iCal vs. PDA

I was revisiting iCal to get it synchronized with my wife's iPod, and it only then dawned on me that although you could only sync Palm calendars into one iCal calendar, you could sync multiple iCal calendars into the Palm or iPod. This let me sync both her calendar and mine to her iPod since I already had her iCal subscribing to my calendar that I publish on the local machine. I then changed my Palm sync to have both calendars as well. I then thought what about the to-dos associated with each calendar?

If you sync your Palm via iSync to use iCal for your Date Book items, you also get your Palm To Do items synchronized into iCal as well. The problem with synchronizing iCal with the Palm Date Book is that iCal has an equivalent of the Palm "categories" in the multiple calendars it can have, but Date Book is the one Palm app that doesn't have categories. The iSync conduit deals with this by synchronizing all of the Palm Date Book items into one iCal calendar. This isn't really a problem, since they were all in one calendar on the Palm anyway. However, the Palm does have categories for its to-do items, and iSync dumps them all into the same calendar that you chose to put all the Palm Date Book items into. This makes using your Palm to-dos in iCal not much fun, unless you don't have very many.

I knew that although iSync will sync events and to-dos on the Palm into only one iCal calendar, it can sync multiple iCal calendars onto the Palm. I used this to sync a subscribed calendar to my Palm. But then I tried taking a to-do that was in my "Work" category on the Palm and moving it (in iCal) from the "Home" calendar (the one with all the Palm items in it) to the iCal "Work" calendar. I went into iSync and added the "Work" calendar to those synchronized to the Palm. When I synchronized again, the item remained in the Work category on the Palm and changes on the Palm were reflected in the item in iCal without disturbing the category there.

So, what I did was to create iCal calendars for each to-do category on my Palm. Then the tedious bit was to change the calendar for each to-do in iCal from "Home" to the one it was on the Palm. Once this is done, you only then have to do this for new items created on the Palm. Go into iSync preferences for your Palm and select to sync all these new calendars with your Palm. Now you can un-check any of the calendars that are holding to-do items that you don't want to see. I have some lists that I don't need to see all the time. This then reduces the clutter in the iCal to-do list.

One drawback is that items created in iCal go into the "unfiled" Palm category, but once you categorize it on the Palm, it stays there. Also, new items created on the Palm go into the "Home" calendar (or whatever iCal calendar you chose in iSync) for items created on the Palm. Once you move it to the calendar in iCal you want, it will stay there. Another drawback is that when you create a to-do category on the Palm, you have to create a new iCal calendar, and similarly, if you create a new iCal calendar with to-dos, you will have to create that to-do category on the Palm.

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X11

I've been doing a lot of unix command line fu lately, getting familiar with the unixness of the Mac. It's really quite good. I had installed Apple's X11 server a while back and was using it to remotely work with the Linux cluster at work, which was quite impressive. It did seem to have one flaw I saw with window sizing with a particular application.

I later installed Matlab, which uses X11 to display its plot figure windows, and I as impressed with the speed of even fairly heavy 3D animated figures. I also have one or two other X11 programs, but I don't use X11 for my command line terminal windows - I use Apple's Terminal for that. So, I found the Xterm window that always popped up when X11 would start when I opened an X application was just unneeded clutter. The other day I found the file /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc and near the bottom of the script are the lines:

# start some nice programs



xterm &

I just commented the xterm line out:

# start some nice programs



#xterm &

You can always get an Xterm whenever you like from the X11 menu "Applications -> Terminal" or command-N.

Then, I came across a tip to enable smooth fonts in Apple's X11 (at least for apps that are able to use them). You need to create the file: /etc/X11/XftConfig with the following two lines:

dir "/Library/fonts"

dir "/System/Library/fonts"

You can then customize the X11 Applications menu to change the command for the xterm. Choose "Applications -> Cutsomize..." and double-click on the "command" field of the Terminal entry. Change this to be "xterm -fa Monaco -fs 12", and when you do use xterm, it will have a nice smooth font.

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Software "Investment"

So far, I have not had to purchase any software. I also haven't had something I used to use that I really can't now except my Windows development tools, which was to be expected.

For software development, I had a collection of Delphi, C++ Builder, JBuilder, Compaq Visual Fortran and Matlab. I no longer really use Delphi and didn't use JBuilder really since I'm still learning Java. The Mac has Java development that I can pick up on since I'm not invested in PC Java. The Mac also has C++ development included. For me, I don't reallly have PC apps in Delphi or C++ that I need to port over (although I may try as an exercise) since my home programming tends to be recreational. The Fortran and Matlab are for work, so they are not my investments. I never really use the Fortran at home. I do more Matlab at home, and fortunately, there is a Mac version that works very well that I have installed. I recently found and installed a Mac Finder extension for the Subversion version control software that I use that gives a very similar GUI interface to it that I have for Windows.

For everything else, I was not very invested in Windows software at all. This probably had a lot to do with all the open source software I made use of. I also didn't have a great need for "office" type apps at home - the most typing I do aside from programming is e-mail. For the occasional Word or Excel attachment I get, AppleWorks seems to do fine. If I really needed MS Office compatibility, there's always the Mac version. Also, much of the hardware I had didn't even need drivers installed. Granted, I tried to buy hardware recently that was Mac friendly where I could. My Microsoft scroll wheel mice, Thrustmaster joystick, APC UPS, Canon digital camera, Canon DV camera, Canon Printer, and SanDisk CompactFlash reader all worked when plugged in. The Sandisk reader isn't even listed as supported, but showed up as a picture source in iPhoto represented by a icon that looks just like the reader. Also a USB to MIDI adapter just worked, whereas Windows XP had to have a driver installed (but that's what you get with an OS that hasn't been really updated in 3 years).

I've talked about my Palm PDA previously, and I may end up purchasing the Missing Sync, if I feel the few extra features it brings are needed. I did recently get the Mac version of Plucker (another free tool), which I used on the PC to download websites and newsfeeds onto my PDA. There was also a Mac version of the time synchronizer, so my Palm's clock stays in sync with my Mac, which is synchronized via the built-in function with time.apple.com.

Games is the other weak area on a Mac, but I'm not much of a gamer. I've got several PC games lying around I bought in the last few years, but didn't even have much time to play them on my PC. I was more into them when I was younger and single. I was an early adopter of network gaming, but we did DOOM and it's derivatives, with a favorite being Heretic. I recent;y found the Mac version of Doom Legacy and can play those classics on my Mac mostly. Unfortunately, the Mac version still can't play networked.

