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TidBITS#484/07-Jun-99

Tired of lousy fax modem software or illegible fax printouts? Hudson Barton looks at a promising alternative: Internet faxing, which delivers faxes via email or the Web. This week's issue also includes followup information about Farallon's HomeLINE, a speed bump for blue and white Power Macintosh G3s, Macworld's purchase of MacCentral, and updates to Mizer, DiskExpress Pro, and AutoShare. Finally, we welcome Trexar Technologies as a new TidBITS sponsor.

Topics:

Copyright 1999 TidBITS Electronic Publishing. All rights reserved.
Information: <info@tidbits.com> Comments: <editors@tidbits.com>

This issue of TidBITS sponsored in part by:

MailBITS/07-Jun-99

Trexar Technologies Sponsoring TidBITS -- We're pleased to welcome our latest sponsor, Trexar Technologies, makers of the shareware MacTuner and WeatherTracker. Trexar's approach is especially refreshing in today's world of lousy interfaces crammed into Web browser windows. Instead of attempting to render interfaces in HTML, a tricky and limiting process, Trexar instead creates real Macintosh interfaces to Internet-accessible data.

Think of MacTuner as a tuner for Internet radio and television stations. It provides several ways of searching a frequently updated database of live and recorded multimedia content. Once you've found a station, clicking it hands it off to RealPlayer from RealNetworks. Want to listen to Australian rock and roll or Irish talk radio or classical music from Rochester, New York? MacTuner makes the universe of Internet radio coherent. WeatherTracker aims to do the same thing for weather information. It communicates periodically with a weather server, downloading current climatic conditions and local forecasts for over 1,500 North American cities and many others around the world. Different display sizes make it easy to leave WeatherTracker running all the time so you can watch the weather change throughout the day. You may not have gotten the window office, but with WeatherTracker you can tell what's happening outside.

Trexar has plans for more innovative ways of bringing Internet data to the Macintosh desktop; we wish them the best of luck in helping Mac users break free from the tyranny of the browser window. [ACE]

<http://www.macalive.com/>

HouseCall PowerPC-Only -- When we mentioned Netopia's new HouseCall remote control product in TidBITS-483, we said it would work with a 68040 processor, based on information from Netopia. In fact, HouseCall only supports PowerPC-based systems running Mac OS 8.1 or better. Netopia has updated their product description - we apologize for any confusion. [GD]

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05410>
<http://www.netopia.com/software/tb2/mac/housecall/>

DiskExpress Pro 3.0.2 Supports 8.6 but not HFS Plus -- Alsoft has released DiskExpress Pro 3.0.2, a free update to the company's disk optimization utility that adds long-promised compatibility with current versions of the Mac OS, though not with HFS Plus-formatted volumes. Users who need disk optimization capabilities with HFS Plus volumes can use Alsoft's $30 PlusOptimizer. Almost a year after the topic first came up in TidBITS (see "PlusOptimizer Jumps, DiskExpress Pro Upgrade Promised" in TidBITS-436), Alsoft is still promising HFS Plus compatibility for a future version of DiskExpress. DiskExpress Pro requires at least a Mac with a 68020 or better processor, System 7.0, and 1 MB of RAM. Registered users of versions of DiskExpress prior to 3.0 can upgrade for $30; new copies of DiskExpress Pro 3.0.2 cost $90. The free update is a 1.1 MB download. [ACE]

<http://www.alsoft.com/DiskExpress/>
<http://www.alsoft.com/PlusOptimizer/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=04957>

AutoShare 4.0 Released -- Four years after releasing version 1.0, Mikael Hansen has released version 4.0 of AutoShare, his freeware mailing list manager and email auto-responder. New in AutoShare 4.0 are support for Sophisticated Circuits' Rebound crash recovery device, several new AppleScript commands, and most important, the capability for AutoShare to enable Web-based subscriber administration by acting as a CGI program. AutoShare 4.0 requires either Eudora Internet Mail Server or Stalker Internet Mail Server 1.2.1 or later and is a 3 MB download. [ACE]

<http://www.dnai.com/~meh/autoshare/>
<http://www.sophisticated.com/products/rebound/rebound.html>

