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In my Moore's Views & Reviews roundup of Christmas software posted on Friday, I missed the very cool "Sno" app. from Sweden. Snö (the Swedish name for Snow ) is an application that makes snow fall over your Desktop. 
Snö consists of two separate parts. Snö Desktop is a program, that lets snow fall on your screen, while you are working with other things at the same time. To install Snö Dekstop, just drag it to any place on your harddrive. Snö Screen Saver is a Mac OS X screensaver module. To install this, drag the file to the Screen Savers folder in the Library folder of your home folder: You can customize and tailor your virtual snowfall extensively using the excellent preferences panel. 
Mac OS X Drive -> Users -> YourUser -> Library -> Screen Savers If you are an admin, you can make the module available to all users on the machine by putting it in: Mac OS X Drive -> Library -> Screen Savers (you may have to create this directory yourself.) 
Snö is freeware, OpenSource, non-copyrighted and totally unsupported. For more information, visit: The Moore's Views & Reviews article has been updated, and thanks to reader Korin Hasegawa-John for bringing Sno to my attention. Moving along, my problem connecting to my back-up computer over an Ethernet crossover cable network has been solved. As is often the case with such issues, it was something absurdly simple. AppleTalk was not turned on in the Network Preferences panel. Duh..... But only a partial "duh." It would be nice if the failure dialog box that I was getting could be programmed to specify the nature of the problem rather than just cryptically reporting an "error." Apparently, when I installed Jaguar over OS 10.1.4, it either returned the network setup to default settings, or AppleTalk had never been turned on in the first place but Jaguar wants it on. There is some ambiguity as to why I need AppleTalk turned on at all. With OS 9.0 and later on the other machine, you are theoretically supposed to be able to connect via TCP/IP. I have had the "Enable File Sharing clients to connect over TCP/IP" box checked in the file sharing control panel on my old OS 9 machine all long, and had assume that was all that was necessary, and I think it was, pre-Jaguar. Anyway, with AppleTalk activated in OS X, the Ethernet connection comes up nicely again. However, I had another weird glitch materialize over the weekend. When I rebooted into OS X on Sunday, the desktop loaded with the row of document and folder icons that usually appears that the top of the screen shifted to about one-third distance from the bottom, and the bottom two-thirds of icons were completely out of sight. The only remedy was to select the clean-up command from the View menu, which brought all of the icons (perhaps 100) back into view, but of course snapped them into a regimented grid, with the ones that didn't fit stacked on top of the hard drive icon. It took me about twenty minutes to restore our everything to where it belonged. I have no idea why this happened. Any suggestions? Addendum to my Odyssey 222 column on switching between OS X and OS 9, A reader who wishes to remain anonymous has pointed out that if you have OSX and OS 9 installed on separate partitions, you can also switch by just holding down the alt key while restarting your Mac. Your Mac then searches for any bootable volumes on your internal hard disk, CD drives, and on any external drives you may have connected and then presents them to you as a choice as to which you want to use. The default startup volume remains unchanged. The disadvantage is that your Mac may take a little time searching for bootable partitions as it performs this restart. Also more on this topic in Jonathan Tyzack's letter below. Double booting not so secure... Re: OS X Odyssey 222 - Shortcuts To Switching Between OS 9 and OS X More on OS 9 Ink in OSX Odyssey 222
Charles, the time has come
Charles, I am writing to you on my iBook 700 (12" May 2000 edition, Radeon 16Mb, 640Mb Ram). I use OS X all the time and never boot in Classic- other than for running Diskwarrior and Speed Disk. The performance is not slow, not fast, but overall, a pleasure to use. Mail and iTunes are always running in the background, and I get my work done. I do not write about Macs as part of my living. If I did I would have to fork out for a Tibook. The form factor is not wonderful, the heat an issue, and the paint a worry (although it's said in the forums there's a new formulation on current models). Much as I love my iBook, the fact is that it's performance with OS X is mostly irrelevant in the scheme of things. There are no other G3s left really- publishers have been buying G4s for years and even the schools have the eMac. That IBM have come to the party with the PPC 970 indicates how central Altivec has become OS X. I was trying to be credible with my audience I could not write from my iBook. Owners and would be purchasers of an eMac, iMac, desktop, Tibook or Xserve would dismiss or discount my observations, in the same way that those discussing Windows 95 from a i486 were' dissed. I am writing this as someone who has broad affection for you. As I read your pieces I am starting to wince now, each time you use the word "pismo". Unlike iBook or whatever, it was never an official Apple designation, but what it says to me is how out of the loop this all is. I could order today an iBook performing better than my own for a grand, and spend another $100 on getting it back to 640mb.. The exquisite agony of all of this of course is that a G3/500 was the top of the line. A 2500 dollar machine that did very much right. But I, you or anyone else can't evaluate where Apple or OS X is going from a G3 prism. The current Tibooks have there compensations of course. G4/800 gave away little to its desktop rivals, besting the 800 iMacs and mixing it with the PowerMac 800. It was the first laptop that Apple ever produced that was performance wise was not a second class citizen to its deskbound mates. With the current crop, only dual processors do better, something few Mac users have the real experience of. If your dissatisfaction with the Ti form factor is insurmountable, you could always take up with an iBook for the next five months until the May release of new G4 models. Even if Steve announced a 1Ghz iBook tomorrow I wouldn't put any real money into it. Its a dead end.