For Internet stuff, I was using Mozilla and Outlook Express on the PC. I now use Mac Mail, Safari and Mozilla on the Mac. I use Mozilla now only for newsgroups. There's IE for the Mac for the odd page that Safari doesn't deal with. For chat, there's iChat for AOL IM and Yahoo! Messenger, although the later does not have audio in the Mac version, but it does support my DV camera for video chat. I can also use VPN to connect to the company's LAN from home (or even the sofa at Satellite Coffee) - something I've yet to get to work on my Windows 98 box. Mac AddressBook replaces Windows Address Book, and the photos of friends I put in there automatically show up on e-mails from them in Mac Mail.

For photos, iPhoto does a nice job. It has some weak areas, but it's already leagues ahead of anything on the PC in terms of ease of use. I got Adobe Photoshop Album for my parents on their PC as about the simplest photo organizer I could find, but it still confuses them sometimes. Adobe don't make a Mac version because it would be ignored in favor of iPhoto. They do sell the nice Photoshop Elements for the Mac, which can work with iPhoto to allow more sophisticated editing. A likely purchase for me soon, but I haven't tried the GIMP for Mac yet.

For music, it's iTunes of course. I had been using it on the PC for a while already ever since it came out for Windows, and have turned several people at work on to it. Some use the sharing feature, which creates an extra social interaction. For other media players, I have the free Mac versions of Real Player and Windows Media Player. There was even a Mac version of DivX, so I can play those as well.

I also found Xephem, some free Unix astronomy software that works on the Mac under Apple's X11 server. If I want something fancier, I can buy one of the versions of Space.com's StarryNight software.

Some other stuff becomes obsolete, or nearly so, like GhostView/GhostScript for viewing PostScript files. The OS X Preview app reads PostScript (although it converts it on the fly to PDF first). Acrobat Reader, even though it is available for the Mac, is not really needed since Preview is so fast at PDF viewing.

There is stuff my wife uses that I may have a harder time replacing on the Mac once I get her one. She has a few of the greeting card programs and some cross-stitch software. These things exist for the Mac, but not very many of them. I'll look into that later.

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Stress relief

As much as I thought I was going to die from the stress I caused myself in fretting over what Mac to buy and when, it was all worth it. I'm sure that normal people who don't get caught in these deep decision tree funks that I do over things as common as picking what to wear today will have an even better experience.

The Mac basically gets rid of all the BS that you have to deal with when using Windows, Linux or anything else I've seen and lets you get on with using the computer rather than fighting it or fixing it just to begin work. As you do something, you find that along the path of your workflow, the Apple engineers have given thought to most everything, whereas in Windows, it feels like there's only things along the way that they were forced to place there, and even then it's a big ugly sign or fork in the road reluctantly placed there that you always have to deal with.

Now before you go and say "where have you been since 1984?", I will tell you that I have been paying attention as my early posts talk about. Although the early Mac OS was very user friendly, the problem was the underlying architecture, and by 1994, I was accustomed to a fully multi-threaded, preemptive, multi-tasking operating system, and the Mac OS didn't have this until OS X. OS/2 had this in 1992, Windows had this with NT in 1993 or 1994, and only partially with Win95/98/ME starting in 1995. OS X was a nice leap ahead for the Mac OS architecture because of its NextStep origins, but the polish on the Mac interface part took some time, and some parts are still maturing. That's part of what took me a while to jump on board.

Now, with OS X since 10.2, you have a system that really lets the user become a partner with the computer rather than an adversary. This allows you to really experience what can be achieved with computers rather than fighting with the computer most of the time and calling that productivity. Your sense of accomplishment comes from things like getting Mail to announce e-mail arrival from your friends rather than from managing to finally wrangling the network settings to get your e-mail in the first place.

The only things that are not as nice as I would like are typically things that will likely get sorted out soon enough and aren't major issues. As lovely as Safari is, it is still maturing, so it has rough places like having no print options for header and footer info. Althought there are many keyboard shortcuts, there are still many places that need them. This is somethings Apple could easily fix. Microsoft tends to have more keyboard access, but Apple tends to have more intuitive keyboard access where they do have it. I still have to re-learn some things like cursor movement and keyboard editing that are different.

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iSync

I talked a bit about iSync in the previous entry, and I thought I might want the Palm sync conduit to have the option to not sync the to-dos with iCal and leave them to sync with the Palm Desktop. However, since I tend to ony work with my to-dos on the Palm, this isn't a big issue. I'm not sure, but it seems that even though the calendar, to-dos and addresses sync with iSync, it appears that the Palm Hotsync still backs up those databases itself. This is good in the sense that they can be restored more easily and that there's an extra backup, but it also makes for a longer sync. Normally, the Palm Hotsync doesn't backup databases that are handled with their own conduits. Certainly, the data is in iCal as a backup, but maybe since there is not a perfect mapping from iCal to the Palm data, they chose to let it also backup in the native Palm format as well.

My biggest gripe is still that there is no good mail sync (see earlier entry). The freeware mail conduit works well enough with the standard Palm mail program, but unfortunately, it does not play well with the iSync conduit enabled at the same time. As Starbuck would say, "Felgercarb!"

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iCal (with some WebDAV fu)

Feeling a little more adveturous, I found some discussion over at Mac OS X Hints about how to enable the WebDAV module in the Apache Web server on your own machine. The goal here is to have something local that iCal can publish and subscribe to. I managed to get it working to a basic level. It's still not totally secure. I would be happy with it as-is on my LAN, but since I take the iBook out and connect to public wireless networks, I want to have things more locked down. Anyhow, I can publish my iCal calendar that has been synchronized with my PDA to a local folder managed by the WebDAV service, and can subscribe to it from another account so that my calendar can be composited with my wife's calendar in her iCal, and I can also pusblish hers to do the same in my account. The beauty of iCal is the separate calendars that can be switched on and off to put them together without having to actually merge them.

The parts of iCal that I don't like so far are the printing and syncing of to-dos. Printing the to-dos on the calendar has some poor alignment, but I'm wondering if that is a printer issue as Safari has something sort of similar. Curently, I've chosen to use iSync to sync with my Palm. The to-dos go into iCal, but since iCal's equivalent of Palm categories is the separate calendars, and Palm doesn't have categories for its calendar items, iSync puts all the to-dos into the same single calendar it syncs the Palm calendar events into. This makes working with the to-dos more difficult on the computer than on the Palm, but I usually work with them on the Palm anyway. It's just nice to have them show up in iCal, but since it lists all my to-dos, you can't really print a calendar with them included. I really would like an option to just include dated to-dos on the calendar. Another small annoyance is the iCal alarm pop-ups. It doesn't seem I can dismiss them with a keystroke that I've found yet.

