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Microsoft Office 2000 box shot reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation. Other names mentioned are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Whatthe%#@#is this? Dtav, the DateVie logo end MaclirkPus Deine ae rgitored trademarks of DataViz, ne. Windows is @ registred tradernarkof Mlcrosot, nc Without MacLinkPlus® Deluxe, you’ll never know. Open Windows Files on Your Mac, Instantly. Is it a critical spreadsheet file? Is it a photo of your cousins at the Grand Canyon? Who knows? Certainly not you...because you can double-click it 'til your finger falls off, but it just won’t open. Why? Maybe it originated on a Windows' machine, or was compressed, or was created with a program you don’t own. Whatever the case, you need MacLinkPlus Deluxe 11. Over 10 million users already rely on it to open, decompress, and convert documents. So Let SE) when a file arrives on your Mac, you double-click it, it opens. End of story. a a | yr 4 (Esa ee ee MacLinkPlus Deluxe is one of several Mac, PC and Palm Organizer programs from DataViz; the | Compatibility. Instantly. compatibility experts. Buy or upgrade at our Web site, or at many software retailers, including: ‘autéuieconifiie 4-800-270-0030 x218 served. Adaptec: hes adapts fog, the Aa oftware is designed toast YOU In Feprodk CompUSA - Fry’s Electronics Micro Center - J&R Computer World Upgrade to new Toast™4 Deluxe and burn music, multimedia and data CDs. It opens a world of possibilities far beyond the software that came with your CD-Recorder. Now with new PhotoRelay” software you can view, sort and organize your photos, illustrations, scanned images, movies, sounds, and fonts in customized media catalogs. ‘New Toast 4 Deluxe, Only 999" You can also pull MP3 files from With $20 Upgrade $79 the Internet, as well as favorites from LPs and cassettes, to create your own REBATE OFFER compilation CDs. New CD Spin Doctor™ software removes hisses, pops and clicks from old recordings—your music is reborn in stunning digital quality. Get new Toast 4 Deluxe and satisfy all your burning desires. For details on the Toast 4 Deluxe Rebate Offer see your retail store or contact us at: http://cdr.adaptec.com/matoastcd or 1-800-442-7274 x1355. At Macworld Expo, Apple revealed the look and feel of its forthcoming Mac OS X (hope your were taking notes, Microsoft). Accompany us as we take a look at the gadgets and widgets that make up this revolutionary change to the Mac OS—all in living color! (But you'd better like Aqua, ‘cause that’s the only color this OS comes in.) BY DAVID REYNOLDS AND IAN SAMMIS | uae aW Time is a terrible thing to waste. So rather than watch yet another rerun of Mash, sit down at your Mac and try one of these nifty 20-minute projects. From setting up a Web cam to making a digital slide show, you'll be on your way to a more productive life in no time. BY KEVIN SAVETZ MMM...doughnut! He blinded me with science, doo doo dco—lan Sammis does his best to damage your ocular nerves with these 20 very cool—and sometimes very geeky—toys for techies. Whether you want to visualize electron orbitals in pulsing colors or play oil seeker with Seismic Duck— it's all here! BY IAN SAMMIS ee my He se oy Real artists make the pen tool look easy, but for the rest of us it's like trying to stuff a large cat into a small box—bits keep popping out. Learn to get that omery tool under control. BY ELYSE CHAPMAN e Ye Mac tc jon K Not all of us sing like doves. Mostly we sound a bit more like demented crows, our notes falling somewhere along one of the lesser-used scales mentioned in the appendix of a musie theory text. We'll show you how to at least get your squawking on key. BY ANDREW TOKUDA ve w > Yeah, yeah, we know—you bought the vastly powerful Word 98, but you hardly use any features SimpleText hasn’t provided for the last five years. We'll show you how to get started with some of Word’s more powerful features. BY MARIA LANGER ithe fire! REPRINTS SUBSCRIPTION QUERIES For reprints, contact RMS at 717-560-2001 Please phone customer service toll-free at 888-771-6222. Yolume 5, Issue 3 Is published monthly by Imag ‘by Art Director, David Ross “}~ HEY, THIS BABY ®) can pull some serious G-dces! every month Editor’s Note | am not Jeff Daniels! Letters Aw, come on, now...that’s just silly! Get Info The Internet does strange things to companies—Apple just got a little wacky, but MetaCreations shattered. We wander about with our wayward iBook, check out the latest industry lawsuit, and chat with musician and Mac user Ice-T. Scrapbook Sometimes the best toys we get around