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This article first appeared in the February 1999 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
A month or so ago one of the local television news anchors started an item by solemnly intoning something like "Personal computer users have another problem to worry about today. The latest computer virus is here, and it's a bad one!" The worried looking reporter then went on to give a brief description of the virus du jour, with a closing admonition that all personal computer users should beware.
The next day, I was among a group of computer users having lunch and passing the time of day, when one of them brought up the television report, wondering whether she should be worried. Since that virus only affects Windows 95 and she is a Mac user, we assured her this virus held no danger for her.
This incident illustrates a problem with the mainstream press. Since the rise of the Wintel duopoly, much of the news media equates "personal computer" with "Microsoft Windows PC." Those of us who prefer a less ubiquitous operating system must work harder to stay abreast of the latest news about our computers.
Luckily, the Internet has more Macintosh news than you'll ever need. Of course, on the Internet, where The New York Times and The Drudge Report are only a click apart, the problem is where to go and what to believe?
There are several sites I check regularly for all the latest news.
First among these is MacInTouch (www.macintouch.com). Ric Ford, a long-time columnist for the now defunct weekly magazine, MacWeek, runs a no-nonsense, fast and accurate news site. Items are updated every day except Sunday. In addition to the daily news, he also gathers special reports on topics as varied as iMac peripherals, credit card fraud and viruses. I especially like the fact that graphics are at a minimum on MacInTouch, so it loads quickly.
MacCentral (www.maccentral.com) is a flashier site with more eye-candy and visual noise than MacinTouch. It does almost as good a job as MacInTouch at reporting breaking news, but has several other features which make it stand out.
MacCentral works very closely with another site called VersionTracker (www.versiontracker.com), which tries to keep track of the latest version numbers of all Mac software. VersionTracker is the best way to find out if your software is current. It also has links to online updaters, when they are available. Of note is the special page listing programs which require updates for Mac OS 8.5 compatibility.
The QUICKclicks feature of MacCentral collects together links to Macintosh articles from all over the Internet. Especially interesting are the foreign links which reveal what people in places such as England, Australia and South Africa think about the Macintosh.
MacCentral has several well known Mac columnists writing editorials. Andy Inhatko, inventor of the MacQuarium, who used to write an eclectic column for MacUser, has taken his somewhat warped observations to MacCentral. Don Crabb has moved his curmudeonly Mac Manager column lock, stock and barrel from MacWeek over to MacCentral. Bob Levitus, well known Macintosh guru, writes Ask Dr. Mac, a question and answer column similar to the one he used to write in MacUser.
A couple of other news sites deserve honorable mention. MacNN: Macintosh Network News (www.macnn.com) has not been around very long, but appears quite promising. The Macintosh Resource Page (www.macresource.com) has decent coverage of new items, but does not update as often as MacCentral and often seems to over-report news from its advertisers. MacWeek (www.macweek.com) is what's left of MacWeek magazine.
More for entertainment than news, MacOS Rumors (www.macosrumors.com) is fun to read. It prints leaks and speculation about upcoming Macintosh-related products. Often wrong in its predictions, it nevertheless has a pretty decent track record predicting the next cool toy to come from Cupertino.
Those looking for news about technical problems with the latest Macintosh software and hardware should check out the MacFixIt page (www.macfixit.com). Compiled by Ted Landau, MacFixIt does an excellent job of tracking bugs and workarounds. Very useful is the archive of past news items, which is often the best place to look when you suspect a bug in some software you're using.
Another way to get Macintosh news from the Internet is to subscribe to one of the e-mail news periodicals. The largest and oldest of these is TidBits (www.tidbits.com). It was started in 1990 by Adam and Tonya Engst and is now e-mailed weekly to almost 50,000 subscribers worldwide in English, and more in Chinese, Dutch, French, German and Japanese translations. TidBits arrives every Tuesday morning with an entertaining mix of news, opinion and software reviews.
Potpourri
In early January the San Francisco occurrence of that semiannual Macintosh love-fest called MacWorld took place. Just before and during MacWorld there's always a flurry of new and upgraded products.
As usual, the hardware announcements were dominated by Apple with the announcement of the new iMac which is slightly faster than the original and available in the several fruity colors (no lemon). Apple also introduced new G3 Macs and servers running a preliminary version of Mac OS X. It's beginning to look as though the real Mac OS X will indeed be ready by Fall.
The software news was dominated by upgrades from Microsoft, with new 4.5 versions of both the Internet Explorer web browser and Outlook Express POP/IMAP mail client. Neither program is a great leap forward from the previous version, but there are enough little changes to make a noticeable and welcome difference.
Internet Explorer has several small innovations which to make web browsing more fun. The most useful of these is the adjustable print preview which gives control over the layout of a printed web page, including the page breaks. It takes much more advantage of Mac OS 8.5 features, including Sherlock, ColorSync and the Appearance Manager. An interesting gimmick is the ability to automatically fill in web forms with name and address information.
Outlook Express 4.5 continues to add features reminiscent of Claris Emailer, such as multiply colored quotations, strong AppleScript support and multiple signatures. In addition, this newest version seems faster and better at multitasking than version 4.0.
The Emailer-type features in Outlook Express are not surprising because the chief programmer of Outlook Express, Jud Spencer, was also the main programmer for Emailer, first at Fog City Software, and then at Claris. Since Apple apparently intends to let Emailer die, perhaps there's hope that Outlook Express will become a worthy heir. The biggest Emailer feature presently lacking in Outlook Express is the ability to read AOL mail without using the AOL client.
Both of these programs are free and can be downloaded from Microsoft's new Macintosh oriented web site, called MacTopia (www.microsoft.com/mac).
Last time Outlook Express was mentioned here, a reader pointed out by e-mail that one necessity lacking from Outlook Express is a spelling checker. Actually, the program is capable of using the spelling checker from Microsoft Office, but that seems like an extreme solution, if you're not going to use Office. Another solution is to use an external spelling checker such as Casady & Greene's Spell Catcher (www.casadyg.com) or the freeware SpellTools from Newer Technology (www.newertech.com).
Spell Catcher is a little daemon that waits in the background and watches what you type, alerting you when a mistake is made and instantly offering spelling corrections. It also has a less intrusive mode in which you can ask it to check selected text. Spell Catcher works in any program, so you need not train several personal dictionaries. It has other capabilities such as a shorthand glossary which immediately expands abbreviations and an instantly accessible thesaurus.
Spell Tools works differently than SpellCatcher. It is an application which puts up a floating tool bar. It will check the spelling on selected text, and has several other tools which are useful in e-mail such as removing extra white space and various search and replace capabilities.
Some information from Insight Cablevision of New Albany came in too late to be included in last month's article about cable Internet access. Their Internet facilities should be in the late stages of testing right now, but they were not sure how quickly accounts would be generally available to subscribers.
Their offerings should be almost the same as those of InterMedia in Jefferson County because both companies are contracted with @Home to supply ISP services. Basic installation will be $99. The monthly charge will be $29.95, with an extra $15 per month, if the subscriber wants to rent a cable modem. Basic service will include three e-mail addresses and five megabytes of web space.
Louisville Computer Society
As this was being written, the topic for the February 23 meeting of the Louisville Computer Society had not yet been finalized. Details will appear on the LCS web page as soon as the details are known.
Remember, the regular meeting time and place for the LCS has been changed! The meetings are on the fourth Tuesday evening of every month at 7:00 P.M. in The Pitt Academy, 4605 Poplar Level Road. This location is at the intersection of Poplar Level Road and Gilmore Lane, 1.2 miles south of the Watterson Expressway.
For more information, see their web site at http://www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail LCS@aye.net.
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