Cool Mac Gear

I ran the OS 10.2.1 upgrade installer over the weekend. The upgrade went smoothly, and took about 10 minutes.

I can't really say I notice any difference in performance. That's perhaps not remarkable, since the list of issues that 10.2.1 is supposed to address don't really apply to the stuff I do routinely. Happily, however, the upgrade doesn't seem to have broken anything either, or degraded performance at all.

I have also managed to move and weed enough stuff and I now have more than 1 GB free space on my OS X partition. Still not as much is there should be, if a twice the amount of installed RAM formula obtains, but better than the 680 MB I had left after installing Jaguar.

Oh yes, I had hoped that the 10.1.2 upgrade might prod the Inkwell handwriting recognition function out of its funk. However, I now don't get any response at all when I try to write with the Wacom Graphire2 tablet and pen-stylus. In 10.2.0 I used to at least get gibberish. The Inkpad window is still AWOL too. This one remains a mystery. I have downloaded the latest driver for the Wacom tablet, but still no joy. I'm not sure that I would use Inkwell a whole lot anyway, but it would be nice to have it working so that I could evaluate its usefulness.

Last week, Chris Green of MacWorld magazine suggested that a complete reinstall of OS 10.2 might be in order. I don't doubt that a clean reinstall of the OS might also help improve general performance somewhat. My current installation of OS X is a year old this week, started with OS 10.0, and has been upgraded through all versions since then except for 10.1.5, which I skipped. However, it's hard to find the time to start from scratch again. It's not just the system install itself, but all the reconfiguration and software and utility reinstallation issues.

Nevertheless, I expect that a clean reinstall might also clean out some deadwood left over from previous installations and help with the hard drive free space issue, so I shall have to try to find the time to get around to it.

That said, I'm not terribly optimistic that even a clean reinstall of Jaguar would result in any drastic speed and performance boost on the Pismo. Most of the Pismo owners commenting on Jaguar performance in this forum, some of whom presumably would have done clean installs, make roughly the same evaluation that I have: OS 10.2 is usable, but it plods compared with OS 9 in terms of speed and responsiveness on these machines.

That said, I have been using Jaguar a lot more than that I did 10.1.4. The big reason for that, however, is my discovery that the Wacom Graphire2 tablet driver can be tricked into supporting simultaneous input from my foot mouse by clicking the left mouse button, which is programmed for click and hold, and leaving hold mode activated (ie: not clicking the left button a second time). As long as I don't click any of the bottoms on the Graphire2 mouse again, I can click with the buttons on my foot mouse or the other hand mouse while dragging & dropping or highlighting with the Graphire2 mouse. This makes OS X much more usable for me.

However, it still bog slow compared with OS 9 for doing stuff like scrolling, opening windows, pulling down menus, saving documents, and so on. I'm actually back to using OS 9.1 for my workaday system lately because a piece of software I like to use is not supported by 9.2.2. Booting back into OS 9.1 after working for a while in Jaguar is like cutting in the afterburners on a jet fighter.

Mozilla and Jaguar

From Chris Long

Hey Charles:

I am LOVING this new Mozilla build (1.2 beta) -- the thing is FAST and reliable and just WORKS. the biggest thing I don't like about it is the pop-under ads -- iCab easily filtered out the ads -- I don't know how to do this with Mozilla. mebbe i'll spend some time researching this.

i also stumbled on to the Mozilla THEMES:

http://themes.mozdev.org/

and installed a groovy theme called "Orbit 3+1":

http://themes.mozdev.org/themes/orbit.html

well ... it's fun, anyway.

Still playing w Jaguar at home -- it's not ready for THE REAL WORLD here at the office, esp since we use Quark Xpress so much and it has to run in Classic Mode -- and a couple of our Quark Xpress copies are older versions which will NOT behave in 'Classic' ... so most of our office is still on OS9 ...

i LIKE OSX but for the life of me I cannot see it as an overall improvement to OS 9. I like the visuals -- great text rendering -- i like the stability ... the way things are organized (eg: sys prefs are nice) ... the CONCEPT is pretty darned good, but the reality is that things need improvements. speed is mediocre & frustrating (click. click!!! CLIIICK!!!!) ... things seem to behave inconsistently ... good & useful options from OS9 are missing ... and I still can't use 2 trackballs at once. ah well. keep playin w it.

