This new Tools of the Trade feature series
reminds me a bit of my all-time favorite Macintosh ad-campaign - the
early '90s "What's on Your PowerBook" series of glossy magazine ads in
which various eminent personages were photographed with their
100-series PowerBooks, whose hard drive contents were listed. Of
course, in those days of 40 MB and 80 MB hard drives, there was a lot
less to list then there would be today, when you can get a TiBook with
a 48 GB hard drive.
My workhorse Mac for the past three years has been a 233 MHz WallStreet LE
PowerBook - the second generation entry-level model with 512K of
backside cache and essentially the same 12.1" 800 x 600 TFT display as
the first generation iBook.
Configuring WallStreet
I originally purchased this machine in January 1999 with a 2 GB
hard drive and 32 MB of RAM, plus a 64 MB RAM upgrade, 
for a total
of 96 MB. This PowerBook has been just about as trouble-free as a
computer could be. It has never missed a beat in three years of daily,
intensive use. Absolutely nothing has gone wrong; its been as
dependable as an anvil. That doesn't make for a very exciting report,
but it's plenty easy to live with.
By mid-2000, the 2 gig drive was bung-full, and I was beginning to
find that 96 MB of RAM was feeling a bit cramped as well, so I
purchased a 10 GB Toshiba 9.5 mm hard drive and a 128 MB RAM module
from Other World Computing. The performance boost facilitated by these
two upgrades was substantially more than I expected, and I think that
the Toshiba drive is largely to thank.
Also in the fall of 2000, I added Macally USB and FireWire PC Card
adapters. Both work great, although neither supports bus-powering of
external devices, and the FireWire card doesn't support booting from an
external volume the way the built-in FireWire on my Pismo PowerBook does. On the
upside, FireWire throughput with the PC Card adapter in the WallStreet
is significantly faster than through the Pismo's built-in FireWire bus,
a shortcoming that the Pismo shares with the first-generation
TiBooks.
It would be an understatement to say that I have been satisfied with
my WallStreet. There has simply been nothing to complain about the
other than its refusal to install Mac OS X, the reason for which
remains mysterious, since many WallStreet owners are happily running
OS X with no problem.
I recently obtained a 500 MHz Pismo PowerBook; that will be the
subject of a subsequent Tools of the Trade article. The Pismo is my
OS X machine, but for the present the old WallStreet remains my
production workhorse and is still doing a very satisfactory job. I have
been surprised at how little speed difference the Pismo - which has
more than twice the processor speed, a 50% faster system bus, and 64 MB
more RAM - provides for many tasks, although it is substantially
quicker for some to be sure.
The WallStreet shipped new with Mac OS 8.1 installed and an OS 8.5
upgrade CD stuffed in the box. I used both of these systems at first
(installed on separate partitions), but soon upgraded to OS 8.6, and
then after 11 months to the new OS 9.0. That cut the incidence of
crashing from three or four times a week to four crashes in the first
six weeks after upgrading. I tried installing the OS 9.0.4 upgrade when
it came out, but it made the WallStreet extremely unstable, and I
reverted to OS 9.0 after a few days.
On the other hand, OS 9.1 proved to be an improvement even on 9.0's
already excellent stability, and it remains my favorite system for this
Mac. OS 9.2.1 works okay, but it has a bug that causes this WallStreet
to crash on waking up from sleep, so I have pretty much settled on OS
9.1 as the ideal WallStreet system.
Software
As for productivity software, my heaviest-used application is
probably Tom Bender's wonderful Tex Edit Plus, which I use for
text crunching, text cleaning, HTML markup, file archiving, and other
general dogsbody text work. I have TE+ customized with a suite of
AppleScripts - some of which I've written or recorded myself, others
downloaded from Doug Adams cool TE+ AppleScript site - which
automate many of my text manipulation and HTML tasks. I can't say
enough good about Tex-Edit Plus.
