For the record, I'm getting closer to catching up on my email. Some
of these arrived as recently as this past Tuesday.
Claris Home Page 3.0: Still Irreplaceable?
After reading Claris Home Page 3.0:
Still Irreplaceable?, Neil Hokanson writes:
I have used Claris Home Page since 1999 to create my classroom web
pages. It is definitely irreplaceable to me! I now have Dreamweaver
(educator's edition), but I can't seem to get comfortable with it. I'm
sure as I train myself I will learn to like Dreamweaver, but Claris
Home Page is my first choice in a WYSIWYG editor: It's simple to use,
does everything I need, and it has been very hard to part with; plus,
it works on low-end Macs!
It would be nice to see Apple create a similar product to make my
"iLife" better. Most of the educators in my school district were
trained to use Claris Home Page to make classroom web pages and to
train students in basic web design. Students loved it! It is a missing
piece of the puzzle in Apple's wonderful line of software. Keep up the
great work and content on your site.
I ordered an AirPort Extreme Base Station and a couple of AirPort
Cards via the Club Mac link on your
site last night. I am looking forward to going wireless with my
G4 PowerBook 400 MHz
(I upgraded my RAM to 1 GB and hard drive to a 40 GB Toshiba in
December to get me through another year) and iMac (Summer 2001). We
have base stations at our middle school, and I check one out each
summer (I have a school AirPort Card in my PowerBook).
It is always tough to take the base station back at the beginning of
the school year; however, I've saved enough to fund my wireless needs
at home. We have a new baby on the way the end of April, and I was able
to convince my wife that we needed to be wireless so that we could move
our computers anywhere and make space for the new arrival. My daughter
and three sons lobbied hard as well, and my wife finally gave in! She
never had a chance! Take care.
Maybe Dreamweaver will grow on me like OS X did. Given a year
of playing with it and some significant improvements from 10.1 to 10.2,
I finally made the switch. The Mac OS has been so comfortable for so
long - and the same applies to Home Page (and Claris Emailer, for that
matter).
I think iPage or iHTML or whatever kind of cutesy i-name Apple can come
up with for an easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page design program would be an
absolutely huge hit. It would fit with the unique image of Apple as not
a hardware company, not a software company, but a solution
provider.
I'd like to get an 802.11g base station this year, but I'll probably
skip Apple's costly offerings and go for a Belkin or D-Link base
station, which not only includes a 4-port ethernet switch, but cost a
lot less than Apple's AirPort Extreme hubs.
I'm also debating how much longer to keep my 400 MHz PowerBook G4.
Quicksilver is two years old, has 512 MB of RAM, and a fast 20 GB IBM
hard drive. It's a bit sluggish under OS X, although bumping RAM
to 768 MB or 1 GB might help there (at $85 per module minimum, I'm
in no hurry there).
The same goes for doing a clean Jaguar install - I'm using 10.0 updated
to 10.1 updated to 10.2 updated step-by-step to 10.2.4. From what I've
read on the Web, a clean 10.2 install followed by the comprehensive
10.2.4 update can result in a perkier, more stable system. Of course, a
full Jaguar (instead of the update) is yet one more investment.
Or I can hold off in hopes of snagging a 667 MHz DVI TiBook later this
year. That will give me a higher resolution, brighter screen,
two-thirds more speed, Quartz Extreme, and the ability to burn CDs
without an external drive. They sell for about US$1,500 used, and a 400
MHz TiBook 512/20 should bring in over US$1,200. Something to think
about....
Overclocking a Beige G3
On the subject of overclocking, Thomas Keller says:
I was reading your update on overclocking the beige G3s and thought I
would drop my 2 cents in.
I've been running my G3/Dt 266 (Rev. B mobo) at 300 MHz for some
time now without any problems whatsoever. I didn't run any bench test,
but the speed increase was extremely noticeable. The G3 wouldn't boot
at all when I tried to go higher or change the bus speed - just strange
noises and a black screen. I used the info I found at this site:
http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/~t-imai/g3ae1.html
(good instructions & visuals). I can't remember where I got that
link; I always thought it was from your site.
Wow, your beige G3 lets you know quickly when it doesn't like a
configuration. I hope ours will be as easy when I try to bump the 333
MHz CPU to 366 MHz and maybe even 400 MHz.
