Card Photo Printer CP-200
Company: Canon, Inc.
Cost: $160 – $190, street
http://www.powershot.com/powershot2/cp300-200/index.html
My “dream photo printer” turned out to be one that was not even on my mental radar screen.
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Canon Digital Rebel SLR
Company: Canon, Inc.
Price: $899 (US) Body only
http://www.canoneos.com/
I strongly considered an alternate title to this review: “Chris, Here’s the perfect Mate to your GL2!” in honor of Chris Seibold’s expansion into the realm of semiprofessional videography with the Canon GL2. Chris, I know you were hoping I would talk you out of spending so much money for a digital camera, and when I didn’t, and you bought it, you probably wondered if I really knew what I was talking about. I probably didn’t, as usual, but you don’t regret it, now that you’ve had the chance to explore the capabilities! So, when you’re ready to get creative with still photography, this camera could be the answer! And I’m sorry if I’m the responsible party for destroying your savings account, Chris!
VTBook 32MB DDR Graphics Card
Manufacturer: Village Tronic
Company: Small Dog Electronics
Price: $245.00
http://www.villagetronic.com
Requirements: Apple PowerBook with Cardbus 32 bit, Mac OS 9.2.x or 10.2.x or later installed. Translation: Wallstreet, Lombard, Pismo, Titanium and Aluminum 15″ and 17″ PowerBooks can use this without modification.
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Interarchy 6
Company: Stairways
Price: $45.00
http://www.interarchy.com
Interarchy is, by all accounts, the single most popular FTP client on the Macintosh with an estimated 650,000 users. Since changing it’s name from Anarchie 3.x to Interarchy 4.x, it has added a host of networking tools, SFTP, FTP/SSH tunneling, HTTP, and a specialized form of WEBDAV called FTPDisk and sold over 100,000 copies. It has an active user group of over 1000 members. It has customizable, skin-able parts, and every command available to it is also Apple Scriptable. If you haven’t tried Interarchy in awhile, take a look. It runs natively on Mac OS 8.5 through Mac OS X 10.2.5. The current shipping version as I write this is 6.1.1, but by the time you read this version 6.2 may be available, which adds some improvements as well as bringing back the popular Classic networking tools for the Mac OS X users.
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Mac OS X In A Nutshell
Jason McIntosh, Chuck Toporek & Chris Stone
O’Reilly
ISBN 0-596-00370-6
US $34.95 CAN $54.95
768 pages, not including index
The nutshell series of books from O’Reilly is well known to the Unix crowd, and so it is with a certain degree of satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment that we now have Mac OS X In A Nutshell. It’s as if we are assured that Mac OS X is not only here to stay, but is here to be explored, worthy of mastery, and willing to make itself a useful and productive part of your computing environment.
In honor of this “achievement” I think it fitting that I should be writing this review using OpenOffice, (a Microsoft Office-wanna-be suite of apps but at an affordable price) running in Apple’s beta X11 environment, rather than MS Word or Apple Works. In addition, the software is not actually installed on this iMac, but rather on a remote iMac that happens to have the software installed as well as a VNC (Virtual Network Console) server that allows me to take full control of the system from a distance. I’m listening to my iTunes library as it streams from that remote system running a free mp3 server. The actual steps to doing these types of gymnastics have been available for Unix systems for some time, but not until Mac OS X came on the scene, have they entered the realm of one-click installations with GUI (Graphical User Interface) controls and preferences.
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Kensington PocketMouse Pro Wireless (a.k.a. Rodentia Tailessia)
Company: Kensington Technology Group
Price: $49.99
http://www.kensington.com
As recently as February 4th, I was visiting an Apple Store in Denver, CO, with my brother and three sons (on our way to Steamboat Springs for a week of skiing) and happened upon Kensington’s latest rendition of their PocketMouse product. In fact, the Apple Genius who was giving us a tour of the store, noted that it had just arrived that very day!
Now I had been looking for a “portable” mouse to go with my Titanium 1Ghz PowerBook for several months and I had considered several. What I really wanted was something wireless but more portable than the current crop with their cumbersome RF receivers with lengthy USB cords. I was about to compromise and purchase one of the mini-mice with retractable cords, but something held me back, and I am glad I waited.
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The first thing that caught my attention wit
Mac OS X for Unix Geeks
Brian Jepson and Ernest E. Rothman
O’Reilly & Associates, Inc.
ISBN 0-596-00356-0
US $24.95 CA $38.95 UK £
188 pages not including index
Confessions of a ‘Net Geezer:’ Yep, I’m old enough to remember when the term ‘geek’ was synonymous with ‘nerd;’ old enough to remember programming computers with punch cards; old enough to remember when “real geeks wore pocket-protectors.” Now, of course, most of you reading this came on board the personal computing platform during the great Internet-Quake, which brought with it that dreaded Dot-Com Tsunami which is still wreaking havoc in the ebb of its tide.
