Macintosh, also known as Mackintosh, has a crest appearing in The Highland Clans by Sir Iain Moncreiffe. The cresf depicts a cat walking a braided rope. The inscription is "Touch not the cat bot a glove," whatever that means. Macintosh is from the Gaelic "Mac an Toisich," meaning Son of Toisich, or literally, a leader. That's your Mac! A leader!
And from a dyed in the wool MS-DOS power user: "Almost every program I use on the PC has a countrpart on the Mac that is as good or better Most importantly, Mac programs have similar interfaces.
"Learning new software is a breeze compared with the PC. That's why I'm eager to revview Mac software and dread breaking open a new PC program. I recently reviewed similar communication programs for both the PC and the Mac. I mastered to Mac program in about 15 minutes with barely a glance at the manual. It took cover-to-cover reading of the documentation and several hours of practice and two phone calls to technical support before I was proficient on the PC version. Yech!" So says Lawrence Magid, a senior analyst for Seybold Group.
Another quote from Magid: "On the PC, you're lucky to be able to exchange text between programs. It's rare when you can move graphics."
The Japanese are working on a 16MB chip, Imagine what that could do. Two or three of these and you no longer need a hard disk. And your applications would really fly, being entirely in RAM. With a suitable rechargable battery, you could use the 16MB chips for storage instead of storing the applications and data on floppies or hard disks. Also, remember that chips typically go down in cost to the $2-$3 range when mass production and competition arrive on the scene.
Speaking of Japan, the $300 million trade sanctions we imposed on Japan will not affect Apple nor will it affect Apple's third party vendors, because the sanction is for "finished products."
Singapore puts some Apple products together, but Japan does not. CPUs, hard disks, monochrome monitors and floppy disks were dropped from the bill before it passed -- thank God! Apple's Ken Lim does not see any affect on Apple products.
MacWeek is a neat new weekly. If you have access to all of the industry news releases, MacWeek would be "old news," but since most of us do not have that access, MacWeek is a good one for "the rest of us." MacWeek calls itself the Workstation Weekly, by which they mean ultra-fast computers with a megabyte or more of RAM. It's not for eerybody, but you ought to take a look at it to see for yourself.
In a recent issue, MacWeek ran a page on the Mac SE vs. the IBM PS/2 Models 50 and 60. They say use the SE if graphics are involved, and the 50 or 60 if data handling is most important. The 50 and 60 cost more when you get the keyboard and monitor packaged into the buy.
Watch for Fontsie 3.02. It is said that this version lets you keep a folder full of Fonts in the System Folder (not installed in the System). Then it lets you use any of these fonts without installing them. A similar DA called DAMob is supposed to do the same thing for DAs. Fontsie is by Lofty Becker and is Shareware. DAMob is by Steve Brecher, and is probably shareware, although I am not sure, not having seen it yet. Anyone got it?
Carl Love will be picking up Imagewriter ribbons for reinking at meetings from now on. Bring them in a plastic sandwich bag or Ziplock bag with your name clearly printed on a sticker attached to each ribbon.
The price is $1.50 per ribbon. Love will keep half, and the other half will go to CMUG to pay for the inker, supplies and to go toward other items, such as a large screen monitor for meetings.
The reinked ribbon will be returned at the next meeting, or through separate arrangement with Love. Thanks, Carl!
Mouse Droppings has been getting more favorable mentions. The June 1987 MACazine calls Mouse Droppings "one of the best MUG newsletters in the country."
The article also praised The Mouse Droppings Book of Macintosh Hints.
Meantime, Berkeley MUG named Mouse Droppings "Best Small Macintosh Newsletter" for the second straight year.
And that is in spite of my carping at them about their newsletter exchange policy -- a battle which is not ever yet.
Thanks, BMUG, for not letting our differences of opinion get in the way of judging Mouse Droppings "Best Small Newsletter" again.
If you bought a CMUG software index in the last six months (January through June) you can have the new CMUG index disk for $2.00 -- just the cost of disk plus postage and/or handling. We feel we owe that to you, since we rewrote the index so soon after you bought the index.
A CMUG copy night is being planned for August -- the date has not been selected.
Attendance at the last copy night was disappointing! You should know that there will be well in excess of 125 disks full of software to copy. For a small single fee ($2 to $5 -- has not been determined yet), you can copy all night long!
There will be more information on this at the July meeting, and still more in the August newsletter. Watch for it. Try to attend. If you have never been to a software copy night, you haven't lived yet!
Your editor is itching to have CMUG move to 800k disks for our Disk of the Month.
The good news and the bad news: The good news is you would get twice as much stuff each month for $1 or less more ($5 for a disk obtained at the meeting, or $6 if it is mailed).
What do you think, 400k disk drive owners? Do you have a friend with 800k drives who will split it up for you? Or if not, would you like your disk of the month done for you on two 400k disks?
Most other MUGs around the country are going to 800k and it seems to be working.
But we don't want to hurt anyone out there. We ask Mac owners who do not have 800k drives to give this consideration and see if something can be done.
You see, there is all this public domain and shareware out there and .......
