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BRMUG BRMUG October 1999 Newsletter This is the index of the October 1999 BRMUG Newsletter: Regular Columns: Front Page News by Isaac Traxler October Meeting September Meeting AAPL Graphic Utility of the Month by Glenn Matherne Nonessentials by Glenn Matherne Cartoon by Pete Steinfeld Special Columns: The New iMacs by Isaac Traxler IPNetRouter by John Quebedeaux Return to BRMUG Newsletter Index Front Page News October Meeting The October meeting will be held at Louisiana Public Broadcasting on October 21st, the 3rd Thursday of the month, at 6:30 P.M. This month's meeting will feature a Tour of Louisiana Public Broadcasting by Don Ballard. LPB utilizes a lot of computer technology in its daily business (much of it Macintosh-based). LPB has some very nice computer systems. This will be an excellent opportunity to see Macintoshes in their natural setting. LPB is at 7733 Perkins Road (just east of Essen lane on the left). Please come and enjoy the meeting. You are also invited to join us after the meeting at Brewbachers for the social hour. The September Meeting Review Don Ballard brought his new Digital Camera to the meeting last time (it had just arrived that day even though it was due to arrive several weeks before). We all enjoyed the "fun" of opening a package for the first time. The quality of digital cameras has increased even quicker than the prices have come down. It should not be long before many of us have one. Thanks again Don! AAPL Apple stock has been for any interesting ride. It reached a high of 80. Shortly afterward, Apple announced that earnings would not be as high as anticipated for this quarter (as required by law). They blamed the lower earnings on Motorola's inability to deliver G4 ships in quantity this quarter. Remember that Apple never said that they would lose money - only that earnings would be a little lower than anticipated. This sent the stock price plummeting. Then an earthquake shook Taiwan - where the iBook is being produced. Add to this escalating RAM prices and you have a formula for disaster. And it happened! Apple un-announced the 500 MHz G4 systems (no chips available). They basically dropped the entire lineby 50 MHz (the 500 MHz machines dropped to 450 MHz, the 450 MHz machines dropped to 400 MHz and the 400 MHz machines dropped to 350 MHz). Basically, Apple rolled the clock speed back by 50 MHz on all systems and kept the prices the same (in spite of rising RAM prices). From a consumer perspective - this looked like Apple raising prices. Apple also temporarily canceled all orders for the 500 MHz machines that they could not deliver because of lack of processors. For the day or so that the orders were cancelled - it was a press nightmare for Apple. Wall Street did not notice. They were noticing that Apple had announced earnings of $0.51 a share (Wall Street's original estimate had been $0.50 before Apple's lower earnings announcement). Apple stock climbed back to almost $75. Apple relented and re-instated the 500 MHz orders allowing the people who had placed those orders todrop down to 450 MHz systems at the old price. This allows those people who ordered the high-end systems to have lost nothing but time. Apple has large numbers of back-ordered G4s and iBooks. They have just announced a 3 model replacement for the iMac product with prices starting at under $1000. Sears is carrying the iBook and the iMac. Rumor has it that Best Buy will return as an Apple outlet. Many new games are appearing for the Macintosh. This quarter looks to be really good for Apple if nothing major goes wrong. Let's hope that things work out! BRMUG Picnic We had a great picnic! Thanks to all who helped make it happen. The food was great (Great cooking John! Great beans Don! Great Potato Salad Kathy!). Along with the food and the great conversation, we had four volleyball gaes (after we started keeping score). I was made to promise not to point who was on the winning side all four times and who was not! See you next year Don. :) Return to Top of Page Graphic Utility of the Month by Glenn Matherne Last week, I received an old Macintosh LC with an ImageWriter LQ printer from a person who knew a person in Cajun Clickers. I was ecstatic to saythe least. Then I turned it on and to my surprise it had Microsoft Works 3.0 and AfterDark and a few games like Kidpix. However, it was limited to 4 megs of RAM, Mac Os 7.1, 128k of VRAM and probably a dead PRAM battery. I soon got bored with only 16 colors and a few flying toasters. So Iwent retro and downloaded a copy of MacPaint and MacDraw from a user group site. No Apple does not support these products nor does it provide downloads of any of these versions. To get the history out of the way, MacPaint, MacDraw and MacWrite were standard products bundled with every Macintosh prior to 1990. MacPaint and MacDraw were landmark products of their day and were the creation of the teams lead by Bill Atkinson, the father of HyperCard. All modern paint and drawing programs are derived from the work done by Apple. Macpaint is the first great