Jaques Law Bits 9609 (© Kevin Jaques 1996) ©(c)1996 Kevin Jaques. All rights reserved excepting that this file may be copied for non-commercial purposes, unchanged. No warranties apply. I am just a user volunteering my observations and collecting those of others. €Note about this issue Sadly, it is more (MUCH!) than 32k. Consequently, it cannot be opened by SimpleText as an editable document. So I saved it as a read­only document. To copy stuff, you must change its file type to TTXT or some other text format which can be read by another text editor you may possess. BBEdit Lite is a good choice. Or, just open it with a more fancy word processor and the file type won't matter. ClarisWorks will suffice. €Web Search Tip Find all the links to your own web page. Search Alta Vista for "Links:[your web address]" €Can't Wait for Star Wars Movies! About three months ago I went to a user invitational weekend sponsored by Electric Image, Inc, the 3D graphics software company. One of the keynote speakers at the event was John Knoll, visual effects guru at Industrial Light & Magic, and writer of a huge portion of Adobe Photoshop. One of the things he showed us was work that he had done on the upcoming Star Wars Special Edition release. (For those of you who haven't heard, in February 1997 Star Wars will be re-released with all new special effects, done the was George Lucas envisioned them in 1977 but was unable to due to a lack of technology. The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi will follow soon after.) In a nutshell, any time you see a space ship in that movie it was done in Electric Image on a PowerMac 8100. Not a whole lab full of Macs, mind you, ONE single 8100. The shots were, to say the least, breathtaking. Many of these shots can be seen in the trailer for the movie, which is available in Quicktime format at . It's a 6 meg download, but WELL worth the time. (Buck) [editor's note - wasn't thx1138 the name of Lucas' first movie? Self promotion? Fanatic?] €Microsoft Office Tips When installing, even if you don't want Word, be sure to select the OnLine Help for Word, since the help for all the other components uses it. Watch out. It might install an old Shared Library Mgr, which has been replaced by a newer version with a minor name change, €Netscape Tip from the Editor I had started a long download. As I often do, I accidentally switched the page to another site. The download stopped. No warning, just stopped. The bytes/sec gradually lowered. I feared I had to start over. I navigated back to the page from which I started the download. I was just about to cancel the download in order to start it again, when I saw it flicker. Yes, when I returned to the proper page, it resumed! €OpenDoc News SpyGlass, developer of Mosaic, in 9604, announced it would make its Web Technology Kit available as a collection of OpenDoc parts. In 9605, Netscape announced it would make its Browser OpenDoc compliant. Later, Apple announced that Netscape would make an OpenDoc part, which Apple would use in Cyberdog, instead of its own. ClarisWorks 5.0 will be an OpenDoc container. €Adobe Type Manager to Manage Type Now there¹s news! Previously, it did font rasterizing and substitution. Now it will manage the installation and use, much like Suitcase. Better than Suitcase, if you open a document calling for inactive fonts, it will activate them, then later deactivate them when you close the document. http://www.adobe.com €PPCP News Apple is licensing Tanzania, an entry-level motherboard design, which will fit into standardized LPX enclosures. It will run ATAPI CD ROM drives, IDE drives, PS/2 keyboards & Mice, ATI graphics controllers, etc. It will support 603e and 604e processors at up to 200 mhz. An IBM prototype called Moccasin ran a 133 mhz 604 was demonstrated in August. It ran an unreleased version of 7.5.3 (³Bloom County²) and Windows NT. It used a standard Intel keyboard and 2-button mouse and offered a choice of operating systems on start up. The PowerPC partners will now offer certification provided that any two operating systems run on a desktop model, or any one on a server model. IBM is offering Long Trail, a prototype motherboard. It allows developers to choose between the processor daughterboard used on many PCI power macs, and the pin-grid array style used on many Intel clones. It offers both PC and Mac I/O. Previous prototypes used different cards for that. €Now Utilities 6.5 out It always included a Startup Manager. But now, that aspect is improved so greatly it is also available separately. Not only is it aware of more types of system stuff, it includes a drop­in database of what the stuff is for, what it is part of, what it conflicts with, etc. Further, you can regularly update that database on line. There are some improvements to old aspects, and some new ones, like Now Tabs (view windows as snap-up tabs on the bottom of the screen), Now ShortCuts, and