here aren't Mac hardware or software—they’re the branded trinkets hopeful companies send us. Here's a look at some of our favorites. Reviews Holy velocity engine, it’s the G4! Kill with skill when you play Total Annihilation, Descent 3, and Rainbow Six. Reign in Mac football with Madden NFL 2000. Cubase VST/24 4.1 converts at least one digital musician, plus we scrutinize Canvas 7, Sorenson Video 2.1 Developer Edition, the Epson Perfection 1200U, and other tools. PowerPlay Star Wars Episode | Racer is far from the lame game we thought it would be. In fact, we're burning a lot of time racing around Tatooine. Get the lowdown on the hottest—er, the only racing game to hit the Mac ina long time. Plus, we take a look at possibly the worst game ever made forthe Mac. Ask Us There’s only one z in Buz, folks, and that’s for Knowz-it-all. This month Buz has tips on Internet speed, locked files, and networking your home printer. Shutdown it's the funniest thing you've seen since Uncle Bill choked on that turkey bone. Oh, wait...that was pretty funny. Still, this is worth a look. -) CMON, Guys, Tm still waiting for my peanuts! PUBLISHER Susan Janus EDITOR IN CHIEF Robert Capps EDITORIAL EXECUTIVE EDITOR David Reynolds (technology) MANAGING EDITOR Jenifer Morgan SENIOR EDITOR Cathy Lu (features) ASSOCIATE EDITORS Narasu Rebbapragada (reviews), fan Sammis DIGITAL MEDIA EDITOR Kris Fong WEB GURU Niko Coucouvanis CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Raf Anzovin, Steven Anzovin, Joseph 0. Holmes, Buz Zoter ART ART DIRECTOR David Ross CONTRIBUTING DESIGNERS Linda “LuLu” Aldredge, ‘Anna Cobb, Chris Vanderhoot PRODUCTION PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Richard Lesovoy PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Hans Hunt ADVERTISING REGIONAL AD MANAGERS Don Kimenker, Kevin White AD MANAGER, DIRECT SALES Ana Epstein DIRECTOR OF MARKETING Mary Lachapelle AD COORDINATOR Balin Brandt CIRCULATION ‘SUBSCRIPTION DIRECTOR Kate Bailey NEWSSTAND DIRECTOR Eric Alekman NEWSSTAND SALES MANAGER Jonathan Vernier ONLINE MARKETING MANAGER Mary Firme FULFILLMENT MANAGER Peggy Mores DISTRIBUTION COORDINATOR Quyen Nguyen DIRECT MARKETING SPECIALIST Melissa Moske INTERNATIONAL LICENSING. Robert J. Abramson & Associates, Inc., 720 Post Rd., Scarsdale, NY 10583 Great job, Niko, Rich, Sharon, and Sherri, Welcome aboard, Cathy and Anna! (Gotta stay friendly with the staff it 'm ever gonna get back on the cover...) Ky EarthLink | An Internet Partnership | Sprint. WE’VE REMOVED THE BIGGEST OBSTACLE BETWEEN YOU AND A PRINTER. THE STORE. indifferent, under-trained clerks! And remember, with every purchase you help us pay our overhead!” No, we don’t blame stores for not being this, well, forthcoming. They have a business to run. But do you really want to help them run it? At the Virtual Printer Store, we bring you the printer without the inconvenience of the store. You shop at home or office, via phone or mouse. You don’t have to deal with traffic — street, store or otherwise. You only pay for what you need (the printer) instead of what you don’t (bricks, mortar and middlemen). And since you buy direct from the manufacturer, you deal with people who'll actually talk to you after the sale. c V= our crowded facility! Stand on lines! Interact with 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 below. The Virtual Printer Store. Because the best place to shop for a printer isn’t a shop at all. ELITE 12/600 uss 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 5 35 PostScript fonts, 15 PCL fonts, 45 downloadable fonts RAM expandable to 64 MB Ist year Platinum Exchange EtherTalk® TCP/IP USB, Ethemet (10 Base), Bi-directional Parallel 2nd Paper Feeder! (cludes $00-sheet Universal Tay) Add $299 ‘2nd year Platinum Exchange? add $ 99 ‘Also available in LocalTalk® version $949 1200 dpi version i, ‘UNIVERSAL SERIAL BUS 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, 250 downloadable fonts RAM expandable to 64 MB Ist year Platinum Exchange EtherTalk, LocalTalk, NetWare TCP/IP Ethernet (10 BaseT, AUD, Bi-directional Parallel 2nd or 3rd Paper Feeder* ‘Gncludes 500-sheet Universal Tay) Add $329 2nd year Platinum Exchange* Adé $179 $1599 Lease $56 Month/36 months* $1899 800 dpi version Lease $67 Month/36 months* $2199 1200 dpi version Lease $77 Month/36 months* 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 {st year Platinum Exchange USB (cable included), Bi-directional Parallel 2nd Paper Feeder! (Gocludes 500-sest Univeral Tay) Add. $299 2nd year Platinum Exchange? adi $ 99 $799 —s = TECHN OLOGIES THE VIRTUAL PRINTER STORE. vitro im to pees Toi cho