painting program. It supports 256 black and white shades and has several textured colors as well. It deployed the now familiar paint bucket, paint brush, spray paint and eraser tools which later were included in HyperCard and all other multimedia and painting programs. Because it did not support color and was rather over priced as a stand alone product, it died in the early 1990's as new competitors such as KidPix and Painter edged it out. MacDraw was the best drawing program of its time. It beat out Adobe Illustrator and Aldus Freehand (now Macromedia Freehand) in ease of use, reliability and efficiency. Apple made it a commercial product in the 1990s and it died as the competition got fancier. It too did not support colors. Apple briefly reincarnated Draw as ClarisDraw, a color product. It died an unnoticed death in the late 1990's with Claris Impact. All in all, I was impressed with the efficiency and ease of use of both products in such a limited machine. Both products fit on a single floppy disk with room to spare. When Return to Top of Page Nonessentials by Glenn Matherne This month, I have been working on a Hyperstudio project for my school and listening to lots of Johnny and Edgar Winter CD's. Because I own a Mac and the school has only PCs, I have to create two versions of everything since Hyperstudio still does not really support interchangeably between Windows and Macintosh versions of its products. Also the school has not one type of removable media for back up. So, I have to use cases of floppy disks and compression to fit all of those wav, bmp, avi and text files. There is only one compression format that works on Windows and Mac Os reliably, zip. Stuffit for Windows is still unreliable and not widely used. I have found two products that seem to zip files rather nicely, ZIP It 1.4b5 by Tom Brown and PKZip 2.03 for Macintosh by PK. Both have been around for quite a few years. ZIP It is by far the more elegant of the two products. It works like the best Windows zip utilities like WinZip. It even creates self-extracting files for Windows and Mac Os. However, it fails at mult-segmented files. You can also create no self extracting archives as well. Amount of file space saved varies with the file compressed. Some are already self-compressed like jpeg files. PKZIP is the bare bones compressor for Mac OS that works just like its Windows cousin. It creates archives and can create self-extracting archives, but they usually fail when you go to mult-segment files. This is a common problem with both products. I use ZIP It almost every day to transfer files to Windows. It will be a few months before the Zip drives arrive at work. PK ZIP like its Windows equivalent if awkward to use. However, it has a verify function that will spot out corrupt files. So I use it occasionally. If you have to work on a Windows machine at work, get yourself a copy of either ZIP It or PKZip. You'll thank yourself in the morning. Now, if I could get Johnny Winter to do a show some time around here. That would really be cool. Return to Top of Page IPNetRouter by John Quebedeaux IPNetRouter is a program that configures Open Transport (OT) for routing TCP/IP between between two or more networks. TCP/IP is the language your computer can communicate with the Internet for communications. Open Transport is now multihoming. The best I understand about this is that it can be configured to be more than one TCP/IP address on your Mac. What? In otherwords, it can let all your computers on your network at home or work share one Internet connection. Interestingly enough it can route (bridge) between two dissimilar networks (like Ethernet and LocalTalk) as well. IPNetRouter is available as a 30 day demo. The price is $89 at full cost or $44.50 if you have an email address ending with ".edu" i.e. educational discount is 50%. Why use this program? Well... let's look at my network which consists of four macintosh computers (sometimes 5) and a couple of printers, etc. I want to be able access the Internet from ALL of these computers at any given time. IPNetRouter will masquerade all your addresses on your network as the address on the Mac running IPNetRouter to your ISP. This allows all your Macs to surf through your Mac with the dialup or cable modem or ADSL connection. Buying four modems is expensive and I have only one phone line to share to my ISP. Here is where IPNetRouter comes in. I now have it running on one of our 7200's configured to dialup to InterSurf (our ISP) whenever anyone opened any program that tried to connect to the Internet. If the connection wasn't already up - it would only take about 30 seconds for it to establish the connection and off we were surfing. Note: I leave this computer on all the time. 2nd Note: in truth, it was like this until two weeks ago when I got AT&T's @Home (formerly TCI's @Home) cable modem service. If available in your area they now advertise $40/month (not including taxes & fees) with free installation and one free month of service. If you refer someone else you get a month free for each referral. I've heard terrible things about