MacAddict 041 200001

On 1Né DISC! | He ay OO/NVE - Ma A eter aching. A hetter A Create the Ultimate Maciofe < Tomorrow, Today! /,/ 4 fis an Solar Powered! . f mes Robot Controlling!!/ 5% Pee Voice Activated! /;; Bi hg Ae! SENG Senay Equipped» $7.99 U.S./s Book Fashion—-a Special MacAddict Photo Extravaganza! Samia @ Speed. Reliability. 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All rights reserved. Microsoft Office 2000 box shot reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation. Other names mentioned are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Nine new surfing hits. eT OYS SULIOIE: Introducing Mac’ OS 9: with nine new power tools designed to make web surfing quicker, safer and infinitely more rewarding, Each of Mac OS 9’s new Internet features would be a smash hit on its own, but now they’ re “Suggested retail price. Tax/shipping not included. © 1999 Apple Computer, nc. l rights reserved. Apple, the Apple lago,dpplscrtt, Mac and the Mac log are Now available on CD. Sherlock 2. The ultimate Internet search tool is now your personal e shopper as well. Sherlock" 2 can pinpoint products you want and let you compare prices, availability, even the tine leftfor items on auction. It'salso the easiest way to locate people, news and just about anything on ibe: ofall those passwords and digital '¢ certificates for e-mail and web servers, The personal keychain built into Mac 05 9 will keep track of them for you. Just Speak or ype pour password ‘ to unlock them all, Y 4 Keychain. No need to keep track Intemet filesharing. Mac 08.9 built-in file sharing now works © over the Internet as easily as it works between two Macs in the same room. Soyou can sel up shared folders that can be quickly accessed by any Mac user you authorize, around the corner or thousands of miles away. all available in one must-have collection. So if you're the type who loves to explore the Internet, now is the perfect time to install Mac OS 9. Surfing’s greatest hits, now only $99° wwwapple.com. @ Think different ‘Multiple users. No matter how many people share your Mag, it je will always 7) SEE beyour very own st Mac. Justlog in and | SR all your preferences va areactwated, from 2 ™ Jour favorite browser to your choice of desktop patterns. Your private folder is easily accessible until you log out. your operating system up-to- e date is as easy as installing Mac OS 9. { Automatically, ver the ( Internet, itwill download ~ (and even install) the latest free updates for your Mac. So you can get the most out of your computer, without worrying about the chores. 5 Automatic updating, Now keeping Internet AppleScript. 4ppleScript® lets you automate your Mac ‘© ond your applications, from the simplest task to the most complex workflow, Now you can tap the power af AppleScript over the Internet. And barnes the 4 power of multiple Macs working together all over the world. pour password. When you log in, |e Mac 08.9 analyzes your voice to make sure you're who you say you are, Sits really you, you can get to work right away, with full access to your personal files. But if its someone pretending to be you, access is denied. 3 Voiceprint password. Your voice is information can remain private, even when you transfer itover the Internet, Mac 0S 9 offers built-in, industrial-strength encryption —so you can rest assured that your important files will remain secure, no matter where in the world you send them. 6 Encryption. Now your private fe built-in Netwonk Browser, you can navigate your way around your IAN, your intranet or the Internet with ease. Now you can find file servers, FTP servers and web ) Network browsing. With Mac 0S9's ° regitered trademarks and Sherlock and Think diferent areirademarks of pe Computer, Inc. Internet access requesInerna service account fees may apply. e BETTER PICTURES * QUICKLY CORRECT FULL RANGE BRIGHTNESS, COLOR AND CONTRAST © ENLARGE, ROTATE AND CROP IMAGES TO ANY SELECTED PROPORTION AND SIZE * USE THUMBNAILS TO VIEW YOUR IMAGES CLEARLY, EASILY, , AND ALL AT ONCE og CATEGORIZE IZE IMAGES THE WAY YOU sages 1D ACCESS AND RETRIEVAL BOOKMARK AND COMPARE YOUR ENHANCED IMAGE V WITH YOUR ORIGINAL IN REAL TIME * SAVE IMAGE TO JPEG (FOR USE ON WEBSITES), TIFF (FOR HIGH END RESOLUTION} OR PICT FORMATS * FUN, FAST AND EASY-TO-USE THE PERFECT ACCESSORY FOR INK JET PRINTERS | Win... a nixon Coolpix 950 digital camera and other fabulous prizes in The Great Photo! Contest 1-800-863-9297 sales @softarch.com www.softarch.com To Enter: simply downtoad The Great Photo demo from the Mac Addict CD, try it out and send us your “before” and “after” Great Photo! images Email your name, address, phone number and entrt to greatphoto@contest.softarch.com or mail your entry to Software Architects, Inc., Attn: Great Photc Contest, 19102 North Creek Parkway, Suite 101. Bothell, WA 98011. Details of the contest, includint how to enter, rules and restrictions are on the demo If you do not have a copy of the MacAddict CD, please visit our website at www.softarch.com. sponsore ny (YA SOPTWARE ARCHITECTS, INC, Nikon. & MACKDDICT MAGKZIN Addie highlight 28 Mac to the Future Your Mac is unlikely to fall victim to the dreaded Y2K bug, but we wouldn't want you to miss out on al the fun of the new year. If you're itching for a little space-age action, cool your jet packs and join us here in the future. BY MARK SIMMONS It Lives! it's creepy and it's kooky. Mysterious and spooky, It's altogether ooky—the iBorg and its team! lan and Dave build a Killer iBook iBorg. Watch out PC Accelerator, here it comes! BY IAN SAMMIS AND DAVID REYNOLDS Desktop of Tomorrow You could sit there using yesterday's outdated desktop scheme, but then you could also be wearing legwarmers and parachute pants. You aren't, are you? Transform your desktop into a well-oiled, speed-mousing machine using tomorrow's technology today—we'll show you how! BY DAVID REYNOLDS iBook Fashion Everyone's going gaga over Apple’s new iBook. The pretty portable with its fresh design and translucent colors steals every scene in our photographic foray into fashion. BY ROBERT CAPPS, PHOTOGRAPHS BY AARON LAUER Filter Your Email BY IAN SAMMIS. Make a QTVR Object BY IAN SAMMIS Use Multiple Users BY DAVID REYNOLDS Make a Shockwave Game BY RICK SANCHEZ REPRINTS SUBSCRIPTION QUERIES For reprints, contact RMS at 717-560-2001 Please phone customer service toll-free at 888-771-6222. Volume 4, Issue 12 ‘MacAddict (ISSN 1088-548X) is published monthly by Imagine Media, Inc, 160 North Hil Dr, Suite 40, Brisbane, CA 94005, USA. Periocical-ciass postage paid at Brisbane, CA, and at adctional maling offices. Newsstand cSsrbution is handled ty Curtis Circulation Co. Basic subscription rates: one year (12 issues + 12 CD-ROMs) U.S. $39.90, Canada $43.95, US. prepaid funds only. Canadian price includes postage end GST 128220686. IPM 0962392. Outside the US, ‘and Canada, price fs $53.95, US. prepaid funds only. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to MacAadct, P O. Box 58251, Boulder, CO 60328-8251. Imagine Mecia, In. also publishes Maximum PO, Business 2.0, Games Business, Next Gener PC Accelerator FC Gamer, and PSM, Entre contenis copyright 1999, imagine Meds, Ine. Al rights reserved. Reprocuct ‘whole orn paris prohibited. Imagine Media, inc. is no afilated with the companies or products covered in MacAdiet. Standard Permit No. 348 Mail Enclosed Editon: A, At, A2, AS, Af, B, BY, 82, BS, PRODUCED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, JAN/OO MaeADDICT 5 AS GLOSE AS WE'RE BLOODY LIKELY TO GET to seaing this pencil-neck geek ‘on the Mac. Editor’s Note {t's the future already! Get out your crossbows and muscle cars! Letters The only place where people expect their two cents to buy them a G4. Get Info Half-Life got gunned down and GIFBuilder died quietly in its bed, but at least Ambrosia’s marketing guy has all he can eat. We also check out StarPlay's claim of having 10 tons of fun, and take another opportunity to rave about IPNetMonitor. Scrapbook We put on the rubber gloves, get out the magnifying glass, and take an intimate look at Apple’s new consumer video editing software package, iMovie. Eew. Reviews Hangover cleared, ring in the New Year with the slick, quick, oh-so-cute iBook. We take off with Fly! scan with the AFGA Snapscan, and build teerning metropolises with SimCity 3000. New incarnations of Toast, Type- Styler, Norton Utilities and AntiVirus, and other goodies also get a look-see. PowerPlay Give Myth Ii new life with four of the hottest plug-ins available. Plus, Ares (as we previewed in issue one) finally makes its debut, and, despite our better judgment, we publish our first installment of great reader screenshots. Ask Us Buz Zoller rocks like the lentil he is in his debut Ask Us offering. Tune in for answers to Digital8 queries, networking glitches, and storage woes. Shutdown Something smells mighty funny here—oh, wait. That's the odor of quiet desperation. The humorous scents are in the back of the book. AIN'T NOBODY GONNA GIVE these bad boys Safeway Specials! JAN/OO. “ ~ Auldigt THE TEAM PUBLISHER Susan Janus EDITOR Robert Capps EDITORIAL EXECUTIVE EDITORS Nikki Echler, David Reynolds (technology) MANAGING EDITOR Jenifer Morgan ASSOCIATE EDITORS Narasu Rebbapragasa (reviews), Jan Sammis DIGITAL MEDIA EDITOR Kris Fong WEB GURU Niko Coucouvanis CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Rat Anzovin, Steven Anzovin, Joseph 0. Holmes, Buz Zoller ART ART DIRECTOR David Ross CONTRIBUTING DESIGNERS Linda “Lulu” Aldredge, Anna Cobb, Gerry Serrano PRODUCTION PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Richard Lesovoy PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Hans Hunt ADVERTISING REGIONAL AD MANAGER Don Kimenker REGIONAL AD MANAGER Kevin White AD MANAGER, DIRECTSALES Ana Epstein DIRECTOR OF MARKETING Mary Lachapelte AD COORDINATOR Balin Brandt CIRCULATION SUBSCRIPTION DIRECTOR Kate Bailey NEWSSTAND DIRECTOR Eric Alekman NEWSSTAND SALES MANAGER Melissa Moske ONLINE MARKETING MANAGER Mary Firme FULFILLMENT MANAGER Peggy Mores DISTRIBUTION COORDINATOR Quyen Nguyen INTERNATIONAL LICENSING: Robert J. Abramson & Associates, Inc., 720 Post Rd., Scarsdale, NY 10583 LEE MEDIA WITH PASSION Imagine Media, ne. 4150 North Hil Dr Brisbane, CA 09005 (215) 4862684 worlooginemadi.com Executive Chairman « Chris Andorson IMAGINE BUSINESS BSION: ‘Business 20) IMAGINE COMPUTING DNSION: England (acdc Maximus Mest Ln) IMAGINE ENTERTAINMENT DIVISION: * Jonathan Simpsor-int IMAGINE EYTURENET DUISION: (vacdaly Network Rex | Fee Imagine Medias almed at people whe ha A pascion for games, For business. 2: OF forthe Whew, It's back. How's that movie Narasu? Takin’ any good digital photos lately Nikki? No touching in the Champagne room. Thanks Dan! Right on. EarthLink on Internet! We're famous for our hassle-free connections and our feature-rich service. And, if you join EarthLink now, we'll give you 5 so you can see for yourself. Here's just some of what you'll enjoy as an EarthLink member: Moving Services—Our software helps you save your old bookmarks and tell all your online friends your new email address Unlimited Internet access at speeds up to 56K Reliable email account (99.99% uptime) S A fully customizable Personal Start Page™ 24/7 toll-free technical support A free subscription to blink™, our members-only Internet magazine Free software like QuickTime™, RealPlayer™, and Shockwave® 6MB of webspace to build your own Web site Easy-to-use Click-n-Build homepage builder And much more! O 4-800-EARTHLINK a ntion registration #4000-42044. NO LINES. NO PARKING-LOT GRIDLOCK. INSTANT SERVICE. 