Regards,
Hi Denis;
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I appreciate hearing your perspectives, even though I disagree on several points.
Notably, your contention that someone writing professionally about Macs has some sort of obligation to be running bleeding-edge hardware. My Pismo is not yet two months past its 2nd birthday. Where would that leave my friend and Mac-writer colleague John Farr, who works on a G3 upgraded Power Mac 8500, and a first generation, 300 MHz, clamshell iBook?
This Odyssey column was never intended to be construed as any kind of authoritative last word on OS X, but rather a chronicle of my particualr real-world experiences in making the transition to the new OS.
This Pismo has more than twice the clock speed that Apple specifies as the minimum spec. for running OS X. It has five times the amount of RAM Apple recommends as a minimum. If Apple is going to sell OS X as supporting G3 hardware, which they do, and pretty well have to since they're still selling G3 iBooks, then I consider it fair ball to critique the performance of the operating system running on a considerably faster than the minimum specification G3 computer.
I do take care to clearly qualify my comments as pertaining to running OS X on a two year old G3 machine. I agree, based on my experience, that the Pismo is not really an adequate OS X platform, but that's part of the story, isn't it?
Among my immediate circle of family, friends, and business acquaintances who are running OS X, the hardware in use includes a 333 MHz Lombard, two 500 MHz iBooks, a 400 MHz Titanium PowerBook, a 600 MHz iMac, and, yes, one 800 MHz TiBook. I suggest that represents a typical real world sampling, and in that selection of computers, my Pismo is upper mid-pack. I suggest further that the performance of OS X on those machines is highly relevant, at least to the many users of similar hardware out there who have purchased OS X. What I am evaluating here help all OS X performs on this sort of less than cutting edge machine.
An awful lot of educational users are running much less powerful hardware thaNovember G4 eMacs. For example, as I reported last week, the Toronto school system, which is the largest in Canada, has just implemented a policy of a seven-year replacement cycle for computer systems.
As for use of the term "Pismo," in practice it is almost universally applied to the PowerBook 2000, or whatever Apple's official designation was for this unit. And it actually was the development code name Apple used for this model. I've seen it used in Apple literature. "IceBook," "TiBook," etc,. aren't official Apple nomenclature at all, but convey what one is referring to clearly and efficiently.
Not everyone can afford to replace their computer system every two years, even at current prices for iMacs, iBooks, and eMacs. I am agonizing over the prospect of having to purchase my third system upgrade in less than two years (counting the Cube I owned for four months in 2001) in order to keep pace. Even if budgetary concerns are not a significant impediment, is still absurd to imagine that a commodity as expensive and a laptop computer has a "relevant" service life of only 24 months.
Is a G3 iBook "enough?" In these benchmark comparos
here and
here, the recent iBooks acquit themselves very respectably in non-Altivec tasks, and since I don't use any Altivec-optimized applications, I should get acceptable performance from one of these machines with enough VRAM to support Quartz Extreme.
As a matter of fact, I've always rather liked to the TiBook form factor, which I think is aesthetically more attractive than my G3 PowerBooks. However, I do have reservations about the price. If anyone wants to start a "buy Charles a TiBook fund," that would be great ( ;-) ), but right now even an iBook will strain my budget. For me, the entry-level $999 dollar machine represents "real money."