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Garage Band

One of the things I want to use my laptop for is helping me with my music. I've been wanting to get some sort of MIDI setup where I can make some drum and bass loops to play guitar with. I thought I might be able to use the iBook for that with some software, and during my lengthy wait for the right Mac buying moment, Apple added GarageBand to the iLife suite. It looks like it is just the thing for what I need once I get a USB MIDI keyboard and a Griffin iMic (yet more accessories you will note).

I was playing around with it to get some practice. I just put together some of the included loops once I finally figred out how to get at the loops. It's pretty easy to use, but you quickly find out that it can't be all that simple, as you realize you need to learn more about music that you might have known (at least for me). It's a bit like getting into digital photography, where you realize you hav to do some of the things that the photo lab used to do, or running Linux and finding out you now have to be the bearded, long haired sysadmin as well as the oblivious user. The main thing that became apparent is that it takes quite a lot of work to make just 30 seconds. I'm sure it gets easier with practice, and I was trying to use it too much without the regular keyboard and mouse hooked up - the trackpad is rather tedious for this application. I can now understand the usefulness of the Griffin Powermate.

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Accessories make the Mac

In my quest for the ultimate in computer aethetics, I got some more cool accessories. First was the iCurve from Griffin Technology, which is very elegant looking, and, if nothing else, keeps you from not having a place to set your laptop when you come home. Next was the Creature II speakers from JBL in white, of course. I'm sure you can get better sounding speakers, but probably for more money, and these sound great as it is, and look great to boot. As long as you have a spot to put the subwoofer, which isn't really very big, the little speakers fit anywhere. However, the power brick is rather large, so you may have to hide that away cleverly, and the power cord is black rather than the white that all the other are. Oddly, I got the best deal on both these from J&R Music through Amazon. iTunes lets you save custom EQ settings, so I can have one for the iBook internal speakers and one for the JBLs. Now all need is to make a final decision on a Bluetooth mouse to complete the ensemble.


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Accessories

After agonizing over it for longer than anyone else, once I'd splashed out $2000 for a wireless laptop setup, buying accessories is easy and fun. Musn't get carried away though (mmm, Amazon, click, click).

First, I found the perfect case for my iBook. I didn't get a small laptop that I can easily put in my lap or on the arm of the couch or anywhere just to lug it around in some hideous monstrosity of a bag. However, it would be nice to carry a few things along. Marware's Sportfolio II was the answer, and Other World Computing had a great price. It's neoprene around a plastic protective shell with a stretchy pocket that easily accomodates my power adapter, mouse, VGA adapter, USB phone cable and some small headphones. There's another one on the back that can't quite hold letter paper, but it could be stuffed when extras are needed. The bottom and side edges are a grippy rubber that makes it easy to hold tight when pulling the iBook out and not slip when setting it down on a table, The laptop compartment has a divider that leaves a smaller part that can hold some letter size documents if you are careful, or a few CDs. The larger laptop holding part fits the iBook snugly and the inner partition is offset enough that it won't try to slide into the wrong part. The zipper only unzips the top part which I like since this is easier than zipping and unzipping 3 sides and having other things fall out as well. The carry strap is detachable with easy clips, and the shoulder pad is flexible grippy rubber as well, so it doesn't slip off your shoulder and it absorbs the shock when you are walking fast or down stairs.

I picked up the TV video adapter cable, just because it seemed like a neat thing to be able to do. I got the USB cable for my cell phone, I have the iCurve laptop stand, the JBL Creature speakers and an Apple Firewire cable on their way right now. I could have gotten any old 6 to 4 pin Firewire cable, but now I was getting picky about the color and flexibility of the cable. I looked around town, and could not find anything suitable. Most are these thick, stiff, black things that look like they would easily break off the tiny connector while plugged in. Apple's is white, flexible and actually cheaper than anything I found.

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PDA

Getting my PDA doing what I want, the way I want it is probably going to be one of the tougher things. For starters, I have a Sony Clie, and Sony does not support the Mac. I might not have gotten one if I hadn't checked that people were using them with Macs. The Clie T-665C I have is a wonderfully crafted device that I had to have. I also sync my PDA with Outlook on my work PC. I also got the same model Clie for my wife, and she syncs it with her PC. I would like to switch to both of us syncing with a Mac and iCal with each subscribing to each other's calendar. Not too much to ask is it?

The Palm desktop for the Mac syncs with it just fine. Of course, I had to tell PalmOne that I had one of their Tungstens to download it since I couldn't get the Mac version from Sony or a Sony Mac version from PalmOne. I also knew that I could get Mark/Space's Missing Sync to enable extras like Memory Stick mounting, allowing iTunes to see it as an MP3 player, iPhoto picture sync, and some others. Apparent PDA nirvana for the Clie user on a Mac, right? All except for mail sync. The Apple page talks glowingly about how well a Palm PDA works with a Mac and how well iSync and Palm Desktop work together, but read carefully, and there's no mention of it doing anything about mail sync. Palm's site is the same story. Fine. Some searching a while back turned up a Palm conduit for the Mac that would sync mail with Mac OS X mail, including ClieMail on the PDA, which I was using. When I went to get this software, it had even been updated, but the ClieMail sync had been removed and only ever worked with the Japanese version I think. So, I'm going to switch back to the regular Palm mail program that I was synchronizing with my work mail via Inbox-To-Go, but not using all that much.

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Keyboard

One of the things that I was worried about in getting a laptop was having used some recently. The keyboards were a problem for me since I had built such a muscle memory geared to the standard 101 key desktop layout. I had liked the keyboards on my old Powerbooks, and my new iBook is actually enjoyable. It seems that the problem I was having with many laptop keyboards was that they would take the editing keys and make some done via a "fn" key with an existing key, but give some of them their own key and then sprinkle them around the edge of the keyboard. This would cause me to always run into them when trying to hit common keys. The Apple laptop keyboards take the approach of just removing keys rather than moving them around. If they want to include certain functions, they put them "under" existing keys using the laptop "fn" key. This really only is the pgup/pgdn and home/end keys and some of the function keys on my iBook. Home/end are under the left/right arrows, and Pgup/Pgdn are under the up/down arrows, which is easy. The result is a simple layout that I can type on so well that I'm having a harder time adjusting to the full size Mac keyboard (Bluetooth model), but to be fair, I've spent very little time with it so far, so we shall see.

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Trackpad

I've been quite surprised by how little I really need to use the right mouse button, but perhaps that's not really all that hard to understand given the system is made to primarily support a one button mouse. I was missing my scroll wheel terribly. I have a small notebook mouse to attach until I find a suitable Bluetooth mouse, but that's not practical for when I'm using the iBook in my lap rather than on a table or desk. I came across a neat replacement driver for the trackpad called Sidetrack. This gives the feature of using the side of the trackpad as a scroll wheel like many PC laptops can. It also allows for some othe things like tapping a corner for a right click. I am loving it. Hopefully, when the beta expires, it gets developed some more.