Chris

Transferring email

From John Dennis

If you could help me it would be greatly appreciated. I will probably have to sell my Wallstreet and wanted to know how to transfer the mail from my inbox over. I am using OS 10.1.5 on both computers. I want to do this before I wipe the hard drive and reinstall the OS.

Hi John;

Just go to your Home folder>Library>Mail>MailBoxes, and copy the Mailboxes folder into the Mail folder on your iMac.

Should work.

Charles

Re: Odyssey 189 - 190

From Tony Roberts

Greetings Charles

This is a case of "Read many (Odysseys), write once".

This concerns converting Apple's screenshots from .pdf to .jpeg.

A couple of days ago I upgraded to 10.2. Then, I downloaded Odyssey 189 to my current Odyssey file on another partition, used Command-Shift-4 to snap the images. I noticed they came out in .pdf but didn't bother about it -- just dragged them to the icon for DropJPEG1.0.1 on the desktop and transferred the resulting .jpeg into the Odyssey 189 file copy. No problems, other than that the .jpeg images are double the Kb size of the .pdfs -- normal where .pdf and .tif are less that 100Kb in size. After this, I read 189 through, and found that the latest DropJPEG is version 2.0, which won't convert .pdf to .jpeg. Interesting!

Next day, I updated 10.2 to 10.2.1 and later read Odyssey 190 to find Judson's comments about automatic conversion to .jpeg. Mine were all .pdf for both Shift-Command-3 and -4 in OS 10.2.1. However, both were converted to .jpeg by DropJPEG 1.0.1 -- still on the desktop.

First comment, Command-I and "Open with" will allow you to choose whichever app you select to open the pic. Second, leave DropJPEG1.0.1 on the desktop till later a version fixes the problem.

Apropos nothing in particular, I have been following just about all of your reviews and articles with 'enormous' interest. Most impressed with your approach and output -- especially when I heard about your disabilities. Of course, I have been following your saga to overcome your 'difficulties'. I suffer from arthritis which has stiffened first and second finger joints so that my fingers cannot bend, but I can bend each finger at the knuckle. The ideal keyboard is the chordic BAT Keyboard (ADB only) from Infogrip, produced in the early 90s, but now with no chance of a driver for upgrading to OS X -- I've asked. For an ex-military cryptographer/telegraphist (amongst other things), using the 'normal' keyboard is slow, error-prone and frustrating. I read your RoadWarrior articles (have PB3400c, being upgraded), pass your religious articles onto a friend, hate M$ (have to use Word because I copyedit/proofread PhD theses), investigate all browsers and word processors -- seeking to keep away from M$, follow -- with nostalgia -- your comments about the cars, and so and so on.

Keep up the great work.

Cheers
Tony

Hi Tony;

I just upgraded to 10.2.1 as well, and am still getting PDF screenshots. I'm finding Kunvert very convenient for converting them to JPEGs or PICTs with no hassle.

I've seen pictures of the BAT keyboard. Very different!

Thanks for the kind words about my articles.

Charles

OS X word processor

From Gareth

Hello, Charles

Not everyone is so geeky as to check out the Abiword Weekly News regularly, so relatively few of your readers may know about the progress that AbiWord is making to become a real OS X application. There's a screen shot of the X Window version at
http://pc057122.shef.ac.uk/AbiWord/XAbiWord-2.0.png.

This version can
apparently be used now to do real work. Hub's work on the Cocoa version has progressed to the point shown in this screen shot: http://www.figuiere.net/new_toolbar.jpg. It's obviously not done yet, but, equally obviously, it's coming along.

As I've said before, interesting times.

-Gareth

Thanks Gareth.

Charles

Where is VIREX 7

From: Howard Weir

Hi Charles,

I did the good deed and did a complete install of OS X with NO OS 9. and everything is working fine on my 266 mhz iMac

However I cannot find the download and purchase site for VIREX 7. and more annoyingly from what I can see Virex 7 is still not available on disk.

Can someone tell me when Virex 7 will be available on disk.

2 other gripes while I am about it.

Epson seems to be deliberately taking its time on making printer drivers available for the older USB models EG Colour Stylus 600.

So stuff epson I will buy a CANON or LEXMARK which do a good job with driver support

And I am really annoyed with WACOM for not supporting their ADB boards.

So I will be looking for an alternate company in the future.

Thanks for the great articles

Howard

Can anyone help Howard with the VIREX question?

Charles

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

CM

Charles W. Moore