Charles Double booting not so secure... From Robert Emslie Dear Charles, Applelinks is one of my main Mac destinations on the Web, and I find great pleasure to read your columns, especially your mailbags and OS X Odyssey. As soon as Jaguar was out, I installed it on my Pismo 400 (upgraded HD and RAM to resp 20GB and 320MB) and have found it a real pleasure to use, no point-and-click problems as you have, though Photoshop and Illustrator take quite a performance hit compared to OS 9... One advantage, Photoshop crashes far less (not at all) than on 9.2.2, so all in all, I'm quite satisfied. I think I get Apple's point quite well, double booting is not a very good feature security-wise. Even if Apple have provided an option to block the restart and shut-down buttons on log-out in OS X, anyone with a bootable OS 9 disc can rip out the power cord of an OS X rig, restart on the OS 9 CD and muck around with root user-like privileges, free to peruse any user's folder and tamper with the system... Not a very good thing in school or business environments! Remind you, they are pushing OS X as a UNIX platform with security features unheard of in OS 9, and that is a very important point in security sensitive markets... Personally, I'm gonna stick with my double-booting Pismo for a while, as I use Cubase V.4 (Cubase SX is for G4's only) and get whatever P4-spanking Titanium Apple will release before Christmas 2003... Take care, Robert Emslie
Hi Robert;
I agree that the security aspect is doubtless one of the reasons Apple wants to end dual-booting.
However, the ability to circumvent OS X's elaborate security protocols by simply booting into OS 9 is one of the things I take mischievous joy in with dual-booting. Call me perverse.... ;-)
Incidentally, anyone interested in computer secutiry issues should take a look at this (warning: long) article in the Atlantic Monthly by Charles C. Mann: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/09/mann.htm
Glad you enjoy Applelinks!
Charles Re: OS X Odyssey 222 - Shortcuts To Switching Between OS 9 and OS X From Jonathan Tyzack Hi Charles, You missed out another method for selecting the boot disk/partition - on so-called "new age" macs, simply hold the option key down at boot up and select the bootable partition you want from Open Firmware (graphically, so very simple). You might like to know that Open Firmware Password available from Apple can be used to set a password on this stage too, thus making your computer that bit more secure - especially if it is portable. If this option key method doesn't work for you, then your Mac isn't a recent enough model.I forget when this became possible, but it works on my Blueberry iMac, so it is a fair while ago. I have a few comments to make about the supposed OS 9 boot block that may or may not be imminent. Firstly I'd like to quote the Apple press release:
To me, that statement is quite ambiguous - it nowhere states that *all* Mac models sold post Jan 2003 will only be able to boot into OS X, just *new* ones. Whether or not that does indeed mean all Macs is something we shall only find out come January and my gut feeling is that this hoopla is over nothing... current model Macs will all still boot from OS 9 and it will only be new Macs with a new model motherboard/processor upgrade that won't - the radically enhanced systems you describe. However, if I am completely wrong there is one thing that many people are apparently overlooking - Classic. Who of us is to say that Apple hasn't got an enhanced version of the Classic environment in the works, one that will let you install and use all your post MacOS 8.5 (a reasonable cut-off I would say) applications and old-OS dependent hardware with no problems what-so-ever? That is, come January, the need and ability to boot into OS 9 could feasibly become totally redundant anyway•. As it stands at the moment, almost none of my old software (even the pre-system eight stuff I still use!) doesn't work in the Classic environment with the exceptions being a few old games. I understand Quark currently has issues (and whose fault is that anyway? I suspect it is more likely to be Quark's than Apple's as no other graphics apps seems to suffer them), but if these were to be resolved, why would anyone have the need to boot into OS 9 on a newer, faster machine to use it? As it stands now, with Jaguar, launching the Classic environment is actually faster than booting into OS 9 itself and running OS 9 apps in OS X is actually (IMHO) far, far more pleasant anyway - at least you have OS X apps to play about in when the OS 9 ones do freeze or crash as is their wont. Before anyone jumps in and says "Ah, but running apps in the Classic environment is slower..." don't forget that this will only be an issue with the latest and greatest machines Apple will be releasing. Compared to what you own now, any speed decrease due to use of Classic should be more than compensated for by increased performance in the machines themselves. I guess that what I am saying is that we could well find that all this minor uproar may well turn out to be totally undeserved and it is something that we can only really know come January, so why not save our remaining breath until then. I think the issue has been debated more than enough for people's views to have been fully expressed on many of the possible meanings of the announcement - especially the most negative ones. If Apple does end up disregarding them, nothing else we say now is going to change that and it will only be the relatively small number of people who take issue with this and leave the platform who will have any impact, if there is any impact at all. Most of us shall simply shrug our shoulders and carry on as normal. • Your disk and file maintenance is very easily achieved in OS X and booting into OS 9 to do it seems to be huge overkill to me - you'll just need to learn the new tricks.