oval veto ees re tad Tete Sng sole Gamer ia neat ti a een cee retires Sy nae des a ie le op et a end tr pr ree ogee Bartle’ i the disc HEY NOW, you're an all-star, get your game on, go play—with this demo! WAS THAT JAR JAR roadkill back “ there? Quick, run back over it to. make sure... WEAVE YOUR DREAM world and suck ‘your visiters into it, foo. bucnikoroshiteya Rob and Kris had the opportunity to meet the Original Gangster—and Mac advocate—tce-T in his home in LA to talk about Macs in the recording studio, the future of digital audio, and the music industry—and you'll find it in i{ this month’s video. We /ove the stuff we had to edit out—but hey, we don’t want to stir up DANG, CHECK IT QUT! This trampoline too much controversy. Oversensitive viewers workout will give you bulletproof buns of steel! 10 MacADDICT MAR/O0 Discover True Compatibility Connectix C V IRI UAL P Connectix Virtual PC delivers true compatibility by enabling you to run multiple operating systems on your Mac. With Virtual PC, you can run Linux, Windows 2000, 98, 95, or DOS on your Mac. Now, you can be compatible with the PC world by giving your Mac the abil- ity to run PC programs, access PC networks, and share files with your PC-based co-workers or clients. Connectix Virtual PC is a software solution that’s like having a Pentium chip in your Mac. And, it’s avail- able in 5 different versions, so you can choose which OS best suits your needs. Whether you choose to run Linux, Windows 2000, 98, 95, or DOS on your Mac, Virtual PC makes it easy to get started because each OS is pre-installed and pre-configured. Bridge the compatibility gap between Mac and PC envi- ronments by using Connectix Virtual PC! To buy or for more information, go to www.connectix.com or call 1-800-395-1824 Kab Connectix © Copyright Connectix Corporation. Connectix and Connectix Virtual PC are trademarks of Connectix Corporation. All other trademarks are property of their respective holders, | wish you people would stop laughing at me. t the Macworld Expo in January, an Apple employee handed me Staff Rants A one of the newly designed Apple business cards, and in addition to the new fruity logo, I also happened to notice that Apple officially dropped the word “Computer” from the title of the company. Its now just plain ol’ Apple—a very small detail, but it made me stop and think. I noticed the shift in the official com- pany moniker the same day Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld Expo and demonstrated Apple’s new Internet strat- egy—including iTools, iReviews, iCards, and a very Microsoftian partnership with Earthlink (I can already hear Jobs calling it his ISP of choice). When showcasing the new Apple Web site updates Steve talked e about going “beyond the box.” Apple, it seems, is fake to ipchie Pia odes to Bi ars O besides just a computer company. Of course this didn’t suddenly happen in January. Steve has repeatedly said that he wants Apple to be the Sony-of computer companies, Sony, remember, makes a bo wide variety of products from Walkmans to com- { just hope that le puters, all of which somehow maintain the Sony } ; 2 pep style and quality. Changing Apple's name is one doesn't forget about what | subde step toward Apple actually becoming more like Sony. It’s probably a bigger move than the A al @ m pies the caeany entire Internet strategy the company unveiled in ‘o ale e size id be gre great—the Mac January—at least I hope so, because the Internet ai on—128 8? Je stuff is pretty weak. The worst offender of the lot, of course, is KidSafe, Apple's ill-fated foray into censorship. I’m all for keeping kids away from porn, but it’s a tricky thing for any company to take on, and so far, Apple A e isn’t doing it right at all (see Get Info, this issue, p18). @ iD It is important, though, that a broadened Apple will begin to interweave Internet technologies with its operating system to create some very unique tools and toys for its customers. It's this idea that really justifies dropping Computer from the name. Only a company that produces hardware and software, and delivers Web services could pull it off. I wouldn't be surprised to see the new Apple finally deliver that hand-held device, or bring some really startling innovation through its unification of the OS, the Web, QuickTime and the Apple site stuff in the near future. But I monitor a Apple's change with a touch of trepidation as well. I just hope that by broadening @ its scope, Apple doesn’t forget about what makes the company great—the Mac. Staff Shifting A id adopt Ambro In our never-ending quest to keep you on your toes, we brought on a new fea- tures editor this month by the name of Cathy Lu. Cathy did a stint at Mac Home and ery softwa 0 Imagine’s Next Generation before joining the MacAddict team. Look for her Staff Video debut in upcoming months. Also, next month will be the last for our beloved Disc Editor Kris Fong. She's A e | re d heading over to join Nikki Echler on Imagine’s new digital photography magazine, oa digitalFoto. She’s done a terrific job of shaping our Disc over the last year, and O e she'll be missed. 