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June 26, 2000
Location, location, location! The three most important words in real estate also happen to be very important in the mobile Macintosh world, especially when followed by the word "manager." The Location Manager control panel has proved an absolute godsend in allowing Trinity to quickly and easily configure various preferences depending on, natch, location.

Now if your Mac never moves, Location Manager is of marginal benefit. But if you, say, haul it off to a LAN party every once in a while, Location Manager can be a big time saver.

Here's how it works: First, you define a home or default location. In my case, I called in SiteRev.com since that's where Trinity is most of the time. Then define a second location. In this case, I called it "The Lillys" since that's where I knew Trinity would be hooked up next.

When I'm using my The Lillys location, I can change all my settings and control panels to whatever I need in order to, say, get online using their account or whatever. When I return home, these settings are obviously no longer valid or useful. But instead of changing a dozen or so control panels, all I have to do is go to Location Manager, select SiteRev.com as the location and all my original settings are restored.

Location Manager: It works great, and after a brief set up period, it will save you lots of time if you ever have to move your Mac around. I couldn't operate Trinity nearly as effectively without it.

June 20, 2000
Microsoft buys out Bungie, at one time the leading game-maker for the Mac. Pundits seem conflicted as to what this means for the Mac, but ultimately, it probably means Bungie will produce games for Microsoft's forthcoming xBox game console only. Although I'm probably in the minority, I'm not certain this is all that big a deal. Bungie's previous hits, the Marathon series and the Myth series, really didn't do all that much for me. Bungie's upcoming products, Oni and Halo, look great, but there's a big difference between looking good and playing good.

On top of this, the other crucial factor is that the Mac game universe just isn't as small as it was in the mid- to late-'90s. There are an increasing number of games—great games—and Bungie's possible departure from the Mac game scene isn't nearly the tragedy it once definitely would have been. Personally, I'm not sure I'll feel the loss at all—if indeed they do stop developing for the Mac which is up in the air at this point.

June 8, 2000
Does Microsoft need to be broken in two? Probably not. Probably needs to be three or more. But too late now, Judge Jackson settled on two, so here we go into the appeals phrase.

In the meantime, we'll have to content ourselves with listening to Microsoft officers and their proxies in full denial. It's utterly amazing that they still can't believe that they did anything wrong.

June 5, 2000
Stinkin' Adobe Software keeps releasing software I want. There's a Photoshop 6.0 (with ImageReady 3.0) update coming this fall that will probably nick me for over $100 and I definitely want Adobe LiveMotion which is another large chunk of change. Then there's Adobe GoLive 5.0 which is pretty much indispensable, dang it. I'm sure this is why my dad owns stock in the company.

Since I'm babbling about wish lists, I might as well add that I'd like to get Trinity 256 MB of RAM (bringing her total to 384 MB), add an AppleCare Extended Warranty, and buy a LocalTalk-to-Ethernet bridge so that Trinity can print to my HP LaserJet. Sometime early next year, I'll be buying MacOS X, too. Here's hoping that's the last of my cash outlays for awhile.

June 1, 2000
Ambrosia Software, home of shareware authors extraordinaire, has released a free CD of all their shareware offerings available to anyone who wants it. They'll even pay shipping. Get all the details. Offer good this month only!

UPDATE: Ambrosia ran out of free CDs in less than two days. You can still get a CD, but it'll cost you $10. Snooze and lose, I'm afraid.

May 15, 2000—World Wide Developers' Conference
Looks like good news, bad news out of Cupertino concerning MacOS X. The bad news is that MacOS X won't ship until January 1, 2001. The good news is that a free public beta is coming by end of summer (probably September), which should be reliable enough for testing purposes.

Apple released Developer Preview 4 today, and though early reports are limited, it sounds like they've improved the dock, made the desktop more Mac-like, and improved some icon sizing issues. You can bet that the "behind the scenes" stuff has gotten better too.

Apple announced they'd be released QuickTime 5 this summer. It'll include support for Flash 4 and some MPEG formats. Apparently, QuickTime 4 has been downloaded by some 50 million users (and Steve Jobs estimated the installed base at closer to 100 million) and Apple's MovieTrailer section is tops seeing movie previews on the net.

Macintosh marketshare is up world-wide, and 45 percent of purchasers are new to the platform. Over 4 million Macs shipped last year.

May 9, 2000
I've now had six crashes in nine days, though two of those are from me unplugging my USB/ADB converter and then plugging it in again. USB is hot-swappable, but ADB isn't and the adapter obviously requires a restart if I'm moving keyboard and Orbit trackball around. That leaves four crashes in nine days, at least two or three of which were due to the QuicKeys bug I covered a few days ago.