A 33 MHz boost might not sound like much today, but on a 266 MHz
computer, that's about 13%. It's not a huge amount, but definitely
perceptible.
On Designing with CSS
After reading my reply to his email in What About Layout
Master?, Scott Earleywine comments:
You could use the sniffer JavaScript created by Netscape to
(http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/sniffer/browser_type.html)
to direct specific OS and browser combinations to the appropriate HTML
page or load appropriate CSS designs. Seems like a lot of work, but
once you got it going, it might be easier to change and implement
design. If you did implement CSS fully, the download times for Power
Macs and Windows machines would more than likely improve because there
is less HTML tags to decipher (FONT, HEIGHT, WIDTH, etc...). I'm sure
you already knew all that though... :)
Try loading www.westciv.com on
one of your older Macs (SE/30, Plus, etc.) to see how they've done
it . . . if at all. I would try it myself, but I don't think
my SE/30 even has an ethernet card in it (I'm at work right now). If it
did though (I'll check when I get home), I will give it a try.
We switched the site to partial use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
by March 2000, when I published an article
about it. Because of the great diversity of support for the CSS
specification in browsers, not to mention the different ways various
browsers interpret CSS, we found that we could only use a minimal level
of CSS and remain compatible with pretty much every browser.
The kind of "sniffers" you found on the Netscape site are one solution
to those incompatibilities, and some sites take great pride in tweaking
their appearance based on the browser a visitor is using. For a site
that uses CSS for overall design, not just text, that might be
important, but our layout at LEM is pretty straightforward.
By moving to CSS for text, we reduced the size of our files by 10-15%,
which speeds up loading, which makes everyone happy, whether on a 2400
bps modem or broadband.
I'm hoping to find the time in the coming week or so to experiment with
alternative style sheets and create a system whereby a visitor can
choose to see everything a bit smaller or a fair bit smaller than the
current size. (LEM uses the default browser size on the assumption that
visitors have changed or left it alone for a reason. The few attempts
to use smaller text have met with resistance from those with elderly
eyes.)
When we get that ready to go, we'll make a big announcement.
Mozilla Composer
After reading my reply in Try Mozilla
Composer, Christian Loweth notes:
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I'm puzzled about sluggishness.
I'm using OS 9.1 on a PowerCenter 150 upped to 400 Mz G3, seems plenty
responsive to me.
One may choose what components to install via custom install. I
nixed the ICQ client. Maybe that's a factor in speed. It may even be
possible to just install composer! Wouldn't that be wild? Though you'd
prob want the browser at least.
They got gobs of tech info at Mozilla and related sites (mozillazine
among others). Perhaps you can get answers at one of those sites. Just
'cuz it's free doesn't mean it doesn't cost anything in time &
learning. :-)
You're running it on a much more efficient OS. Mac OS 9 is
visibly faster than OS X, especially on older hardware without
Quartz Extreme support.
Regardless, I still don't like the brain-dead way it puts breaks
between paragraphs that should be styled at regular individual
paragraphs. It's a frustrating behavior also exhibited by a lot of HTML
export in word processing programs, AppleWorks and MS Word among
them.
It may work, but I consider it bad HTML and won't work that way.
More on CPU Competition
I was more taking your assertion of proprietary to mean, "no one
else can compete or offer an alternative for that platform." I mean, in
theory ethernet is also proprietary since Xerox patented the protocol,
but I don't think that's the notion you were trying to get across?
Maybe I was reading into things too much.
I had thought that the Pentium 4 Xeon CPUs had more integrated L2
cache, but it seems as though 512 KB is the max so far. There are some
1 MB ones but that's L3 cache... Odd!
I had also thought that the Pentium 4 Xeon had been shipping for
quite some time, actually, as that's where Intel first debuted the
HyperThreading that's only now found its way to the desktop Pentium 4.
I'm not sure what extra the Pentium 3 Xeon was above the Pentium 3 -
all it really added was more L2 cache. The Pentium 4 Xeon does seem to
be a bit of a departure from the consumer Pentium 4 line, though rumors
did abound that the Pentium 4 consumer line had the same HyperThreading
support that the Xeon line did - only it was deactivated.