Now Mail. Now Utilities includes absolutely great interface additions, but is greatly suspect in reduced system stability. http://www.nowsoft.com €ARA & OT go PPP ASAP Can¹t beat that MacUser title. Yes, OpenTransport 1.1.1 will add a Point To Point Protocol module that looks like the current ARA client software. . AppleTalk Remote Access 2.1 will add CCL files for ISDN and high speed modems. Then, OpenTransport 1.5 will permit AppleTalk over PPP, full scripting, multihoming and multinode support. Then, ARA 3.0 will include client software supporting AppleTalk and TCP/IP over PPP. AppleShare's new version, FutureShare, will use HTTP, SMTP, PPP3, and FTP, and deliver its AFP onto TCP/IP networks. It will be fully native. Get it? €Neat Feature on Apple¹s Network Administrator Toolkit You can see 4 tiles in a montage. Each tile represents the screen of a computer on the network. You can zoom in to see exactly what is on the screen. Needs Ethernet. €Another AudioConferencing Tool Maven can be coupled with CUSeeMe (freeware video conferencing). It needs an Internet connection, at least 4 mb Ram, System 7, and at least 14.4 kbps, and both parties must be using Maven. €Apple's 2d Quarter Filing with Securities Exchange Commission Apple predicts more losses, sluggish sales, and no dividends for the foreseeable future. The recall and repair program for Performas and Powerbooks cost $60 million. There is a $369 million backlog of orders, $145 million of which is due to the said program. Yikes. €MacUser loves Power Computing Power Towers The 604e chip is way faster than the Pentium, but comparable to the Pentium Pro (the Sextium? the 686?). However, no 200 mhz Pentium Pros have shipped. Power Computing is shipping the Power Tower 225 at, well, 225 mhz. It crushes Apple's top of the line, the 9500, earning a 5 mouse rating. It was 61% faster in the processor test, nearly 100% faster in the Disk Mix, 34% on the Publishing Disk Mix (very significant since it measures raw data throughput). When they used the optional RAID drive, it was better at a 2.5:1 ratio in the Disk Mix and 100% better in the Publishing Disk Mix. They come with a IMS Twin Turbo accelerated graphics adaptor, leading to scores 3 to 4 times as good as Apple's. The CD performance was 7.5 times faster than Apple's (confusingly, because they use an 8x, and Apple uses a 4x). It has twice the L2 cache, and four times as much VRAM, and bundled software. Now Power has gone to the same 60 mhz Tsunami motherboard as the 9500. The new 604e chip can run up to six times the speed of the bus. They have it set to 5 times and run the bus at 45 mhz. MacUser even loved the internal arrangement, bragging they installed Ram in less than one minute. €Stuffit Deluxe 4.0 is out It adds formats (ARC, tar, UUencode, Binhex (hqx). Magic Menu will call up your emailer with a new message ready to send the attachments you had selected in the Finder. The engine is faster, and it claims to be smarter. It offers what it calls True Finder Integration. Previously, you would open an archive, Stuffit would run and show a Window listing the files. You could drag stuff back and forth between it and the Finder. Now it opens (fast) as a Finder Window. http://www.aladdinsys.com €QuickTime (v.2.5) starts to make sense to me I have been puzzled since QuickTime's introduction by the emphasis Apple seemed to place upon it. It is now fairly well accepted on both major systems. Of course, it plays movies. Now, it is available as a plug­in for Netscape. HTML tags can be embedded, to control, or permit the user to control, the playback of movies, or background music. It now does MPEG compression without special hardware. It is multi-processor capable. It includes support for QuickTime VR (Virtual Reality). Apple says that hyper-links will be embeddable in such virtual tours, in the future. It's MIDI music track's instrument specs are now published. Expect lots of high quality instruments. It can even control and play external (physical) instruments. MIDI files are tiny (compare it to downloading a score, rather than a symphony). It supports QuickTime 3D, so the author (or the user!) can resize, edit, move, turn shapes, without affecting the rest of the movie. There is other fancy stuff, such as the ability to make it play back the same movie using different frame rates (e.g., NTSC & PAL can be recognized, and video (30 fps) can be translated to film (24 fps). Synchronization is improved. Photoshop compression is improved. Text tracks are more flexible. It will be the operating system for digital cameras. Aha! It should widely become the standard for web advertising. The Browsers will be free, but Apple will charge heavily for the designers. Nope. Still puzzled. The basic unit includes authoring. €MPEG v. Cinepak Most QuickTime movies on CDRoms use Cinepak video compression. It is capable of 30 frames per second. MacUser says MPEG "uses the keyframes at the start and end of a sequence -- where there is the least motion -- and discards the frames in between. When the sequence is played back, MPEG interpolates between the two keyframes, so the movie plays at the correct length." Still, it supposedly delivers better quality, roughly equivalent to VHS tapes. MPeg traditionally relied on hardware to do the compression, and different cards had different 'flavours'. QuickTime 2.5 recognizes two common flavours. €QuickTime v. ActiveMovie Microsoft's Video for Windows (VfW) didn't do so well. But they have (pre)announced ActiveMovie, which is much like QuickTime in most respects. QuickTime offers FastStart. It starts the download, measures the speed, then starts the movie at such a time that it should be able to complete the download at the same time as the movie is done. In fact, it makes little difference over a normal (slow) connection. Microsoft's approach to fast starting movies might be better, if more demanding. If the download can't keep up, it sends a message upstream to scale down the quality to increase the speed. Microsoft doesn't support all the data types QuickTime does. Text, sprite, MIDI, 3-D and others would be lost. QuickTime doesn't open AVI files (Windows video format). (The only two workarounds are to drag the AVI file onto Microsoft Explorer, or use Microsoft's VfW 1.1 Utilities.) Microsoft charges extra for authoring capability. Duh. €Hypercard The new Hypercard will be QuickTime based. The cards will be like frames. So, you can use Hypertalk to move between frames and add buttons and fields to frames. Wow, truly interactive movies! It will be native Power PC and will "implement modern programming techniques". But, but, but! I love the language! Its the printing and the lack of indexing I hate about Hypercard. €Company info on the Net Try http://www.[company name].com, or just http://[company name].com or email to info@[company name].com. Hoover's Profiles (http://www.hoovers.com) lists company contact info, financial data, number of employee's, name of CEO, SED filings, stock quotes, and charts. The US Securities Exchange Commission is at http://www.sec.gov/edgarhp.htm €Create a removable System Disk It is bad to have two system folders mounted. It is hard to make a system on a floppy. It is bad to not have a back up system. So put it on removable media, with all appropriate disk repair and maintenance software. When starting, hold Delete-Option-Command-Shift (Mnemonic=DOCS). €More Ways to check if software is native PowerPeek flashes a red or green light to tell you on the fly. http://www.zdnet.com/macuser/software/ [search for it by name] €Microsoft Annoying re AppleScript Microsoft in their infinite wisdom and to maintain compatibility with Visual Basic has written their own syntax within their application suite. you have to use something like tell app "Microsoft Word" Do Script {WordDocument.Append "Test text"} end tell Joe Banko €Batch processing with AppleScript If you have System 7.5 installed, and all the files are inside the same folder, you can do it with a couple of lines of AppleScript code using the Scriptable Finder. set sourceFolder to choose folder with prompt "Where are the files" tell app "Finder" set the creator type of every file in sourceFolder to "ttxt" set the file type of every file in sourceFolder to "PICT" end If the files are contained in sub-folders inside a single folder you could use set sourceFolder to choose folder with prompt "Where are the files" tell app "Finder" set the creator type of every file in entire contents of sourceFolder to "ttxt" set the file type of every file in entire contents of sourceFolder to "ttxt" end If the files are mixed in with other files, but they all have the same file type, you could use set sourceFolder to choose folder with prompt "Where are the files" tell app "Finder" set the creator type of every file in sourceFolder whose file type is "????" to "ttxt" set the file type of every file in sourceFolder whose file type is "????" to "ttxt" end Andy Bachorski - Apple Developer Technical Support €Trial Web Authoring - Claris Home Page Claris Home Page Trial Software is available. If you are interested in seeing for yourself that Claris Home Page allows you to create dynamic web pages in minutes, you can download the 30-day time limited trial version at http://www2.claris.com/forms/homepagedownload.html. €How to Submit Files to Gaea email the binhex file directly to Fred Terry, Webmaster Alta Group http://members.aol.com/pfterry pfterry@altagroup.com http://www.altagroup.com 913.838.0115 The current information about contributing files and the MacScripting, Nisus, and QuicKeys mailing lists are rather lost at . €Motorola's Mac Clones now out! Motorola Computer Group (MCG) recently unveiled its new StarMax family of PowerPC processor-based, Mac OS-compatible systems. In February, MCG announced its