So six in nine sounds bad, but excluding the problems mentioned above, and of a sudden it's clear that MacOS 9.04 is among the most stable operating systems I've used. I'd probably rate it higher than MacOS 8.6, and I thought 8.6 was great.

That said, count me among the early adopters of MacOS X and its protected memory. Rumors have it coming out in beta next week at the World Wide Developer's Conference (WWDC), and personally, I can hardly wait for the retail version.

Trinity is now wired to the hilt with the hardware and loaded to the gills with software:

• Trinity is driving a dual monitor display, operating the built-in 14.1" display at 1024 x 768 and Princeton EO90 19" at 1280 x 1024. The 14.1" LCD is much clearer than the larger Princeton, but I've adjusted to the difference. I knew the Princeton offered huge screen size and mediocre performance when I bought it, and one can hardly blame Trin for having such a wonderfully crisp display.
• The sound-out to the NEC speakers work great, a big improvement over the built-in speaker. I'm listening to SoundJam MP play MP3s as I write this, and they sound terrific.
• The external PlainTalk microphone in the sound-in has enabled very accurate speech recognition. It's not perfect, but it's close, and easy to use, too. For example, I can now launch applications by saying, for example, "Open GoLive" or "Open Navigator" or whatever. To accomplish this, I put an alias of the application (say Eudora) in the Speakable Items folder and renamed it to "Open Eudora." When I say, "Open Eudora" Trinity then searches the Speakable Items folder for "Open Eudora" and executes that Applescript or alias. Very nice.
• Despite the aforementioned problems with the iMate ADB-to-USB converter, it's working great when I leave it plugged in. Although the PowerBook keyboard is great, it lacks a 10-key pad (unless you do a funky function key thing) and full arrow keys. And the trackpad, while acceptable, is no match for the Kensington Orbit trackball. The trackball simply kicks butt and takes names as an input device.
• I've been ethernetting files back and forth with Zeke, and at least at 10-BaseT speeds, it works great. I should be able to test it at 100-BaseT speeds soon. (I'm also eager to try FireWire Target Disk Mode, in which Trin networks through a FireWire cable and becomes something of an external drive to a G3 or G4.)

May 5, 2000
Trinity continues to roll right along, speedily handling everything I throw at it. It's only been a few days, but at this point I have no complaints whatsoever with the new machine. It's done everything I've tried very well.

I'd rate MacOS 9.04 as a good but not great upgrade from MacOS 8.6. Here's some impressions:

• Sherlock 2 is a good improvement over the original (despite another awful interface). Sherlock under 8.6 was a crash-happy beast, and thus far Sherlock 2 has proved rock solid. It's great to have that functionality back, since Sherlock is easily my favorite search engine (with MetaCrawler second).
• Stability seems good. I encountered a bizarre conflict between QuicKeys 4.1 and Eudora Pro, Newswatcher, and iCab which caused those last three to crash on exit with a Type 3 error. The workaround disables QuickKeys' functionality in a minor way, but shouldn't prove to be a big inconvenience. That known bug aside, I have had no crashes whatsoever, and MacOS 9.04 seems even more stable than 8.6.
• The Keychain Access is a wonderful feature for those programs which are able to take advantage of it. I type a password once to unlock my keychain and then anytime I go to a site requiring a log in or go to retrieve email or whatever, the password which I've previously stored in the keychain is automatically supplied. In other words, I don't have to remember a dozen different passwords or user names. Very convenient, and probably increasingly so as more applications are written to take advantage of it.
• The speech recognition is good, and I was surprised by that given the small laptop microphone. Nonetheless, it's not easy to memorize all the ways in which one must speak to the computer in order activate functions. "What time is it?" or "Close this window" are easy enough, but stuff like "Change the view of this window" is a lot more difficult for me to recall.
• The software update control panel is very handy. Downloaded the CarbonLib 1.4 last night without any need to go searching the Apple Support web site for it. Good time saver.
• There's some interesting Applescript over IP and TCP/IP file sharing that I've not had a chance to play with yet, and I'll be curious to see how those work out.
• Excluding the Applescript over IP stuff, Applescript itself has been significantly improved and a lot of computer functions can now be automated. Coupled with QuicKeys, there's literally no repetitve computer task that I can't automate and speed up measurably. That's pretty exciting.