Blue & White G3s Speed to 450 MHz -- Apple has introduced revisions to its blue and white Power Macintosh G3 computers that sport processor speeds from 350 to 450 MHz and come with Mac OS 8.6. Apple claims the 450 MHz G3 offers up to 23 percent better performance than the previous top-of-the-line 400 MHz systems. Apple also introduced two new blue and white G3 server systems sporting one to three 9 GB Ultra-2 SCSI drives, and either Mac OS X Server or AppleShare IP 6.2 with Mac OS 8.6. The new systems are available immediately from Apple's online store. [GD]

<http://www.apple.com/powermac/>
<http://www.apple.com/store/>

Mac Publishing Buys MacCentral -- Mac Publishing, the folks who publish the online and print editions of Macworld and the online MacWEEK.com, have announced their acquisition of MacCentral, a Nova Scotia-based Macintosh news and information service. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Mac Publishing's specific goals for MacCentral aren't clear, but it's likely Mac Publishing hopes to utilize MacCentral's daily content to beef up the relatively small amount of material available each day from MacWEEK.com. [GD]

<http://www.macworld.com/>
<http://www.macweek.com/>
<http://macweek.zdnet.com/1999/05/30/maccentral.html>
<http://www.maccentral.com/>

Mizer Gets Wiser -- Antimony Software has released Mizer 1.5.3, an update to its drag & drop utility for squeezing bytes out of bloated HTML files. (See "HTML Crunchers Fuel Compression Obsession" in TidBITS-453.) Mizer accomplishes this reduction by eliminating HTML comments, line breaks, and other characters ignored by Web browsers. Version 1.5 introduces several changes to the program, including the display of more information during file processing, an improved parsing engine (which also intelligently trims JavaScript code), and the capability to optimize JPEG images in addition to HTML files. Mizer also adds support for the Appearance Manager and Navigation Services; because of this, Mizer now requires a PowerPC-based system running at least System 7.5.5 with the Appearance Manager. The update is free to registered users (you may need to apply several incremental updates to get the most recent version). Otherwise, Mizer can be purchased online for $70. [JLC]

<http://www.antimonysoftware.com/mizer.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05154>

HomeLINE Followup

by Matt Deatherage <mattd@gcsf.com>

Because of recent events and some confused information from Farallon, our look at the company's new HomeLINE products for HomePNA networking needs some clarification (see "Farallon's HomeLINE: Spiritual Successor to PhoneNet" in TidBITS-482).

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05404>

SurfDoubler Correction -- Farallon's Ken Haase told us that the bundled Vicomsoft SurfDoubler could handle more than two computers on the Internet at once as long as they weren't trying to access the Internet at the exact same time. We have since learned that SurfDoubler includes configurable timeout values for both computers. Once a computer on the local network uses SurfDoubler to access the Internet, one of the two available slots belongs to that machine exclusively until that machine generates no Internet traffic for the duration of the timeout value. Also, contrary to our report, one of the two machines using the Internet does not have to be the one on which SurfDoubler is installed; any two computers on the LAN can use SurfDoubler to access the Internet simultaneously. For details, see David Chapin-Loebell's note in TidBITS Talk.

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkmsg=3561>

HomePNA over USB -- Haase made it clear in our discussions that Farallon was not outlining future product specifics but did state that it would be difficult to do HomePNA over USB because the Mac OS didn't contain the necessary USB support for such traffic. Over the following week, however, BeadleNet and Diamond Multimedia both announced USB HomePNA products that will allegedly be Mac-compatible when they ship. A third company, Silicom, jumped into the ring with USB and PC Card versions of a HomePNA product, though Silicom made no statements about Macintosh compatibility.

<http://www.beadlenet.com/home2000.htm>
<http://www.diamondmm.com/>
<http://www.businesswire.com/webbox/bw.052699/191460101.htm>
<http://www.businesswire.com/webbox/bw.053199/191510006.htm>
<http://www.silicom.co.il/>

Other Standards -- We should point out that HomePNA may or may not wind up as the emerging home phone line standard - Avio Digital has announced a partnership with Cadence Design Systems to create chips for Avio's MediaWire technology, allowing 100 Mbps in first generation products. MediaWire would "enable a single telephone line to simultaneously deliver sixteen 24-bit audio channels, four MPEG-2 video channels (6 Mbps each), eight phone or ISDN lines and over 6 Mbps of serial control or TCP/IP data." MediaWire, if it ships in the last quarter of this year as planned, would be ten times faster than the planned HomePNA 2.0 and one hundred times faster than today's HomePNA products. There's obviously a lot more yet to squeeze out of those old phone cables.