24-HOUR SUPPORT. WHAT KIND OF STORE IS THIS? rhea shopper-friendly kind: a Virtual Printer Store. You don’t get here by car or bus. You come by phone or mouse instead. And you couldn’t stand in a line, get lost in a crowd, or be ignored by a store clerk if you tried. At the Virtual Printer Store you buy your printer direct from the people who made it. So you pay only for what you need (the printer), and not what you don’t (the middleman). And there’s another important difference after you leave. At conventional stores you get demoted from customer to stranger. At ours you become a virtual client. We offer free technical support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — for the entirety of the one-year warranty. And if you run up against a problem we can’t solve, our Platinum Exchange Warranty Program guarantees you a replacement printer by the next business day. (All our printers come with a thirty-day, money-back guarantee as well.) Finally, we offer printers good enough to sell themselves — because they have to. Printers that turn out vivid halftones, poster-sized graphics, printshop-quality text, and perform various other noteworthy feats noted here. Now, what are your chances of finding a conventional store that offers all that? Virtually nonexistent. ELITE 12N Series 12 pages per minute 600 x 600 dpi resolution Maximum Print Area 8.5" x 14" Letter, legal, envelope 250-sheet Universal Tray PostScript® Level 2 compatible, PCL'S 35 PostScript fonts, 15 PCL fonts, ELITE XL 20 Series 20 pages per minute 600 x 600 dpi resolution Maximum Print Area 12,6" x 35.1" Letter, tabloid, legal, envelope, poster 500-sheet Universal Tray PostScript Level 2 compatible, PCL 5 35 PostScript fonts, 15 PCL fonts, 45 downloadable fonts 250 downloadable fonts RAM expandable to 64 MB RAM expandable to 64 MB Ist year Platinum Exchange Ist year Platinum Exchange BtherTalk TCP/IP USB, Ethemet (10 BaseT), Bi-directional Parallel 2nd Paper Feeder! ‘Gnclodes S00-shost Universal isy) Add $299 2nd year Platinum Exchange? Aas $ 99 EtherTalk, LocalTalk, NetWare? TCP/IP Ethernet (10 BaseT, AAUD, Bi-directional Parallel 2nd or 3rd Paper Feeder? (Gnelades 500shest Universal Tray) Add $329 2nd year Platinum Exchange? aad $179 $849 $1599 Lease $56 Month/36 months* $949 1200 dpi version $1899 800 dpi version Lease $67 Month/36 months* en, TA $2199 1200 dpi version ee oes Lease $77 Month/36 months* Also available in LocalTalk® versions ELITE 12/600 uss 12 pages per minute 600 x 600 dpi resolution Maximum Print Area 8.5" x 14" Letter, legal, envelope 250-sheet Universal Tray PostScript Level 2 compatible, PCL 5 35 PostScript fonts, 15 PCL fonts, 45 downloadable fonts RAM expandable to 64 MB Ist year Platinum Exchange USB (cable included), Bi-directional Parallel 2nd Paper Feeder! (Gncludes 300-sheet Universal Tray) Add $299) 2nd year Platinum Exchange? add $ 99 $799 ‘UNIVERSAL SERIAL BUS Nigeosor at —— = TcaNotocies THE VIRTUAL PRINTER STORE. ein ne or si oi op pn Tey orn pees ng nmi eld ween em ad Sr es sen Soto i ete en Satelite tse ped eet saat gua oops Hi eo vl eo ae Keycode 001MAD1 ae en femal ei pet bl an Cpe the dist © 100% Y2K Compliant! Celebrate the new Year’ with These Highlights Unreal Tournament Demo It's a fight fo the finish in this latest seek-and-destroy, shoot-to-kill fragfest. Tournament delivers nonstop, heart-pounding combat and allows you to play multiplayer games whether you're connected to the Net or not. Join your team's assault as you challenge other teams in various gameplay modes, including Capture the Flag, Team Deathmatch, Deathmatch, and Domination. Wimps need not apply. Photoshop 5.5 Tryout This industry-standard image-editing powerhouse now takes all Web graphics gurus under its ~ Tighty wing. With the addition of ImageReady 2.0, the latest version features tools specially designed for Web graphics optimization. Slice, dice, and julienne your photos and graphics to pristine perfection. Decent 3 Demo Wow, Duane—you've done well! Anyone who remembers MacDescent 3dfx from a past MacAddict disc will be happy to know this software's creator is the lead port programmer of. the official Descent 3. Running on the new Fusion Engine, D3 blasts you through a white- = knuckle spaceship ride through amazing 3D graphics. So pop a Dramamine and get ready for warp speed! ioe ' QDesign MVP 1.0 Trial Anyone who's serious about digital music will want to check this one out. MVP is the first cross-platform MP8 player and audio production system that fully supports the Secure Digital Music Initiative along with its proprietary QDesign audio format. Play over 20 popular audio and video formats on one player, including streaming content. It just may become your Most Valuable Player. @) CalcWorks SE—MacAddict Edition All you brainiacs, get the MacAdoict -exclusive edition of CaleWorks SE, a colorful calculator with much more computing power than your Mac standard. Visit this link for special MacAddict reader pricing: http://sitelink.net/ibrochu/MacAddictOrderForm.shtm. WITHOUT A TARGET, this rocket will launch to infinity and beyond! ® plug for a new digital music one-shot Imagine Media is releasing. NO AIR-SICKNESS bags? How about some peanuts, then? DAVE REYNOLDS MATTER-OF-FACTLY STATED there was something women could do that men could not. We attempted to prove his theory wrong. Too bad we got to the video camera after Dave and Rob had their turn. If Dave's theory is true, he and Rob are all woman. You go, girls! DANGER, DANGER...this player may induce some serious booty shakin’! MMMM, OURS TASTES like blueberry! 410 MacADDICT JAN/OO t doesn’t come with a standard floppy drive. After all, why would you want a standard floppy drive. So you bought an iMac. And now you are in the market for a disk drive that will allow you the capacity to enjoy our multimedia world. Sounds like a plan. But what about your old floppy disks, you ask? Not to worry. Get a SuperDisk drive, the drive that accepts 120 MB SuperDisk diskettes and your old floppies, giving you easy and immediate access to all of your files, old and new. Maxell SuperDisk diskettes use the same reliable technology as your floppies, and even function in virtually the same way. Hey, you're going to buy a drive for that iMac. Make sure it's one that can handle all of your big ideas. And, equally important, your smaller ones. For more information, visit our website at www.maxell-data.com o, SuperDick dive required to use SupesDisk media maxell a pple TRE ME DUA PMA TOE Rss: re i qf ai cE ae af at af ‘ E | i r kay, it’s not a new millen- nium—tI hear you. Heck, it’s not even a new century. Fine, you sticklers, we'll wait until 2001 to start celebrating the Big Ones. It is, however, a new year and one of the traditions here at MacAddict is that as a new year begins, we gather the staff together and randomly predict the events of the coming 12 months. Keeping with that tradition, in early November, I sat all your favorite editors around a tiny desk in our office, gave them too much beer and sake, and forced them to look deeply into their crystal balls. Here’s what they figured Y2K will bring for the Mac, Apple, and the rest of the world. is Fong A. To be a stumbling, happy drunk wandering aimlessly through the crowded San Francisco streets, wondering why f'm even there in the first plac © At least two additional parts of the Mac OS will don the “brushed-metal” look introduced by QuickTime 4 and Final Cut. QuickTime 4 will come to be known as The Brushed-Metal Virus. * Steve Jobs will publicly utter the phrase “I almost forgot...” no less than five times. © G4s will morph into PowerBook form. © We'll see snap-on color schemes for Macs. © Steve Jobs will push his luck too far with some grand scheme, prompting Apple insiders to say, “Oh yeah, that’s why we fired him the first time...” © Mac 0S 9.1 will ship. * Mac OS X will ship. It will be totally unlike the current Mac OS and cause panic and confusion—but it will rock! ‘A. To hunker in my bunker with a Junker. * You'll be able to pick up a used generator for $1.95. The DOJ will split up Microsoft. Muscle car and | « jean-touis Gassée will call his Be operating system “the |e Porky's. Definitely Porky's. | hear they're ulti ultimedia i oh ‘ oe ll arm-mount ltimate multimedia operating system,” but no one will care. starting up thi ranchise again. Oh, and G4s will reach 700MHz. Pentiums will reach 1 GHz. Muscle car and arm-mount crossbow sales will rise. Logicware will change its name to Vaporware. * You'll be able to buy a whole new Mac for $99 (or some- thing /#ke a whole new Mac anyway). * Crayola will introduce Bondi Blue to its crayon color collection, and Apple will thank them with a massive lawsuit. crossbow sales will rise, * Pokemon will go the way of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (and pet rocks). © Tinfoil will be big. A. Body shots at th mphony Gi m * Wireless networking will blossom as Apple introduces FireWireless connectivity. pagne reception...well-timed, crude outbursts * iBook fashion spreads will dominate Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Details. during the performai gettin’ jiggy with * Steve Jobs will legalize marijuana at Apple. Strauss later on. * Disney will purchase both Apple and Pixar. Larry Ellison will make more than 15 completely bizarre comments. © DVD movie hacking will grow, yielding a vast illegal online movie market. A. iBook fanny packs with extra zippers. Silver © MacAddict will publish its biggest issue ever. bodysuits, DNA-based criminology. . Dave and Ian will make geeky references to obscure parts of the Mac OS. 12 MacADDICT JAN/OO Complaints, kudos, conspiracies, and lusting hearts, oh, the drama! This Month WRITE TO US: MacAddict, 150 North Hill Dr, Brisbane, CA 94005, or email to letters@macaddict.com. FOR CD PROBLEMS: Go to http:// support.imaginemedia.com. FOR SUBSCRIPTION QUERIES: Call (toll-free) 888-771-6222. CHEEZED OFF What's the deal with Cheez-lIts? I've read enough about them in your magazine and GETON, have heard more than enough about them in GET ACTIVE. gamer chats. The bottom line is, they suck. I Talk tous and snepest you get a big bag of Fritos (not the other Mac Scoops or those new stupid racecar Fritos) ah a and retire the Cheez-Its along with the G3s. site, Fritos rule and will soon be classified as superchips, since you can easily eat a billion of them and not get enough.—Marx KipBey RECENTLY SIGHTED-© y company (shameless plug— M Avanti Press, aka the coolest greeting card company in Detroit) is in the process of moving, and we just bought 26 iMacs! | thought you might like to see all of them nestled together. Aren’t they cute? Now, who gets what flavor?—KnisTINa TROXELL WE LIKE ORANGE! 14 MacADDICT JAN/OO Kevin, You IGNORANT Stut! Kevin Savetz may want to throw out his lowly puzzle in the Apple Menu (“ANALize Your Mac,” Now99, p44), but I love it for some- thing quiet and slow to do while talking on the phone. Of course, I don't keep the silly map picture—I use more interesting pictures such as Jackson Pollock’s “White Wall” or illustra- tions from Where the Wild Things Are,—RUTHALICE ANDERSON In “ANALize Your Mac,” Kevin Savetz suggested giving old hardware and software to schools. Please stop giving old stuff to us! If an individual — or company finds the equip- ‘ment too out- dated to be very useful, why do you give it to the schools? Sure, we can use a few old pieces, but mostly | ‘tee we have to spend dol- lars or precious staff time to upgrade them to fit into our networks or get them working. Or, we have to pay to dispose of them. We have standards that equipment must meet before we buy it so that all of our pieces work together. Would you pay to upgrade your equipment to our standards before donating them? Are we supposed to prepare students to enter the workforce with the workforce’s old equipment? Think again about what you are saying —ANNETTE ScHALO As CLear AS...PLASTIC In his dead-on accurate review of the G3 laptop (Reviews, Oct/99, p42), which I own, David Reynolds makes the following recommendation regarding the scars the keyboard leaves on the screen: “For extra protection, just lay a piece of plastic between the monitor and the keyboard when closing.” Could I get a little clarity, please? A piece of plastic? Like Saran Wrap? Like an overhead acetate? Like a Tupperware lid? I would appreciate any clarification —Derex WesLey SELBY You want something thicker than Saran Wrap but thinner than a Tupperware lid—it doesn’t even have to be plastic. A light cloth will do. Now please don’t ask us what kind of cloth to use (sigh). DR Groovy, Dappy-O Did anyone else notice that if you shaved the head of David Ross (your new art director), he would look like “Prison Guy Je” or “Mini-Me Prison Guy”? Perhaps this way Robert Capps can shake the image and fully assume the new “Beatnik Editor” role. Just look at that goatee!