoshop. I am making the Performa perform things that it does not want to, or should not be doing, and the only upgrade is RAM.

ciaofornow,

K.E. MacDonnell kmacdonn@pacbell.net

QuickBooks 4.0 Y2K compliance

Since you mentioned QuickBooks 4.0 in your article about software you use, I wonder if you know any more than I about updating the "year" fields to four digits. I can no longer find their web page that promised a free upgrade by "second quarter" of this year. The Windows version states year 2000 compliance right on the box, yet they stopped developing QuickBooks for the Mac a while ago. What about Quicken? I'm still using version 4, and it works fine, even has a four digit date. I wonder if I should be thinking about upgrading to a more recent version, even though I don't need any new features. All my business data is in QuickBooks. All my personal and investment financial data is in Quicken.

"Daniel M. Dreifus" crm3@ix.netcom.com

Dan, The latest update to QB for Mac can be found at http://www.intuit.com/support/quickbooks/index/ndxm_4_updates.html It says nothing about Y2K compliance, though. I did find a link by doing a search at Intuit's website, but it is in the Windows category. http://www.intuit.com/support/quickbooks/faqs/win/1168.html It reads "A: Intuit has been working--and continues to work--to ensure its products and services meet Intuit's Year 2000 Compliant Standard well before the Year 2000." A lot of help that is...
Tim

A-10 Cuba

Can I have a demo of a Mac game called A-10 Cuba. Please send me a email and then could you please send the demo to this postal address XXXX Jimmy

Jimmy, I wish we could send you the demo you desire. We don't have it, I'm sorry to say. I would also caution you about sending your address out via the Internet. That could be a very dangerous practice, perhaps more so here in the US than in Britain, but something you should still consider. Please only send your address or phone number to someone you know and trust.
Tim

Curiosity

Just out of curiosity, whatever happened to Mac OS 9? I haven't been able to get an answer on my own. Maybe you could explain why we are going from 8 to X(10)? By the way, when is Mac OS 8.6 being released?

Kevin Cotham rapparee@wavegate.com

Kevin, OS 9 belongs to another company that has nothing to do with the Mac OS. Therefore, Apple couldn't use that designation for its Operating System even if it wanted. Thus we go from 8.x to X (or 10, depending on which way Mr. Jobs is quoted). And OS 8.6 is already here.
Russ

A "Programs We Use" response

The review of the email programs in a recent MacHome was very accurate as far as Eudora and Outlook are concerned. I have used Eudora for years and this stupid Nickname option is not the greatest idea. I have recently used Outlook Express 5 on a real Windows machine and in emulation with Virtual PC on my Macintosh and this is a fine product. I have trouble however installing the PGP plug-in for Windows. I have no problem however with the PGP plug-in for Eudora.

Louis tiwi@lino.com

Great column! Just a quick note to say that I found QPict and it is really a sharp program for handling my pictures. Thanks!

Everett Sandersesanders@gvc.net

The Wrong Stuff

Recently checked out your ezine, and needed to comment on the Mick O'Neil-authored ad for Microsoft titled "The Write Stuff: Essential Writing Tools for the New Millenium." If you want to run a review of Office/Word 98 and its features, great. But call it that, and don't disguise it as something else. I wanted to learn something new about writing tools of the future, not read a digest of the features of one software package.

Of the 3357 words of text, 1.25% (42/3357) are NAMES of Microsoft products, and 23.9% of the article (804/3357; text included below) is devoted to explaining features of MS products. (I am not including the paragraph describing Macros, since Wordperfect is mentioned as also having macros.) In all those words, no warning is made of the mangling Word does and all the junk it includes when it saves files as text. Nor of its huge memory and storage requirements. Nor of the time it takes to start up, even on a G3 (over twice as long as Wordperfect).

WordPerfect boasts almost all of the features described (excluding export to Powerpoint, another MS app), not only macros, and does a much better job of handling images on pages of text. THERE IS NO MENTION OF NISUS, which has incredibly strong search features, great foreign language capabilties, and excellent graphics handling. What about the fact that its earlier versions are FREE? What about Mariner Write, which is able to do VERTICAL TEXT (for Hebrew and Japanese) and Mariner Lite (free). There's also HanMac, an incredibly powerful, lightweight wordprocessor from Korea. Also worth noting is that Nisus, Mariner, and HanMac are Mac-only.