12 MacADDICT MAR/OO Suitcase 8.2 includes a free copy of Suitcase Server with three connections. Now small workgroups can automatically coordinate their fonts. OS 7.5. 5— 9.0. Simple brilliance Some ideas are timeless. Take the light bulb. It’s easy to install, and even easier to use. Extensis Suitcase takes a cue from the humble bulb when it comes to font management. It couldn’t be easier to install and use. You turn fonts on, and you turn fonts off. You can easily organize fonts, see what they look like, and help your system run faster and crash-free. Your Macintosh has a bright new future with Suitcase. Extensis Products Group, |.800:803.6921, 503.274.2020, Fax: $03.274,0530. Extensis Europe, The Netherlands, Phone #31-30-24.75050, Fax: +31-30-24-12039, © 1999 Cr Extensis and the Extensis logo are crademarks of Creativepro.coms Inc. Suitcase is a trademark of Symantec Corporation. Menu Fonts isa crademark of Dubl-Click Safe Software, LLC, 1999. Macintosh and the Maciacosh OS logo are trademarks of Apple Computer. lnc. used under license. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners ‘SUMANAO2|299 wepro.com, Inc. All rights reserved. ne. Suitease XT developed by NRG ‘letters Write on, you hard-core Mac fans! We can take it. This Month WRITE TO US: MacAddict, 150 North Hill Dr., Brisbane, CA 94005, or email to letters @macaddict.com. FOR CD PROBLEMS: Go to bttp:// support.imaginemedia.com. FOR SUBSCRIPTION QUERIES: Call (toll-free) 888-771-6222. FraGnasit! I was enjoying the January 2000 issue of MacAddict when \ noticed the picture GET ON, from Unreal Tournament on page 10. You GET ACTIVE. say, “Without a target, this rocket will Talk tous and Janach to infinity and beyond!” other Mac Well, that’s not the rocket launcher eel you’re holding. The weapon you're holding is the ASMD Shockrifle. Just thought you’d like to know that. No harm done. I don’t think anyone else actually looked at the picture as closely as I did.—Kyus Duren We Want Sim Fiyinc Heap Tm rather disappointed by Sierra’s foolish and shortsighted decision to yank Half- Life. Boy, that company has some geniuses up in marketing! If they studied the Mac gaming market a little more closely, they would quickly find out why Caesar and Civilization bombed. Take a look at what games sell on the Mac—Unreal, Marathon, Myth, Warcraft. They're all action games! Yes, some have a dash of strategy, but games like Civ will never (I believe) do well in the Mac mar- ket. They get great reviews from those who actually sit down and learn to play them, but the general Mac public (who haven't really seen a whole lot of this stuff before as the PC people have) will say, “Where are the flying heads? Looks boring to me,” and not buy it.—Davp Kari. SHouLD Be READY By THE TIME You Reap THis You guys are worse than losers; you are lying losers. You got me all excited about 14 MacADDICT MAR/00 —_— MARKETING GUY SAYS Unreal Scrabble Arena Il is gonna be a cash-cow! Trust me! the iBorg and said that it would be fin- ished and I could pilot it “by the time I read this.” So here I am, all excited about the rebirth of the Mac as a system controller, but when I scour your site there is not even a mention of the iBorg. Let me know when you guys stop lying and I can really come and visit the iBorg. Don’t bother letting me know when you stop Josing, because it'll never happen. Humpfffi—Pau BRUNEMEIER Like THE FLu Well, Mac OS X Client is just months away (knock on wood), and you guys are prob- ably thinking of a punny headline to put on your cover. Well, have no fear, I’ve done the thinking for you: “X Sells!” Catchy, eh? —Simon Yiu Tsun Won Whoa...HEavy In your investigation of StarPlay's claim of Ten Tons of Fun, | believe you forgot to cal- culate the entertainment value of opening the read-me files with the monitor turned off, listening to the text via Speech, and guessing which game it’s talking about. I would estimate each read-me file is worth at least 15 metric pounds. This is still well under the ten tons StarPlay claims, but it’s closer—Marx Krspey LIGHTEN Up I was going through my January MacAddict when I noticed the “Mac to the Future” article (p28). Just at the beginning, to my surprise, I spotted an error in the “Travel Near Light Speed” section on page 29. You said, “Think about that next time someone tells you we'll never break the 186,000-mph mark.” Einstein didn’t say that the speed of light was 186,000 miles per hour—he said it was 186,000 miles per second. I really believe that for changing what Einstein said, you should fire Mark Simmons, or at least give him a good smack in the pants.