<http://www.aviodigital.com/>

Finally, a company called Enikia has announced a chip set that uses standard Ethernet cards to provide 10 Mbps networks over home power lines. Enikia's chip set is scheduled for release late this year, so it might appear in products from other companies early next year. Pricing is speculative, but Enikia expects products to be more expensive than the existing HomePNA products, on a par with future HomePNA 2.0 products, and less than wireless networking products. Enikia has shown proof of concept demos, but it remains to be seen how well a product based on Enikia's chip set would work in real world situations.

<http://www.enikia.com/>

Facts about Internet Faxing

by Hudson Barton <hbarton@highwinds.com>

In "FAXstf Pro Echoes Sad State of Fax Software" in TidBITS-476, Jeff Hecht dealt primarily with fax software which is enabled with a fax modem. Here I examine a potentially better method of faxing: using the Internet as the transport medium rather than the telephone network. For fees ranging from free to a modest monthly cost, faxing via the Internet can result in lower overall costs, fewer headaches, and a greater degree of usability.

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05350>

The Promise of Internet Faxing -- Imagine that you're on the road in Europe with your laptop, thousands of miles from home in the U.S.. At your hotel, you walk past a line of weary businessmen waiting to use the hotel fax machine. In your room, you log into your email account and recognize a few messages as faxes that have been sent to your home and business fax numbers. The sender knows only your regular fax numbers, which route the faxes to your fax service company, which in turn delivers them via email.

Using a custom fax viewer or a general graphics program like GraphicConverter, you can open a multi-page fax file. You can enlarge it, rotate it, print it, or annotate it with graphic editing tools. You could also forward it to another fax number or potentially run the fax image through an optical character recognition (OCR) program to convert the graphic into editable text.

<http://www.lemkesoft.de/us_gcabout.html>

Then you decide to send a new text-only message to a group of correspondents, some with email addresses and one with just a fax number. After creating a new email message, you enter that person's fax number into the appropriate email header beside the other email addresses (appending the domain of your fax service company, such as <1-800-555-1234@example.com>). With no extra work, the fax recipient receives the same information as everyone else.

Soon after your message goes out, an email message comes back confirming that the fax was delivered successfully. If there was a delivery failure, the confirmation would note the reason, whether it was due to a busy signal, a human answering at the fax number, or something else.

As for cost, the fact that your fax correspondent is back in the U.S. is irrelevant, because the charges are essentially flat-rated (at $.10 per page) for calls throughout the U.S. If your correspondent lives elsewhere, the fact that the Internet is being used to cover some of the distance will save you a bundle on toll-charges.

Meanwhile, the folks back at the office are also using the same fax account simultaneously. One person is reading a fax that was sent using a leased fax number in a faraway city where many of your customers are located (reducing the faxing costs to those of a local correspondent). Perhaps your office has a fax administrator who determines the actual addressee of the inbound faxes to the shared fax number. If so, he can forward the message, as email, directly to the appropriate people.

Another person is sending a limited customer mailing with a mixture of fax numbers and email addresses in the BCC header of his email message. A third has composed a fax message with her word processor's fax stationery, which she has customized with a scanned copy of her physical signature. The body of her message contains a mixture of text and graphics, and she is "printing" it to a fax driver, converting the document into a graphic file which will be transported as an email attachment and delivered as a fax. The print driver has a built-in address book and it is integrated with the user's email client, so sending a fax from any desktop program is a snap.

The promise of Internet faxing is available today and is constantly improving. The experience can be rewarding if you choose your fax service company and fax software (for reading, editing and sending faxes) carefully. That's especially true for those of us who have had bad experiences using modem-enabled fax systems.

The Reality of Internet Faxing -- Internet faxing doesn't require a fax modem, fax software, or even a telephone line if you can connect to the Internet via a local area network. Depending on your faxing needs and how much you want to spend, you can take advantage of all or parts of the situation described above. Setting up a reliable Internet faxing system is a matter of choosing a provider for inbound and outbound faxes, determining the best software for the job, and understanding the current limitations of Internet faxing.