—S, E. Emry ALTERNATIVE ALTERNATIVES Sorry to rain on your parade, Dave, but I noticed a glaring omission in your “Software Alternatives” feature (Nov/99, p32). You forgot the coolest Mac software of all. I’m speaking, of course, of Linux, in all its variations—LinuxPPC, MklLinux, YellowDog Linux. Linux comes with lots of cool stuff compiled for the PowerPC— Gimp instead of Photoshop, StarOffice instead of M$ Office, Apache, KDE, Netscape, the list goes on. I love the Mac OS to death, but until Mac OS X comes out, I want something I can actually play with, I dual-boot my 7600/120 between Mac OS 8.6 and Linux PPG, and it never crashes in either operat- ing system. Let’s see a Windows 98 box that can keep up! I love having a Wintel-free ‘system!—Mart STENINGER ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID “TWIGG AND BERRIES" ROSS Tam saddened that in your article about alternative software, you didn’t include Corel WordPerfect in the word processing sec- tion—especially since I learned from your Web site that Corel was giving WordPerfect away free, Although I have only used this pro- gram for a little over a month, it has replaced Word 98 as my favorite word processor. Because it has such smal! system require- ments, WordPerfect even runs on my PowerBook 180, which has just 4MB of RAM. WordPerfect’s Grammatik puts Word’s spelling check and thesaurus tools to shame, helping me become a better writer along the way. And while Word attempts to add features that end up as annoyances, WordPerfect’s features are more useful than I could ever have imagined. —Zacu Lutz We're Not THaT WEAK Here's a word search puzzle I made for you just in case you might be tempted to do some work.—Put. WALKER More Like a Conspiracy Iwas poking through my system file last night when I noticed that the mouse control resources are named mcky. Now, if that’s a coincidence. ..— CHARLEY TISHMAN Stop, You’RE MakinG Us FLummicuLate! I noticed that on page 77 of the October issue Mark Simmons used the word embiggen. 1 can’t find that word anywhere in the dictionary, What does it mean? By the way, MacAddict is a perfectly cromulent magazine.—KEVIN ANDERSON Our Wires Got CrosseD While browsing through the contents of the November MacAddict, 1 spy instructions for making a crossover cable in “Save Your Old Data with EtherTalk,” p92. Yee-ha! I've been meaning to make one for years, but never got around to digging out the instructions. Now MacAddict YRREBWARTSFIREWIRE | !1SDIEATSRIFKS!IDFRAE SALOEQUICKTIMEERSA OREEPDSNO! SNETXEKH | DEBNEOCMFEEASEHUA TGETCANIAMNHWTIBSH AARUTOPTIMS!OHMLBA KI NALENLRWRNTLAUSH EO!GPBLTOASEVECEHL ESOMEE!IDRRNSWEGBUL | FESBGRNDOOTS! OLETI NIHRRI | TNELNPHPRDB TKEEWEINVOJSOOXROK | ECRVODWEENBHTCRYWP | RILIteE!JODKSALRETNA NTOEKOOBPARCSRI AHR ESCWBPAPPLESCRI PTG TDKSMODEMMACADDI CT | APPLESCRIPT GET INFO POWERMAC | | ASK US GRAPE QUICKTIME | BILL HA HA HA IMAC REVIEWS | BLUEBERRY INTERNET SCRAPBOOK | BONDI BLUF LETTERS SHERLOCK | CONTROL PANELS LIME SHUT DOWN CONTROL STRIP MACADDICT STEVE JOBS DISK FIRST AID MODEM STICKIES EDITORS NOTE OPEN TRANSPORT STRAWBERRY EXTENSIONS POWERBOOK TANGERINE FIREWIRE WINDOWS HATER USB TV and Video Capture for your iMac or G3 MyTV and MyTV/fm are the first products that bring television to your iMac or G3 over a simple USB connection. Convert your Mac into full screen 125 channel cable ready TV or watch TV in a scaleable win- dow. Capture high quality, full fr: rate, QuickTime movies from any video source. With MyTV & MyTV/fm there is no complicated installation, no opening your computer, no valuable: PCI slot to find, just plug itin and... play! Esk4he “Thinking Outside the Box” MyTV and MyTV/im, the perfect comple- ments to your iMac or G3 Macintosh For more information visit www.eskapelabs.com Slimming down for the New Year just got a whole lot easier VST‘ line of thin, lightweight and portable products help you shed unnecessary weight while maximizing computing FireWire Hard Drives power. Our ultra slim FireWire® (6GB and up) Hard Drives and Zipe Drives offer blazing fast transfer rates, are hot-plug and unplug supported and do not require any device IDs or terminators. FireWire CardBus Cards FireWire Zip100 Drive USB Floppy Drive with Snap-on Color Kits USB Hard Drives Our USB-based products feature thin hard drives and floppy drives. The newest addition to the floppy line has snap on covers in blueberry, tangerine, strawberry lime, and grape. The drive is also available in black. www.vsttech.com Visit our web site at www.vsttech.com to view and order these and other VST products. Mac TECHNOLOGIES Incorporated > i ny 15 Park, Acton, MA 01720 cer toto tan camciyn NAPPA OTT Pee ea Sree eet eee cine ‘omega patents protected by patent applications pending Renee re eretas ‘the Mac OS logo, PowerBook, iBook and are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, inc. there they are, right in front of me! I grab an old cable, slice and splice away, connect two Macs, fire them up, and get the message, “There has been an error.” Rats! Rechecking the directions, I find that you point out the correct wires, but the colors are wrong! It's the green wires, not the blue! With the correct connections, it works beautifully. I think Buz needs a ColorSync upgrade —Jerr MuER This is why I love MacAddict—it’s wacky but useful. When I got home with my new beige G3, I got to thinking about how I was going to transfer the gig of data from my faithful but tired 7100. Hmm...the cable company left me a spare 10Base-T Ethernet cable when it set up my cable modem...and here's a stroke of luck: MacAddict has just published instructions on how to save my old data with EtherTalk, along with instructions on how to make a crossover cable! Useful, timely, amazing... Of course things got wacky (and a little frustrating, I must admit) when I connected the Macs with the modified cable (having followed the written instructions very carefully). You guys are a hoot! Challenging your readers to these games of troubleshooting improv! Well, it took a while, but I finally figured out your little secret and cut a few more wires in the cable to make the connections described in the visual instructions. All in all, it took me 30 minutes more to get the Macs talking to each other, but that was nothing compared to the 17 hours it took to transfer the data over the network con- nection. Thanks for the useful articles and irreverent fun—Donatp JUBINVILLE AnyTuinG ELse? Has the hard time in thinking jail finally gotten to him? Why is he giving us full programs on The Disc? If he has gone mental, please keep him that way. I pay about $30 a year for a subscription and I’m treated to hundreds of dollars worth of software! Next month, could you put Mac OS 9, Adobe Photoshop 5, Avid Videoshop, Macromedia Director Studio, and Poser on The Disc?—Anprew T. Scavick We now have to keep Prison Guy chained to his desk to keep him from giving away free G4s to all the readers. It’s really quite sad. Thank you for your concern.—Ed. Were Were You? You know, I was digging around in my MacAddict collection and came across the premiere issue. It was fun to look back and see the direction this magazine plotted out. I just received my latest edition, and I compared the two. The magazine has stayed on target through every issue. It never fails to amaze me how well done MacAddict is. You people clearly had a vision (gag on a corporate buzzword), and you haven’t lost your focus since issue number one. While I’ve got you, what's been going on between issue number 1 and number 39?—Cnariss Cusumano WW “What THE?!” F After a week of using my new Connectix Playstation emulator to play Human’s Fire Pro Wrestling G, I decided to create the match every Mac lover dreams of: Steve Jobs kicking the crap out of Bill Gates! Using the game's editing tools, I re-created Jobs and Gates as closely as possible and took a few snapshots of the entire match. I wonder when I'll be able to see Jobs do a stunner like that on Pay-Per-View —JaxE Gonsoskt A BEHIND-THE-SCENES LOOK at negotiations between Apple and Microsoft. By Jasper, You’ve Got It! I was experiencing a brief lapse in creativity while designing graphics on my G4, when a question suddenly came to me: What does Pentium mean? So I double-clicked my Oxford Dictionary and typed in “Pentium”—and to my dismay the definition didn’t appear. But I did find information about the two roots of the word. Pent means five or fifth, and ém means pertaining to an element. From here you can follow two logical paths: Either Intel is truly confused and thinks its product is the elusive fifth element, or Pentium refers to the fifth ele- ment of the periodic table, boron. When I thought of the latter option, limmediately recognized the striking similarity to the word moron. And, as we all know, the definition of moron is anyone who would actually pay money for a PC with one of the previously mentioned inferior processors. Coincidence? I think not —Jasrer Urron You’rE, Um, Mucu Betrer OFF Tm wondering if I should be miffed at Apple. In April, I purchased a 63 and got Final Cut Pro soon after. Now Apple has released iMacs with the iMovie app for editing video. I spent nearly $5,000 for the ability to edit video via FireWire on a Mac, but now it seems I could have waited a few more months and spent a lot less for the same privilege. Please tell me the differences between iMovie and Final Cut Pro. Please tell me I'm much better off with my higher-end configuration —Srrve Swrnckowski Check out Scrapbook on page 26 of this issue for a closer look at Cuick ‘nN’ A SNIT Pssst...I just thought I’d enlighten you about Steve's clicker of power (Scrapbook, Now/99, p30). He’s not really advancing the slides. When he presses the clicker, a light and/or buzzer goes off backstage, and the guy sitting at the computer advances the slides—very likely in MicroShaft PowerPoint. (If it's not an Apple-paid event, it could be on a PeeCee!!!) There are several reasons for doing it this way: 1. The clicker could malfunction, and then the slides would not advance. 2. The computer could freeze, but since there are two running simul- taneously backstage, the operator can switch to the backup system. 3, Steve might forget to click, but the producer could tell the operator to advance the slide. 4, Steve might click the reverse button by mistake, and look like an idiot who doesn’t know how to operate a garage door opener. 5, Steve might click too many times, and look like an idiot who does- n't know how to operate a garage door opener. Of course, the ultimate desirable outcome here is that Steve doesn’t explode in a fit of rage for something that was his fault. —Rick AHLGREN Dave Took A SPEED- Writina Course What are you guys feeding Dave? I was enjoying the November MacAddict when I noticed that most of the stories seemed to be by David Reynolds. He wrote three of the four features, two of three how-tos, and two of 17 reviews. I think he also had a text box in the PowerPlay sec- tion. In short, of the 61 pages with content, excluding the table of con- tents and letters, Dave was responsible for 30 of them. What's the deal—is Prison Guy getting a little revenge?—Soorr GALLAGHER I noticed in the November issue that you made David Reynolds write five articles. This seems kind of mean. Is it some sort of payback for when he was in charge and made you guys do all the work? Is it because he was drinking too much and you all tricked him into doing it? Or was it just some weird freak of nature?—Ben TeRMEER Witt Work For Kris Please include more pictures of Kris Fong in all future issues. She is awesome! I am applying for the editor’s position advertised on your Web page. Heck, I'll work for free if I get a desk across from hers.