Further, however great the described features are, they've been here. Nothing in the article talks about new tools we'll be using in the future. The article was little more than a synopsis of Word's features. And the thought that Word is our tool of the future is truly a frightening one.

Straighten up, guys. Why not follow up with articles on the features of all these other word processors--appropriately titled, of course.

Tony Silva tonyslv@gol.com

(Mick's Response)

Hi Tony,

Thanks for your detailed reply to my column. I appreciate you taking the time, and though I disagree with your conclusions, I certainly respect your opinion.

As to the "O'Neil-authored ad for Microsoft," I think you do an injustice to the article in general and suspect that you are motivated by factors that have little or nothing to do with word processing (such as an obvious contempt for Microsoft).

To add some perspective, I have reviewed or written about word processing tools on the Mac for some 11 years and have covered just about every product that can function in that capacity. Early on I did a series on Mac word processors for Byte, several reviews of different generations of Word and WordPerfect for Personal Computer World Magazine in the UK, MacUser (UK), and MacWorld, Australia. I also did a comprehensive review of Word 98 for My Mac Magazine.

I have no loyalty to Microsoft. In fact, because of the enormous amount of time and energy I expend trying to get different versions of Windows to work in an educational setting, and because I suspect the company cynically releases version after error-plagued version, I pretty much despise Microsoft. Still, as the de facto industry standard, Word is a very important product, and the features I outlined I considered the best available on any word processor. WordPerfect does NOT have an outliner or style editor that compares to Word nor does Nisus.

So what are the word processing tools that will be used in the new millenium? Perhaps writing vertical text in Hebrew will appeal to some users, but I suggest that a whole new generation of computer users will finally begin to use some of features that have already been around awhile.

Microsoft's built-in outliner was so good it wiped out a whole software niche--outline processing. Word's graphics capabilities provide most of the graphics power required for word processing and will no doubt eliminate much of the need for programs like SuperPaint. Though it's no substitute for a true desktop publishing package, Word now does relatively simple DTP tasks satisfactorily. I don't like the knock-on effect, eliminating whole categories of software and killing really good products like MORE, SuperPaint, Personal Press, and the like. I suspect we're all worse off because of it. That shouldn't hide the fact that these Word features are now an integral part of word processing--and will be--for the foreseeable future.

Word 98 may be a hard disk hog; it may still have problems saving files cleanly (though I understand that has been fixed); it may even 'mangle' text whatever that means; but the bottom line is that it also does an incredible range of things well. My goal was not, however, to advertise Microsoft Word--rather to talk about those features of Word or any other word processors, that I thought were important to the writing process--now and in the future. It just so happens that IMHO most of those processes are best implemented in Word. Perhaps I should have mentioned Nisus or Mariner or for that matter AppleWorks, but I didn't want to get into a comparison review.

Finally, I should note that the reason I wrote the article was because my experience teaching teachers suggests that the vast majority of users never scratch the surface of the features available in most word processors. I tried to highlight how word processing should really emphasize 'processing,' and how that means molding and manipulating words using state of the art features--beyond a simple spell checker or paragraph format--and I tried to make these arguments in the light of a variety of input and output options provided by the Internet and mass storage devices.

And finally, I was motivated at least in part by using a G3 PowerBook running Word 98 with a Microsoft Bookshelf CD mounted. And whether you hate Microsoft or not, the combination of these three tools provides one heck of a writing environment.

Thanks again for your input.

Mick

Tony,
Just a quick note to let you know that My Mac was among the first to review Mariner Write when it first came out, that we have always spoken highly of the qualities of ClarisWorks/AppleWorks, and that we are featuring in this issue a review of RagTime.

We will continue to review and report on other "writing tools" in the future, including WordPerfect, as soon as new versions of these applications are released. And thank you for pointing out HanMac, another worthy contender.
Russ