To be honest, I would be surprised if the Pentium 4 Xeon and the
Pentium 4 consumer CPUs were all that different. I would think it would
make sense to keep the designs around the same and just deactivate
features on the chips in order to segment the market. I'm not saying
that they all have 512 KB of integrated cache, but who knows
. . . maybe Intel just gets the ones that have defects in
that part, deactivates half the cache, and boom there's a consumer
CPU.
I still think that the G4 is being crippled (ok, maybe that's too
harsh) by the horrible FSB. I guess the Pentium III does "ok" at around
the same MHz, but one of the strengths of the G4 is the multimedia
processing and that's generally shown to improve when the memory
subsystem and FSB improve as well.
Ah, either way, I guess we'll see once Apple gets a PPC970-based
system out for general consumption. I might have to start saving my
pennies... ;)
By proprietary I mean something that they own and can prevent
others from using. By controlling the licensing fees, they can make it
inexpensive for motherboards to support their socket but very expensive
for other CPU makers to adopt it.
I'm sure the PC side geek sites could provide the low down on Pentium 4
vs. Pentium 4 Xeon. Intel is sure pushing HyperThreading - I even heard
an ad on the radio the other day from a local computer dealer pushing
the feature. It's almost like getting two processors on a chip; the ad
said about 30% more efficient than without HyperThreading.
On the Mac side of CPU competition, the hot news this week is that IBM
is showing blade servers designed around 1.8 GHz to 2.5 GHz PowerPC 970
processors. These are just prototypes at present, but they're 50%
faster than anything we'd heard about a week ago. This could be the
power Apple needs to get Pixar's next rendering farm contract....
That said, unless IBM has changed their specifications, the PPC 970
requires a pair of busses running at half CPU speed. At 1.8 GHz, that
means two interleaved 450 MHz busses providing 900 MHz access to
motherboard memory. And if you think that sounds fast (and
prohibitively expensive), a 2.5 GHz PPC 970 would need a pair of 625
MHz busses to move data to the CPU at 1.25 GHz.
I'm wondering if IBM has really done that - or maybe decided to support
a higher multiplier to allow use of a slower bus requiring less costly
memory. Regardless, these things are going to rock.
And on a related note, Intel's marketing department - already
challenged with the reality of Itanium 2 at a much lower clock speed
than Pentium 4 Xeon - now has to push their more efficient Centrino
processor. According to Intel, a 1.6 GHz Centrino is more powerful than
a 2.4 GHz mobile Pentium 4.
Maybe we'll all learn to bury the MHz Myth in the coming year.
Final Word on AirPort Extreme USB Printer
Sharing
Taking up the challenge in More on
AirPort Extreme Printer Sharing, Jeff Preischel reports:
I know you're busy and I appreciate all the effort you put into LEM.
Here's Apple's
documentation about the AirPort Extreme Base Station and
Wireless Printer Sharing.
Section #5 talks about Wireless Printer Sharing.
"5. Enables wireless printer sharing AirPort Extreme lets everyone
in a house or small office share a single Internet connection - and an
Ethernet or USB printer - wirelessly.(3)"
Footnote in gray at bottom of page is;
"(3) Wireless Internet access requires a wireless-enabled computer,
a base station or other access point, and Internet access (fees may
apply). Some ISPs are not currently compatible with AirPort and AirPort
Extreme. Wireless printing over USB requires Mac OS X v10.2.3 or later
and a compatible printer."
I searched the knowledge base for "airport extreme printer" and
found article #107456 (dated 02/12/2003)...
2. USB printing with an AirPort Extreme Base Station requires Mac
OS X 10.2.3 or later.
3. Mac OS X Rendezvous technology is used to share the printer over
your network. In the event that a compatible printer is not available
to you using the steps below, remember to troubleshoot factors such as
network configuration and firewalls that may affect Rendezvous.
...article #107430 (dated 02/01/2003)...
Note: Mac OS X 10.2.3 or later is required to use a printer that is
connected to the USB port on the AirPort Extreme Base Station.
...and article #107455 (dated 02/12/2003).
Note that USB printing with an AirPort Extreme Base Station
requires Mac OS X 10.2.3 or later.
Hope that helps a bit.
Thanks for digging that up. I think a lot of AirPort Extreme Base
Station buyers may be very disappointed when they learn that USB
Printer Sharing only works with Rendezvous, but at least they have a
footnote mentioning that it requires 10.2.3 or later.