—Scorr Curris We've SEEN Worse Isit just me, or does this worldwide DRAM shortage have anyone else envisioning life in the near future as a new postapocalyptic Mel Gibson film—The RAM Warrior? Y'll leave the screenplay as an exercise for the reader's overactive imagination —Kris THOLE Anp THEY Catt THis News Right in front of my disbelieving eyes, this appeared on the front page of Section Two in the Wall Street Journal (October 14, 1999) in Walter Mossberg’s Personal Technology column: “Finally, a word of warning. Today's Windows 98 PCs are generally unreliable. They will crash on you, do unexpected and puzzling things, and generally cre- ate hassles and headaches. I know of no brand that is immune to these problems. So be prepared for more trouble than you deserve.” It brought a tear (from laughter) to my eyes—Marc Orcuant Pure JEALOUSY Just out of curiosity, why is Max exclaiming “Holy crap!” as he lunges out from under the iBook on the October cover? I thought the iBook was a good thing. And why would it want to squish Max?—Jennir E. Cattas Teen ANGST I really love your magazine, but why the hell did you make the guy from Matchbox 20 your editor?—SEAN VILLAFRANCA ‘you introduce a controversial topic in your college class with, “Now I don’t want to start a flame war, but...”—NicxoLaus Wing ~»you have a nice, big house, but you'd rather live in a Power | Macintosh G4 cardboard box (“Live Different”)—Ctay Camano ‘ano Ket OTANI The latest victim of San Francisco ...you refer to the beautiful redheaded country singer as Reba Macintosh —Curls Seses ..your brather is in Cub Scout Pack 604, and you encourage him to find Pack 450 (G4) and join it—“PowenDenex G4” Hanms JAN/OO MacADDICT 17 It's a good thing these first-person shooters don’t really make us violent. My So-Called Half-Life | | Sierra and Valve cancel Half-Life for the Mac n case you've been stranded on a desert island (or just don’t have Inter- net access), let us catch you up with the latest punch to the gut of the Mac- gaming community; The much-anticipated Mac version of the ultra-popular PC game Half-life is, at least for the time being, dead. Valve Software (who originally developed the game) and Sierra (who publishes the game) told Logicware (who were porting over the Mac version) to stop work in mid-October, and shortly thereafter Valve issued a letter of apology to the Mac community for canceling the project. The reason the company gave for shutting down Mac Half-Life was that economic factors would make it impossible to keep Mac development and updates at the same pace as those for the PC. Rather than treat the Mac community like a second class citizen, Valve decided to not treat the Mac community at all, Logicware lead programmer Bill Heine- man said he was stunned by the decision to cancel the game, and by Sierra and Valve's reasoning. Heineman said that Logicware had just completed a full working beta of the game and expected to have the final build ready to ship in November. Especially sur- prising, Heineman said, was Valve's indica- tion in its letter that the Mac and PC versions of Half-Life would be unable to network via the Internet for multiplayer games, Accord- ing to Heineman the game was already net- working fine with version 1.13 of the PC Half-life (the latest PC build) on LAN and over the Net, and all that remained to be. done was bug fixing, some optimizing, and tweaking of some Macintosh-specific fea- tures, Heineman also disagrees that a suc- cessful business can’t be had by selling Falf- Life on the Mac. In fact, his company as well as Aspyr Media and MacSoft have showed interest in purchasing the Mac rights to Half- Life, but Sierra has not officially responded. 18 MacADDICT JAN/OO The company has unofficially said that a licensing deal is probably unlikely, though. Sierra spokesperson Genevieve Ostergard explained that one reason for canceling the ‘game was poor sales figures on Sierra’s other Mac games—Caesar III in particular. Oster- gard pointed out that even though Ceasar III has received rave reviews and heavy promo- tion, it has sold less than 10,000 units to date. On the PC side, Ceasar I has currently sold around 450,000. Best selling Mac games such as Civilization IL, a top seller for months and months, only sell around 60,000 Mac units, while it's not uncommon for a popular PC title to sell over a million units. Being a Mac gamer herself, Ostergard said she is also disappointed that Half-Life will not be coming to the Mac, but as a business decision, she understands it. “How can we justify being [a Mac] ff business with those numbers?” Ostergard said. “60,000 units should be considered a failure.” Low sales, Ostergard feels, is not necessarily caused by the relative small size of the Mac market— with over two million iMacs sold, there should be a market fora game to sell half a million copies on the Mac. The real problem as she sees it is that people still don’t think of the Mac as a gaming machine, and Apple still has a long way to go in evangelizing games on the Mac. On the PC side, hard- ware manufactures and graphic accelerator card makers, such as 3Dfx, work in conjunction with game companies to gen- erally promote gaming. On the Mac side, gaming companies are left on ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID “T:BONE* ROSS. their own except for Steve Jobs's occa- sional keynote mentioning. (Apple didn’t return phone calls on the subject.) Ostergard told us that has far as she knows, Sierra is still moving forward on its other Mac titles such as Pharaoh and Tribes I, but the company is in the process of Teevaluating its Mac strategy so production could halt at any minute. Even though she has a point that a company should be able to see higher unit sales from a blockbuster title, we stil feel that part of the problem with Half-Life is still that Sierra’s sales expectations are a little overblown. Smaller companies such as Aspyr and even Macsoft have proven that a business can be successful by bringing big PC titles to the smaller Mac market. Aspyr had to make large financial guarantees (although it’s not telling how big) for Tomb Raider II, but according to founder Mike Rogers, Tomb Raider broke even in its first three weeks, Perhaps the Mac market is too small for a ‘company as big as Sierra right now, but no one has made a compelling argument for Sierra’s refusal to take money from a com- pany that thinks it can make Half-Life a suc- cess on the Mac—RG Dining at Ambrosia | Less pleasant than it sounds jardly a software company in existence ‘doesn't claim io take bugs seriously, Most companies spend a lot of effort testing their software (Microsoft has even managed to use beta testing as a source of profit). Now, Macintosh gaming stalwart Ambrosia Software has gone one step further: It has promised to eat its own bugs. Ambrosia made the pledge in a late-August press telease: For every appli- cation Ambrosia releases between August 1999 and Macworld Expo New York in July 2000 that contains bugs, company marketing maven Jason Whong will eat a course containing real insects. Two products, Cythera and Ares, have already tumed out buggy, so he will eat an insect- laden salad and a similarly infested soup. As consumers find further product defects, Whong plans to continue with an entree and, if necessary, a dessert. To make the insects a bit more palatable, Whong has purchased The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook by David Gordon, which contains a variety of appropriate recipes. While it might seem strange that Ambrosia would punish its marketing director for its engineers’ mis- takes, Whong considers the ordeal fair; after all, the whole thing was his idea to start with. He came up with the concept shortly after the July 1999 Macworld expo, when he ran across choco- late-covered grasshoppers in a catalog. After making the obvious connection between real and virtual bugs, Whong went ahead with the press release August 19, 1999. We'll provide continuing cover- age as bugs—coded or ingested—warrant—/S Where’s the Holdup? Bad luck on a global scale pple ran into some snags in its distribution of Macs in October, resulting in significant delays of its three new product lines. The delays resulted from a combination of prob- lems around the world, Here's where the most significant problems occurred.—IS Yee CUPERTINO, CALIFORNI Apple took some risks in announcing the availability of its latest computers before it had built enough to fill the channel. The risks initially paid off by focusing media atten- delays occurred. tion on Apple, but left the company vulner- able to embarrassment when unexpected | AUSTIN, TEXAS: uled for release early this year). Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector encountered unexpected prob- lems in ramping up the G4 for full production. This left Apple with far more 64 orders than it could fill, especially for the 64/500 (now sched- TAIWAN: A 7.6 earthquake struck ‘Taiwan on September 21, killing well over a thousand people. Apple subcontracts iBook construction to a Tai- wanese firm—although the plant wasn’t badly damaged, quake-related power out- ages held up iBook produc- tion for about a week just as Apple was ramping up pro- duction for their introduc- tion. The quake also caused an increase in RAM prices, which Apple cited in its G4 JAN/OO MacADDICT 19 get info Shareware Pick of the Month patente re URL: http://www.sustwerks.com Name: [onan a REQUIREMENTS: System 7.5.3 or Packet [ Pr I ae fater, Open Transport 1.1.1 or later | IN THEORY, it’s like a car lease— you get your wheels for . a limited amount of time. be ee ‘nat avalale> apd Ces the TORTI ezntrol panel Yo upd ase latormatien. @ Limit Delay torino uta | @) F210) (1 Cass) | PNetMonitor is an oldie but a goodie in the Mac shareware community—-we have written A SIMPLE PING to a friendly server (either by IP about it several times. In the address or by name) will do the job of testing past, we've talked about how your TCP/IP connection. you can use IPNeiMonitor to check out your Internet connection’s Lease. With DHCP Test, you can use performance. This time, though, one of several tests to find out how TPNetMonitor deserves a special men- well your DHCP server is working. tion as a great tool for dealing with Often all it takes to make a flaky DHCP flaky DHCP connections (DHCP is a connection work properly is to do a scheme in which a server autoassigns DHCP test. The more powerful DHCP IP addresses, allowing IP networks to Lease provides you with information set themselves up without a system about your DHCP lease. (A DCHP serv- administrator doling out numbers). — er leases you an IP address for a cer- The popularity of cable modems and tain amount of time.) With this, you DSL connections is growing, and both can find out when your IP address often use DHCP to assign IP addresses. lease is about to expire, and renew ‘That’s where IPNetMonitor comes in. your lease. This is a good thing, Besides letting you look up because an AppleTalk connection over domain names and test connections TCP/IP may fall apart if your Mac has with a ping, IPNetMonitor also has two _to renew its DHCP lease in the middle DHCP uiilities: DHCP Test and DHCP of a file transfer —DR Fee Oe eam er it is) (ao ooo mara 5 (nee a ca = FA WITH A SIMPLE plish of the Test button, you can check out your DHCP server. 20 MacADDICT JAN/OO New for the Mac Outlook Express 5 Microsoft 425-882-8080, hitp://www.microsoft.com/mac Free (on The Disc) Okay, so stop the boos and hisses already. Its from Microsoft, and it has some pretty cool features, including multiple account sup- port, a junk mail filter, access to Hotmail accounts, and a revised user interface. Plus, the new Outlook Express has an advanced search function and a host of other user inter- face tweaks that make it worth a test drive, SPORTING) A NEW SET of icons, "Outlook Express is a mail client you wouldn't mind taking out to meet the folks. Digital Media Remote Keyspan http://www.keyspan.com $79 Finally—a bit of hardware that connects your USB-equipped Mac to a remote control, letting you use your Mac as a component in a home entertainment center. Dubbed the Digital Media Remote, this infrared remote and USB infrared tecelver plugs right into your Mac and lets you contro! the QuickTime player, SoundJam, RealPlayer—even PowerPoint and the Finder. MvP Design hitp://vww.mypsite.com $19.95 (demo on The Disc) it MP3 files were small--that is, until QDesign happened on the scene with MVP MVP not only handies MP3 playing and decoding, but it also features the QDesign encoder, which promises to deliver 60:1 audio compression with great sound quality. And since QDesign is a member of the Secure Di ital Music Ini MVP won't suffer the same pirating stigma as MP3.