May 2, 2000
My Pismo PowerBook arrived yesterday. I named the PowerBook "Trinity" (or "Trin" for short), referring as you like to God, The Matrix, and/or this being the third great Mac I've owned (Henry, my Mac IIci, and Zeke, my G3-charged Power Mac 7500, being the other two). After less than a day of use, here are my initial impressions of Apple's Pismo PowerBook:

1. Great out of box experience. Very easy to set up and use. I've got lots of Mac experience but even a first time user might not have to crack the "How To" manual. (Manual is well written, though.)
2. The 14.1" active matrix screen is stellar. It's bright, sharp, and thin. As a bonus, there are no noticeable bad pixels (which is rare considering there are a few million pixels on the display). Even if it turns out that there are a few, I like that they're not immediately obvious.
3. Beauty is, of course, a subjective standard, but I've been enamored with the Lombard/Pismo form factor from the get-go. I am thrilled that Apple didn't do an iBook style case for this machine (although I like the iBook SE style as well, just not as much). The PB is sleek, curvy, and I find it jaw-droppingly attractive. One cool feature—which is so full of whimsy that I love it—is that white Apple logo on the top of the PowerBook glows when the LCD is active. There's absolutely no functional advantage to it of which I'm aware, but I find it a nice aesthetic enhancement.
4. Trinity is faster than Zeke. On processor based tasks it's almost 2-to-1, with Trinity MacBenching 1518 to Zeke's 845. (For reference, a G3/300 = 1000 on the MacBench 5.0 scale.) That's not the same orders of magnitude jump I saw moving from Henry to Zeke (Henry MacBenched 18), but it's a distinct difference.
5. That speed difference is dramatic in most applications I've tried, but most notably Virtual PC 3.03. Running Windows 95 on the Pismo feels just like the real thing. Granted, I don't run Windows everyday anymore (thank you God), but it's clear to me that I'm getting well over the Pentium 133-Mhz speeds that were Zeke's norm.
6. Trin came with MacOS 9.04 and it's been perfectly stable. No problems whatsoever. A lot of the new features (compared to MacOS 8.6) are Internet-based, so I've not had a chance to check them out yet, but so far, so good in every respect.
7. The installed applications are your typical web browsers, email clients, and so on. Not a lot, compared to the iMac and iBook bundles, but I'll spend the next few days solving that problem.

April 27, 2000
Apple's recent quarterly financial report was a good one: $233 million. Cash and short-term investments on hand: $3.6 billion, take or give. Shipped over 1 million computers in the quarter. Nice.

Microsoft has announced Office 2001 for the Mac, but they're giving a pass to carbonizing it for MacOS X (at least initially) so I'm not sure how big the stampede to their door will be. They're also touting a Personal Information Manager, or PIM, as the central upgrade of the suite. Not sure that I'd trust my calendar to Microsoft, frankly, though I'm now conceding defeat in my efforts to wipe their programs from my hard drives. Whether I like it or not, my clients are standardized on Word, so I've got to use it too. At least I don't have to use it a lot.

Word on the street is that the Justice Department will ask for the breakup of Microsoft into two distinct companies, one for operating systems and one for everything else. I'd like to see a multi-billion dollar fine in there as well, but I'll reserve full comment until the recommendation is formally made.

April 14, 2000
Microsoft Frontpage 98, a really lousy Internet web site design tool, apparently was intentionally programmed with some security holes in it. (Might as well, it's a terrible program.) Used by thousands of poor uninformed office managers, the software includes server extensions with a backdoor-style security breach. The password, "Netscape engineers are weenies!", might be funnier if it didn't compromise security on Internet web sites around the world. Brought to you, yet again, by the software company you love to hate, Microsoft.

In that same vein, I've actually decided that I'm going to try to purge Microsoft application from my workflow entirely. As it currently stands, business considerations force me into Microsoft Word and (occasionally) Microsoft Internet Explorer. What client wants, client gets, of course, but if I can have them save things as a text file or RTF file instead of a Word document, that would eliminate 90 percent of my Microsoft application usage (and, not coincidently, crashes) right there.

I had the opportunity to try out the Apple Store last night, and I'm giving a thumbs-up to most of it. The build-to-order section was simple, and in fact, everything was a cakewalk except for the Apple Loan part (which is actually handled by a separate financial services company). Fortunately, Apple also maintains a 24 hour order center (in Sacramento, California if anyone's interested), and a quick call to them solved my problem. I highly recommend the built-to-order process as a way to configure your own system to your specifications. If you can get an educational discount at the same time, so much the better.

I've finished playing with the PowerOn Software's Now Up-to-Date & Contact 3.8. Ultimately, though it adds a few neat features, I didn't find it compelling enough to switch from Claris Organizer 2.2 which Palm offers for free.