For spell checking, I use the shareware application, SpellTools, which also
includes handy date and time steps and a number of other utility
features. An OS 9 compatibility patch can be downloaded here.
When I need a full-featured word-processor, Nisus Writer is my tool of choice. I also
have an ancient copy of Microsoft Word 5.1
(purchased back in 1993 for my Mac Plus running System 6.0.3), and it
is the sole exception to my Microsoft software boycott. It still works
fine in OS 9.1, and I like to way it handles printing chores for the
small amount of hard copy printing than I do.
Email Tools
For email, my favorite POP 3 client is still Eudora
Light, although it is getting pretty marginalized to with no
support for multiple accounts, no SMTP authentication, and no OS X
support. I used a simple Res Edit hack to allow several copies of
Eudora Light to run simultaneously for separate accounts, but I expect
that I will be reluctantly leaving this wonderful, rock-stable, and
fast legacy program behind in the near future.
For several of my email accounts that receive a lot of spam, I use
Nisus Email
1.6, which also has the happy facility of allowing you to preview
email messages and delete them from the server without
downloading, a significant advantage when you are on a slow, dialup connection
like I am. I also love Nisus Email's quick send feature, which allows
me to zip off quick messages with a couple of mouse clicks. It also
supports OS X.
I also use Eudora 5.1, which
will take over from Eudora Light soon. This is one powerful email
client, perhaps the most powerful available, and I like it a lot,
although it feels a bit ponderous compared with its lean, slick,
ancestor.
Finally in the email department, I use S. Ichise's SweetMail, which he affirms
is based on his admiration for Eudora Light, and which shares many of
its virtues, but with a much richer feature set. SweetMail supports
OS X and SMTP authentication.
For browsing with the WallStreet, my mainstay is iCab, which I find fast and stable, although
it doesn't offer full support for JavaScript yet. For pages that iCab
can't handle, and as a backup, I also liked Mozilla, currently at the 0.9.7
build. I also used David Pearson's cool little text-only browser,
WannaBe, extensively for its
speed.
For graphics work, my favorite application is MicroFrontier's
excellent and very reasonably priced Color It! 4.1,
which is enough like Photoshop for my purposes, but without the
latter's bloat and astronomical price. Color it! also has the happy
facility of being able to run on 68 K Macs like my old LC 520, and MicroFrontier tells me that
they are working on an OS X version.
I use the excellent shareware Notepad Deluxe as my database program for
article research and sundry data storage.
My FTP client is Vicomsoft's excellent shareware program, Vicomsoft FTP Client, which does a
great job for me.
Efficient Input
I have serious problems with typing pain, and there are several
programs that help me work around this handicap. I use the IBM ViaVoice Millennium Edition
extensively for dictation, and it runs tolerably well, although slowly
on the 233 MHz WallStreet. Actually, faster dictation was one of the
reasons why I purchased a faster PowerBook, as it is one of the very
few areas where I find the WallStreet really struggling to do what I
ask of it. I have also used MacSpeech's iListen, but it is really unacceptably
slow on the 233 MHz G3 machine.
Two other utilities that cut down on keystrokes are Niemeijer
Consult's eponymously-named virtual onscreen keyboard application,
Keystrokes, which allows me
to spread some of the stress to my foot mouse, and Ricardo Ettore's
superb TypeIt4Me custom
text macro utility.
Other utility applications that I use everyday include the freeware
APM
Tuner, which eliminates the hard drive's tendency to " hunt" and
make annoying noises when it isn't being accessed. I am also very
partial to the text search applications SpeedSearch and FindText, which I like
a lot better than Sherlock for this purpose, and which don't require
the tedious annoyance of drive indexing.
Stuffit, and Stuffit Expander, handle file
compression/decompression chores, and Adobe Acrobat Reader does the PDF
honors.
Looking Forward
I plan to make a transition to OS X on the Pismo this year as my
production setup, but for now, the old WallStreet continues to do a
superb job, and it is one of the finest tools of any sort that I have
ever owned. 
