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This article first appeared in the February 2000 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.

Over the last month there has been a flurry of interesting questions from readers of this column. Here are a few, with my tries at answering them.

No less than three readers asked variants of the following question. When I view a web page with Netscape Navigator, most pages are fine, but on some pages the letters are too small to read. Is there something wrong?

There's probably nothing wrong. It's just another one of those annoying little Windows versus Mac things. When Apple designed the Mac, they decided the operating system should assume screen pixels are 72 to the inch, because that's about the size of a standard printer's point. In the early '80s, when the Mac was being designed, this was a fairly high resolution monitor. Remember, those were the days when 80 column by 24 line text screens were the most common interface. Some years later, when Microsoft was designing Windows, monitors were getting better, and they settled on 96 pixels to the inch as their standard resolution.

Now fast forward to the present day, when both Macophiles and Windows people are using the same monitors at the same screen resolutions. A typical 19 inch display at a resolution of 1280 by 1024 pixels actually has about 90 pixels to the inch.

The Windows user might call for ten point Courier on her Web page. The operating system thinks there are 96 pixels to the inch, so the nominal baseline height of the characters in the ten point font will be between 13 and 14 pixels high, or about .16 inch on the monitor. For the Mac user, where the operating system assumes pixels are 72 to the inch, the same ten point Courier would have a nominal baseline height of 10 pixels, only .11 inch on the monitor.

This explains why Mac Web pages use 12 point fonts and Windows Web pages use 10 point fonts. They both think they're working in the same comfortable size! The best solution for both is to discourage Web page designers from specifying font sizes.

You can often see the same problem with e-mail messages containing styled text. Coming from a Windows user to the Mac, the text is too small. In the other direction, Windows users often complain that e-mail from Macs has huge fonts.

For Web browsers, a solution is on the way. Internet Explorer 5.0 for the Mac, the new version of Microsoft's free Web browser, can be set to assume characters are meant to be seen at 96 pixels to the inch. This will make them seem the same size for both Mac and Windows readers. As I write this, in mid-January, it hasn't yet been released, but should be available some time in February. Check out Microsoft's Mac pages at www.microsoft.com/mactopia.

With e-mail, the solutions are a bit more complicated.

The friendly thing to do, if you're sending e-mail to someone, and you don't know how they're reading it, is to only use plain text. Plain text is the base language of e-mail; all e-mail programs can read and write plain text.

If you're unwilling to do this, there is a way to have your cake and eat it too.

The e-mail standards allow e-mail to be sent in several formats at once, called MIME parts. Most mailers that can send styled text can be configured to send two versions of the text with each messageŅone containing the styled e-mail and the other a plain text file without all the fancy formatting. Modern e-mail reading programs will automatically choose the version they can best handle. If you can't read the styled message, just tell your program to show you the plain text part.

This is one of the reasons I like the mail program Mulberry (www.cyrusoft.com). It makes handling multi-part e-mail a breeze. Whenever an e-mail is being read in Mulberry, there is a simple pop-up menu allowing you to view any other available format. I find myself using this quite often when reading those badly formatted HTML-mail advertisements from places like OnSale.com.

Continuing on the e-mail front, several readers asked whether Claris eMailer 2.0v3 has a Y2K bug when reading mail from AOL. The problem was that when we entered the oughties, e-mail retreived from AOL by eMailer seemed to be coming from the 1940's. Soon, after the new year began, various workarounds appeared, such as an Applescript to fix the dates and a program to patch eMailer itself.

It turned out the problem was fixed by AOL. They were sending out two-digit years with their mail headers, and eMailer does have a problem with the year being 00. AOL switched to sending out four digit years, and eMailer now seems happy without patches or Applescripts.

In late December several people were downright paranoid about viruses. The pundits were spouting off dire warnings about all those evil virus writers who were supposedly readying nasty Y2K surprises for us all. Add to this the fact that both of the major anti-virus programs, Norton AntiVirus and Virex, had "issues" with Mac OS 9.

Well, as we all know by now, the great virus storm of January 00 did not materialize. In fact, there haven't been any new Mac-specific viruses in months. The total number of Mac-specific viruses "in the wild" is only about 40, and doesn't seem to be growing quickly at all.

AntiVirus (www.symantec.com) has an update to version 6.01, which seems to work with Mac OS 9. A late beta version of Virex 4.0 (www.drsolomon.com) is available for registered users running Mac OS 9.

It's a good idea to keep these programs current, especially if you're using Microsoft Office. Although the crop of new Mac viruses has been lean lately, there has been a bumper crop of Microsoft Word macro viruses. Most of these won't hurt the Mac, even with Office installed, because they make too many Windows-ish assumptions about where files are stored and the names of things. But, a bit of caution is always in order.

Of course, the big news in January was the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. Apple usually saves up some big announcement for MacWorld, and this year was no exception. The venue for the surprise announcements is usually the keynote speech by Steve Jobs. Jobs puts on an amazingly good show, and weaves what has aptly been called a "reality distortion field" during his presentations. Even watching the presentation live from 2000 miles away via QuickTime 4 streaming video, the field clearly came through.

To everybody's surprise there were no big hardware announcements. Instead, Apple unveiled a collection of free web-based "iTools" to be used from Mac OS 9 (itools.mac.com).

To log into iTools for the first time, you must be running Mac OS 9, and you must download a small program called iTools Installer. The iTools Installer includes a web browser plug-in and several other pieces that allow access to the iTools Web page. After doing this, you can create an iTools account

Your free iTools account includes POP based e-mail, 20 megabytes of disk space, a simple to set up Web page, good looking e-postcards, and more. All this lives at a new Apple Internet domain called mac.com.

Even though Apple requires Mac OS 9 to run the iTools Installer, once the account is set up the e-mail can be read by any POP mail program, and the disk space can be mounted as any other Appleshare/IP volume.

For example, I created an iTools account for myself with the user name leelarson. This gives the e-mail address lee.larson@gmail.com, and I've had no trouble POPping into it from machines running Mac OS 8.6 or Linux. The Mac OS 8.6 machines can mount the leelarson volume at mac.com as they can any other Appleshare/IP server.

The main purpose of the iTools software, and the reason Mac OS 9 is required seems to be KidSafe. Mac OS 9 and your browser work together to censor your children's view of the 'Net. Apple will keep an extensive database of child-safe Web sites at mac.com. When KidSafe is turned on in your browser, this web site will be queried before a site is shown.

None of the goodies available at iTools are particularly new or revolutionary. But, seeing them all together with a very Mac-centric focus is very nice.

Perhaps the biggest announcement at MacWorld was that Interim CEO Jobs has removed the "Interim" to become what he called an iCEO.

Louisville Computer Society

The main speaker at the February 22 LCS meeting will be Bob Manning, co-owner and technical guru for Videobred, which does video production, post production, graphics, animation, film, and multimedia. Videobred does all their video editing and production on Macs.

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