Cool Mac Gear

From dxtr

Hi Charles,

It was a sad day here in Mudville when reading my favorite columnists latest musings on X (pronounced ex). He had to resort to second hand accounts of the latest greatest Operating System on the planet. How can this be I thought to myself. The Odyssey has come to an end because of a rock in the river? A fly in the honey? Well almost. It's a feature that has been lacking all along. The dreaded notwomouse insect. Now mind you we here in Mudville have become used to the sage advice of our esteemed purveyor of knowledge and are mightily confused by this departure from the norm. When will the light return? It is as if the sun has refused to shine, the stars are gone and the water frozen, nay I say the very air has left our lungs! We understood when the mighty one deferred on 1.5. Not enough legs in the trusted steed. Not enough had changed, the song remained pretty much the same.

Oh but now the melody has changed, the tempo has hastened, the smell of ozone permeates the air as the electrons soar! There is much to be seen and heard in the land of v2. Do animated thingies really exist or are we just pulling the wool over his eyes? Might it be that the cheese has been moved to far? Will the challenge be taken or will the light fade and be forgot?

Take the plunge there is always 9 to fall back on.....

seeya
dxtr

Hi dxtr;

Nice bit of prose. ;-)

Actually, I'll be moving on Jaguar fairly soon, notwithstanding the mouse support issue. If that bug had been fixed in 10.2 it would have been major incentive to move more quickly than my customary cautious pace (i didn't nemt this series "Odyssey" for nothing!).

Another issue is that, as you're likely aware, I am in the throes of a dillemma about what to do for a second computer, and with the Pismo, which had been my OS X box for the past nine months pressed into service for production in OS 9, I have not been able to play with OS X as much as I would like for the past month. It's a hassle to have to change the Startup Disk setting, quit OS 9, reboot into OS X, then the reverse. That's another big disincentive for upgrading to Jaguar precipitously, since I can't use it for production because of the mouse problem.

I'm weighing the options for a replacement for the late, lamented WallStreet, but its unanticipated demise has thrown my system upgrade agenda out of kilter. I'm hoping to get something that will handle OS X reasonably well for a bcakup machine. See The Road Warrior next week for more extensive musings on these matters.

In the meantime, thanks to Odyssey readers for the Jaguar input!

Charles

Quartz Extreme on PCI and/or <16 MB of VRAM

From Boris Herman

Hi Charles,

I want to thank you and all your readers for the help in finding a notebook text editor and I am returning a favour by sending you a tip on how to enable Jaguar's Quartz Extreme on older machines with PCI graphics or less than 16 MB of VRAM.

Open the config file
/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Framewor ks/CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Configuration.plist

Find the following:

<key>GLCompositorRequiredClasses</key>
<array>
<string>IOAGPDevice</string>
</array>

Change IOAGPDevice to IOPCIDevice if you have a PCI graphic card in it.

If your graphic card has less than 16 MB of VRAM, find the following:

<key>GLCompositorMinimumVRAM</key>
<integer>16</integer></pre>

And change the 16 to 8.

Then use the QE Check utility
http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=15911&db=VT to see if the Quartz Extreme has been enabled.

Regards,
Boris

Hi Boris;

I'm sure that MANY readers will find this tip interesting and helpful. Thanks!

BTW, you didn;t mention which word processor or text editor you finally settled on.

Charles

Original Bondi iMac & 10.2

From Jon R. Smith

Charles,

I recently acquired an original Bondi iMac from my local University Surplus. ($35.00) It is a G3/233 and has 160MB Ram. I decided for the halibut to install OSX.2 just to see if it would run. I wiped the drive and did a clean install. Just punched up the easy install and let it ripp. It took about 75 minutes to install and do the set-up. I restarted and it booted in 90 seconds. I have played around with IE on a cable connection, mail, Quicktime movie trailers, added items to the Address Book, played with iTunes, you get the picture. For a machine that as I understand is "not supported," (I could be wrong here) I am totally impressed with the performance I am seeing with Jaguar on this iMac. I have not installed any software other than Jaguar so this is not a total picture. I find the iMac to be as quick as my G4/500DP/640ram was with 10.1 (very close indeed) Jaguar on the G4 is awesome! Quartz is simply beautiful. I have a Radeon w/32MB (Apple special order with G4) I digress... the iMac does work very well and is very usable in OSX 10.2.