Quote of the Month: "Word Handler is the first Macintosh program I have been offended by," Franklin Tessler, LA MUG. (Didn't buy Habadex, huh Franklin?)
More than 600 people got food poisoning at the Apple User Group Conference in Dayton, Ohio, April 10-12.
Why is it that every single article I ever read about System errors (bombs) leaves me knowing exactly what I knew before I read it?
It seems that no one can explain System bombs for "the rest of us." If I want to read about bombs, I want to know what real world, practical things I can do to avoid the dreaded 02, 03, 11, 12, 15 and 28. Anyone out there want to try to enlighten "the rest of us?"
Apple's Cray computer requires a staff of 47, including three Cray employees. It has a 700 gallon water cooling tower, two 20-ton air conditioners, a 480 volt mega-transformer and cost $15.5 million.
It would take 100,000 Macs to compute at the same speed as the Cray, not including the Mac to Mac communication time which would be required.
The Cray handles 400 million instructions per second (mips). One job Apple gave the Cray took 2-1/2 hours instead of the two weeks, 24 hours a day, which a VAX would have required to do the same job. That's 1,700 times faster.
Apple gets to use the name Apple in England through a license from -- guess who -- the Beatles!
Deleting a file does not remove it from the disk. It only erases its location from the disk directory. MacTools, FEdit, MacSnoop or MacZap can recover such files. But, if you initialize that disk, all is lost. (Bay Area MacForum)
Typesetting practice is one blank space separating sentences. Typists are trained to leave two spaces. Most word processing programs can quickly edit a typist's work. Select Change from the menus, key in two spacebar strokes in the Find box, Tab to the Change To box and key in a single spacebar stroke. Now say Change All and it is done.
Meanwhile, retrain yourself.
In Pagemaker or ReadySetGo, make your cover page your last page. This makes it easy to prepare a cover page which does not use Master Page items.
Paladin Software has filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, so don't hold your breath for Super Crunch.
When 4.0 FEdit hits the streets, it will provide for complete HFS compatibility and automatic recovery of HFS disks.
The best way to use HFS is many folders with few files in each one.
Post-it™ Correction and Cover-up Tape, 3M#658, 1" width is handy to label disks temporarily (or permanently). Unlike the little yellow Post-it notes, the entire back of the tape is sticky, so it will not catch in your drive.
Now here is another idea for LaserWriter owners. Using a paint or page makeup program, draw horizontal lines 1-1/16" or so apart across the page. Make tick marks outside of these lines to mark off 2-3/4" wide area.
Type your disk label information between the 1-1/16" lines and withing 2-3/4" widths. Run one copy of this sheet through the LaserWriter using Manual (not Cassette). Carefully press down Post-it Tape across the label information. Now run this sheet, with Post-it Tape covering all the labels, through the LaserWriter on Manual, using the same label information.
Peel off the labels, cut them apart and press them onto your disks. Part of this idea appeared in the June 87 MacWorld, page 188.
If you don't have a fan in your Mac, some relief can be provided by aiming a small desktop fan at the lower left side of the Mac and letting it blow gently.
The Mac SE keyboard is slow. If you type better than 50 wpm, it can't keep up with you.
Illustrator
To import Illustrator files easily into page makeup programs, select the whole image, hold down Option and Copy. Paste into the Scrapbook. Copy and Paste into your page makeup program. Now you can scale or move the graphic without playing with Postscript code. .
Imagewriter
If you change the Imagewriter paper thickness lever to print on heavy paper or multiple copies, turn it back before resuming normal printing on regular paper. Printing on regular stock (#18 to #24 pound stock) with the thick paper setting is hard on the print head. Dick Thiese reports replacing his print head twice before discovering the problem.
To use the Imagewriter's built in NLQ (near letter quality) mode, turn the select button off, press the print quality button until both lights are on. Turn the select button back on. Now use Courier or Monaco font in draft mode. You will get the Imagewrirter's built-in NLQ printout.
LaserWriter
The LaserWriter driver which comes with System 4.0 and Finder 5.4 has trouble printing page-sized landscape bit maps, according to MacNews, Eugene MUG. Everything MacPlus and up should switch to System 4.1, Finder 5.5 or higher as soon as possible. The LaserWriter driver that comes with this combination is fast and should have no bugs.
High print density settings on the LaserWriter should produce better blacks, but lower settings give a cleaner, sharper edge on objects and letters. Take your choice.
To stop printing out a test sheet every time you fire up your LaserWriter, use Widget from CE Software (Shareware) to cancel this operation permanently. If you want to check how many copies have been run, Widget has a menu choice to let you find out.
If you want to resume printing the test sheets, Widget also lets you do that.
MacWrite
Apple has told some consortium schools that they "have no plans to improve MacWrite." (Penn Printout, U. of Pennsylvania)
However, you can hear about anything you want about macWrite. Many rumor mongers are saying that MacWrite 4.6 is about ready to release.
Pagemaker
Pagemaker 2.0 comes with a really useful 68-page book, "The Aldus Guide to Basic Design," by Roger C. Parker. Aldus has realized that Pagemaker does not make good layout -- the operator doesd. Since most of "the rest of us" are not design trained, this is a welcome addition. Thanks, Aldus!