For receiving inbound faxes, you have two basic decisions: what your fax number will be, and which interface will be most convenient. To minimize long distance charges for senders, you may want a fax service that can assign you a fax number located in a specific area code or country. In some cases, that places it in your local telephone exchange, but it could also be in your customer's city or a toll-free number.

All fax services offer numbers in the area code of their main office. Some of these are free, such as those offered by Jfax and eFax (with the caveat that you might have to endure a cover sheet with an eFax logo and advertising). Other inbound fax services that offer no choice of fax number charge $5 to $10 per month.

<http://www.jfax.com/>
<http://www.efax.com/>

Jfax and Interpage allow you to choose where your fax number is located. The choices are not unlimited, but you can reserve a number in most major U.S. cities and an assortment of cities worldwide. Inbound fax services with this type of limited choice costs from $12.50 per month (Jfax) to $16.95 or more per month (Interpage).

<http://www.interpage.net/>

For toll-free inbound faxing, the best deal comes from eFax, which recently announced availability of toll-free numbers for $29.95 per year and 10 cents per page - a great deal if your volume is moderate.

Be sure to look into a service's quality and reliability. I've used Jfax for many months and have never had a non-delivered fax or any fax that was not properly attached to its email message. eFax is a newer service that might improve with experience; however, I've had problems decoding some of the faxes it has delivered to me as email attachments.

If you intend to receive faxes as email attachments, your email account must be able to handle them. A 25 page fax could be 1 MB in size (depending on the density of the graphics). If you sometimes receive large faxes, make sure your email account quota is large enough, especially if you don't check email frequently.

For most situations, receiving faxes as TIFF-F attachments via email works best. However, accessing inbound faxes with a Web browser has certain advantages, such as the capability to check your faxes from someone else's computer, where you can read and delete them, or forward them to another fax machine (perhaps to your free Jfax or eFax account). The main fax services with Web interfaces, Interpage and HT-NET, sport a number of features, such as being able to store faxes locally in a choice of formats. Interpage lets you forward faxes to your email account as GIF attachments, which many email clients can display inline. Unfortunately, GIF files can't handle multiple pages, so a 25 page fax results in 25 email messages.

<http://www.htnet.net/>

Reading Received Faxes -- Email-based services generally use the TIFF-F format, which is nicely suited to faxing due to its multi-page capability. Unfortunately, common Mac graphics programs like Photoshop, GIFConverter, and JPEGView don't yet support TIFF-F. No Mac email program supports inline TIFF-F graphics either. Among popular Mac programs, Microsoft Word 98 probably comes the closest, supporting TIFF-F for single-page faxes only. When QuickTime becomes more savvy about TIFF-F, applications that rely on QuickTime for graphics (like SimpleText) may become suitable fax viewers. The current QuickTime 4 preview offers only limited support for TIFF-F.

<http://www.microsoft.com/macoffice/>

In the meantime, Mac users have three choices for viewing TIFF-F faxes. A TIFF-F fax viewer is available from Jfax (if you subscribe to the Jfax service). It works best on its own fax files (identified with a .jfx suffix) but it will open any TIFF-F file, including fax files from eFax. The $15 shareware program GraphicConverter opens all TIFF-F files regardless of suffix. Finally, we have the just-released $15 shareware program TIFF-Sight by Blue Globe Software.

<http://www.blueglobe.com/~cliffmcc/homepage.html>

The Jfax viewer is clearly ported from Windows but works reasonably well. It can open multi-page faxes, zoom in or out, rotate images, and send faxes to the printer. The Jfax viewer does not, however, have any tools to annotate a fax document that you want to resend as a new fax. To build a new fax document from an existing Jfax document, you copy and paste sections from the fax into an application that supports inline TIFF graphics (like Word or a graphics application), add your notes, and print it to the Jfax print driver. The process is easy, though not elegant.

GraphicConverter's main advantage is its capability to annotate faxes directly. With patience, you can use GraphicConverter's drawing tools to annotate a fax on-screen the way you would mark up a paper fax. However, rotating a fax page 90 degrees with GraphicConverter results in the page being cropped and distorted.

TIFF-Sight has no capability for annotating or for copying a section of a fax into another program. The quality of its display is also not quite crisp enough for easy viewing, though this may be because TIFF-Sight anti-aliases the fax image in an effort to make it more readable.