—DR come Series of All Time CALL TO POWER conventional warfare * More units, buildings, Wonders and technologies + Vast new realms: Space and Sea s it graphics * Breakthrough time-saving interface * Enhanced diplomatic and trade options ernet and LAN Multiplayer * All-new Wonders of the World in stunning cinematics =e AVAILABLE NOW! é | “cezmcsveces. MacSoft INTERACTIVE i ‘AGT Interactive Software Compan www.wizardworks.com/macsol www.activision.com and get info OS 9 Esoterica | Small changes add up for OS 9 ast month, we told you about to increase, some of the big, flashy new OS 9 OS 9 corrects a font-corrupting features. Lest you think these are the bug in 8.6. only changes OS 9 brings, this month The new OS offers improved USB we'll tell you about some of the small support, including support for things that make OS 9 worthy of its generic speakers, microphones, single digit. and network devices. ° The Finder can now copy and oth- Improved multitasking support erwise handle files over 2GB. The maximum file size is now 8 means preemptive threads can now issue file system and device exabytes (1EB is just slightly over commands. (Jargon translation: a million terabytes). Well-written apps can do a much e The maximum number of open better job of twiddling with files in files has increased to 8,169, from the background.) 348. Though 348 may seem like a ‘Mac OS now supports cursors big- Jot, the Finder keeps many files ger than the traditional 16 by 16 ‘open constantly—by the time it size, as well as animated cursors. Jaunches, the Finder has opened over 100 files. Programs can no longer directly Drive Setup now has presets for many non-Mac OS drive types, such as Linux, Darwin, and Mac access the underlying structures OS X. This will help folks who use in File Manager. Apple had to the same system for both Mac OS make this change, which has and a Unix variant, caused many incompatibilities with third-party software, in order to allow the number of open files Passwords appear as bullets instead of as readable text when you're adding users—IS Farewell to old friends | Development ceases on GiFBuilder and clip2gif | t's always heartbreaking to get news of an old —_ animations on Microsoft's home page bore GIFBuilder’s stamp). ae | friend passing. Longtime Mac Web site develop- Although GIFBuilder has recently been largely superceded by ers may need to reach for their hankies: Yves Piguet + commercial applications (Adobe's ImageReady, for example), has ceased development of his wildly popular free- most Web designers still have a warm place in their hearts for the ware applications GIFBuilder and clip2gif. Although —_ old warhorse. the programs’ popularity remains almost undimin- Piguet decided to officially stop development for two reasons: ished, (Download.com reports that GIFBuilder to focus on his new, much more ambitious project SysQuake remains in the top 50 Mac downloads), Yves's (gamers who rush to http://www.calerga.com based on the name focus on new projects and uncertainty over the GIF __ will be profoundly disappointed—it's a systems analysis pack- ‘standard have conspired to doom the applications. age) and because of concerns over the fate of the GIF format. GIFBuilder is one of the oldest and best Macin- GI Fuses a compression algorithm proprietary to Unisys | tosh applications that allows Web site designers to _(http://www.unisys com), which has become increasingly ener- create animated GIFs, the litte animations that per- _getic in pursuing what it considers violations of its patent rights in THE GIFBUILDER INTER- vade the Web, First released in 1995, just as the recent years. Rather than deal with possible legal repercussions FACE is familiar to the vast Web's popularity was taking off, GIFBuilder quickly —_ (a rather daunting task for a freeware developer), Piguet decided majority of Mac-based Web became one of the main tools for GIF Animation (in to simply cease development. GIFBuilder and clip2gif will contin- site developers. ‘one particularly ironic case, it was noticed that GIF _ue to be available from all the usual download sites 1S ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID “BRING IT ONI ROSS 22 MacADDICT JAN/OO There’s only one utility in the world that does more for your Macintosh than TechTool Pro 2... ... Introducing Tec MicroMat's disk repair and Macintosh troubleshooting utility just became a whole lot better. Now loaded with new features like Check Drive, which allows you to preview drive repairs before committing changes to your disk. Or the new Rebuild Directory feature that lets you manually optimize and repair drive directories, which not only makes your Macintosh run smoother but makes drive access noticeably faster. TechTool Pro 2.5.2 also now supports new technologies like System 9, “Pure” HFS+, all of the latest Macs and much more. But the real power of TechTool Pro 2.5.2 isn’t in the MicroMat Inc. 800-829-6227 707-566-3831 FAX: 707-566-3871 info@micromat.com, ‘www.micromat.com 6066 MacWorld ‘Aug. 1999 * Version 2.5.2 is available at no charge to registered TechTool Pro 2 users as an up download the updater or wi Please have your serial number ready when Version 2.5.2 is scheduled to be released when App! Fix different: Prefer a new CD, they can be purchased for $25 plus tac shipping and handling by calle eee bee subject to change witho hTool Pro 2.5.2 features you can see, it’s in the features you can’t see. Like a multitude of new drive repair routines that can save data that other utilities would simply abandon. An improved recovery system that will find lost files in the darkest caverns of a damaged drive. You'll also find improved performance on key features like disk optimization. But maybe the feature you'll find most interesting about this version is the price: FREE". If you own any prior version of TechTool Pro 2, just go to our web site and grab the updater**. You'll be glad you did. \dater application directly from the MicroMat web site. If you do not wish to calling the phone tummnber above. (©1999 MicroMat Inc.All rights reserved TechToo! is a registered trademark of MicroMat Inc. Fox Different is a tmdemark of MicroMat Inc. Macintosh is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. get info Ten Tons of Fun? | We investigate StarPlay’s claims i i e've gotten used to them by now, Wrtese packs of four to six aging (nT) games that lurk in dark corners on even the most meager shelf of Macintosh games. Still, when StarPlay production released its latest collection, Ten Tons of Fun, we were curious. The five CDs that make up the col- lection have a total volume of only about 67 cubic centimeters; for them to weigh ten tons (we assume metric tons for sim- plicity), they would need to have a density of almost 150,000 grams per cc—an almost ludicrous value (by contrast, lead is just over 11g per cc). This would clearly represent a tremendous advance in materi- als science! To our disappointment, we could easily lift the box, and a quick check on our postal scale confirmed that the CDs weighed a total of just 68g. Total fun: 5.3 tons of fun! Clearly, the cited figure of ten tons must refer to some strange connection between The Featherweights ae ae ‘Althe sith beg De ie e ABSOLUTE | A decent solitaire game, but you certain, we tried to estimate the actual ‘SOLITAIRE can find better shareware games than this. weight based on the clear fact that Descent’ ["§taRiinT Tis a ton of fun. To our best estimates, the | gaging name of the collection is a serious exagger- zi ation—the pack contains only slightly over ALLEY 19 Bowling sim is incredibly buggy—it’s hard to get five tons of fun.—IS BOWLING the ball out of the return chute, much less actually bowl. PRO PINBALL | Time has apparently passed this one by— ‘THE WEB the program consistently locked up our machine on startup. How Heavy Is It? Ss Ss _A-10 CUBA 1400 LBS PRO PINBALL THE WEB 0 OZ DESCENT II 1 TOW BONKHEADS 500 LBS VIRTUAL POOL 1400 LBS 1 ton of fun! ALLEY 19 BOWLING 1.5 OZ ABSOLUTE SOLITAIRE 250 LB: STARLIGHT CASINO 50 LB. SOULS IN THE SYSTEM 1000 LBS I Straightforward casino game manages to be less impressive than the 1984-era MacCasino. Acrobat Graduates from Clown College Plug-ins bring Mac Acrobat up to Windows parity few months ago, Adobe announced Acrobat—sense the circus theme?) until Acrobat made Mac and (with great fanfare) Acrobat 4.0—the Windows versions equal. latest and greatest version of the universal Well, that happy day has arrived. Adobe has released a set document creator. Acrobat has several cool new features, includ- _ of plug-ins that will bring the two versions back together, allow- ing Web Capture (the ability to save Web pages or sites as PDFs), _ ing us to say (while fighting back emotions) that Adobe Acrobat Digital Signatures (for secure PDFs) and the ability to compare _ is back. Right now, the plug-ins are only available in beta form, two or more PDFs to see changes. There was a sticking point, _ but Adobe is working hard to make sure that they're finished however: Those features were only available for the Windows ver- _ soon. If you want to download the plug-ins or information about sion, not the Mac version. So, to express our discontent, we — them, just go to http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/acr4diff promised to call version 4.0 Adobe Clown (instead of Adobe — .html.—DR 24 MacADDICT JAN/OO ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE GORMAN Introducing the Color Connection from Hewlett-Packard! Our newest industry leading “Mac Connect” solutions allow you to easily connect a variety of HP color printers to USB-ready Macintosh computers, including the new iMac — in the blink of an eye! HP has long been the leading provider of Macintosh peripherals connecting more printers to Macintosh than any other company. The new lineup includes the HP DeskJet 800 and 900 Series models. Hewlett-Packard’s PhotoREt color Layering technology delivers the optimum combination of print quality, print speed, and great image quality on a wide range of media. You'll also experience the benefits of HP’s unparalleled Level of quality service and support. So don't delay, we're “Mac Ready”, so ne cos you can get “Mac Connected” today! Pane ie ee cash For more information about HP’s “Mac Connect” products visit www.hp.com/go/mac-connect WA eackano Expanding Po: ‘Available for HP Desklet 800 Series models only. J fomese =) EZ/DV by Robert Capps he iMac DV's bundled iMovie application has suddenly put thousands of new Mac owners face-to-face with their own incredibly underdeveloped movie-making skills. Jokes about would-be Spielbergs may not have the same resonance after you make your own backyard mon- Strosity, but at least iMovie makes it easy to assemble. Here's a closer look at Apple’s intuitive new DV-editing app. (You can purchase a FireWire-capable DV camera separately.) Scrubber Bar 5 Clip Viewer ‘This bar represents the length of the clip in To put together a movie, just drag the window above. To trim a clip before plac- captured cps from the Shelves to the ing it in the timeline, you must Shift-click this line and select part of it to delete. There are ho traditional in and out points in iMovie. clip view. Put clips in the order you Want, fay in the transitions and titles, and you're ready to go. You can drop lips (or transitions, for that matter) before, after, or between other clips. Audio Control Capture mode (which controls your DV camera) To expose the audio timeline for ~ <==" and Editing mode. In Capture mode, you'll see the adding sound effects and music, all-important Import button, which tells iMovie to record what your camera is playing. just click the note icon. 26 MacADDICT JAN/OO The key to a good movie is a good script—oh, and lots of money. Monitor ‘The main window in iMovie is reminiscent of the new (and some say darn ugly) QuickTime interface. Intuitively enough, this is where you watch clips play—from Shelves, in the timeline, or while you're importing them from your DV camera. Shelving ‘When you import clips from your camera, they get stored in these fittle bays, called She/ves. You can ‘keep a maximum of nine clips at a time here, but as you drop a clip onto the timeline it disappears from its Shelf, making room for another clip. Palette Clicking these buttons brings up the palettes for controlling titles, music, transitions, or (provided) sound effects. For transi- tions and titles, iMovie offers a quick preview window of what a title effect or transition will look like on a selected clip. For music, you can pull a track off your favorite CD, Free Space Because iMovie works with clips at full screen size and frame rate, adding no extra compression, it creates big files. This handy-dandy bar lets you know how much of the iMac’s hard drive you're ‘sucking up while you work. Transitions To add a transition to the timeline, sim- ply drag it from the Transitions palette and place it between the clips you want to merge. It will take a few minutes to render (a red progress bar appears along the bottom of the transition icon). Then you'll have a smooth fade (or dis- solve, or overlap, or whatever.) “ek IK” - Computer Gaming World 79 9 8 (6) Yo pe (Highest review score ever awarded) -PC Gamer “Nipha Centauri is unmistakably the rightful heir to the Civilization throne. It’s also the best | strategy game ever made.”