April 10, 2000
Apple announced yesterday at the National Association of Broadcasters convention (1) Final Cut Pro 1.2.5, (2) a bunch of Mac-specific DV items from Matrox and Pinnacle, and (3) the acquisition of Astarte's DVD group.

The Web Standards Project loudly condemned Microsoft's new version of Internet Explorer for breaking with open internet standards and pushing proprietary Microsoft-controlled solutions. For those Microsoft apologists who believe the technology sector changes too rapidly for a breakup to be warranted in the Justice Department v. Microsoft case, guess who is making a bid here and now to control the Internet thanks to their monopolist tactics? This ought to be all the proof a person needs.

April 6, 2000
Dave and I attended the Macintosh Business Expo in Portland and while there wasn't much in the way of earthshaking news, we did get a chance to learn a few things and play with some neat toys. Here's a rundown in no particular order:

• PowerOn Software announced the world-release of Now Up-to-Date & Contact version 3.9 at the Expo. This version adds Palm Pilot synchronization support. I'll be installing a demo and trying it out over the course of the next few days.

• For the keynote, Andrew Baum, Apple's Product Marketing Manager for Final Cut Pro, gave a rather nervous and very truncated version of the same Final Cut Pro speech Dave and I saw a few months ago at the Corvallis Mac Users Group. Only real news this time around was that Apple has a big announcement planned for the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) meeting next week and that it probably includes Final Cut Pro being able to do real-time effects. (Rumors today on the net say that this is accomplished via a special PCI video card.) Baum also said that a special Final Cut Pro keyboard would be introduced next week. Like most of the audience, I wasn't really sure what that meant.

• Fritz Ogden of Apple Small Business Group talked about various Apple small business solutions. One neat one was eFax.com, a free fax receiving service. From the sounds of it, Apple is finally making something of a push into the small business space, and if that's not long-overdue, I don't know what is.

• John Cambra, Senior System Engineer at Apple, gave a very impressive demonstration and overview of Apple's Airport technology. The entire Expo was networked wirelessly, so it was hard not to be impressed. Those little $99 network cards are amazing. Pop one in a G4, and you don't even need a base station for other Airport-infused Macs to connect. The Mac Gaming Pavilion in the Expo hall featured 10-12 Macs playing Quake III via Airport as well. Very cool stuff.

• Dave and I played with Wacom's graphic tablets for about an hour. I don't see how an artist could work without one, frankly. They are simply quite impressive. If I thought of myself as more of a graphic artist, I would buy one immediately. (I don't, so it's probably not something that will ever show up on my "to buy" list.)

• The Expo area seemed a little less boisterous compared to last year, though it gave me some good chances to play around on the Pismo PowerBooks in the Apple area. The keyboard is better than I'd hoped, and the screen seems adequate, though only at the highest resolution. This should be less of a problem if I regularly use it to drive my 19" monitor.

Speaking of Pismo, I downloaded the Apple Service documents to the machine this evening and looked through them. Wonderfully constructed machine. I sure wish I could figure out which model to buy.

April 5, 2000
Little more info is now out on the MacOS 9.04 upgrade which Apple says "provides additional FireWire and USB support, enhances networking and power management, and improves audio, video and graphics functionality." Free update for MacOS 9 owners.

Apple signed a deal with Kanisa to have them provide automated customer support services. No idea yet what this involves, but one is hopeful that it ultimately provides consumer benefits.

Apple released QuickTime 4.1.1 today, a free update which offers additional FireWire DV camera support. Apple also announced 10 new QuickTime TV channels. Additionally, Apple released DVD Player 2.2, which early reports indicate improve software-based DVD encoding.

Tomorrow, Apple and The Computer Store hold a Macintosh Business Expo in Portland at the Oregon Convention Center.

April 4, 2000
Apple released the MacOS 9.04 bug-fix update today. No word yet on exact benefits, but the DVD audio sync problem is rumored to be squashed.

SoundJam MP is updated to 2.0, a free update for previous owners. What a great MP3 player and encoder! (A free 2.0 MP3 player-only version is available for free.)

TechTool Pro, my main Mac diagnostic and repair tool, received an update today to version 2.5.4. This update includes several improved fix-it routines and it compatible with MacOS 9.04.

Microsoft, aka the slime of American business, was found guilty, guilty, guilty yesterday, opening the flood gates for dozens of lawsuits. Couldn't happen to nicer people.

April 2, 2000
The Macintosh Business Expo returns to Portland this Thursday, April 6. Like last year, Dave and I will be driving up to see what we see and eat lunch at Burgerville. Personally, I hope I can get in a little time on a Pismo PowerBook, so I can start thinking about what accessories I might need, etc.