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Unix Power Tools, 3rd Edition
Shelley Powers, Jerry Peek, Tim O’Reilly and Mike Loukides
O’Reilly & Associates, Inc.
ISBN 1-596-00330-7
US $69.95 CA $108.95
1,036 pages not including index
Unix Power Tools, an apt title not meant to be redundant (Unix is THE power-user’s operating system, after all) has been the ShopSmith manual or the Unix Almanac since it first appeared in the early 1990s. The second edition appeared in 1999, and with the amazing, if not predicted, growth of Unix and expansion into many flavors; it’s fitting that a 3rd edition should appear now. Over half of the articles have been revised since that last edition to include information pertaining to many of the smaller but ground-gaining Unix’s such as Linux, freeBSD, and Mac OS X’s Darwin.
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Adobe InDesign 2 for Macintosh & Windows, Visual QuickStart Guide
Sandee Cohen
Peachpit Press
ISBN 0-201-79478-0
US $21.99 CA $34.99UK £16.99
379 pages not including index
For all you people who couldn’t wait to try out Adobe’s oft-referred-to Quark Killer… For all you desktop publishers gradually being weaned by Adobe from the aging PageMaker… Here is the salve to help heal the bruises you’ve no doubt acquired on the rocky road back to desktop publishing nirvana.
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Adobe GoLive 6 for Macintosh & Windows, Visual QuickStart Guide
Shelly Brisbin
Peachpit Press
ISBN 0-321-11222-9
US $21.99 CA $34.99 UK £16.99
476 pages not including index
It’s arguable whether or not a picture is, indeed, worth a thousand words. It’s not arguable that pictures AND a thousand words are the most effective means to communicate the features and methods of any particular software application, especially an application like Adobe’s GoLive 6 which excels at filling your screen real estate with windows and palettes.
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realMyst
MacPlay
Ubi Soft International
MYST took the gaming world by storm way back in 1993, the two-year brainchild of brothers, Rand and Robyn Miller, the founders of Cyan in 1988. It went on to become the most popular computer game ever, with over six million copies sold. Sequels, RIVEN and MYST 3 Exile, followed later and were also very popular.
Now comes realMyst. Okay, this is a Mac web site, so perhaps we should be a little more accurate and say realMyst for the PC arrived in the fall of 2000 and then MacPlay ported the game to the Mac world, arriving for sale just this year!
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Two months ago I received an email query from an acquaintance named Dr. Moo, who is considering migrating from Windows to Macintosh, specifically for Apple’s seamless digital video capability. I enlisted the help of Jeffrey McPheeters, with his greater experience. What follows is our combined response (excuse the choppy email format):
In a message dated 4/4/02 8:21:42 AM, DoctorMoo222@aol.com writes:
DRMOO: Dear John, I’m thinking of getting a new Mac, mainly for its media capabilities. I have a few questions that I hope you will be kind enough to …
NEMO: Certainly. Happy to help.
DRMOO: … answer. How hard would it be to transfer files from my PC? Do you know …
NEMO: Not very difficult if they are compatible.
JEFFREY: That’s the short answer. Here’s the long answer. Your new Mac will likely come set to boot up in Apple’s new, Unix-based, gorgeous looking operating system: Mac OS X. It will also have Mac OS 9 installed and can be booted into either one using a control panel (similar to control panels in Windows) called Startup Disk.
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Poor Richard’s Building Online Communities: Create a Web Community for Your Business, Club, Association, or Family
Margaret Levine Young and John Levine
Top Floor Publishing
ISBN 0-9661032-9-7
US $29.95
372 pages not including index
This is the second book in the Poor Richard’s series to come my way, and it’s another winner. The authors, Margaret Levine Young and John Levine, have been seriously involved in building an extensive online community for a large nonprofit organization since “way-back” in 1994. [note: though it's never been scientifically proven, Internet Years are something akin to Dog Years!] Their knowledge and grasp of the many vehicles for creating and maintaining online communities is apparent in the very first chapter, where I found out that MUD and MOO are not necessarily what my 6 year old thinks!
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Hot Text – Web Writing That Works
Jonathan and Lisa Price
New Riders
ISBN 9-7357-1151-8
US $40.00 CA $62.99 UK £30.99
492 pages not including index
Dear professional web authors: please read this book! And you, who aspire to write professionally for the web, whether or not you write professionally for other venues, get this book and consume it!