? - PC Gamer “Meier has again set the gold standard for strategy.” - Newsweek THIS 1S THE STRATEGY GAME TO BUY! Alpha Centauri is now available at and at other fine Mac retailers or contact us 1-888-212-7797 wwwaaspyr.com + a INTERACTIVE ASPYR: ELECTRONIC ARTS” MW maejtoyThe future tanding on the very doorstep of a new millennium,* Well, as it so often does, the wonderful world of Macintosh it’s hard to avoid asking ourselves one nagging has the cure for what ails you. In the state-of-the-art question: Where did the future go? Here we are, innards of the Mac OS, in the ever-expanding universe of Mere weeks and days from the fabled year 2000, with shareware and third-party gadgetry, and in the nanoscopic nary a jetcar or a home genetic engineering kit to crevices of your very desktop lurk all the whiz-bang sci-fi show for it. For all the technological advances of the last —_ contrivances the most ardent futurist could ever wish for. couple of decades, it looks like the 21st century isn’t going Redshift those blues away, buckle up your rocket pack, and to be the planet-hopping, robot-packed futuropolis that —_ take off with us ona thrill-packed voyage into the world of science fiction tradition led us to expect. tomorrow——today, right here on your Mac. Tens Or on the doorstep of the year before a new millennium, for sticklers. — qa 28 MacADDICT JAN/OO Js there anybody out there? You may be the first to find out, thanks to the much-hyped (by us, at least) seti@home (free, http://setiathome.ss! -berkeley.edu). For those of you just joining the alien-hunt now in progress, this exercise in distributed computing harnesses the power of your idle CPU to help digest radio telescope data from the Search for Extraterres- trial Intelligence. A bit closer to home, you can commune with a totally alien species by simply installing a Windows 98 emulator from Connectix (Virtual PC with Windows 98, $179, http://www.connectix.com) or Insignia Solutions (SoftWindows 98, $169, http://www.insignia.com). Just don’t blame us when it takes you over and devours your brain. Ever since that killjoy Albert Einstein declared the velocity of light to be the universe's absolute speed limit, the finest scientific minds have applied themselves to the task of weaseling around this barrier. Now, with the arrival of the supercomputer-level PowerPC G4 processor (technically the MPC7400), Apple likes to claim that it’s pushing the boundaries of light ‘speed. Since gigaflops don’t have a physical dimension, it’s hard to make a velocity comparison. But it's worth noting that a 500MHz Power Mac G4, with a theoretical ceiling of 4 billion floating-point operations per second, can potentially perform a calculation in less time than it takes a ray of light to travel three inches. Think about that next time someone tells you we'll never break the 186,000-mph mark. Build! Your Own Galaxy After turning back time and breaking the light barrier, how better to push the boundaries of speculative fiction than to blasphemously create your own galaxy? It's easy enough with Andrew Lee’s Starfield Creator (htip://www.geocities.com/drew_drew.geo/starfield.html), a cool share- ware widget that generates random nebula-spangled starscapes you can export in PICT format. If you'd rather think small, you can instead just populate a desktop solar system with some of the many available sets of pretty-looking planet icons. The Iconfactory’s Space Icons (free, YOUR HEADQUARTERS FOR MARTIAN INVASION, courtesy of the gang at NASA. ors On gagtome a, | Mega DRAW YOUR OWN VOID VISTA with Starfield Creator's randomized tools. http://www.iconfactory.com) and Reby Lee’s 32-bit Solar System Icon Set (free, http://www.hk.super.net/~rebylee) make particularly good planetary construction kits. Enjoy your cosmic tinkering, you futuristic Mac addict, you! [Attack Marst_f After steering the Mars Pathfinder mission’s robo-buggy over the Internet, we've all been looking forward to the next example of NASA's partici- patory approach to planetary exploration. Well, the next visit to the red plan- et is coming up fast, with a couple of surveyor probes in Martian orbit as you read this and a stationary Polar Lander scheduled to hit the ground on Decem- ber 3. With its tripod legs, claw arm, and insectoid body, the Polar Lander bears more than a passing resemblance to the Martian war machines of H.G. Wells; will our neighbors assume they’re being invaded and react accordingly? Tune in to http://mars,jpl.nasa.gov for the latest developments. ‘ADD A HEAT RAY TO THAT CRANE ARM, ‘and we're ready to kick some Martian...uh.. whatever they have. Mark Simmons set his system clock to December 31, 1999, while writing this feature...but that’s as far as he dares to go. JAN/00 MacADDICT 29 The YK Blackout Shey swe a - Of all the prognostica- ‘Steep Bh seveduted startup tions people have I zy Eescm: Dist | (iesevs | Satara — l| || «Gemma made regarding the 21st century, it’s obvi- ‘ous which will be put to the test first. Survival- || (@) ists and naysayers sppiy THESE SETTINGS inthe last week of December, may be confounded if i ‘and do your bit to make those Y2K warnings come true. global darkness fails to Ls ballad e fall at midnight on December 31, but you can make a little piece of this prophecy come true by setting your Mac to shut down abruptly at the close of the millennium. At some point during the last week of December, go to the Energy Saver contro! panel and set it to shut down at 12 a.m. on Saturday morning (December 31 being the preceding Friday). it’s unlikely that you Or any gullible friends will be hanging around your Mac at the chosen hour, but you’ll at least have the quiet sat- istaction of knowing that somewhere, the lights are going out... Since the world’s supply of fossil fuels is finite, the day will surely come when we'll have to turn to alternative energy sources to run our laptops. While atomic portables would be more in genre, there's ample science-fictional precedent for the ecologically sound option of solar power. You can live this 21st-century lifestyle today by outfitting your PowerBook with a Power- Line Sun Catcher Professional from Power- Qwest —_(http://www.powerexperts.com /solarhtm). These mobile solar arrays, which start at $395, will liberate your lap- top from its umbilical connection to your focal coal-burning power plant—that’s so Industrial Revolution. emma | All Aboard the Holodeck There's more to desktop virtual reality than navigating through QuickTime VR panora- mas. Just as sci-fi heroes use VR technol- ogy to escape their soulless environs and reconnect with the natural splendor long since exiled to Sifent Running-style orbiting dome ships, you can generate your own rus- tic simulation to create the illusion that you're crunching spreadsheets beside a babbling brook in some sylvan glade. Both Sundial ($29.95, http://www.jna.com) and the AppleScript-based TiDes ($5, http://Awww.sover.net/~media) can update your scenic desktop picture over the course of the day to reflect the current conditions in the outside world, while Relax ($15, http://www.sperspect.com) supplies a variety of soothing audio accompaniments. NICE GOLDEN GATE BACKDROP, the sound of gurgling water..i's enough to make you forget you're writing a magazine article. 30 MacADDICT JAN/OO Prospect of upgrading all your VHS tapes and laser discs to DVD, and wonder- ing what they’re going to replace music CDs with | TODAY THE TRACK TITLES, tomorrow the next year, take heart. In the high-tech world of tomorrow, physical stor- age will become a thing of If you're groaning at the | songs—orbiting jukebox satellites will beam all of it right to your Mac. ‘the past, with all your infotainment needs met via satellite broadcast. You can preview the possibilities by tapping the vast knowledge of the online CDDB database with a music player like RiverSong InterActive’s TitleTrack ($25, hitp://www.titletrack.com) or the Java-based InCDius GH (free, http://www .genhelp.com); the CD itself may be local, Nobody knows for certain where the dividing line lies between mere simulated banter and genuine artificial intelligence, but it's pretty certain that Eliza, the venerable simu-shrink, falls a little short of this threshold. While Eliza ($5, on The Disc) is surely cheaper than a human therapist, its algorithmic responses have a definite mechanical quality. On the other hand, the fortune- cookie randomness of Uli’s Moose (free, http://www.weblayout .com/witness), recently resurrected in a new PlainTalk-based incarnation, has acquired an enigmatic quality that may well foreshadow the emergence of genuine computer intelligence. Let IT'S HARD TO GET PAST THE FACT that Eliza's Al is as thick as MST3K's Gypsy. ULI'S WISECRACKING MOOSE, by contrast, has acertain fonsequitur wit going for it but the disc info and track listings download from a centralized data source. You Gan consider this a foretaste of our plugged-in future, like the proliferation of Internet radio stations and Apple’s QuickTime ‘TV network. Vidleo Phones Isn't it about time to bring on that videophone revolution we used to hear so much about? The desktop videoconferencing boom has been going for a few years now, and the advent of afford- able high-speed connections gives us even more incentive to Phase out voice communications in favor of grainy postage- stamp-size CU-SeeMe feeds ($89 from White Pine Software, http://www.wpine.com). And with faster Macs capable of digitizing QuickTime video in real time and streaming it out to the world, the line this antlered desktop sidekick harangue you for a while and see for yourself. Pass the IRC Turing Test According to legendary cryptographer and mathe- matician Alan Turing, a computer will achieve true artifi- cial intelligence when it can hold up its end of a conversation well enough to pass for a human being. If so, then Internet Relay Chat offers a perfect testing ground for your prototype Al. Using a scriptable IRC client like Ircle ($15, http:/Awww.ircle,com), you can devise an AppleScript that analyzes the text of the console window and dispatches an appropriate response. Throw in a repeat loop, and your script can watch the progress of an online discussion and throw in its artificially intelligent two cents. Robot Houses As we've demonstrated in our occasional forays into home automation (most recently in “Command Your Mac,” May/99, p36), you no longer need to be Bill Gates to live in a robot house. Thanks to the magic of the David Reynolds-approved X10 system, you can turn your Mac into a central control station for everything from mood fighting to toasters, between videoconferencing and full-bore Web- casting is getting pretty blurry. Metric Matness Naturally, in the future we'll be forced to eschew all these pounds and ounces and feet and inches and hew to the decimal discipline of the metric ‘system. But thus far, even the most orthodox of metric advocates has clung to an archaic timekeeping system based on hours, minutes, and seconds. Well, that’s no longer the case. The latest