Cool Mac Gear

Thoughts of sites and servers
I don't think I'm giving anything away by mentioning that Applelinks has moved. That's right. If you're reading this now, it means our hardworking honcho Joe Ryan has successfully hooked up two new servers and miraculously reconstituted The Ultimate Macintosh Resource in a new physical location in Manhattan. Hopefully you've also discovered that this page downloaded lots more quickly than in the past. I expect this to be a huge improvement! It certainly was faster on Saturday, but as I write this on Sunday afternoon, Netscape can't resolve the domain. Wassup?! [Note: waiting for "DNS propagation"]

Well, the Internet is a mess, so what else is new? In my own little corner of cyberspace, I've activated FOTOFEED.COM. There's only a placeholder page there now, but keep checking. You see, what I usually do every day is upload a nice shiny new 500 x 375 pixel digital photo from northern New Mexico to a Fotofeed page at Zoozone.com, my long-standing hypertext playground. Once I'd registered the Fotofeed domain, I decided to set up a separate site just for the images. Should be a lot easier to promote this way (niche! niche!), at least that's what I'm hoping. And with JHFarr.com as the "safe" professional compendium for all my stuff, the Zoozone can revert to a showcase for bizarre artwork and libelous insanity.*

There are all kinds of people who can design much more complicated ($$) Web sites than I can. I met one of them the other day, vowed to code no more, and decided to stick to writing instead -- but then I got an actual referral, hoo boy! A graphics pro friend of mine gave my card to the owner of one of the biggest galleries in Taos. Nothing has come of this yet ("Yeah, your site really sucks, but sure, I can fix it!"), but the incident prompted me to get moving on Fotofeed.com -- you have a hot date after a long drought and you start doing pushups, right?

Well, what about OS X? (etc., etc.)
This definitely falls in the "pretty much the same" category. I have the original installation CD-ROM, the update CD-ROM from Apple, the utilities necessary to make all this work on unsupported machines, and a second hard drive I only use for backup. Hah! "Only use for backup." That's like saying I have a seat belt and shoulder harness that I only use for driving. I'll do it, though. I'm dying of curiosity. It'll hurt to give up my backup capability, but I'm a reckless bastard and I want to know how this Unix booshwah works.

["Yeah, yeah, right. Why are you even mentioning this again?"]

Well, because I just installed two new browsers t hat I'm running on OS 9.1. They're Opera 5.0 (which also comes in an OS X-compatible beta version) and Netscape 6.2. See, I started working on Fotofeed.com, and trying to design for Internet Explorer and Netscape was driving me batty. I'd have a block of text looking real nice in Netscape, then check it in Explorer, where it looked like those big letters the teacher used to have tacked over the blackboard in second grade (96 dpi). Maddening! I'd read that the latest version of Netscape rendered type more like Explorer (BIG), so I thought I'd try it and then pretend that the whole world has the latest stuff.

While this plan was taking shape, I got a friendly email from the Opera Software folks. Would I like to try the latest Mac version,and BTW, here's a serial number for the press. Well, sure. Anything to save the price of a tank and half of gas. Well, I now have not only a fully-registered version of Opera 5.0 for Mac OS 9, I also downloaded the beta Opera browser for OS X. If I ever get moving on the OS conversion (du-uh!), I'm all set.

Overlooking the obvious
Supposedly Internet Explorer has something like almost 90 percent of the browser "market" all sewed up, though everyone I meet is using Netscape or iCab or something silly (one of my faithful readers still uses CyberDog). That's the only reason I even have it, so I can test Web pages in it. That, and because Netscape 4.7 didn't work with my bank's Web site. Well, after playing with Opera and Netscape 6.2, I have this to say: That "old" Netscape 4.7 looks best, at least on pages that don't defeat it, which is most of them. Take MacSurfer, for instance, a site I have to visit every day. It looks JUST FINE in Times font displayed at 72 dpi, nice & small & tight. Yes, I know. Some people have to have it bigger to read it, and the latest browsers make it easier to change this on the fly. I'd just rather not mess with it. (By the way, one of the best discussions of this, with screenshots, is right there at Apple.com. Just go look for "Font" pages at that URL.)

But basically, I like the new browsers. They are faster than Netscape 4.7, although Opera 5.0 isn't necessarily "The Fastest Browser on Earth," as the splash screen proclaims. I tried downloading some newspaper comic pages with Opera and Netscape 6.2. On several of them Opera was a few seconds faster, but not on all of them. And oddly enough, on at least a few pages of mostly text, Netscape appeared to be a good deal faster. This is all quite subjective, however. While the Netscape browser displays a download time after the page is finished, Opera displays a running total that inexplicable disappears when the download is complete!

There are a couple of points that make me wonder who's in charge, too. Opera clutters up its bookmark pull-down menu with "Add current document here" and "Open all folder items" in every menu subwindow (why??). And Opera has no "Personal Toolbar" like Netscape does, at least not one that I can find. Maybe it's lurking there somewhere. Dang it, I need that. It's the one feature of Netscape I use maybe a hundred times a day. But Netscape doesn't get a free pass: Why, for example, does 6.2 render Web page pull-down menus in such a desultory fashion? I mean, they're so ugly you don't want to see them. Opera and IE still do this the right way.

Booby prizes
Each of these new browsers, which I now use every day, has at least one feature or aspect that proves they were coded (or marketed) by chimpanzees. For Opera, it's an unnecessarily complicated preferences set accompanied by uselesss "Help" documentation. Touch the default settings, especially for "Page Style," and you're in big trouble. The "Revert" button doesn't revert anything, and the only way I could get the prefs back to normal was to reinstall the app. Again, this may be due to something I haven't learned to deal with yet. No doubt I'll hear from some of you on this.

But Netscape 6.2 has one thoroughly frustrating feature for anyone designing Web pages: if I make a change in Dreamweaver or HomePage and select "Preview in Netscape," the thing opens a different browser window every time...so if you work like I do, in a couple of minutes you have five or ten tiled windows clogging your monitor. And hitting the Back button to view an earlier change won't work, either -- you have to hunt through the pile of windows on your screen. (Bleah!)

Both Opera and Netscape offer improved Web browsing in many respects, namely speed. But my old Netscape 4.7 launches twice as quickly as the new one, and it uses a RAM disk for the cache. There doesn't seem to be any way to make the new boys use a RAM disk for caching files. Opera has a RAM cache for visitng previously-viewed pages, but there's also a hard drive cache.Go figure.

Try 'em out and see what you think.

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr is burning copal and sticking flint knives through his (never mind!) in an attempt to awaken the slumbering Gods of Content.

*Yay, another makeover! For reasons best known only to my psychoanalyst, I just freaking love endlessly tweaking my own creations. I can change fonts, styles, colors, and layout all night long. Last night I was up till 3:00 a.m. just trying out different Fotofeed logos. I wasn't a bit tired, either.

GRACK Update List

The new GRACK! Update mailing list is now operational. To receive your own weekly notice of new column postings, just CLICK HERE and send a blank email.

Feb. 18 "Mascot Lore & More" Feb. 11 "Killer Email & Wiccan PotLuck" Feb. 4 "Meanies, Guerillas, & Subscription Copycats" Jan. 28: "Full Moon Frenzy, w/ PowerMacs" Jan. 21: "iMacs & Webmaster Schadenfreude" Jan. 14: "Was It Only a Week Ago?" Jan. 7: "Useless Column" Dec. 31, '01: "I Want a Refund"

AUDIO CREDIT: embedded 44k file, European Birds -- Sounds and Sonograms.

Cool Mac Gear