Handling incoming faxes with a Web browser - as you would with Interpage or HT-NET - is a one-page-at-a-time experience and provides few of the conveniences of zooming, rotating, etc. Annotating a Web-based fax for resending requires you to download the fax, open and edit it with a another program, then upload it. Handling a fax that has arrived by email is easier.

The Jfax viewer is the best option, especially if you are receiving faxes through the Jfax service. If you are not receiving faxes via Jfax or can't procure a copy of the Jfax viewer, then try GraphicConverter or TIFF-Sight, or wait for Apple to make QuickTime compatible with TIFF-F.

Selecting an Outbound Fax Service -- The standard method of sending a fax via the Internet is to address an email message with a fax number at the domain of a fax service company in the same way you would dial a phone, as in <5551234@example.com>. Many services support this method, including Jfax, Faxaway, Interpage, NetMoves, TPC.INT and HT-NET (which uses a slightly different syntax).

<http://www.faxaway.com/>
<http://www.netmoves.com/>
<http://www-usa.tpc.int/tpc_home.html>

eFax does not support outbound faxing; by the same token, Faxaway and TPC.INT do not support inbound faxing. NetMoves goes both ways but doesn't support the Macintosh. It is possible to mix and match inbound and outbound services, but there's little point unless you are compelled by price issues (one service provides free outbound faxing in the New York City metropolitan area, for example).

The most useful tool for Mac users is Jfax's fax driver, since it enables you to fax from any desktop application. Faxaway and NetMoves appear to have similar drivers in development, but don't expect one for the Macintosh any time soon.

Weigh the pricing options carefully before selecting a service for outbound faxing. Although Internet faxing can be cost effective if much of your faxing is international, a regular fax machine or fax modem would be cheaper for sending local faxes that wouldn't incur time charges. For reference, a domestic U.S. fax sent via one of these Internet services typically costs a minimum of five cents per page (one page takes about 30 seconds at a rate of 10 cents per minute). The digital revolution is making the cost of all communications less sensitive to distance, so the savings one can obtain by using the Internet for faxing will gradually disappear for international faxing, as it has already done for domestic.

Security -- Internet faxing can raise significant security concerns. Just as email can be made more secure using digital cryptography and authentication, it's possible to make Internet faxing more secure than standard phone-based faxing. However, just like email, it can be trivial to abuse Internet fax services, and you must be certain you understand how Internet faxing operates to use these services securely.

If you use an email-based fax service, someone who can fake your email address in a "From" header (i.e., almost anyone) can send a fax which appears to be from you and is billed to you. Because of this, Internet faxing via email can impose unacceptable risks. The good news is that the owner of the email address receives a confirmation message when a fax has been delivered, providing an opportunity to correct the effects of any misappropriation.

NetMoves, a Windows-only fax service, uses cryptographic tools to solve this and other security holes. Essentially, NetMoves attaches a digital signature to the fax file. Unfortunately, NetMoves seems to have decided not to support the Macintosh. Faxaway claims to be working on support for PGP, which would work as well, but there's no word on their commitment to the Mac. Web-based services like HT-NET or Interpage can (and do) offer SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) connections and password protection to avoid these security problems, but SSL connections can be slow.

Building a Better Internet Fax Service -- There's still room for improvement in Internet fax services; here's a short list of the features to look for in the future, plus things I'd like to see.

The Benefits of Internet Faxing -- Real efficiency can be derived from integrating different forms of communication into a common interface, such as when you combine faxes and email. Several Internet fax services go a step further in this integration process, enabling voice mail messages to be delivered to you as email attachments. You can also collect your email with a telephone by having a computer read it to you.

For now, though, I'm sticking with combining faxes and email via Jfax, my favorite service. Jfax has built a significant lead in the effort to support the Macintosh for Internet faxing. However, the reality of Internet faxing continues to improve, and room remains for another company to set the standard for Macintosh support in the Internet faxing field.

[Hudson Barton is president of Highwinds Trading Company, a venture in software development, consulting, and Internet services concentrating on security and email issues, especially as they relate to the Macintosh.]

<http://www.highwinds.com/>

Non-profit, non-commercial publications and Web sites may reprint or link to articles if full credit is given. Others please contact us. We do not guarantee accuracy of articles. Caveat lector. Publication, product, and company names may be registered trademarks of their companies. TidBITS ISSN 1090-7017.

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