development in well-inten- tioned futurism is a metric time system, which divvies up each day into a thousand “beats” (each 86.4 sec- onds long). There are still a couple of feuding syn- chronization standards, but the free metric clock mBeat (Catara Software, http://www.grapevine -net/~catara) lets you hedge your bets by toggling between ’em. eS 09.21.1999 weg IT'S TIME TO GET METRIC, but will they ever pick a standard meridian? ACRUDE SAMPLE of an automated [2 Tnaied IRC response. And we do mean crude, ‘One day, positing the availability of high- quality image-analyzing software for your sentinel Webcams, you may even be able to autoactivate your lawn sprinklers to chase off intruders. (You can pretend they're acid sprays or something.) [ae So Why should barking orders at a computer be the sole province of bald- headed Brits in spandex bodysuits? The Mac OS's built-in speech recogni- tion already gives you the ability to issue commands and trigger Apple- Scripts, but it doesn’t necessarily have the faculties to tell Jean-Luc from the lowly Barclay. As of Mac OS 9, however, you'll be able to substitute voice authentication for hard-to-remember passwords. Rumors that a mid- 2000 follow-up release will include system-level support for USB retinal scanners have yet to be confirmed. Looking Busy Remember how the computer revolution was supposed to liberate us humans from the toil of labor, ushering in the three-hour workday and cre- ating a slew of newfangled social problems as we struggled to fill our idle days? Hal Well, you can still work toward this goal, just so long as you do it covertly. First, get a fast Internet connection so you can plausibly telecommute. Then set up a bunch of AppleScripts to send random time- wasting email memos back to the office. Lastly, set up Big Island’s YoYo Call Tracker ($119, http://www.big-island.com) to screen incoming calls and notify you via email or pager when some bigwig phones, so you can dash off a reply from your island hideaway. Now that’s progress! JAN/OO MacADDICT 31 eurvelf.with Jerenee = 6 Projects for the Armehair Mad Scientist ————c 7 Time Travel ‘Who among us doesn’t long for the power to redirect time’s arrow? The Mac’s Date & Time control panel gives you a certain amount of lee- way to skip chronologically back and forth, though it's currently limited to dates between January 1, 1920, EARLIER FORMS OF OUR MANUSCRIPT and December 31, 2019—too late for are retained in FiashBack’s ancestral dinosaurs, too early for Morlocks memory for instant reversion. versus Eloi, After you revert the date back to normal, altered files retain their time-warped _modifi- cation dates, allowing you to fetch documents from next week or turn back the clock and submit that project two days ear- lier. For another take on time distortion, try Aladdin's FlashBack ($69.95, http://www .aladdinsys.com); this file-archiving utility allows you to regress documents back to their earlier forms, just like in Altered States. It's Artificially dust because Victor Frankenstein slipped up on quality control is no reason for you to shy away from one of the most primal of science-fiction pursuits—the creation, rearing, and guided evolution of artificial life. ‘You can raise virtual fish and other pets via Mindscape’s line of “virtual life” creatures (http://www.mindscapegames.com)—its Mac species include Catz, Dogz, Oddballz, and the fish featured in Aquazone Beluxe. But why settle for PC hand-me-downs when you can start a career in honest- to-gosh genetic meddling, aided by gene-splicing scientific software from such companies as Textco (http://www.textco.com), BioTools (http://www -biotools. com), and Biosoft (hitp://www.biosoft.com)? Mind over Mac For the mad scientist, voice communication is only a stepping-stone. Luck- ily, telepathic communion with your Mac is actually achievable for the deep-pocketed hobbyist, thanks to IBVA Technologies’ Interactive Brain- wave Visual Analyzer ($1,300, http://www.ibva.com). This sensor head- band monitors your brainwaves and displays them on your Mac's screen; with practice, you can train yourself to generate specific brainwave pat- terns and then match these to computer commands. A wireless option makes for mind control that would make any cyberpunk green with envy. || Coaterormats=) | Tie Zone. Set Deytiaht-seing Time Automatically Dayoabtsevng Timels inate Setrceeeynoe (seating Tae) arn ie ter ede tine Sever. as i ! pharacest Menu Bar Gock em gor @ THAT'S AS FAR BACK AS SHE GOES— sorry, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, we Reach Out and Touch Someone's Desktop | ‘While we’re on the subject of psy- chic powers, how about that other old favorite, telekinesis? There’s something distinctly intoxicating about the notion of moving objects at a distance, using only the power of your furrowed brow. Though they require the consent of the party on the other end, both Netopia’s Timbuktu remote-control software ($99, http://www.netopia did our best. .com) and the AppleScript-over- TCP/IP features of Mac 0S 9 en- able you to perform just about any action you can imagine on a distant Mac. By sending commands across the Internet, you can move and manip- ulate files, launch applications, and display taunting messages on the screen of a machine halfway around the world. And you won't even have to clutch your head and sweat a lot. We can't all afford the R&D outlay to develop our own scaled-down side- kick, but through the magic of avatar technology you can project your ‘own Mini-Me incarnation into a virtual online realm. If you're seeking a personalized proxy for your violent instincts, the Quake series and its ilk let you download new 3D models to wear into net- worked combat, or you can even slowly and painstaking- ly craft your own polygonal replica. If, on the other hand, you'd rather shake hands than break heads, check out the Sci-Fi Channel's The Palace (free, http://www. thepalace.com) for a graphi- cal chat experience—you can create your own illusta-§ —_— ed stand-in to meet and greet AN ASSORTMENT OF AVATARS cavort in the your chat buddies. Sci-Fi Channel's The Patace chat room. [Baise the Dead | Resurrecting the dead is the ultimate taboo, even for a mad scientist. Invari- ably such tampering with the basic order of nature leads to zombies, flesh- eating, and vast quantities of goo. Within the well-ordered universe of your Mac, however, you can tinker with reviving dead applications in relative safety—thanks to the software equivalent of Reanimator, Karl Pottie’s Keep It Up ($22, on The Disc). Intended for use with mission-critical server appli- cations, this handy utility doggedly relaunches key programs whenever they quit (unexpectedly or not), over and over again, until they're begging you to kill them...but they just can’t die! Such is the dark side of science. r of the 1996 Computer Press jation Award for Best Overall Magazine! er of the 1998 Folio Editorial Excellence a mae for Best Consumer Computing Magazine! Subscribe TODAY and SAVE over 68% on the cover price! ESSENTIAL EXCLUSIVE. APPLE'S WIRELESS NETWORK WIDGET: THE A ART a, P i i E pati every issue you'll get: a aa a Cc ccoae Ul * AkillerCD-ROM -< ADOICTE - 650 MB of the coolest Mac shareware, demos, and upgrades on the planet! i e | on topics like trouble a aot es ith late spacs | | shooting, Web design ‘aaa, and more!! en What more could a Mac addict ask for? Start your subscription today and receive 12 issues and 12 CD-ROMs for just $29.95! Call: 1-888-771-6222 OR Visit: www.macaddict.com Code 5MA71 veryone has a dream. For some, it’s graduating from second grade and going on to bovine university. For others, it’s traveling through time for fun, profit, and ultimate world domination. As for us—we've always leaned toward creating a Mac- based killer robot. Thanks to recent technical innovations from Apple, our day has finally come—with AirPort, our robot can free itself from its control tether and wander anywhere within 150 feet of its master. Thanks to BeeHive’s ADB/IO (http://www.bzzzzzz.com—that’s six 2’s, folks), we can control the motors that drive our robot PHOTOS BY AARON LAUER it! i, around. Thanks to PC Accelerator’s recent descrip- tion of us as its “evil, red-headed stepsister,” we’ve even got a victim. As we write this, our robot, which we’ve dubbed the iBorg, is nearing completion. We’ll give you a glimpse of the iBorg’s current state, as well as a step-by-step description of its cre- ation. When finished (by the time you read this), you'll be able to go to our Web site (http://www .Macaddict.com) and take it for a spin. If you’ve got droids on the brain, we’ve got all you need to turn your delusions of power into reality. THAT'S NO MOON, that’s a Web cam! OUR ORIGINAL MOTORS WEREN'T UP TO pulling our cumbersome robot about, so we used much more powerful gear motors instead. We've included the D battery for scale. A SMALL TWO-PORT HUB lets the iBot both move and see. THE BRAINS OF THE BEAST—a blueberry iBook. GRIFFIN’S IMATE lets the USB- based iBook connect to the ADB-I/0. USING CASTORS AS REAR WHEELS allows the iBorg to corner like it’s on rails, We originally conceived of the iBorg as an iBook with wheels—a revised version of our old MARS probe (see “Introducing the 3 MacAddict Remote Sensor Probe,” Jui/97, p54) that would use AirPort allow Web-enabled Mac addicts to explore Imagine Media's offices. This requires a relatively large, heavy rover; the iBook alone weighs; over six pounds, and the iBorg would also need to carry enough bat-' teries to power its motors and any other devices requiring juice. Following a brief flirtation with the notion of mounting a lead-acid car bat- tery, we reclaimed our sanity and settled on several 6-volt lantern batteries as a power supply. After some scribbling in ClarisWorks with shapes repre- senting the iBook and the batteries, we decided to create a base for tho (Borg on a 24-by-16-inch piece of plywood. During a trip to a skateboard shop, Dave found the ultimate in iBorg wheels—a pair of offroad skateboard trucks and tires that would allow the Borg to negotiate even relatively difficult terrain. The two-inch rubber wheels were large enough to make attaching motors relatively easy—smaller Wheels would require very precise work we weren't sure we could handle. THESE ENORMOUS WHEELS should let the iBorg maneuver well even in the somewhat hazardous conditions prevalent in the MacAddict offices. | THIS ADB-1/O links the beautiful iBook to its monstrous robotic alter-ego. - Steering Our attention turned nee fo ‘steering—what use: ed to use differential steering instead of actually trying to turn one of the trucks. To steer a robot differentially, you need to drive each side of the robot ferent speed, causing the faster side to pull around the slow- c turn ‘the iBorg right, for oes you, could stop sat even eaehiie needed tobe able to pivot \ ae ar i decided to use castors in the back insiead of a st board wheels, giving the iBorg a surprisingly tight tuning radius (castors ate. like shopping cart wheels—they can pivot to face their direction of travel). Differential steering also required that we use separate motors for the two front wheels so we could start and stop each wheel independently. JAN/OO. MacAddict 35 MOTOR CONTROLS—The relays turn the gear motors on or off. They also control | whether the green or the red LEDis lit. | : MOTOR REVERSE—This : frightening tangle of wires — just hooks up the battery in ference ereny US: r ADB-1/0 RELAYS—These control circuits use a relatively small current | flowing through the ADB- | 1/0 to control the much larger currents that the motors use. THREE RELAYS, TWO FUSES, and a whole bunch of alligator clips were not harmed in the making of this robot. Control Circuits, At the heart of our control circuitry beats an ADB-1/O, which allows a Macintosh’ to’ contro! four relays (electrically triggered switches). We hoped to use two of these relays to switch our motors on and off. The iBook doesn’t have an ADB port, so we used a Griffin Technology iMate {$39, http://www. griffintechnologies.com), a USB to ADB converter, to connect it 10 ‘the ADB-1/0. Unfortunately, our powerful gear motors drew up to. 700 milliamps of current, while the Small retays in