—Zach Korrers Well, now you have done it. Officially, the old speed of light was 186,000 miles per sec- ond. However, you have just changed it to 186,000 miles per hour. Now we know what happened to the last Mars Lander. It's not lost—it's just been detained for breaking the speed limit. Have you guys informed NASA about the change? Mark, that’s miles per second, not per hour. Do you live in a slow-mo world? Actually, you must have known that, because 4 billionths of the distance light travels in one second is 2.8512 inches. So I guess that was just a typo. Darn, I thought I might win that G4 for outsmarting the author—Jos DEMUTH WHo THE Heck Is Jaiu-Guy? I was messing around on my old Mac SE, and I went to About The Finder to see the monochrome image of Silicon Valley. 1 é : E 3 i ; é noticed a name under the picture—Steve Capps. Is this person any relation to the Jail-Guy?—Quesr200sr Ay, CaramBa! Ever try to use Apple’s Spanish Text ‘To Speech voices (only available in the Apple CD Extras folder on the Mac 0S CD-ROM) to speak English instead of Spanish? I’ve been dying of laughter all weekend! —Dvian Drazen LL My BROTHERS, ISTERS, AND E Td like to sing a little sing-along song today about Macs. Macs are cool ‘They don’t drool PCs suck They are bad luck So buy a Mac Or I will sack Your family! — ANDREW Moun TuHat’s SPEcTICIOUS oF You! Regarding Anderson’s letter in your last issue, I know the definition of the adjective cromulent. It means: 1. Having the quality of being crummy. 2. Coated or sprinkled with crumbs, especially of starch-con- taining food, As you can see, crumb and cromulent do sound vaguely similar. The first defini- tion does not seem quite accurate in regard to your magazine. When I thought of the second definition, however, I remembered a letter way back where someone said his MacAddict was covered in crumbs. Quite a coincidence. —Brnjamin NusHMuTT Don’t You MEAN PERSIMMON? T’'m writing this for many reasons, but only one comes to mind right now—the color orange. The past few issues of MacAddict have discussed many orange-colored items, including the tangerine iBook and Cheez-Its. As for the tangerine iBook, many people refer to it as orange, but when the word orange appeared on your magazine cover (Ocl/99), I noticed a number of letters addressing that “error” in subsequent issues. My opinion: Apple should have saved itself the trouble and called the tangerine iMac orange. After all, an orange is also a fruit. Now, about the letter regarding Cheez- Its in your January 2000 issue—how dare Mark Kibbey insult Cheez-Its! Cheez- Its are great! Goldfish are good, too. It’s fun to bite them in half. But that’s sort of beside the point. Well, I guess that’s about all I have to say regarding iBooks and Cheez-Its. —GrEG ANDERSON Lie It’s Stitt 1999 T’m in high school now and have to make an important decision—what to do with nny life. I have decided to either become an actor or work at MacAddict as a writer. But if I choose one, I'll miss out on the good stuff that goes with the other. Here’s the dilemma that faces me. If] become an actor: I can become famous. I can have a lot of fun making movies. I can have fun going to cast parties. If | work at MacAddict: I can become famous. Ican have a lot of fun making movies. I can have fun getting paid to work with Macs. So my question is, do you have parties? —Stepuen B. Swarr Next YEar’s Mopet is Mape Or ‘TRANSLUCENT PLASTIC The boys (and a few girls—let’s be fair) can have Kris Fong. Gimme Rob “Prison Guy” Capps any day! Prison Guy is to MacAddict what the iMac was to Apple: a big, huge, and desperately needed dose of sex appeal. Now don’t bother me while I assemble my Rob Capps Desktop Picture. Yowza.—CrciLy WALKER No, it Just Means 5 You’RE WEIRD I don’t knowif this qualifies or not, but are you a Mac addict if you pry the logo off a Quadra 800 tower and epoxy a stud onto it just to make an earring?