Hello everyone! It's been a long time since I've written a column
here at Low End Mac, but I've heard from a few people who have
asked me to write more, so I'm back. I'll write columns as I have
time and inclination, and I hope to hear more from you loyal
Acoustic Mac fans out there.
I've been spending a lot of time at the border of OS 9 and
OS X. My first Mac was an iMac
350. Now I've upgraded to an iMac DV 400 so I can have FireWire.
For the last few years I have been running a Western Digital 30
GB hard drive in my iMac with separate partitions for OS 9 and
OS X. For whatever reason, that hard drive didn't sleep
properly: often when I booted in OS 9, if the machine went to
sleep by itself, the drive would "catch" - it would spin up, catch,
spin down, spin up, catch, spin down, not stopping unless I
succeeded in waking the iMac or turning it off.
I was able to get around this by choosing "Spin Down Hard Drive"
from the control strip and then putting it to sleep. But in
OS X, it would get stuck in this "catching" most of the times
I tried to put it to sleep, forcing me to shut the machine off when
I was finished with it - if I didn't want it up and running
24/7.
That dampened my enthusiasm for booting in OS X
considerably. Result: Until the last month, I was booting in
OS 9 almost all the time.
I knew Apple had pronounced OS 9 dead. My answer to that was:
"Not until you make something that works better for me, it's
not!"
I believe we may have finally reached that point.
It's been a long slow road for some aspects of OS X to really
get smoothed out and worth using. Near the top of my list of things
that still don't seem to be really up to spec is the support for
Apple's own dialup modems and Internet Connect over dialup in
general.
Apple, if you're listening, there are lots of us out here in
rural dialup land who are still trying to use this technology. It
is simply not acceptable for a basic function like Internet Connect
to fail to work fairly often, and then in too many cases, require a
restart to get rid of the endless "Disconnecting . . .
Disconnecting . . ." status.
As anyone who is still using OS 9 has noticed, lots of things
still work very well, including Remote Access for dialup users.
Subscribing to the "if it ain't broke" school, as I do, I've been
pretty happy with most of the functionality of OS 9 for most
of the things I do.
The one all too significant exception is the continuing
deterioration in usability of the Internet from OS 9
browsers.
I don't know what the heck they're doing out there in JavaScript
land, but there are more and more sites that either load like
molasses in January (and let me assure you that here in New
Hampshire this January's molasses was extra slow) or just won't
work at all.
Here I have to insert a note of chastisement to PayPal, which last year discontinued support
for most OS 9 browsers and (according to their tech support)
all versions of Internet Explorer. Maybe this move on their part
made sense, except that they didn't bother to post any notices of
this change on their site, leaving thousands of users to muddle
through - "What's going on? It worked last week!"
I had been using iCab with
success for 99% of my OS 9 browsing, but PayPal changed
something so that although iCab could log in just fine, any attempt
to pay by credit card dumped me instead into the "Add a Bank
Account" screen. I finally switched to Mozilla for
OS 9, which works - except that it takes about 20
minutes to pay for something that way: each page takes several
minutes to load. Kind of removes the "convenience" idea.
Recently I finally got around to buying and installing a new
hard drive, and I am now running OS X 10.3.4. I have the
updates to go to 10.3.7, but I had such serious problems with
Internet Connect in 10.3.5 and 10.3.6 that I decided to stick with
10.3.4 for now.
The new hard drive sleeps beautifully, and I have plenty of
space (120 GB set me back 20% of the price of my first external
1 GB drive back in 1997). I booted in 10.3 and have hardly
been out of it since.
The last few weeks I've been very busy figuring out my new work
routines and what software to use. I've been very happy with the
OS X browsers I'm using: currently my browsing is split
between iCab and Firefox.
iCab was ahead to start, as I'd been using it in OS 9, but
as new extensions are added to Firefox it may be edging ahead. In
extensions, I am especially fond of
FlashBlock, which stops auto-loading of Flash-based
advertising on web pages (ugh!), and
Nuke Anything, which instantly removes any offending
item from any page - a wonderful feature that should be available
in every browser.
Most of the other applications I depend on will run fine in
Classic mode.
Here's another little pet peeve: the Epson printer drivers are
better in OS 9/Classic than they are in OS X. For instance,
the OS X drivers will only allow printing in color for many
Epson printers - you can't choose to print in black even for a
plain text document. This is ridiculous and needs to be fixed. So
much for staying in OS X and not launching Classic - I find
myself copying documents I wrote in OS X into Classic apps so
I can print them without using up my color ink.
Because I'm running Classic all the time, I haven't had to
switch my email program yet, although the day is coming. I am still
using (gasp!)
Outlook Express 4.5.
I've downloaded a number of email programs, and I'm still not
certain which one I'll go with, although Thunderbird
may be a good possibility.
Why not use Apple's Mail, you ask? There are several features I
want in an email program, and Mail does not have them all. And I
ruled out one other email program because I want to be able to
remove an attachment while keeping the rest of an email, and it
wouldn't let me to do that. 
Next time: OS X Freeware I Wouldn't Want to Be Without