The latest MacOS update, 9.04, is rumored to be out any day now, but the most recent word is that the release has been pushed back slightly by a bug in the updated ethernet driver. Reportedly, MacOS 9.1 is in alpha and should be released late summer.

The Department of Justice v. Microsoft mediation talks have broken off the judge's decision will be handed out later today. The penalty phase, if any, is still to follow.

March 7, 2000
Here's a sample Flash movie I created using Adobe LiveMotion. It's nothing spectacular—for the most part it's just a rip-off of a tutorial file—but it's pretty impressive what you can do with only 4k. [Note that you must have the Flash plug-in installed in order for your browser to run the Flash movie.] I think I'll need to learn this program.

March 6, 2000
This morning Adobe Systems, Inc. released their "Flash killer" application, Adobe LiveMotion. I've downloaded the beta, and I'll be playing with it over the course of several days. I will say that screen shots from the Adobe web site look promising, but they better: The program will have a street price of $400.

[As a side note, this was perhaps the fastest download I've ever had. I got sustained rates of over 165K/sec. That translates to move over 15 MB of material over the Internet and into my computer in just over 90 seconds. Smokin'.]

February 22, 2000
So Microsoft finally launched the 30+ million lines of new code that is Windows 2000 last week in the expected overly-hyped fashion. They rented out a pavillion, trotted out Bill Gates and a couple celebrities, and proceeded to bore even the heartiest of journalists to tears. You think I'm kidding, right? Well, check out the very funny piece by MacWorld's Philip Michael entitled "Windows 2000, Michaels Nothing." Here's a teaser:

You can argue many things about Bill Gates -- his business savvy, his strategic decisions, his place in the pantheon of high-tech innovators. And you could probably come up with dozens of different views of the man, all equally sound and supported by logic. But one fact about Gates cannot be disputed: The man's speeches could one day replace general anesthesia.

Of course, that's a Macintosh journalist's view of things. What does a more impartial observer have to say? Here's an excerpt from Wired's Win2K Launch Fall Flat:

Wringing his hands like a Dickensian schoolmaster, Gates was his normal, humorless self. He followed the script and managed to sabotage the feeble jokes with an unerring lack of timing.

The endless show chiefly consisted of benchmarks casting the new operating system in a glowing light. Some of the more technical journalists in the audience afterwards claimed some of the benchmarks to be highly suspect.

About an hour in, many of the reporters sitting in the front rows had run out of steam. Most had stopped writing, some were fidgeting with their watches and one had her head in her hands.

The highlight of the show was seeing the Microsoft cheerleaders miss their cues.

If nothing else, you've got to give Apple and Steve Jobs in particular their props for running a good show—especially compared to this.

February 15, 2000
Apple does it again, this time at MacWorld Tokyo. Among the announcements and noteworthy comments:

• Speed bumps to the Power Mac G4 line. The three configurations will now be 400-, 450-, and 500-MHz and all price points remain the same ($1599, $2499, and $3499).
• Velocity Engine-based Photoshop tests show the G4 running 50 percent faster than an 800-MHz Pentium III on those specific tests.
• The iBook line—the best selling consumer portable ever—was revised to offer twice the hard drive space (6 GB) and twice the RAM (64 MB) at the same price ($1599).
• Apple introduced the iBook SE, a graphite iBook with a faster processor (366-MHz G3 vs. the standard 300-MHz G3) priced at $1799.
• The biggest item was undoubtedly the long-awaited "Pismo" PowerBooks. Clocking in at 400- and 500-MHz, the G3-based portables come with two built-in FireWire ports, two USB ports, and 64 MB of RAM. Significantly, both models are AirPort-ready, use an ATI RAGE Mobility graphic controller featuring AGP 2x, have a 1 MB L2 cache, and sport VGA and S-video ports. Additionally, the machines, which retain the same beautiful case as the previous "Bronze Keyboard" models (thank you, Steve!), have a 6x DVD-ROM, 56k modem, 10/100 BASE-T ethernet, and 14.1" active matrix display. Weight: 5.7 lbs with battery; 6.1 lbs with DVD-ROM and battery. Pricing starts at $2499.
• Apple announced the forth-coming MacOS X would ship with high quality Japanese Fonts and an expended character set of 17,000 characters in six typefaces. This is a clear marketing advantage for Apple, since having kanji characters available in the system will by an obvious boon for professional publishing in Japan.
• Apple also revved its Mac OS X Servers.

All-in-all a very impressive announcement list, particularly for a foreign market. Apple's Japan marketshare is substantial, though, so Jobs and co. might have seen MacWorld Tokyo as a prime opportunity to further ignite the Japanese market. I'll bet it doesn't hurt.