I am having some issues with the trackpad's tracking of my finger. It can be quite jumpy at times. Sometimes it's obviously that there's some dirt or a crumb on the pad, but it can still be tricky at other times sometimes jumping wildly. I'm trying to see if it's my touch, and if I just need to maintain a consistent pressure and finger orientation.

After a liitle playing around, it seems the problem is when my other fingers get close to the pad surface but don't actually touch it. There seems to be enough of whatever the pad is detecting before I tought the pad for it to think I'm pressing it in two places, which causes it to not really know where I'm pressing it at all, so the cursor moves around wildly. This is not easy to avoid since both thumbs want to naturally rest in the area. Even the fingers adjacent to the one I'm using to point with have to be kept at a distance. I'll see if I can develop a finger posture to minimize the problem.

Update: it seems that the scroll wheel emulation of the trackpad may be giving me pain in my finger I use for the feature. I'm not 100% sure that's the cause, but it seems likely. I suppose I do use it a lot, even when I shouldn't, like scrolling many pages down quickly when I should use page down.

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Address Book

I had noticed the nice touch of the address book initially using my login picture as my address book picture, but I decided to try to change that from the gingerbread man in the address book. I had an HTML e-mail that had a linked picture of me that was a suitable head shot, so I opened address book, edited my entry, and dragged the picture from the e-mail window onto the existing picture in address book. Up popped a picture adjustment window that let me zoom and center my head to my liking. Nice. Even better was finding out that this is linked with my login picture, and so that changed as well. I have yet to have iSync take over my Palm address book and calendar sync to populate the Mac address book, but that's coming soon.

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Cell Phone

I remembered a page I came across a while back soon after I got my current cell phone, a Sanyo 8100 from Sprint. It was about using it under Mac OS X. I was able to find it, and with a USB data cable from Radio Shack that had a sticker warning you to first download and install the USB drivers, I just plugged it in to my iBook, and it was recognized without any problem. The networking settings had it in the list of devices to connect with. I just had to set it up as a Sprint Vision modem with just the data access phone number. Worked like a charm. Now I can connect with wired Ethernet at work, wireless ethernet at home and some hot spots, and cell phone anywhere else (in a digital area). The only one left out is through a cell phone via Bluetooth, but then Sprint seems to be Bluetoothless, and if they continue, I may reluctantly have to switch carriers.

Although I can use the phone as a modem, of course, it doesn't do anything fancy like sync with iSync. I did manage to find a sourceforge project of a phone utility program to upload and download the phone book, pictures, etc. It even had an OS X version. It didn't work though. Maybe someday soon. No biggie for me though.

Update: the phone is sometimes not recognized as being plugged in to the computer. The workaround noted on the helpful site that showed me how to connect it up and that it was possible, is to plug the phone in before turning on the computer. This seems to work.

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Chat

So far, I haven't tried out iChat, but I did set it up to connect to my old AOL IM userid. My brother is using Yahoo Messenger, which is not compatible with iChat. I went to Yahoo's site, and much to my surprise, they had a Mac OS X version! I was soon sending IMs to his mobile phone. I tried the PC webcam that he was using with Yahoo Messenger, but it appears that you need OS support as well as application support for a webcam to work. I've found a few that are indeed Mac compatible and Yahoo compatible. It's interesting that iChat seems to only support Firewire cameras, and Yahoo Messenger only supports USB cameras.

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Music

When I had the iBook connected to the network at work, I copied the music files from iTunes on my work PC to the iBook and imported them into iTunes just fine. I had been using iTunes at work since I was using Windows 2000 there and only Windows98 and ME at home - iTunes only runs on Win2000 and XP. I had some purchased music and some from a few of my CDs. I just authorized the iTunes on my iBook and I'm good to go. I need to test if the iTunes "authorizations" are really per-computer or per-user. If they are per-user, then I'll need one for me and one for my wife's login as well as the one for work, which would only leave two more, and those would be me and my wife's logins on another computer. I still need to sort out how to do our music library at home. Ideally, each login would point to the same Tunes library in a shared location. The iBook could access this over the network, but it would then not have music files for when you had it away from home, so some kind of library sync would be in order. I've got a similar situation for iPhoto to solve.

Update (31 July 2004): The iTunes authorizations are indeed per computer as it is worded and not per user. So the other accounts on the same computer can play the purchased music from my library.

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Mail

Once I got the network to the PC going, I went into Mozilla on the PC and imported my e-mail from Outlook Express. I then copied the imported mail folder from the Mozilla profile over to the iBook. I had installed Mozilla for the Mac earlier, and I placed the Mozilla mail files in the Mac Mozilla profile folder, and Mac Mozilla saw the mail just fine. I then went into Mac OS X Mail and ran the importer to grab the mail. The problem was that the Netscape/Mozilla importer didn't want to work, so I used "other", which imports mail folder that are of the Unix "mbox" form. When pointed to the right folder, this worked fine. The only problem was that all my mail was now marked as unread, but that didn't take long to fix.

The mail program is nice so far. One thing that was different than what I was able to read about it beforehand was the inbox structure. What I read seemed to indicate that if you had several e-mail accounts being retrieved into Mail, they would each go into subfolders in the inbox, but in reality, they all go into the one inbox (which is how I was used to with Outlook Express). The subfolders of the inbox for each account are there, and you can click one to see just the mail from that account, but otherwise, the inbox is a composite of all the messages from all the accounts.

The message rules are nice. I can simply have messages from certain people or mail lists colored to easily spot them. The rule creation is slick too, because if you highlight a message and then create a rule, any criteria you set up are automatically filled in with the values from the message you had highlighted as default values. A small nit is to apply the rule to existing messages, you need to select all in the inbox, then go apply the rule.

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Windows Networking

I had taken the iBook to work, and I had it on the network in no time with it seeing my Win2000 shares and the Windows machine seeing my printers and home folder. My home network was another story. I had managed to FTP into the iBook, but it would not see either PC and the PC would not see the iBook. I tried many things, including some superuser edits of the smb.conf file and some commands from osxhints.com, but nothing worked. There were countless "fixes" for getting Windows and Mac peer networking going, but it seemed that each person had a different problem. I finally found one that worked. In my Windows networking setup, I had purposefully not bound the TCP/IP protocol to the Windows sharing and the Microsoft Networks client thinking that might be a security risk, but it wasn't really with my firewall and router setup. Changing that made everything work fine.