—Bruce HALMo Curses, You MeppLING Kips! You may be interested to know that I have foiled your diabolical plans to hide the cool audio tracks on The Disc! Using an ingenious combination of ResEdit (to view invisible files) and TechTool Pro 2 (to recover them), I am lis- tening to all four tracks over and over and over again in QuickTime Player! Nice try, MacAddict. Until next time... mua-ha-ha-ha-ha-haaaaah! —ADAM BARISOFF REAL mia Appicts Don’t Have FRIENDS Don’t get me wrong, I love your magazine. But I’m a little confused about one thing. You constantly refer to “our peecee friends,” I thought real Mac addicts didn’t ave peecee friends.—Jor CRONIN Um...No Js Dave getting in touch with the young Steve Jobs within him? 1 was taking a look at some old staff videos and his hair is a lot longer now. When you look at how it’s styled, it reminds me of Steve Jobs's hair style in college (at least, the image of Steve Jobs in college that TNT provided me with over the summer). What does this new look mean? Is Ian the Woz to Dave's Jobs? Does the iBorg secretly double as a Blue Box? How long until they bring us a a By the look on your face, | can tell you ‘ are a Windows™ user. $o | thought | would explain a few things about Macintosh™. 1) 1 am here to serve you and want you to be productive. 2) | will not assume | know more about what you want to do than you do. 3) Once you've used a Mac™, going back to a PC is like moving back in with your parents. Enjoy the freedom. YOU'VE PROBABLY NEVER SEEN THIS dialog box because you're a Mac user. MAR/00 MacADDICT 15 completely revolutionary computer? Can I get a job in their new computer company, which they'll run out of Tan’s garage? Where do I sign up to buy stock? Oh, and who are the evil enemies, those narks from Maximum PC? —JonarHan CiayDon Keep GUESSING I'm sure you knew that Gil Amelio’s user password, published on page \ 90 of the January 2000 issue, would |» generate a pile of mail. So what was it? Hmmm...eight characters...so many pos- x sibilities: hatejobs? 2tuffame? I have to know. Tell me, pretty please, please, please —Joun LavcLois Dati WouLD Be Proup I was taking a Photoshop class last semes- ter. Unfortunately, for some odd reason we were using NT computers in class. Luckily for me, we could take the work home, so instead of using those cold, slow machines I was able to do the work on my 266Mhz beige G3. When informing the teacher that Thad a Mac, her first response was to say “Oh, I'm sorry,” in a joking manner. I took RECENTLY SIGHTED-©) 16 MacADDICT MAR/00 it as a challenge. From then I stuck some sort of Apple reference into every assign- ment she gave me. I am sending you this picture, “Can I have a Goldfish Now?”, the project I submitted for my final in the class. The saying is from Polfergeist, when Drew Barrymore decides she should get a new pet after hers dies. In this case, the dead pet is represented as those damn slow PCs in class, and the reward would be receiving a Mac to work on instead. By the way, I did get an A on every assignment I turned in, including this one —Jerr ALso SwimMING WITH THE FISHES... Where's Max? He’s disappeared! Someone call a private eye and find him! No seri- ously, where did Max go? He wasn’t on the cover of the January issue, much to my dis- may. If you have decided that he was steal- ing the show, or not an option, or whatever reason you had for getting rid of him, please tell us readers about it. If you didn’t get rid of him, and this was just a mistake, please get Max back ASAP. —Perer Nix, 14-vear-op Mac appict PUNKER THAN Us The feel of The Mag is different. Yeah, sure, new logo, but that’s not it. No more biting editorials, if there ever were any—well, forget it, but it’s the feel that counts, and the “new” MacAddict feels like a watered-down Macworld clone. Yes, that’s scary, and I’m almost sorry I said it, but it needed pointing out. I know, I'm selfish, but I’m the reader (maniacal laughter). Maybe it’s the 13 advertisements in the first 27 pages of the January issue. What I guess I'm asking for is more attitude, please. And I don’t mean attitude TITLED “CAN 1 HAVE A GOLDFISH NOW?”, this work represents the absolute supremacy of the Mac...really. like Prison Guy's inaug- ural editor’s rant, which was excellent propaganda (brought a nationalistic tear to my eye). I mean attitude F like “I’m going to burn this Wintel box and roast marsh- mallows over it.” —Aaron Heg-StacPooLe ACTUALLY, 4 THEY’RE COASTERS Since I got my G4 and its USB keyboard, I cannot help but complain about the miss- ing end key. I think Apple should trash the help key and put in an end key. The only time I actually use the help key is when } press it accidentally. PS. Stop sending shiny silver frisbees with every issue. They don’t fly well. —Ban Unwan ConsiDER Him SuHuT In the Letters section a couple of months ago, I read a letter about no grape iBook. Then I read about a new graphite iMac. Dub! Apple is saving the other colors (strawberry, lime, and tangerine) for the 64 iBook. Well, maybe not, but if it'll make what’s-his-name shuddup, then that’s good enough for me,—Rusyrvrs Go AHEAD We are an alternative rock band that wishes to play at the Apple campus. The band’s name is Tenpennydime. PS. We are a good band, so you don’t need to worry.