broad licensing agreement with Apple Computer. This agreement allows Motorola to sell, support, and service Mac OS (versions System 7.5.x and the next major Mac OS release), PowerPC platform desktop systems under the Motorola brand name. As Apple's first licensee to be granted sublicensing rights, Motorola may also sublicense Mac OS main logic boards and private label systems to the OEM marketplace. The StarMax family consists of an entry-level 3000 series and high-performance 4000 series. The 3000 series uses 160-MHz and 200-MHz versions of the PowerPC 603e; these models ship with 256K level 2 cache, 16 MB of memory (32 MB in minitower configurations), a Motorola 28.8 data/fax modem, and a software bundle that includes Internet connectivity, office productivity and financial applications, system utilities, and additional CD titles. The 4000 series incorporates 160-MHz and 200-MHz versions of the PowerPC 604e chip; these models include 512K level 2 cache, 2 MB of video EDO DRAM, 16 MB of memory (32 MB in minitower configurations), and three PCI expansion slots (five PCI slots in minitower configurations). All StarMax 3000 and 4000 systems are equipped with multimedia features, including an 8x CD-ROM with 16-bit stereo sound, in addition to a keyboard and mouse. The StarMax line also carries a five-year warranty, the most comprehensive warranty plan. Motorola estimates that prices will range from $1,595 to $2,395 for the StarMax 3000 series and $2,395 to $3,595 for the StarMax 4000 series (prices U.S. only). Availability is expected within 45 days in the United States and by late 1996 in other parts of the world. For more information about MCG and the StarMax family, see the Motorola Web site: http://www.mot.com/GSS/MCG/products/systems/ €Apple Updates Mac OS to System 7.5.5, Explains Numbering Strategy for New System Releases Apple recently released System 7.5.5 Update, a set of system software enhancements that significantly improves the overall reliability and performance of all Mac OS-compatible systems. It provides one update for all computer systems currently running System 7.5.3 and integrates all improvements found in the System 7.5.3 Revision 2 update, released last June. System 7.5.5 includes numerous performance, reliability, and network improvements. It is also the final system software release for the Macintosh Plus, SE, Classic, Portable, SE FDHD, SE/30, LC, II, IIx, and IIcx, and the PowerBook 100. Future Mac OS releases will require 68030-, 68040-, or PowerPC processor-based systems that support 32-bit memory addressing (which includes all Macintosh models except the ones listed above). In response to customer feedback, Apple has standardized how the version number will change for future system software releases. If major architectural changes are being delivered, the first digit of the version number will be incremented. If new features are added to a system software reference release without major architectural changes, the second digit will be incremented. When system software updates are delivered with only reliability and performance improvements, the third digit will be incremented. System 7.5.4 Update was not made available to the general public due to a problem with the software. For more details on System 7.5.5 Update and the improvements it delivers, see the press release on the following Web page: http://product.info.apple.com/pr/product.updates/1996/q4/960919.prd.up.sys7 .5.5.html €Beta version of Open Transport 1.1.1 The current version is 1.1. This will also include the first public beta release of Open Transport/PPP. For more details on this software, or to download either software package, click the What's New button on the Open Transport Web page: http://devworld.apple.com/dev/opentransport/ €Free Mac Unix? Apple has just released Developer Release 2 of MkLinux (a version of the Linux implementation of UNIX for PowerPC processor-based Mac OS-compatible computers). You can obtain the software free of charge at the Apple MkLinux Web site: http://www.mklinux.apple.com/ €Metrowerks Code Warrior Gold 10 Metrowerks just announced that it has shipped its new CodeWarrior Gold 10 software development product. Among its improvements are an improved look-and-feel, better Java support, and a direct-to-SOM compiler. For more information, go to the following Web page (which is a part of Metrowerks' Web site): http://www.metrowerks.com/products/announce/cw10.html €Applescript OSAX for string formatting I recently got frustrated with the lack of string formatting ability in AppleScript and made the mistake of complaining about this to Andy Bachorski. His reply was for me to stop whining, get off my butt and fix it. SoŠ I did. I wrote an OSAX for printf that formats strings. If anyone in interested in it or its source, post a reply here or eMail me at geowar@apple.com and I'll send you a copy. GeoWar €Integrate Filemaker to the web