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Printing

I had tried to find out beforehand if my Canon s500 printer was supported by the base station's USB printer sharing. It is listed as an OS X compatible printer, but is not listed in Apple's printer sharing compatibility list, although the s520 is. I first connected it via USB directly, and OS X recognized it and had a Canon driver ready. I connected it to the base station, and the base station recognized it after all, and I was able to add that and print wirelessly. For now, one PC still connects to it through the parallel cable and shares it to the other PC as I had it before. Presumably, I can get the PCs to use the printer over the network by connecting to it as if it were served by an HP JetDirect print server. This would be nice, but we'll see since PCs aren't supposed to be able to connect to it. It was part of why I went with the Apple base station rather than another, because the built-in print server is worth a good deal, and not many other wireless routers have them.

After much searching, I found a post on macosxhints.com that had a link to a Fuji/Xerox page for a driver utility for one of their printers, which is just an LPR port driver for Windows95/98/ME (2000 and XP have this built-in). You set this to the JetDirect setting, which appears to be just LPR over port 9100. It worked fine.

I have noticed some alignment errors in printing. I've mostly just printed from Safari, so I don't know if it's just Safari or the printer driver itself. Some of the graphics are shifted in vertical alignment on the printout, like the round edges of buttons are not aligned with the middle part that contains the text.

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Internet access

I had some trouble with Internet access initially, but I expected that since I already have a two computer network with a Linksys 4-port router. I initially just connected the iBook to the router with a cable before I did the registration thing when first turning it on. However, I forgot about the DHCP settings on the router - my LAN is set up with static IP addresses and the DHCP function is turned off on the router. I didn't manage to fix it for the initial registration, so it saved the info to send later. I finally sorted the router settings, and later connected the Airport Extreme base station. That took more fiddling, and I settled on giving it a static assignment on my LAN and letting it use DHCP for the wireless clients. I also changed it's IP assignment scheme to use the same IP subnet as my router, and things seem okay. However, I cannot get sharing with the Windows machines going yet. I managed to turn on FTP on the iBook and FTPed in from my PC to upload my Mozilla bookmarks.html file to my home folder. Safari help said I'd missed my chance at importing my bookmarks, as it does this the first time you start it. However, I didn't have anything else installed anyhow. I grabbed Mozilla for OS X and used it to import my bookmarks file. I then poked around my home folder figuring that there should be at least a Safari settings file I could delete to make it think I hadn't run it yet. Indeed, there was a Safari plist file, and much to my surprise, it opens in the Property List Editor! And what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a setting named "NetscapeAndMozillaFavoritesWereImported". I set it to "no", saved it, then opened Safari. It imported the bookmarks from Mozilla in the background. My first OS X hack!

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Arrival

I had finally ordered my iBook and it arrived yesterday. It is the 12" model with a 40GB hard drive, 768MB RAM, Airport Extreme and Bluetooth. I also got the AppleCare, an Airport Extreme base station and the Bluetooth keyboard. Today, my Marware sleeve case arrived, and it's very nice. Not very big, but that's what I wanted - no point in getting an ultra-portable laptop, if you tote it around in a giant case. I eventually got the Internet access set up, and I'm typing this entry in bed via Airport into my LAN and out the cable modem. I took it to the Albuquerque Mac User Group meeting, and easily joined the wireless network that had in the meeting room, and at the gathering after the meeting at the Flying Star cafe they also had a wireless access point. I've noticed that there are two near my house that come on late at night as well, but they are closed. I've got mine hidden.

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Decision

I'm notorious for taking a long time to make a decision. I totally understand why Steve Jobs wears the same thing to work every day. I waste considerable time in my closet in the morning optimizing my clothing for the day. I had really been wanting to get a laptop, but that certainly wasn't an iMac. However, since I'd become hard-over on a G5 iMac, that meant that was going to be an uncertain wait. I thought about getting a PC laptop, but like when I thought about upgrading the PC desktop, I just couldn't bear thinking about spending money on something that was going to run Windows. Once the recent updates to the eMac and iBook came along with the improved G4 chips, it made it much easier to decide on getting an iBook now to make the wait for a G5 iMac bearable. I thought some more about the G5 iMac as a non-upgradable all-in-one, and realized that not only is OS X itself getting faster with each release, but as more G5 optimized and 64-bit software appears, that G5 iMac (and other G5 Macs) will seem to get even faster, giving them a much longer useful life, which is a good thing for an all-in-one machine.

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Pecking Order

With the release of the G5, there was finally hope for a real up-to-date CPU for the iMac, but the problem was when that would become a reality. After following Apple closely for a while, you become very aware of their product pecking order: PowerMacs, PowerBooks, iMacs/eMacs, and iBooks. This was a policy of product feature positioning, and basically a lower Mac could not get faster or better than any higher Mac. This meant that even a desktop (iMac) had to wait until they got the feature in a laptop (PowerBook) first. This arrangement runs in to problems easily. When Motorola couldn't increase the top speed of the G4, it created a product log jam since the lower machines couldn't get very close to the top end machines in clock speed. Once the G5 was released, this created some breathing room again, so when Moto finally produced better G4 chips after feeling the heat from IBM, the logs could move again.

The current situation is back in log jam mode again since IBM was having yield problems, causing the G5s to not increase in speed on schedule. If PowerMacs have no faster G5s, then PowerBooks have no slower G5s to move up to, etc. And certainly, according to history, the iMac will see no G5 before a PowerBook will, which could take quite some time given the G5's heat production characteristics. However, recent developments seem to indicate a change in policy. The iBooks and eMacs were updated with better G4 chips than the iMac has. Only the eMac has equivalent speed, but the new G4 chips have twice the level 2 cache memory, putting the eMac notably above the best iMac in performance. It would not be unprecedented for this to happen with an upgraded iMac coming a few weeks after, but it's been several weeks. If they were going to just do a G4 upgrade for the iMac, it would have been easy and out already. Unless there was some technical issue with a G4 iMac update, this points to them getting a G5 iMac ready as the next iMac update. However, there's no way that it'll come until the G5 PowerMacs get their update, but that should be very soon.

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Hard-over-ware

The new switching barrier that cropped up while Apple was working on the software barrier was the hardware. First was the fact that Motorola was really sucking mud on G4 improvements, and this was causing the G4 to really get old. The G5 seemed to spur Motorola's G4 development, and there were finally some improvements that made it a respectable laptop processor. The other problem was all the cool form factors that Apple had been coming out with. The flat panel iMac was perhaps the most brilliant thing in computing hardware I think I've ever seen. Except that it intrinsically has the same problem any all-in-one has: the fixed display choice. Initially, the 15" screen was nice, but certainly too small for me. They quickly came out with the 17" widescreen model, and that was way better. However, the iMac suffers an additional problem: in being a very small all-in-one, it has very little expansion capability. To make matters worse, one of the few expansion options, one memory slot, was going to get filled from the get-go since it only starts out with 256MB of RAM. That just left the Airport card slot and whatever you want to dangle off the Firewire and USB ports. At least the Cube had an AGP slot to upgrade the video card. Indeed, I had fallen in love with the iMac, and wanted it as my Mac, but I was hesitant about the no expansion thing. I wanted to have certain capabilities in the box if I was going to lay down that kind of money on a machine with limited expansion options. I then got hard-over on wanting a G5 iMac.