—Jasoy OK, It’s Two Now Hey there! It’s been a while since I've writ- ten to you guys (and since you guys have published many of my letters—a whopping one “You Know You're a Mac Addict When...” joke in the Dec/98 issue), but I'd just like to address a few things. 1) Thank you sooo much for putting a Photoshop tryout on The Disc in January. I have seen all of these cool-looking Photoshop how-tos and tutorials through- out my MacAddict collection, but I'm not about to spend $500 on a program that I’m only going to use to waste my time drawing with. I'd rather have that stuff either for free or relatively cheap. 2) Regarding the iBorg: Ian, Dave, how *bout you take that brand-new ViaVoice c¢ Appict WHEN. you argue that although your next coffeemaker will probably be USB, the blender to be FireWire (you know...for frappés).—Dave Fink u're typing a research paper on Microsoft Word, and you suddenly find yourself giing to resist the urge to plagiarize —Pasto Torre ou work in technical support and you can identify a Mac by its startup chime (I'm right 90 percent of the time).—Ceciy WALKER -you buy one of every iMac ever made...including the PC clones! —Davin ORR your art teacher asks you to make a colorful sculpture, and you immediately ask for translucent clay.—JONATHAN BELL ..you realize that you love your wife even more because she was born on the exact same day as Steve Jobs!—Gene MeLcHionne ..you identify your friends and coworkers by the flavor of their iMacs.—Jor RavesLoor .. you put jam on one piece of bread with one hand and peanut butter on another piece of bread with the other hand and call it “multithreading. "—Sam Martin .-you only wear grape-colored clothing to match your iMac —Euisnoe RyoBens Millennium program to the Eliza virtual therapist and have that roaming through the halls of PC Accelerator? Or, better yet, use T, Bender’s other creation, called Azile (Eliza with an attitude). That way, if they start bad-mouthing the Mac, Azile will come back with some darn good, uh, comebacks. Or if you're feeling really evil, hack away at Azile’s STR# resources and put in your own responses! Or add some more! The possibilities are endless! Bwa- hahahahahahaha! 3) Could we have an issue devoted entirely to old Mac games and vintage Mac software? I’d love to see more screenshots of the earliest systems and read about the clas- sics like Dark Castle and Enchanted Scepters (remember those?). Then you can absolutely cram The Disc with all the games mentioned, plus maybe a copy of vMac so that owners of the new G4s can enjoy them too. Heck, we had an issue about new games—now how about some old ones? Oh, and by the way, Jeff Daniels—oh, I mean Rob Capps—nice new look in the January Editor’s Note.—Keirm KaIseRSHoT 1)You’re welcome. 2)They sure are. 3)No. Finally, thanks.—Ea. A Better Eco Boost I was looking through the January 2000 issue of MacAddict, looked over the cover and all that good stuff. So I look up at the top and notice you changed your slogan. And for some reason it seems like you guys are trying to insult yourselves with it. It used to be “A better machine. A better mag- azine.” Now it’s “A better machine. A better logo.” What the heck? Don’t you guys think it's a better magazine anymore? Well, it is! —Danret De La Torre lr You Don’t Reap It, How Do You Know It’s Fine? Although I do not personally read your fine publication, I happened to see a letter by Mr. Abigren, who presumes to be in the know as to how Mr. Jobs of Apple Computer manages his presentations. I do not recall ever meeting Mr. Ahlgren. Mr. Ahigren may be enlightened as to how some organizations may manage their keynotes and presentations, but he is clearly uninformed regarding Mr. Jobs and Apple. I would suggest that Mr. Ahlgren reserve his editorial effort for something he is sure about—StepHaN ADAMS, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER TO Mr. Joss, ADAMS & ASSOCIATES Think Macs. Think again. PC MACLAN All Your Connectivity Needs: ih lel WK Think Windows. Think network. Think nightmare. in One Convenient Package at One Great Price. get info 100% KidSafe news since 2000. Pour the Champagne! Oops. Postcards from the Expo | Jobs Stumbles with Apple’s