I have read so many "complaints" at as many sites about non-supported hardware that I just had to give it a bash. Anything above this G3/233 with enough RAM will seem to work. I will load some programs, do some more testing and let you know what I find.

My main G4/500DP is working great! Yes, there are some things not working, HP psc950 is the all right now. The 12/640PS has worked from the "X-go". All-in-all, I am giving Jaguar a big thumbs up and recommend it to anyone interested in upgrading. It is worth the $129.00!

Thanks for the column and the ear Charles. I really hope you can get the "Dual Mouse Mac" working for you. God Bless.

Jon R. Smith

Hi Jon;

Thanks for the interesting and very encouraging report.

Actually, the 233 MHz iMac IS officially supported for OS X, although just under the wire.

I hope the mouse thing can be resolved too. My concern is that it's such an esoteric issue that I expect its on a very back burner, if it's indeed on the stove at all. :-(

Charles

10.2 & laptop performance

From Scott

Aloha Charles!

Been wondering over here if anyone's had experience with Jaguar giving them better battery performance? I've got an original dual USB iceBook that lasts longer on-the-go when booted directly in 9.2.2 than in 10.1.5. Has 10.2 closed the gap in any way?

Thanks for any info :-) (May help me in my decision to upgrade to Jaguar.)

Scott

Hi Scott;

Reports I've seen so far are mixed. Some say better; other say worse. Some TiBook owners have complained that the cooling fan runs at its low speed nearly all the time after installing Jaguar, which can't be good for battery life. One guy said he was so disappointed with Jaguar on his PowerBook that he was considering reinstallin 10.1.5. Others say they're pleased with Jaguar's performance on their 'Books.

I doub;t if this is much help in your quandary. ;-) If you do make the leap, let us know your impressions.

Charles

Jaguar On A Legacy 8500 And A Beige G3

From Dr. Joe

Charles,

Having more courage than brains I installed 10.2 on two machine out of the box ... .. and they both worked. A legacy 8500 with a 275 Newer G3 u/g and a beige G3 DT with a 476 XLR8 G4. Both worked just fine. The total 'issue' count is one. The old software DVD player on the DT machine[ 3.1.3] stopped working. [this machine has a LG4120 combo drive and an ATI 7000 card.] However with some fiddling I retrieved DVD player 3.2 from the 10.2 install CD. This plays DVDs OK now, but only once per boot! For subsequent playings I have to restart the machine. Very Strange. Otherwise 10.2 is a keeper.

drjoe
Exit, pursued by a bear.
--'The Winter's Tale,' Shakespeare

Dr. Joe;

It's great news that Jaguar works so well on ancient upgraded machines. I'm pondering possibly upgrading my UMAX S-900.

Charles

Jaguar Mail

From Wayne Folta

Charles,

Maybe you're not using Jaguar because of the mousing problems, but in case you do and in case you want to try the Mail program, here are my observations. At the end is a question, if anyone can help me...

Mail doesn't like huge mailboxes. BUT Mail has a cool feature that Eudora doesn't have: mailboxes can contain mailboxes. (Eudora can have folders which contain other folders or mailboxes, but a folder can't contain messages. So you can't nest mailboxes in Eudora.)

I had a huge personal mail folder with 8000+ messages dating back to 1986. So I selected my personal mail folder and created mailboxes nested in it named: 1986, 1987, ..., 2001 and then drag-n-dropped each year's worth of messages into the sub-mailboxes. So if I click on my personal mailbox, I see only this year's messages. BUT Mail does hierarchial searches, so if I'm in my personal mailbox and search, it searches current messages and all past messages as well. Cool!