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The X Factor

In the late 1990s, I had been following Apple only a little because there was talk of them shopping around for some operating system technology. Be, Inc. was the favorite. This was understandable since it was run by an ex-Apple guy and was very new, so it was in the computer press a lot at the time. My Spock ears really pricked up when I heard that they were considering Next as well. Later, when it was announced that they were not only going with Next, but that they were buying the whole operation and getting Steve Jobs as CEO, then my Spock eyebrow went up with the requisite uttering of "fascinating". This really changed the game. I knew Apple was serious since they had chosen the more mature system over the clearly incomplete BeOS. Or maybe Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field had just hypnotized the Apple people - it didn't really matter. Suddenly, I saw that Apple would have a huge leap in capability, and it could very well meet my high standards. The only problem was how long would it take. I had already decided to wait things out using Windows, and kept a watchful eye on Cupertino. After some initial hiccups, OS X was finally taking form. It was pretty rough in its "dot uh-oh" release, but I think getting something out the door was ultimately the right thing to do. Of course, it was still not for me. 10.1 was quite a bit better, and the trend of new releases getting faster had begun. I probably would have been able to use 10.1 knowing it was going to get better soon enough, but the jury was still out on the OS X applications. By 10.2 that was looking really good, but unfortunately there remained a problem with the hardware.

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War on My Desktop

But for all the things that are nice, there are several things that are annoying as hell. I tried many photo management programs for Windows for my parents to use. I finally got what was supposed to be one of the best, but it's just adequate and still not terribly easy to use. I really was getting sick of the media player war on my desktop. I had finally decided to buy one of the "deluxe" versions of a player to just get it to quit bugging me and be able to rip good MP3s. So I got a good deal on MusicMatch. I was trying to rip a CD, so I insert the disc, MusicMatch starts to look up the CD track info, and then Real Player leaps in front wanting to play the CD I had just put in. I didn't recall changing my preferred CD player program from MusicMatch to anything else, but apparently Real Player had. So it tries to look up the CD info as well, grabs the CD resource, MusicMatch complains it can no longer access the CD, then Real Player crashes and locks up the machine. But hey, at least Windows gives you the choice of several total crap media players to choose from, unlike other less popular operating systems. Let's not also forget it has a better selection of OS fixit, anti-virus and anti-spyware as well.

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Sleeping with the Enemy

With nothing really addressing my needs, I went to Windows 98 to get by. This was good, in that it let me be more objective in my assessment of operating systems. It let me not get blind to what improvements had been made to Windows, especially since my only recent Windows experience had been NT at work, and it lacked things the consumer Windows had. However, Windows 98 certainly lacked the stability that NT had. It wasn't long before failure to shutdown was a regular occurrence. However, once I got a Palm handheld, it was clear the emphasis of synchronization ability was for Windows and Outlook. I reluctantly had to switch to using Outlook Express because it was the only mail program that would reliably sync with my Palm in the way I wanted. I figure this is because Palm spends more effort on their Outlook Express sync conduit than any other, but that's the thing: it's not whether I like a particular mail client; it's whether Palm likes a particular one and makes a nice sync with it.

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Great Expectations

Having completed a master's degree in computer science, having used computers of all kinds for many years, having seen the likes of Next, and having used OS/2 for years, I had some great expectations of an operating system. I also knew what was accomplished at Xerox PARC so long ago, and you realize how far behind we are from where we should be. Unfortunately for me, IBM was no longer moving OS/2 forward, so eventually, other things began to catch up capability wise. Where there was once a modest amount of software for the system, the existing companies started to leave. I began to figure out what to do.

I started looking at Linux. I had dabbled in the past, but it had been quite a while. At the same time, I also started checking into Macs since I hadn't followed them much in a while either. Linux was hard, even for me. I kept at it, and I got more familiar with it, and newer distributions kept getting easier. However, it was clear it had a long way to go. It certainly had power, but I was getting to where I was no longer interested in the day-to-day stuff being a challenge, no matter how powerful or slick it was. The Mac was the opposite at the time: no power, but very easy. As much as I liked the Mac, it was still stuck with a Win 3.1 style kernel, and that wasn't going to work for me. I did get some old PowerBooks to play with. I fixed them up, and found they worked well as single application appliances. One just did Quicken - always ready in sleep mode - very good.

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My Computer

I tried in vain to explain just how awful, in a technical sense, Windows95 was, and where the OS was making things difficult rather than it being the users that just didn't understand. I tried explaining how the Windows Explorer was single-threaded, and this made things feel very like Windows 3.1 at times. I said to see this, copy a sizeable file to a floppy disk using the desktop, and watch the desktop become unresponsive. I would say just right-click on the file and choose "send to", then pick the floppy disk. That's when they would interrupt with, "you can copy stuff to the floppy disk that way? Cool!" I had to admit that the "send to" feature was a handy thing, but I could not convey how limiting the single-threaded explorer was. In OS/2, I could have done multiple drag-drop operations with the same window to re-arrange files without having to wait for the file moves to finish because they went on in the background. The other problem was that DOS/Windows users had been conditioned that copying things to disk was just something you had to wait until it was complete. Even when they had the ability to do other things while copying to a disk in Windows NT, they treated it as a critical operation, and would not task the machine to do anything else in case it "messed up" the copy operation. This explains why they completely accept not using their computer at all while burning a CD. After all, doing anything else might indeed screw things up under Windows, and you were missing the point: the mere fact they were able copy a CD was so amazing that having to do nothing until the process was complete was not a problem to them. This philosophy extended to the computer in general. Windows users also accepted crashes since that had become the norm. No one felt they could do anything about it, but it didn't really matter since everyone else was in the same boat, they could all commiserate and that made things okay.

People like me knew that there wasn't some fundamental law of the universe that meant the computer could only do one thing at a time and that humans had to wait for the machine. What rubbish. The problem seemed to be not that it was technically impossible or hard, but that most consumers didn't know to demand it. At every turn, they would just sigh and bend to the will of the machine. It seemed to be partly because computers were rather complicated, and people just didn't want to bother with all those details to get stuff done more efficiently. Telling them that it was possible to do these things, but you had to use Unix was not an option.