their customer service and it may or may not help that you will know more about your Mac than the guy doing the install (if you know what to do with the information he has - great!) but when it works (and so far mine has) it's really great. I actually save about $10/month over having my ISP and second phone line. IPNetRouter can be very simple to configure but can also give you some trouble if you don't follow the examples or directions set by Peter the author. It helps to understand it only configures OpenTransport and then pretty much sits back and lets OT do the work. Also, you need to make sure TCP/IP is set to load all the time. Don't make changes to your TCP/IP settings while IPNetRouter is running. Finally, sometimes when you get in trouble, simply start over. The author, Peter, has some good information on his website on different configurations based on PPP or Cable Modem connections you may have and I'm amazed how often he is improving or fixing problems. I'm on the list for his product and he is quite often on there answering questions. I did something interesting the other day that I have to note with this router that you may not even consider - you do not need to have an Ethernet network to take advange of this program. Your basic Localtalk network (PhoneNet) will work great. I forgot my Ethernet dongle at for my PowerBook when I came home. So, I couldn't hook up to the Ethernet network in my house to check my e-mail. I didn't want to setup a modem just for that but had written 8 or so e-mails I wanted to send out after I got home. It occurred to me that I should be able to route TCP/IP onto my localtalk network that I use for my LaserWriter NTR. I setup my TCP/IP on the 7200 and my laptop for a set of local addresses different from my Ethernet addresses and added it to the IPNetRouter - and it worked. I was getting onto the Internet via my phonenet connectors on my serial port. I have not talked about how to configure IPNetRouter - it very much depends on your network and configurations. This could leads me to another article perhaps - or just check out the info on the website for this program... yea, that would be best. by John Quebedeaux Return to Top of Page The New iMacs by Isaac Traxler Apple has changed the iMac again. Now it is three different models. All models now include a slot loading CD/DVD drive. They also include a redesigned audio system by Harmon Kardon. The introductory model comes in Blueberry only and lists for $999! This system includes: 350MHz G3 Processor, 64MB Memory, 56K Modem, 6GB disk storage, slot loading CD-ROM drive, stereo speakers by Harman Kardon, Dual USB Ports, 10/100 Mbps Ethernet. Notice the increased memory! The middle model is available in the traditional five colors (Tangerine, Strawberry, Blueberry, Grape, and Lime) and lists for $1299. These systems include: 400MHz G3 Processor, 64MB Memory, 56K Modem, 10GB disk storage, dual 400 Mbps FireWire ports, video editing software, slot loading DVD drive, stereo speakers by Harman Kardon, dual USB Ports, 10/100 Mbps Ethernet. Software includes iMovie, Appleworks, Internet Explorer, 3D games and more. The third model is a high-end system designed to complement the new graphite G4 systems. It lists for $1499 and comes in Graphite. This system includes: 400MHz G3 Processor, 128MB Mem-ory, 56K Modem, 13GB disk storage, dual 400 Mbps FireWire ports, video editing software, slot loading DVD drive, stereo speakers by Harman Kardon, dual USB Ports, 10/100 Mbps Ethernet. Software includes iMovie, Appleworks, Internet Explorer, 3D games and more. As you can see, Apple is moving ahead at a staggering rate! The entry model is below $1000 including enough memory to be useful (64 MB - I am curretly writing this article/laying out the newsletter on a 233 MHz G3 with 32 MB) and a monitor. Apple is price matching the PC clone look alikes and exceeding many of their features (not to mention providing a better operating environment). The new iMacs are definitely a great product line! Apple could have done little better than this announcement. The replacement of the iMac means that Apple is no longer selling any computer that was in their product line just 5 mounths ago. They have completely upgraded every machine in their product line in less than 1/2 a year! The future has other great things in store. Apple has already announced Mac OS 9 (to start shipping on October 23rd - this should be a great shot in the arm for Apple's economic situation). New laptop models are seriously rumored. Apple has signed to purchase G4 chips from IBM (with altivec). This gives Apple two sources of processors. Either IBM or Motorola (if not both) should be able to resolve production issues for the chips. This may even make faster chips available even sooner! Apple has been able to move to the new motherboard for the G4s as planned. The larger LCD screen is expected to be available in larger quantites soon. MacOS X is doing okay. It is not ahead of schedule, but it is not significantly behind either. Boy the future looks bright! Maybe $100 by Christmas... Return to Top of Page