February 14, 2000
The lovely news out of Redmond is that Windows 2000, the long-delayed replacement for Windows NT 4.0 will finally be shipping this Thursday. The kicker? According to an internal Microsoft memo, the operating system comes with 63,000 bugs. Of these, only 28,000 are "real problems" according to the memo. (Whew. What a relief.) Any company who upgrades to this prior to a service pack update from Microsoft is nuts in my book. (Of course, they may be nuts in my book anyway.)

February 10, 2000
Last night's Corvallis Macintosh Users Group (CMUG) meeting featured a demo of Apple's Final Cut Pro 1.2 by Andrew Baum, the product manager. Final Cut Pro is sort of like a great version of Adobe Premiere with elements of Adobe After Effects thrown in for good measure. It can't really compete with After Effects when it comes to compositing, but it does look to replace Premiere pretty much wholesale. Since you can read about the features of the program in other places, I'll skip most of the presentation and dish the gossip:

1. Final Cut Pro and iMovie, though similar in nature and developed by the same engineering group, are not code-related. They are entirely separate products, despite what some in the Mac rumor-mongering business have speculated.
2. Final Cut Pro's problems in running on iMac DVs are not intentially. Baum said that Apple wants Final Cut Pro to run on as many machines as possible. He said to expect a fix shortly.
3. Baum refused point-blank to say whether Final Cut Pro had been "carbonized" for MacOS X, insisting that he could say nothing relating to MacOS X. The best he could do is tell me not to worry about and that all would be taken care of. I took this to mean that the program would ultimately be transformed to take advantages of MacOS X but not right away.

February 8, 2000
I've been trying out an Aqua-like theme on my Mac for the last day or so. Because Aqua will be the design style of MacOS X, I wanted to get a feel for it and make an early determination on whether or not some of the new interface elements will be problematic.

Bearing in mind that this Aqua-like theme is not a full implementation of what's to come, here are my impressions: First, it's a strikingly pretty, perhaps even too much so initially. The candy-like appearance of buttons and sliders and such can be distracting in the sense that they're really fun to look at. Second, the stoplight close, minimize, expand buttons are proving pretty easy to get used to. Despite their relatively close placement, I've not yet inadvertently clicked the wrong one. Third, the gel-cap sliders and "ok" buttons are fine, though I will note that there is no pulsing of the default button in this Aqua theme like there will be in the real version. Finally, there is no dock in this Aqua theme, so I have no idea what that will be like.

In summary, I think that the basics of Aqua in MacOS X will prove to be a visually appealing improvement over the current Apple Platinum theme. I remain somewhat concerned about other interface elements (like the dock), but I'm willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt even with the screwed up interfaces of QuickTime 4 and Sherlock 2. MacOS X ships this summer, so we'll know soon enough if I'm right to do so.

February 6, 2000
The latest version of my favorite web browser, iCab, was released today. Now up to preview version 1.9, iCab adds full plug-in support and rudimentary JavaScript into an already terrific browser. In my tests this morning, the plug-ins that I copied over from my Navigator folder worked great. No problems with QuickTime, PDF, Flash or Shockwave. Note, however, that the plug-ins folder itself has to be in the iCab folder and it has to be named "plug-ins" not "Plug-ins" (with a capital "P") as the documentation calls for.

The JavaScript solution (called "InScript") is fairly unreliable according to the documentation, so I didn't bother with it. Just knowing that they're working on it and making progress is heartening, though. After that, only Cascading Style Sheets will remain and iCab will be my full-time web browser of choice. It's already so much better than Navigator and Explorer that it's silly; it's just missing a couple of essentials. Those are on the way.

I've played around a little with the Unreal Tournament demo. The system requires are whopping (recommended: 96 MB of RAM!), but it's a lot of fun. Very pretty game, too. Don't know about network play, but just going against the bots is a pretty good time.

January 28, 2000
Apple's iBook continues to do very well in the marketplace. Latest data show it the number one selling portable over the Christmas season. The iBook and PowerBook combined give Apple a greater than 10 percent share of the overall portable market.

I downloaded the free Tomb Raider II Gold levels recently and played through them. Some neat stuff (and dig the price). Overall, though, I'd say that the game was hampered by the lack of a detailed storyline (unlike regular Tomb Raider II). It didn't help that their were no cut scenes or movies in the mix either. Nonetheless, if you're a Mac Tomb Raider II player. Go for the Gold! The price is definitely right, and the Tomb Raider series continues to garner my recommendation as a fantastic single player game. (And for all the latest, see TombRaiders.com.)