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Chicago

The hype of Windows95, then known by its codename of "Chicago", was unreal. By early 1995 it was frightening, and it still would have most of a year before it shipped. It was like being in a horror movie where everyone's body gets replaced or they're under mind control. I had been showing people the wonders of OS/2, and all they would tend to say in response was, "why would I ever need to put a folder inside of another folder?" Nevermind the absolutely mind-boggling other things you could do with folders alone in OS/2, they couldn't get past putting folders within folders. I would try to say it's just like subdirectories in DOS, only you can see them and do all these other amazing things with them that you can't do in DOS. My failure was not realizing that most people didn't even use subdirectories in DOS. The Windows 3.1 Program Manager didn't even let you create subgroups of program icons, let alone let you have icons representing your data files. Sure, they technically had them in the root directory of their C: drive, one for each program they had. However, they did not create any deeper than that. Many people could not think of subfolders to such a degree that they could only think of keeping their data separate by putting it on a separate disk entireley or partitioning their hard drive into several logical drives; all because they couldn't grok subfolders. Little did I know that Microsoft understood this well.

The brilliance of Microsoft is not understanding what their customer wants or needs, but what they are ready to understand. This isn't so much brilliance as just watching which cutting-edge stuff that ordinary people start to get interested in, or by not upgrading their software for so long and listening to what existing customers are shouting as they wave torches and pitchforks outside the window. Soon after I was trying to get someone, anyone, to recognize the wonders of OS/2, even if it was just that you can have folders within folders, I had people telling me about how they were running Windows95, and they could do this neat thing: put folders within folders! When I pointed out that I had shown them this in OS/2 long ago, they just said, "well, but Windows has it now, so it doesn't matter" (is this familiar to you Mac people?). I swear I could hear Rod Serling narrating. I began to search for the pods that grew these zombie replicas of everyone. I later realized that this is just the way it is, and I retreated to my OS/2 world for a while to ponder and wait out the time when Windows ruled the Earth.

I didn't completely retreat, of course. I had to make sure I truly knew the enemy. I tested some of the theories about how Windows95 was constructed. One theory was that even though it was supposed to be a 32-bit, pre-emptive, multitasking, multi-threaded operating system, it was still DOS with Windows 3.1 on its shoulders kicked up a notch with a fancy dress on. The technical bit was that in order to have good backwards compatibility with Windows 3.1, it ran the 16 bit windows system in the kernel with the 32 bit system. Worse, the Win95 kernel was really like the Win3.1 kernel in that it cooperatively multitasked between the 16bit system and the 32bit system. It's just that Win95 was supposed to spend nearly all its time in the 32bit part. What this meant was that when a 16bit Windows program was busy (not all the time), the 32bit system did not execute. I wrote a 16bit Windows program to be busy on demand for several seconds. When this happened, nothing else would respond. The entire user interface would freeze and you could not interrupt it until it was finished. It was later revealed that much of the 32bit APIs just simply called the 16bit ones. This meant that even two "32bit" programs would wind up not multitasking if the both called such functions because the 16bit system was not re-entrant, so only one at a time please. This is why people were told that to be able to take full advantage of Windows95, you had to switch to all 32bit Windows applications (so the 16bit system would never get called), and Microsoft just happened to have a complete set of these ready to go.

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OS/2

I had gone to Dallas to see the launch of OS/2 3.0 and was blown away by the demo. The object-oriented shell was to die for. They showed opening the address book, then dragging a few entries out and onto a document on the desktop causing the document icon to grow a tiny head in its corner to indicate there were some contacts now attached to it. This document was a form letter. Without opening the document, its icon was dragged to the fax printer icon. The system then went into action. It then began to print the document to the fax printer, which caused the word processing program to instantiate the form with data. It recognized that there were address book entries associated, and pulled the fields required (name, address, etc.) from the address book to fill in each version of the letter. Then, the pages could be rendered and sent to the fax printer to be converted for faxing. However, to fax them, you need fax numbers, and the fax printer was able to see the attached address info and pull the fax numbers from it! The fax printer then informed the user that it would have to que up the faxes for sending later as there was no fax modem in the machine. The presenter simply plugged in a PCMCIA fax modem card, the system recognized it, and the fax software began to send out the faxes. Then we got to see how easy it was to use it to connect to the Internet. This was October 1994. Windows95 was a sad beta called "Chicago", and this system could run rings around it. For the next few years, I was in OS hog heaven. I could run DOS programs, I could run Windows programs, and I could even boot real DOS into a virtual machine window. However, you couldn't run some of the newer DOS programs that were using protected mode on their own. The most popular of these was DOOM. It would run, but you couldn't get sound. The stability of OS/2 came at a price. No biggie for me, OS/2 let you boot back into real DOS. However, it was a biggie for many others, and besides, the new Windows Chicago beta was running it with no problems.

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Next

Whilst I was studying computer science, there was a guy in one of my classes who I don't remember much about other than he was a fan of Steve Jobs and what he was doing with Next. He showed me a Next workstation they had in the computer lab and some of what it could do. It was really amazing stuff for 1991, and I ate it up. However, there was that little problem of price again. Next machines were not cheap. I did start to follow what Next was doing. This was a time when operating system technology was a popular topic. There was all sorts of things in the works at various companies. IBM was working on "Workplace OS", which was beat up for never shipping, but it was really some technologies being developed. Windows NT was starting life, and Microsoft was working on what was supposed to be the be-all end-all of systems, codenamed "Cairo", which still hasn't gone anywhere. IBM and Apple began their Taligent effort, Linux was in its formative stages, BeOS popped up later, and I think there was even a small resurgence of AmigaOS as multi-media was all the rage.

The PC people were coming up to the 32-bit operating system decision point since Windows 3.1 was getting old, and there were regular articles talking about alternatives. One I remember was comparing systems to "help" you decide what platform to switch to. It compared Windows 3.1, Windows NT, Windows 95, MacOS and OS/2. The jist of it was that whatever shortcoming that Windows NT had, then Windows 95 could pick up the slack, and whatever shortcoming Windows 95 had, then good old Windows 3.1+DOS could step in. Mac OS and OS/2 were good, but just not enough to beat the Tres Windows Hombres. That was fine as long as you could somehow run all three versions at the same time in the same kernel space.

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Comeback

It's not that I really couldn't afford a new monitor, but that it would put a serious dent in the money I was saving to upgrade my computer. By now, I could have afforded a reasonable 386 upgrade, but I had the bug, and I had to have a 486 if I wanted to play computer games reasonably well. That also meant a good sound card. During this time, I was heavily interested in operating systems and was studying them in school. At work, we got a sample disk of IBM OS/2 2.1, and installed it. It was really cool. So cool that I had to run it at home. I found out that a new version was coming out soon that had reduced memory requirements, and so I might be able to just afford the 4MB it would need versus the unthinkable 8MB it currently needed. I began to save even more money, and was able to get the RAM chips off the dead 286 boards piling up turned into SIMMs. I finally was able to get my 486 with 4MB RAM, SVGA (thanks to a used monitor), with a nice sound card and a CD-ROM. I was back. I got my special deal on the new version of OS/2 for $30, and I was having a great time.