I can look at previous messages by clicking on the appropriate sub-mailbox, of course. But this technique keeps each mailbox smaller -- good for Mail's speed -- and keeps things better organized. My rules still plunk personal emails into the main folder and some time in 2003, I'll create a 2002 sub-mailbox and move this year's messages into it. (No need to create it at the crack of 2003, since that would be inconvenient for looking back to December's messages.)

I hope people find this a useful idea.

MY QUESTION is: does Apple's spam algorithm consider the message's (subject and body) text separate from its originator? That is, if I get a message that's trying to sell me something and it's from someone I don't know, I call that spam. But a very similar message from a company I've signed up with is OK.

I'm a little worried that if I simply use the controls to unmark the legitimate ones that it might be teaching the program that certain phrases are not spam-ish, when in fact they are spam-ish but from people I'm happy with. The alternative is to not mark good stuff as "not spam" but to either rescue it with a rule that's higher up in the list than the spam rule, or to put the sender in my address book and have the spam rule no act upon possible spam that's from someone in my address book.

Any clarification on that, anyone?

Jag screenshots and Preview 2

From Eric Daniels

Charles,

Yes, Jaguar does screenshots in PDF format, but they are easily converted natively through Apple's Preview application--which, btw, has the capacity to "export..." to: BMP, JP2, JPEG, MacPaint, PDF, Photoshop, PICT, PNG, Quicktime Image, SGI, TGA, and TIFF. Wheh. That's a lot of options. Also, Preview 2.0's interface and features are tons better and more intuitive. Again, not a touted feature of X.2, but definitely adding more value to the price.

Eric

Thanks for the info, Eric.

Charles

Re: Animated Icons

From Thomas Rohde

Hi Charles,

the animated icons stuff reminded me of my old NeXTcube... and of NeXTstep, its operating system which, as you well know, is the root of Mac OS X.

In NeXTstep it was possible to put something like icon.tiff and openicon.tiff into a folder (not quite sure about the names -- my memory is fading -- and whether they had a dot at the beginning of the name to make them invisible) and then, when one dragged something over the folder the icon would change. Was really cool.

I have no Jaguar (Power Mac 8100/80), but *if* Apple does use the same technique for Jaguar's animated icons, the format may have changed to something else that TIFF.

Cheers,

Tom
TOM ROHDE MEDIA DESIGN
Bispingen, GERMANY

Jaguar

From Wayne Folta

Charles,

Thanks for posting my note. Two things to add:

1. Somewhere along the way, the /etc/fstab example got word-wrapped. There should be three lines, each beginning with "LABEL=". This is really nice, since it lets you mount a Mac partition based on its name, not some obscure /dev/disk0s5 kind of thing.

2. The MacOS 9 disappearing is a puzzle. Jaguar is supposed to not include MacOS 9, so you already have to have it installed, but somehow it's now missing from my disk. No System Folder at all. On my laptop, which is all one partition, there is a System Folder and I assume that Classic works.

I'd wanted to remove Classic anyhow, so I guess Apple (accidentally) did me a favor.

Hi Wayne;

Thanks for the correction.

"There's many a slip, 'twixt the cup and the lip" as the saying goes, not least in transferring emailed text to html markup.

The Classic purge must have been something relatively unique, since I have not heard of many other cases. Personally, I will need Classic for the foreseable future.

Charles

Screen capture under Jaguar

From Anonymous

Charles,

Because now it defaults to PDF, Tinkertool's options to change screen capture format are disabled. I contacted them, and they told me that until this is fixed in Tinkertool,

I should use the Grab utility in the Applications/Utilities folder.

Sincerely,
anonymous

The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
http://www.applelinks.com/news/odyssey/

CM

Charles W. Moore

Cool Mac Gear