January 19, 2000
Apple announced its quarterly results today of $183 million in profit on revenues of $2.34 billion. Apple shipped 1.377 million computers in the quarter, about 350,000 of which were Power Mac G4s. That's more computers than Apple has ever shipped in a quarter. Financials were, obviously, excellent.

Apple also posted QuickTime 4.1, a rather marginal upgrade to the excellent QuickTime 4.0 technology. If you're behind a firewall, 4.1 will help, otherwise feel free to stick with 4.0.

I've been playing a little bit with the demo of Unreal Tournament, a breathtakingly pretty first-person shooter in the Quake mold. It's truly beautiful to see and the game play in the deathmatches is at least as good as Quake's. (QuakeWorld is a better multiplayer game, though.) The down side is that the system requirements are unholy. I'm allocating 80 MB of RAM to it (which is all I have) and still getting memory-related warnings on bootup. My friend Dave allocates 130+ MB RAM. And don't even bother unless you've got a really fast video card. (My new Rage Orion handles it just fine, I'm happy to report.)

I've now converted a number of my favorite songs from my CDs to MP3 format. Sound Jam MP allows me to now shuffle these MP3s, so it's like listening to the world's greatest radio station because there's no talk and every song is a favorite. Special thanks to Joe for mentioning early on how cool MP3s were. Sorry I didn't listen to you sooner!

January 14, 2000
Some of my purchases from the recent MacWorld have started to arrive via UPS, so I've got a couple item updates on stuff fellow Mac-o-philes might find fun, interesting, or useful.

First is Sound Jam MP, an MP3 encoder/decoder. Despite all the hype, I'd not experimented with MP3s before, and I confess to being amazed. A 40 MB aiff file (which is essential a digital sample off a CD) can be compressed using MP3 format down to about 4 MB, and so far as I can tell it loses none of its sound quality. MP3s can be streamed too.

Sound Jam MP allows one to build up a catalogue of MP3 files and operate sort of a personalized jukebox. Just insert a CD, convert whichever songs you want to MP3, and then you can add them to your playlist. (You can have as many different playlists as you like.)

Sound Jam MP also offers a wide variety of "skins," customized interfaces, which users can try out. (This isn't any big deal to me, but some younger, hipper folks probably find it compelling.)

Finally, there are a lot of MP3 sites on the web, some of which broadcast MP3 files in a streaming format. I assume this requires a faster internet connection (ISDN or better), but the sound quality is outrageously good. I listened to a streaming MP3 site last night, and I'd swear that the quality was better than FM radio.

Another of my purchases at MacWorld was a reduced price package of Quicken 2000 Deluxe, MacInTax, and MacInTax State. I installed Quicken 2000 Deluxe this evening, and let me just say that as much as I love Quicken as a program, this was the most problematic upgrade I've had in years. I had to fiddle like crazy to get the program to accept my old Quicken data file without crashing, and even now I'm not fully convinced everything is a-okay. Quicken 98 is going to stick around for awhile on my hard drive just in case.

And I should also note that Intuit has once again stuck Mac users with a really marginal upgrade. If you're using Quicken 98 successfully, think twice about updating. The navigation system in 2000 is a little better than 98, there's a sort of financial snapshot "Insights" page that's cool, and stock quotes can now be downloaded for the last five years. If you don't need any of those things, stick with the Quicken you've got. Heck, even if you do need those things, I'd probably recommended waiting until Intuit patches 2000 past the current revision 2 that they're on. Right now r2 seems buggy as all-get-out.

January 12, 2000
Stats are in from the recent MacWorld SF 2000: An all-time attendence record of 85,179! That's a 23 percent increase from last year, and a big jump from the previous record of 76,000 set in 1997. Here's a neat quote from the Yahoo! Business Wire:

``By all accounts this was the biggest and best MacWorld Expo of all-time,'' said Nicole Derany, Show Director. ``In addition to the new attendance record, many exhibitors told us they sold more software and hardware and generated more sales leads than at any previous MacWorld Expo.''

It's also worth noting that it was a whole heckuva lot of fun, too. I'm sure planning to be there next year as well.

January 11, 2000
I'm sorry to say that I appear to have suffered a massive brain cramp: the PMUG swap meet was last night, not tonight as I thought. Apologies (again) to Dennis who was left wondering for a time if I'd died a fiery death on I-5 or if I was just an absent-minded moron. Moron, it is!

Dennis, who didn't forget about the event and who did get the day right, offered this report:

To tell the truth, I wasn't impressed with it. But then, I went with one goal in mind, Ethernet stuff, and nothing else. Good news, and an inexpensive part came out of it.