I admit that I was a little surprised when the book arrived to see how hefty it was. Since the title seemed to indicate a rather narrow scope compared to many other web-authoring texts covering the whole range of web content from graphics to interactive code generation, I somehow expected this book to be a light weight work of ‘dos and don’ts’ with regard to writing content for the web.
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The Little Digital Video Book
Michael Rubin
Peachpit Press
ISBN 0-201-75848-2
US $19.99 CA $29.95 UK £14.99
178 pages
As a long time personal computer user and software junkie, I have a bookshelf full of computer software “how-to” books. I’m not ashamed to say I’ve only read a handful from cover to cover. Most wind up being additional resources to the manual, or “missing manual” and I use them like I do a good encyclopedia, skipping around to the parts I really want to understand.
There’s a better than even chance that you’re reading this review and smiling to yourself, having acquired your own library of computer software how-to books, also only partially read.
This book won’t fit in with those. In fact, go to your book shelf where you keep those novels you couldn’t put down once you started reading them, and make a place about 1/2″ wide and a little over 9″ tall to be the home for The Little Digital Video Book once you’ve bought it and read it through twice. That’s right, it’s even better the second time through! I promise.
The author, Michael Rubin, is eminently qualified to write about digital video. He’s the expert’s expert. He was with George Lucas in “the beginning.” His film and video text, Nonlinear, now in its fourth edition, is considered the hallmark text on the whole idea of nonlinear film editing. I have not read that book. It was not written to me. I am not a digital video geek.
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iMovie 2 For Macintosh, Visual Quickstart Guide
Jeff Carlson
Peachpit Press
ISBN 0-201-78788-1
US $19.99 CA $29.95 UK £14.99
182 pages not including Index
iMovie is Apple Computer’s solution to nonlinear video editing for the rest of us. It’s currently at version 2 and runs natively on Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. If you have purchased a computer from Apple in the past 2 years, you probably have this software. It’s part of the included software package on nearly every Mac sold.
It runs only on a Mac, and it is the overwhelming favorite among reviewers and users alike, causing some to actually switch platforms from the world of Windows just to experience the ease of use and power available in this incredible piece of software. It comes with no manual.
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Tis the season to be inviting and being invited…
Recently I was asked to assist a non-profit organization in setting up an online registration system for a mid-winter weekend conference and they needed it online by …yesterday. As a web host provider for the past few years I was just sure there would be a dearth of scripts ready made for such a task and volunteered to help them out even though they weren’t hosted on my servers. After an hour or two with www.google.com and www.hotscripts.com it became apparent that it wasn’t going to be as simple as I thought and I really didn’t have time to create a PHP solution just for them. I was please, however, when I began to look in another direction: web-based services to provide this capability. Of course! Organization Management is a huge industry, because most organizations, large and small, hesitate to spend money and effort trying to organize their own conferences and conventions. My favorite such service provider is rsvpBOOK.
My very first impression of the site was positive: aesthetically pleasing (obviously created on a Mac, I thought), easy to navigate with ample FAQ and well-written help documents, and all at a fair price – normally $99 per event with a Fall Promotion at present (I don’t know when it ends, but Fall ends Dec. 20, I think) which lets you create an event free of charge. There is an additional cost of $14.95 if you elect to customize the registration form with your own custom questions/survey.
For something as simple as a wedding shower, this might be overkill, but it would be great for a wedding banquet, graduation party, company picnic, business open house, etc.
Currently there is no way to collect payment through this system but that is currently in the works. In fact, I was very impressed when, after setting up an online registration system for my client, I sent off an email to the contact email address submitting several suggestions and I heard back within a day thanking me for the suggestions and detailing the many exciting features they are in the process of building into the service.
The administration features are quite nice; in fact one of the strongest features is that I can set these up for my non-techie clients but assign the administration and data collection to them!
If you help with setting up events from time to time, have a web site to announce the event, but don’t have a way to easily collect registrations online in a systematic and professional manner, I suggest you take a look at rsvpBOOK.
If you know of another similar service you would recommend, feel free to let me know!
Here’s a tip for all you Mac users that have your own blog access, whether it be as a writer for MyMac.com or some other ezine or web hosted service; particularly if it accepts html in the body of the blog.
Open AppleWorks, start a new document. Type it the way you want; adding style as you think best; create the live links as needed with either the link button in the main toolbar or from the Format–>Create Link–>Internet menu action. Check your spelling when done. Save your document to be safe. Then ‘Save As’ and change the output to html in the File Format popup button. I save mine to the desktop, usually, since once I’m done, it’s trashed.
Now find that document, (mine is called ‘blog.html’; clever, aren’t I?), and drag it to your AppleWorks icon or however you choose to open the sucker in AW, and you’ll see the html code you created. Select the portion BETWEEN the <BODY> and </BODY>; it probably starts with a <P> and ends with a </P>, copy that to the clipboard, and paste it into the blog form window in your browser to submit/update your blog. Submit and you should see the output in your browser similar to what you created in the original AppleWorks document.