Blue World Communications, Inc. has announced a powerful new family of tools for quickly integrating FileMaker Pro 3.0 for the Macintosh databases with the Web. It works with both FileMaker Pro and Claris Home Page. €Tip for Enabling File Sharing Your beloved editor was informed by System 7.5.5 that File Sharing could not be enabled. After exhausting struggles, the following solved the problem. My partition with the least free space was the suspect. I created a copy of an alias and called it "AppleShare PDS". I option-dragged it to the top level of the suspect partition. I approved that it should overwrite the invisible file of the same name. I then attempted again to enable File Sharing, and it worked. However, I had to re­set all my sharing options for that partition (a matter of a few seconds since it was all public). This is much like, I suppose, rebuilding the desktop, which many regard as a cure­all. Now you can add 'rebuilding AppleShare PDS' to your weekly disk maintenance regime. €PCI Based Macs Problem PCI Based Macs, running system 7.5.3, connected to a Novell Netware Network via Ethernet will crash on shut down or restart unless you have installed System 7.5 Update 2.0. Even after that, there will still be a 2 minute delay at that point, so it is better to log off before attempting a shutdown. Apple Computer €New Jargon - "Dry Copper" SaskTel permits a customer, for $30 on each end, to have a direct copper line from one location to another. It is just a regular phone line, but rather than going into the normal phone computer, which would permit dialing and so forth, it just gets linked to the regular phone line going to the other location. Accordingly, you can get whatever speeds you can wring out of a direct copper wire connection of that distance. It is called, "Dry Copper". DLCWest and First Nations are connected, we hear by rumour, by two of these wires and achieve speeds equal to or exceeding a T1 connection. €WrapText Applescript Functions --wrap(texttowrap, wraplength) on wrap(sOld, iMargin) set sNew to "" repeat until sOld = "" set iLength to (length of sOld) --length of remaining text to wrap if iLength > iMargin then set iEndPoint to lastpos(" ", sOld, iMargin) --determine where to break the line else set iEndPoint to iLength + 1 end if set sNew to (sNew & ((characters 1 through (iEndPoint - 1) of sOld) as string) & return) -- add new line to output string try set sOld to ((characters (iEndPoint + 1) through iLength of sOld) as string) --remove new line from input string on error exit repeat end try end repeat return sNew end wrap on lastpos(sChar, sLine, iStart) repeat with i from iStart to 1 by -1 if character i of sLine = " " then return i end repeat end lastpos ------- I'm still pretty new to AS and didn't take much time to flip through the books when writing this. (Or to bother spending two seconds making it so that it didn't need the on error exit. ;-) I couldn't find an equivalent for the lastpos fuction of rexx (find the last position of a string in a string) so I included a replacement, and I couldn't find an equivalent for rexx's strip function which strips trailing characters such as spaces. I glanced in the index for these, but for all I know, if they're present, they're something like "remove all the extra spaces from the end of the string". Are there equivalents for these? I really like AS, but rexx's string handling seems far superior and this was a lot shorter in rexx. Regards, -- Michael Loader SoftLogik Publishing http://www.softlogik.com €Applescript Function to remove Trailing White Space -- function Strip(TextToStrip) on Strip(origText) set breakers to {" ", " ", return} -- , , repeat with i from (length of origText) to 1 by -1 if breakers does not contain (character i of origText) then return characters 1 thru i of origText as text end if end repeat end Strip -- example call -- set theString to strip("The text from which to strip spaces. ") HTH, Bobby Roe Director of Marketing, Evangelism and User Group Relations Chena Software, Inc. - The Makers of InfoDepot (tm) WWW: - AOL: keyword = Chena 800.245.4577 (sales) / 610.770.1210 (support) / 610.770.9266 (fax) €System announcement "Harmony," is expected to be made available in January. The Harmony release will include features such as OpenDoc and Cyberdog in the OS, along with a new Extension Manager, an updated LaserWriter driver, and an installer front end. Going forward, we will continue to provide features that improve the reliability and performance of the system.Š Ellen Hancock Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer Apple Computer, Inc. €Sorry, that¹s all the time I have. This Jaques Law Bits was delivered by: Kevin Jaques, B.A. LL.B. of the Jaques Law Office #101 - 2515 Victoria Avenue Fax: 525­4173 Regina, Saskatchewan Home: 586­2234 email: jaques.law@dlcwest.com Tel: 359­3041 visit our web page at http://www.dlcwest.com/~jaques.law/