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Downgrade

My computer became a new hobby as I now had access to cheap parts and the occasional surplus items, which was good since I didn't have a lot of extra money. I remember getting a tip for a house call I made in the form of a 20MB hard drive and some RAM chips. It turned out that they just happened to be the right chips for a memory board someone had given me a few years before. My computer was getting pumped up with hardware and software, then one day, the 286 chip died. Luckily, we had some spare 286 boards from upgrades, and I was able to use them. Unfortunately, they would not fit in my case, so the board with cards sticking out of it sat beside the case with cables snaking in to the drives. Not pretty, but it worked. Then that board died, and I started to go through all the spare 286 boards there were, the last of which were even slower than where I had started. Then, of course, my nice SVGA monitor died. There was no way I could afford a new one. Luckily, there was a spare monochrome monitor, and my super VGA video card had dual output, so you could hook up the older monitor types and run the card in the old video modes. I was just able to run Windows 3.1 in a low-resolution Hurcules Monochrome mode to get by. My downgrade was a low point.

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Supergeek

My box served me pretty well, and I finished my engineering degree. That Christmas, I started to play with my old Sinclair just for a change. I even learned a few things and wrote a game. I liked games, but I'm just not very good at writing them, so I would to challenge myself. One summer, I wrote two little games in Lotus 1-2-3 just to better learn its macro language. I soon started back to school to get a Masters degree in Computer Science. The aerospace industry in 1989 was not exactly the best job market, and I was now a tremendous computer geek, so it seemed natural to formalize it and be a certified supergeek. Soon, I got a job working at a small local computer store building PCs and LANs and doing custom programming. While I was learning several computer languages at school: Fortran, Pascal, C, assembly, Lisp, Prolog, I was programming at work in Forth, C, Visual Basic and Delphi. All while building computers and hooking up small networks. I was loving it. Once the game DOOM came along, we had some awesome LAN parties even before most people knew you could play the game with multiple players.

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80286

Armed with a bank account with more money than I probably had ever had in it, I went shopping around for a regular PC. This was a time when the clone market was really starting to take off, and it was making it difficult to decide. For some reason, I decided to spend more on the graphics capability - probably after several years of staring at the PCjr's CGA screen. Once I saw a super VGA display, I had to have it. I had beautiful text for several years, but SVGA took quite a while to be fully utilized due to lack of standards, so I had very little good graphics before my hardware was too slow to run it.

I had myself a 286 at a whopping 12MHz (16 MHz just cost too much at the time). I think I did get the full 640KB RAM, and the amazingly vast 1.2MB floppy drive with a 360K drive as well. A 1200 bps modem to connect to the university computer, DOS 3.3, a box of floppy disks, and my tight 12" SVGA monitor with a honkin' 512KB SVGA card. I think I got out of there for around $2400. I remember when writing the check out, I hadn't left quite enough room since I'd not writen a check for such a large amount before.

I left with a Packard Bell made in California (before they became absolute crap) bought from the SoftWarehouse in Dallas, which later became the first CompUSA. Once again, investing in the PC. It didn't even have a hard drive. Why? At the time, I could fit WordStar and the Fortran compiler on one 1.2MB floppy. All my data could fit on one or two disks. The next summer I had saved up for a hard drive as my storage needs increased at a rapid pace. The 40MB harddrive was a vast tract of hyperspace by comparison.

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Peanut

In 1985, I was given a PCjr as a graduation gift to help me through college. This was primarily because it was much more affordable than an Apple II, Mac or a regular PC. For the first year of college, I still used my trusty Sinclair quite a bit since I could do magic with it and hadn't yet gotten comfortable with the new level of complexity that the PC was. I remember realizing that I almost completely knew my Sinclair (I would realize later that there was still quite a bit I didn't knwo). The PC was clearly far more involved; at least in the hardware and operating system. Initially, all I cared about was that the BASIC was quite lacking, although it did have more capability, but that was just because the PC had more power than my Sinclair.

It took me a while to realize the problem of owning a PCjr. It didn't really matter for a while until my needs grew. By 1988, I was needing more to finish my final years in Aerospace Engineering. In the summer of 1988, I wrote a BASIC program on my PCjr to make the summer job I had much easier. Easy to do when you've got lots of spare time when you're young. At some point, I just took my whole system to work, set it up at my desk and began keying in new data as it came in and entering existing data when I had nothing else to do. It worked great. So great that I was able to sell the program to the company along with my entire computer system before I went back to school. I used the money to help buy a new computer - a regular PC. I had managed to get out from under a PCjr for not much less than it cost and then some for the software, which they ran for about another 10 years. Before that, I was certain that I'd be stuck with the PCjr lemon, unable to get rid of it. I just had to find the right job for it.

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A long time ago, etc.

I remember back in 1983 going to a computer show at the Info Mart in Dallas. One of the things I saw there was an Apple Lisa. I only remember that I didn't spend much time with it and that I didn't fully understand what I was seeing. I do remember noting two things: It was a bit pricey at $10000, and that it looked good to me because it had a black on white display like my Sinclair.

Somewhere in 1984 to 1985, I remember checking out the early Macs and getting a very mixed first impression. I liked the system, but it did tend to crash a lot - how much of that was due to beat-up demo units, I don't know. I was looking mainly because I had been reading all this hoopla in the computer press about how great "pull down menus" were until I was sick of hearing about it. To vent my frustration, I programmed up some pull-down menus for a program on my Sinclair. A little man would come running from the side of the screen, jump up and pull down on a cord, thus pulling down the menu (rather slowly animated), then wait until you made a choice and let it roll back up as he ran off the screen. Once I saw the Macs in the flesh, I better understood the usefulness, and promptly went home to redo the menus and entire screen on my program, which ended up looking like a clone of the Mac screen with the same pull-down menus (sans little helper man) that even blinked the choice you made before vanishing. Of course, my program wasn't an entire operating system, but it certainly was easy to use.

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Take the White Pill

This is about my experience switching to a Mac. Hopefully, any tips and solutions I come across will be useful to others. The difference from most "switcher" stories for me is that this switch has taken 20 years. Well, to be fair, maybe not quite that long. A few years ago, I aquired several old PowerBooks and a Mac SE/30 for a couple hundred dollars to play around with, but they were not used as primary machines. I'll start with a quick history to catch up and get ready for the arrival of my 12" iBook G4. Now that I've taken the White Pill, we'll see what happens.

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