the ADB-/O couldn't handle Drive Train and Disaster Now it was time to build a drive train. Here, disaster struck. We were in’a hurry, so we bought a pair of motors tong before com- pleting the chassis. Unfortunately, we dra- matically underestimated the amount of force required to pull the iBorg’s heavy chas- ‘sis, Our original motors could only deliver a meager amount df torque (torque is the ‘strength with which a motor turns its shaft) — they simply weren't strong. enough. We: could make the wheels moye if we gave the motors an eriormous mechanical advantage (this is how af automobile motor pulis- car—the engine spins much faster tha Cat's tires, thanks to the gears in mission), but that reduced the gave up and tried new motors. \ switched vendors from Edmi Scientific (htip:// www.edmi 36 MacAddict JAN/00 more than 500mA. To avoid burning out the ADB-I/O, we purchased much larger 5-amp. relays, which we controlled with small cur- fents switched by the ADB-I/O’s smaller relays. Because our initial motor mounts weren't terribly solid, the motors initially tend- ed to twist in their mounts and short out. This: forced us to put fuses inline in the motor con- trol circuits to keep the short circulis from draining our batteries. Unless we could reverse the motors, the iBorg would be unable to get itself out of tight corners without assistance. Electric -scientific.com) to. MeMaster-Carr Supply (http:/Aww.mcmaster.com), a company that caters to serious industrial concerns and hobbyists gone mad. We bought a pair of Phillips gearmotors from McMaster that “could lift over 8 pounds with a 1-inch pulley. After we mounted these motors, the iBorg ‘could easily move under its own power. The. Mounts turned out to be somewhat tricky— unless we were quite precise in the place- ment of the motors, they'd lock off-center and jam. After a few failed attempts, we built stur- dy aluminum mounts, which worked well. (0 ard wrote sare ot AppleScripts to control the motors tun backward if you hook up a bat- tery in'reverse, so We rigged'a simple circuit that would effectively hook up thé battery backward when we flipped a: third relay inside the ADB-1/O. This meant we couldn't fun the two wheels in opposite directions, but the Borg turned well enough with one motor stopped and the other running so that “we. weren't too:concemed about the loss of maneuverability. To add a final stylistic touch, we mounted red and green LEDs that would quickly let us know if the motors were on or off. problems; Multiple commands sent to the ADB.-I/0 in tight succession didn’t always work, ‘and the ADB-/O would switch both motors on when the attached PowerBook went into Sleep mode. Tuming off sleep in Energy Saver cured the iBorg’s sleepwalking problem, while putting delays between the ADB control statements made all the ADB commands work. The Future As soon as our AirPort card arrives from Apple, Sorenson Broadcaster and CGI scripts will allow us to control the iBorg remotely with a Web-based interface. We'll also be adding a dash of style to the iBorg— ‘soon our creature will be more than a motor- ized plank with a tangle of wires. Keep an eye on our Web site for iBorg updates— especially if you work for PC Accelerator. ‘Like Steve Jobs, David Reynolds and lan Sammis are now slaves to their evil robotic creation. Laser Power for Generation i Flatbed Laser Multi-Function from $899 OUR 12 PPM LASER FAMILY Laser Printing from $299 Laser Multi-Function from $499 Say hello to our iMac” & G3 compatible Laser Printers and Multi-Function Centers. When it comes to laser power for iMac, we offer some very solid solutions. Case in point, our HL-1200 series Laser Printers with up to 12 pages per minute, true 600 dpi laser output and more. Need to make your iMac even more of an all-in-one solution? Good, because our all- in-one Laser Multi-Function Centers deliver faxing, printing, copying and scanning. There's even an all new flatbed model. If you're part of the Generation ready to change the world, it's nice to know you have a company like us at your side, Available at: MACWAREHOUSE, CDW, MACZONE, COMPUSA, J&R COMPUTER WORLD, ‘OFFICE DEPOT, OFFICEMAX, MICRO CENTER, MACCONNECTION AND STAPLES At your sidé. Intemational Corporation, Bridgewater, NJ « Brother Industries Ltd, Nagoye Japan. tem at Brother For more information vplease call the Brother Fak-Back Syst Alll trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. ‘of visit our web siis at www.brother.com iad desktop @ FIND A Biggy- Light demo, AliasMenu 2.1, Desktop Tatoos, and a DragStrip 3.7.1 demo on The Disc. DragStrip” Options oes Seip Sptens ‘Strip cover Gueson Feat articts stationery reviews seattanery, ometimes we think we're such big Mac smarties. We fling our beautiful desktop § patterns about, cram tons of icons on the screen, and squeeze as many menus as we possibly can into the menu bar. Sure, it seems like we have the most whiz-bang desktop around, but what we've really created is an unholy mess that does nothing but cause us to waste time—time spent moving the cursor in an attempt to click on that tiny application icon, time spent finding the proper folder on the desktop, time spent doing nothing but navigating the mess that our Mac has become. That's so 1999, We're rolling up to the year 2000, man. ‘Two-freakin’-thousand. It’s the future coming up on us like a Peterbilt on an off-ramp, and we can either freeze in the head- lights with our plastic-fantastic stuck-in-the-90s desktops, or we can jump into the future with a clean, elegant, and (most importantly) stylish new user interface. Face the oncoming millennium with your head held high. And yes, we know it begins in 2001, you heathens. So follow along! We've carefully analyzed user interface guidelines and the works of prominent human interface experts to understand what makes up a clean, easy-to-use, and efficient user interface, and we've sunk all of this know!- edge into creating the Desktop of Tommorow. And, because ‘We're not stingy pigs (despite what you may have heard about us), we'll even share this with you. Oink. by Bavid_ Reynolds dopisep Handy Window Menu—With the handy shareware widget Wapp (a menu that shows all open windows), you can get a handle on your windows. ( 7) AliasMenu—With AliasMenu, you can add menus U=\' containing aliases to items you frequently use. Here, we have one for control panels, one that mimics the contents of the DragStrip window, and one with aliases to frequently accessed folders. DragStrip— Include aliases to frequently used applications in a DragStrip window that’s anchored to the left side of the screen. It’s aligned so that the screen’s edge will stop the cursor conveniently over a button (_,)) Functional Desktop Pattern—Desktop pictures can be both functional and elegant. In this case, the desktop pattern has a natural resting place for drive icons and other icons. (el Aliases—Sometimes J you'll need aliases to commonly used apps, files, and folders. Find an easily accessible spot on the desk- top for these. [ @ Fite Eait View Special Ge Gy Folders Help = AbaoAddict Est sg Adobe PE) imageReady™) internet & Explorer 4.5 MacAddict 0: alias WA meron ve | Netsoape rors NiftyTeInet Ea Gutlook Express. Gap orstore | QuarkXPress 4.04 Trash Alias— &) By including an alias to the Trash on the left side of the screen, travel time to trash a file is cut in half. {L Selmar Ls. Player BE owen Sturrit Expander™ 10/25/99 4464 Frosh 37393 7) Pop-up Windows—By including a pop-up window with frequently accessed items, you can keep them at your cursor-tip without having them in the way. This pop-up window's contents are the same as those in the DragStrip. 40 MacADDICT JAN/OO {[p]) Process Menu—Whether its the Finder's EN floating process window, or DragStrip’s, having a window listing which applications are open provides another place to drag and drop items and shows you where your Mac's resources are tied up at a glance. [System Folder BIA LU SSE FEAT P99 155 FEAT 99D TSE El Acrobat Prefs opie ‘El Acrobat™ Annots Pr Adobe Photoshop 5.! fe) Aliasttenu Prefs > & Anarchie D & Anarchie Pro 3 Apple File Security b © Apple Help Prets Apple Menu Options Db & Apple Monitor Piug §¥ AppleShare Prep fe Appletatk Preferen AppSwitcher Prefer [53 ASL Preferences [53] ASP Preferences Q Stationery ausioco settings Article stationery Reviews stat -o reviews_template Get Info planning ([)) Buttons—Keep icons UES in pop-up windows arranged as big one-click buttons. You won't roll past them, and they take only a single click to launch. fl Appropriate Icon View—When there are 5 just a few items in a window (five or less), then view the contents as icons, The human brain has a hard time recognizing more than five or six items at a glance. & Ironsides items, 380.1 MB availaple ot. © & Applications a Utilities. Users (} Preferences Status Clock—By setting the clock to dis- J play seconds (allowing the colons to flash with each passing second), it's obvious whether or not the system is locked up. 1 items, 380.1 MB available Size | Kind 8K Acrobat™ 4.0 document 4K Acrobat™ 4.0 document 4K Photoshop® Preferences file 4K file 28K folder 20K folder 4K Apple File Security document 16K folder The name's the thing—if you have the real estate in your menu bar, view the Application menu with the full name of the current application. This will reduce time figuring out what app is up front. Arranging Volumes— The Finder takes care of arranging hard drives along this side of the desktop— how nice! doyjsop 20K Apple Menu Options document fs 8K folder 4K document 4K document 4K document 4K document 4K Apple System Profiler docume 4K document 4K Audion document BBEdit preferences file BBEdit text file document document document Appropriate List View—When there are lots of items in a Finder window, it’s time to view the contents as alist. That makes locating files much easier than viewing by icons. Relocated Control Strip—Although 4) the Control Strip is an easy-access item, it often gets in the way. By holding down the Option key, you can drag the Control Strip tab to any location on the right or left side of the screen. We find that the lower right side, a bit off the corner, is a great place for it. 12/1999 ISSUE © 01/2000 ISSUE Pop-up Window Shape—Match the width and height of pop-up windows. You'll minimize mousing time to any given point in the window from where you click to pop it up. Deskton, gf Tomorrow - @ee@ 2eee UaN/o0 MacADDICT DragStrip $20, Aladdin Systems 831-761-6200, http://www.aladdinsys.com DragStrip started out as shareware, where Aladdin saw its poten- Using the corner drag box, resize the strip until just a single column of icons shows. Select Untitled Options from the Options menu, and in the dialog box that appears, resize the icon until the entire application name appears and the button is suitably big. Click OK. Bap Opa eo Dragstrip” tial and decided to give it a new life as a commercial utility. At its ‘Options desktop A BRAND NEW DragStrip ready to be molded to your liking. heart, DragStrip lets you create customizable docks for applica- tions, files, URLs, and folders—in other words, pretty much any- thing that can live as an icon on the desktop. DragStrip is cus- tomizable, letting you tweak everything from the size and orienta- tion of the strip to its colors. Here’s how to set up DragStrip for maximum efficiency— we'll assume that you've downloaded and installed DragStrip already, From the File menu, select New Large Icon With Name. You'll get a win- dow with a 6 by 2 grid of icon wells and three tabs. Main Strip Select Remove Current Page twice from the Options menu, leaving a single pink tabbed page. Select Rename Page from the Options menu and give 5 ii =| itamore personal name. a DYING UP IS EASY once we get rid of all of those ~ “extraneous pages. Select Rotate Strip from the Options menu, and then select Hide Page Tabs from the Status/Title Bar submenu under Options. Select Draw Horizontally from the same submenu. Tae QuarkkPress™ 4,04 ‘Adobe ImageReady™ 2.0 Dc ei etsro ene vn trs ton Tt T rat ewer a tine ora MAKE THOSE ICONS big by resizing them in the preferences box. After all, bigger icons are easier to hit. 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