Thanks for clarifying this. I hope it will help others understand the
limitations of printer sharing on the AirPort Extreme hub before they
buy.
Dreamweaver
In the Feb. 25 Mailbag, Kelly
Jones suggested I look into Dreamweaver, which I have downloaded but
not installed yet. Brian Warren responds:
Greetings from Snowy Arkansas! (Did I just say that?)
Kelly Jones suggested you use Dreamweaver. I grant that it is most
likely the best currently produced WYSIWYG editor. I take issue with
the idea that, as she said the "OS X version is on par with the
Windows version."
I've been a little disappointed with Dreamweaver MX for Mac,
especially in comparison to the Windows version. I've found Dreamweaver
to be very sluggish. I don't run a top of the line Mac - a G4/466 with far more RAM
than I need - but compared to my other applications, Dreamweaver (and
the entire MX line, for that matter) runs comparatively slow.
And then I saw my friend's (also not top of the line) Windows XP box
running Dreamweaver, and it was fast. Very responsive. I thought, "Ah,
I just need a faster Mac." I inspected the performance of Dreamweaver
MX on a friends Power Mac G4
Dual 867. Also sluggish (though not quite so much as on my
G4/466).
Also, I am disappointed to find that Dreamweaver MX for Windows has
a feature that the Mac version does not. It has "Homesite View." It
allows you to view Dreamweaver with the layout similar to how HomeSite
was. (I'm assuming that as Macromedia annexed Allaire, they decided
that they liked the way HomeSite was organized and adopted it as an
option, also, in hopes of not alienating a bunch of homesite users out
there).
This option is kind of a convenient one - it allows a tabbed
interface (much like Mozilla, Chimera, and the (unreleased) Safari,
allowing you to immediate access to any of your pages by clicking on a
tab. It also shows your files in a column on your left, where you can
toggle between viewing your local and remote files. This self-contained
environment is classy and depending on how you work would be handy (at
least as an option). I'd be glad to send you a screenshot.
I remember a day (not too long ago) when performance of Macromedia
applications far exceeded that of those on Windows. I'm disappointed to
see the pendulum swing the other way.
I'm intrigued by Contribute. I'd really be interested to know how it
does on authoring pages from scratch, as the way it seems to be
presented is as a content publishing tool - filling in existing
templates with content.
I do all my coding in BBEdit these days. A nice and speedy solution
for me, although it is completely the opposite of Home Page. Maybe that
was too harsh - maybe it's the other side of the same coin. A wonderful
fast editor, just for the codemonkeys instead of the WYSIWIGers.
Dan you are doing an awesome job.
Thanks for the kind words. I'm watching the snow slowly melt here
in Michigan. I want to see green grass again.
If I recall, Macromedia really started out on the Mac side of things.
Always a shame to see another great Mac company decide to provide a
better version of their program for the dominant platform - but that's
where the money is (not to mention the tech support costs).
I'm running a PowerBook
G4/400, which is already stressed handling OS X despite 512 MB
of RAM and a fast (5400 rpm, 8 MB buffer) hard drive. With well
over a dozen applications open almost all the time - the classic
environment among them - I'm often on the edge of using up all my
memory.
We'll see how Dreamweaver work when I have the time to try it out.
Claris Home Page for Free?
Among several emails praising Home Page, I found the following from
"NoSpam":
If one can locate the demo version of Home Page 3.0, it runs for 30
days as the full version. To restore the functionality after 30 days,
all you need to do is throw away the Homepage pref file while Homepage
is not running. I used to do this about twice a year for a page or two.
At this low usage level, I could never justify paying for it.
About 6 months ago I inherited a Homepage CD but without a serial
number as it was lost. I just used a random made up serial number (I
think it needs 7 or 8 characters) and it accepted that just fine. So
this should work with a demo version as it the same as the standard
version.
I googled but was unable to find a working link to the demo version
of Home Page 2.0 or 3.0. FileMaker has abandoned the project. What a
shame, since it's not considered commercially viable, it would be nice
if they'd at least put it out as abandonware so people can download
it.
And don't tell anyone, but I don't think Claris or Apple ever released
a product that required a serial number. You can usually just
leave it blank.
Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