Okay, what if you don’t have AppleWorks? Is there another way to do fancy blogging? Well, there are dozens, really.
Here’s a practical solution for those of you who are using Mac OS X 10.2 and above, and need or desire to create styled text which can be output as clean html to be pasted into your blog or a forum. Download the excellent MacJournal from Dan Schimpf Software and write your blog entries in that. You can export a journal at any time to html. It might be rather helpful to actually manage your blog entries using a local journal, anyway!
For example, I created an entry in MacJournal, writing it in a journal labeled, MyMac Blogs!
Yep, I know, I'm about as creative as Highway Road Sign painter, but you're getting what you pay for, remember that!
Next, I exported the journal as html to my desktop, creating a new Safari document named …you guessed it: MyMac Blog.html I double clicked to open it in Safari, checked it over, then from the Safari Menu I selected View –> Source, or Command-Option-V. Select the portion of the journal you want to add, copy and paste it to the blog entry form in your browser window. Submit and it should look the way you wanted!
Okay, what if you don’t have Mac OS X, but use Classic Mac OS 8.5 or later? Do you have $5? Because if you do, I’ll clue you in to a super little piece of software I’ll bet you didn’t know about. It’s called Simone and it’s written by one of the most interesting and talented graphic artists I’ve come across.
Simone, now at version 3.01, was designed primarily as a way to create clean, formatted text for forums such as Apple’s Support forums . An example of before and after can be found here .
Simone is a superb little tool, and a very significant time saver if you are a regular on more than one forum or blog or web-based discussion.
Okay, I think I've just about exhausted that little topic...
It’s a beautiful, snowy day here in Kansas. In winter, the snow makes it prettier here; contrasting well with the gray theme nature leaves us when the leaves have fallen.
This week a couple of articles drew some attention in the Mac quality-control arena, one pointing out a security issue in DHCP services in Mac OS X and another pointing out a quality control problem, supposedly, in Mac OS X’s print to PDF feature.
Both of these particular columns could have benefited greatly by more research and eliciting some technical expertise concerning their respective topics. For example, Leonard Rosenthol had to take time to respond to the PDF misinformation with some intelligence so as to clarify and expand on the issues, assuring press and pre-press professionals that they weren’t somehow being blind-sided by Apple.
Several technical-oriented lists discussed the DHCP issue, but the gist of the matter boiled down to this: the DHCP security issue is with the current DHCP standard, not Apple, and all Lance would have had to do was read a couple of white papers about this and he would have had a clearer understanding of this issue. It’s not Apple’s fault that DHCP is inherently insecure any more than it is Apple’s fault that the first versions of WiFi encryption passed the password in plain English!
Indeed, Apple should be praised whenever they adhere to standards without trying to add some proprietary ‘feature’ to make the standard better as opposed to working with the standards organizations to improve the standards.
Lance should have pointed out that IT managers need to encourage their respective organizations to adopt the new, secure DHCP standards as soon as they are ratified.
But why do we have to sift through this stuff, and the constant after-effect of damage-control rebuttals, week after week? I think that there is a danger for anyone, myself included, who sees their names and their words in public week after week, or month after month, of somehow beginning to think that this somehow validates their words as truth without the need for critical editing and feedback prior to publication. A columnist is hired to write articles. Unfortunately, today, there is a ready supply of white space to receive a never-ending supply of hyperbole, surmise, and sloppy ‘reporting.’ The acronym, FUD, is used in the technical press today more than the 4 letter rhyme is used in a Hell’s Angels Convention.
What elixir is there in the reading of our own thoughts on web pages designed to attract thousands of readers which clouds our minds and gives us that euphoric feeling of infallibility? Are we truly educated beyond our ability to think wisely?
I am reminded of a poster my wife purchased for me, shortly after we met: a smug lion cub sitting in a chair and the byline: “It’s my opinion and it’s very true.” She has never let me forget that poster, as it described me perfectly in my youth, and sometimes yet today. The web was conceived as a means to create interactive discussion; but it has become, at least in some aspects related to the distribution of news and information, a platform for seeing who can yell the loudest and most compellingly, “It’s MY opinion and it’s VERY true!
[as an afterthought; I think I see part of the problem: it's when I look in the mirror of my own opinion of myself, I see a wise, mature Lion whose thoughts must carry a 'roar' of approval; however I suspect that more often than not, others who know me better, or know the subject matter far more thoroughly, may see me as the 'cub' I am. Though I may appear cute, it comes from watching me stumble over my own big feet while trying to act somehow brave and authoritative.]
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