First...I do have an ethernet card installed already. So, all I had to do is buy a cable adapter ($5). Even if it doesn't work, it's only $5. And if it works, perfect, a TON less than the $90 I was quoted at The Computer Store.

Second...The only other item of interest to me was a used Zip drive. $50 from the PMUG table, but I passed on it. I didn't want one that bad. I didn't see anything else that really looked that nice. Lots of old equipment, and not much software. Good turnout though. Shoulder room packed with people.

I did almost buy an old computer for my mother. I figured the low prices for an old Quadra 950 ($25) and what a monitor may cost (didn't get a price) and she could be back on the internet. In the end I didn't do it.

That Quadra might have a perfect upgrade for our aging Mac IIci, so all I can do is kick myself once more for missing the meet. Oh well, next time.

January 10, 2000
Reports continue to filter through about various bugs and items that need fixing with MacOS 9. Although I long for the much-improved Sherlock 2, I'm still in "wait" mode for a little while longer. (I'll also need to add another 64 MB of RAM, so that's a consideration too.)

Tomorrow is the Portland Macintosh Users Group swap meet, an event which held several great deals last time around. Never can tell what you'll find, so best to go with an open mind and a ready checkbook. (Last time I picked up QuickBooks Pro 4 for $2, an ethernet card for $20, and a 10BaseT ethernet hub for $15.) This time around, I'm hoping to find a good deal on an internal 24x CD-ROM drive. There was one at MacWorld for $69 + tax, but I'm hoping I can do better.

January 9, 2000—MacWorld SF 2000
This was my first MacWorld and oh what an event it was! I've been to 2 or 3 Seybolds, and this was only slightly smaller. I'd be surprised if this year's MW didn't top the 76,000 all-time attendance record for the event. (All the exhibitors I talked to were very positive and enthusiastic about this MacWorld as well.) All that hype aside here's my informal and rambling comments and observations:

• Apple sold 1.35 million Macs last quarter, a record for the company. Of the iMacs and iBooks sold (which accounts for most of that number), between 30-40 percent were to either Wintel converts or first-time computer buyers. Because these people tend to by more software (since they don't have any Mac software already), this is a crucial number for software developers.
• Apple announced MacOS X, which will be available to the retail customer in the summer. There are some human interface quirks, but on the whole this looks to be an amazing operating system.
• QuickTime 4.1 will ship in a few weeks. It adds increased MP3 and firewall support.
• AppleWorks 6 is shipping immediately. It offers about 100 new features (no email client, though), making it a compelling (and in the case of iMacs and iBooks free) alternative to shelling out $500 for Microsoft Office 98.
• The revamping of Apple.com was overdue. The MacOS 9-branded iTools—particularly iDisk—should boost MacOS 9 sales considerably, though they've already got 1 million copies out there. iDisk, a "virtual" 20 MB hard drive hosted on Apple's servers, eliminates the needs for floppies and should prove to be an excellent collaborative device. The drag and drop nature of the thing was particularly impressive.
• MicroMat announced TechTool Pro 3 (shipping in a few months) which will add antivirus support and an all-new interface. It will be a total rewrite of the current utility.
• I spoke Intuit's Product Manager for Quicken 2000. The lack of parity between the PC and Mac versions of Quicken should decline over time as more of the product's feature set becomes web-based. Quicken 2000 looks to be a pretty marginal upgrade in my opinion, but the ability to download 5 years worth of quotes for a stock or mutual fund should prove compelling for any long-term investors out there. There are also interface enhancements which I consider rather ho-hum, but Intuit was touting them highly so perhaps there's more than meets the eye.
• Mark of the Unicorn's Digital Performer 2.7 is an astounding piece of audio recording/MIDI software, and if it didn't cost around $900 I'd already own a copy. Maybe someday....
• The National Macintosh Gaming Championship was held at MacWorld, and there are some darn fine gamers out there. I saw a few guys who were clearly "in the zone" when it came to first-person shooters. Didn't really hang out in the gaming area much, but I saw enough to know that I wouldn't win any prizes by entering the competitions.
• Speaking of games, Madden 2000 looked great. Tomb Raider III was very nice. Quake III Arena kicked, as expected. Unreal Tournament looked very good as well. Lots of big name games on the Mac nowadays.

All of the above really only scratches the surface. There were great deals (I bought Quicken 2000 Deluxe, MacInTax Deluxe, MacInTax Deluxe State, QuickKeys, and Sound Jam MP), celebrity sitings (Sinbad, Gregory Hines, John DeLancie ("Q" from Star Trek)), and lots of fun amid the chaos. Definitely worth the trip—I'm already planning on going again next year.

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