This is the second step Aldus has taken to make sure the users of Pagemaker get the most out of it. They have already released a set of templates for Pagemaker users. Expect to see more design help from Aldus, too.
Design experts recommend setting line spacing (leading) at 1 to 2 points larger than the selected type size, rather than accepting the Auto default setting.
To line up items on non-adjacent pages, place a line (line tool) a measurable distance below the item on the first page. Select the line, hold down the Shift key and drag the line off until it is completely on the pasteboard. Now go to the non-adjacent page. Hold down shift and drag the line onto this page. Now place your element the appropriate distance above your line. When everything is OK, delete the line. (MacValley Voice, Burbank MUG)
View Paint
One of the easier ways to make a StartUpScreen out of a Paint-type document is with View Paint, found on many user group disks. View Paint lets you scroll the image around until the specific part you want is on screen. It does not limit you to the upper left quadrant of the Paint screen as many other StartUpScreen-makers do.
MS Word
User group newsletters continue their love-hate relationship with Word 3.0. They love it, but point to literally hundreds of bugs. But they keep using it! C'mon Microsoft, where is 3.1, or 3.01, or whatever you are going to call the "fix?"
You can recover those MW000 type documents which show up when you crash. Change the name of the MW000 document to something descriptive of its content. Now use DiskTop, miniDOS, Oasis or any of a dozen file utilities and change the file type from WTMP to WDBN. Word can open this file.
Converting Word 1.05 to 3.0 can result in bombs, strange characters, missing text and loss of formatting. A safer procedure is to Open the document in Word 1.05, select the text, Copy, close 1.05, Open Word 3.0, and Paste.
You can Search-Find-Change Tab and Return characters in Word 3.0. Preced the ASCII number of the desired character with a caret (^ or Shift/6). For example, to search for "Column A TAB Column B, type in "Column A ^9 Column B" in the Search edit field. That's because 9 is the ASCII number for a Tab. Return is ASCII 13.
When Word 3.0 opens a selected document, the untitled empty document is automatically removed.
To show all files, not just Word 3.0 documents in the Open dialog window, hold down the Shift key while selecting Open from the File menu.
To avoid Cut, Copy and Paste, select the desired text, press Command/Option/X. The words "Move to" appear at the lower left of your screen. Now place the cursor in the new location and press Enter or Return.
To select a vertical column (something no other word processor can do), hold down the Option key while pulling the cursor diagonally through the column. Now you can Copy, Cut or change the font, size or style.
In Page Preview, double click any part of the page to see it enlarged.
Double click the page number in Page Preview to automatically place a page number in the upper right corner of the page.
To select the entire document, place the cursor just to the left of your text. The cursor is in the correct location when it is an arrow facing "northeast," and if it faces "northwest," you have moved too far to the left. Press the Command key and click the mouse to select the whole document.
Command/Shift/B in Word 3.0 is not a "boldface" command. Rather, it shifts the bold bit. This means that it changes bold letters to plain and plain to bold. Watch this if your selection includes both bold and plain which you wish to change to all bold. All of the style keystrokes are bit-changers, so watch Italic, Underline and Outline commands, too.
Using Tall Adjusted in the Print dialog box for the Imagewriter will make your printout a good match for what LaserWriter output will look like. If you want to just "look" but not print, click OK to start printing, then cancel the job (Command/period) and your screen will now reflect what the Tall Adjusted page will look like, and therefore what the LaserWriter output will look like.
Surprise! Word 3.0 changes any Word 1.05 document with type smaller than 12 points to 12 point size in 3.0. To avoid this, highlight the entire 1.05 document. Use Command/> to increase the sizes of all portions of the text until none remain smaller than 12 point.
Now import the file into Word 3.0. Select the entire document in Word 3.0. Now use Command/< the same number of times you used Command/> in 1.05. All of your text will be back in the proper sizes.
ReadySetGo! 3.0
The linking icon flashes as you click on blocks to tell you where you are. There are no flashes for the first block, and a flash is added for each block from the second block forward. There will be three flashes when you double click on the last block for the current article.
If your copy of ReadySetGo! 3.0 has a creation date prior to December 15, 1987, send your original program disk to LetraSet and ask for the latest version. The address is LetraSet, 40 Eisenhower Dr., Paramus, NJ 07653, Attention: RSG Product Replacement. Ask for the latest update.
Switcher
If you bomb while loading applications into Switcher, press Command/Shift/ Option/period and Switcher will let you try again without rebooting or losing previously installed applications. (Get Info, Club Mac Midwest)
Thunderscan
To square up a graphic for scanning, draw a horizontal rule above the graphic. Line this rule with the roller shaft. Listen to this one, because Linda Spaulding of Burbank MUG does better Thunder scanning than anyone else I know. (MacValley Voice, Burbank MUG)
WriteNow
Graphics are treated as text characters by WriteNow. You can fine tune them with the space bar, tab key, backspace, return and/or sub- and super-script selection.
The learn button adds all selected words to WriteNow's dictionary. Forget deletes all selected words.