FWIW, with your networking issue the first thing to do would be to open the Console.app and see what it says in the console and system logs whenever you have a problem. It could help you to diagnose what is going wrong. Alternatively, mimic the OS 9 type of thing to do and delete the relevant preference file
Cheers,
Hi Jonathan;
I agree that the wording of the September Apple announcement on dual-booting termination was ambiguous (probably intentionally), but subsequent information leaked indicates that a firmware block will be employed to prevent holdover machines from booting directly into OS 9 after January 2003.
Apple's announcement on Friday that they were backing down on OS X only booting for some models shipped through education channels and to Quark users pretty much confirms by context that the leaks were correct.
I would like to think that your optimistic prognosis for OS X performance on Macs in a post dual-booting era is accurate, but I still want to be able to boot into a OS 9 until performance in OS X (and I'm not just talking about speed) it as dependable as it is an OS 9.
On the networking thing, see my comments in today's column above.
Charles From David Meyer Charles, It seems Apple has relented a bit. Now it says new MODELS will not be able to boot to OS 9 after some date. Models existing before that date and still sold after that date will not be changed. This makes more sense than the blanket shift, unless they intended to refresh every model line at a single go. Pushing the date back past the end of the school year is an obvious concession to an important market niche where they would like to regain the lead. This should not give solace to those who would keep OS 9 forever. Their world will dwindle daily regardless of such brief reprieves. Yet all is hardly lost for them. Should OS 9 indeed be the perfect solution for them, there is certainly an answer. A possibility would be to buy one of the last OS 9-bootable PowerMacs off the line and keep it running 'forever'. I bought a used Quatra nearly a decade ago, gave it to my mother when I upgraded, who gave it to a neighbor when SHE upgraded - and it still sees semi-regular use! It must be pushing 10! And I've seen older Macs working at yard sales. They should go for the PowerMac because it is likely they will want to upgrade and make other changes that just are not elegant with an iMac and because 'desktop' computers generally live twice as long as 'portables'. Solutions are happening. Eventually there will be few excuses and fewer reasons. I hope the solution for your usage problem comes along sooner, rather than later. Have you explained your problem to Apple? Dave Meyer
Hi Dave;
You may be right, but Joe Wilcox at CNET News.com says:
And Apple has stated that
and
That still sounds like "the rest of us" will get the firmware block, but I hope you have information otherwise that I haven't seen.
Charles From Travis Smith Charles, You may have already resolved your issues with INK in OSX, but I just saw a tip in MacWorld that may be helpful if you haven't. In MacWorld, January 2003 issue, they state (to paraphrase) that you need an OSX 10.2 compatible graphics tablet, ADB tablets will not work.
Also, they explain if INK does not show up in system preferences, you should go to your hard
It continues to say that it is possible to overlook ink even when it is running. It says that there's no apparent effect that ink is on, until you turn the ink functions on. To do this, click on the ink system preference pane under system preferences. In the resulting ink window, click the ON button in the settings tab to turn handwriting recognition on. When you do, the inkpad windows should pop up at the bottom right of the Mac's desktop. If you select anywhere from the "allow me to write" popup menu, you can use Ink's handwriting application in any application. Just start writing and a yellow sheet appears in the front & center. When you finishing writing a word, it appears at the insertion point of the foremost application. This is a quick paraphrase and hopefully will help if you haven't already tried this. Travis
Hi Travis;
Thanks for the info.
MacWorld's Chris Breen suggested something similar to me a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, still no joy.
I may need a firmware upgrade and a clean install to get it working. However, I doubt that I would use it much anyway.
Charles
Odyssey 222
Hey Charles! What I want to know is what's going to happen when you get all they way up to Odyssey 666? ;-) Chris ^_^
Yikes! I hope I'll at least be switched to OS X full time by then.
I do get your drift. ;-)
Charles
The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here: Note: Letters to Moore's Mailbag may or may not be published at the editor's discretion. Correspondents' email addresses will NOT be published unless the correspondent specifically requests publication. Letters may be edited for length and/or context. Opinions expressed in postings to Moore's MailBag are those of the respective correspondents and not necessarily shared or endorsed by the Editor and/or Applelinks management. If you would prefer that your message not appear in Moore's Mailbag, we would still like to hear from you. Just clearly mark your message "NOT FOR PUBLICATION," and it will not be published. CM
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