new “Internet Strategy” t's almost never a good sign when a computer industry giant announces an “Internet strategy” or a decision to “focus on e-commerce.” This sort of announcement seems to be roughly equiva- lent to invading Russia in the winter—it always seems like a good idea, but it usual- ly leaves you looking somewhat ridiculous. As best, iStrategies are marginally useful, as with Metrowerks’s decision to start hosting Internet courses on programming (http:// www.codewarrioru.com). At worst, they tear into a company's existing base, leaving cus- tomers and employees alike confused and angry. (The recent slashing at MetaCreations, which has cost 100 of its 230 employees their jobs and terrified loyal customers is a painful example.) Fortunately for us all, Apple's new Internet strategy is much closer to ihe former—the worst parts will simply become irrelevant, while the best have some chance of eventually being useful. Record Sales Steve Jobs, Apple’s now-permanent CEO, announced Apple's new strategy to an enthu- siastic crowd during his keynote address at January's Macworld Expo. Before describing the new Internet strategy, Jobs spent a short time crowing over the previous quarter's sales. Although full results weren’t in (and won't be until after we go to press—we'll bring you full coverage of Apple’s QI finan- cial results next month), Apple revealed that they'd sold over 1.35 million Macs during last quarter. That's a new record for them—almost twice its average rate of com- puter sales in 1998. Jobs also announced that a significant fraction (38%) of new iBook users were new to the Mac platiorm, with more than half of those from the Wintel side. He also announced that QuickTime has now more than paid for itself: The $12.5 mil- lion investment in Akamai (http:/Avww .akamai.com) that we reported on four 18 MacADDICT MAR/0O Tals iCord has bean sent to you froe Steve Jobs Please check out iCards, Review and iTools - our new free services for Mac users at www.opple.com Best, Steve STEVE SENT US AN ICARD! We feel so special. months ago (Get Info, Now/99, p20) has increased its value to over $1 billion. Apple’s Internet Potpourri To be fair, Jobs would have had difficulty meeting the ccowd’s expectations with any- thing other than an announcement of new hardware. Since the introduction of the iMac in May of 1998, nearly every major speech by Jobs has served to unveil a new type of Mac. Somehow, new Internet-related gad- gets didn’t quite compare. Still, even Jobs’s legendary Reality Distor- tion Field couldn't hide the banality of Apple's new Internet strategy. The crowd grew increasingly restive as Jobs discussed, in his usual glowing terms, Apple’s new plan to review Web sites (Reviews) and its new Internet greeting card service (iCards). The latter announcement provided a great deal of unintentional humor as the newly unveiled site repeatedly kicked Jobs off for inactivity. ‘Things got slightly more interesting as Jobs moved on to iTools, a series of new Internet- related tools which lets OS 9 users take advantage of Apple’s servers to add new capa- bilities. Jobs introduced four iTools: KidSafe, Mac.com, iDisk, and HomePage. KidSafe, the first iTool Jobs demonstrat- ed, is an Internet filter that works in a man- ner precisely opposite to most filter tools. Instead of maintaining a list of “unsafe” sites, KidSafe checks servers to see if a site has been declared safe by “certified teach- exs and librarians.” We can’t help but approve of this system—just after launch, Macaddict.com was KidSafe, while both Macworld.com and Machome.com were blocked. Most other major corporate sites were also blocked—so if you're deter- mined to save your children from the ravages of Newsweek, Hasbro, ABC, NBC, CBS, the WB, and most of the rest of hu- man existence, KidSafe may be right up your alley. Apple is now providing new email addresses to Mac users at the domain Mac.com. Email addresses are first-come, first-serve, so the MacAddici editorial staff would like to apologize to all the Irving Sam- mises, Donald Reynolds, and others out there whose preferred email addresses may already be gone. We're apparently not alone in this game—Jobs cheerfully pointed to the inaccessibility of “steve@mac.com” as he introduced the service. With iDisk, Jobs introduced the one genuinely useful component of Apple's new strategy. iDisk provides a 20MB Apple- share-over-IP volume to any Mac user who wants one. This provides Mac users with an easy way to shuffle data from one machine to another, without the reliability problems presented by magnetic disks. Since one folder on each iDisk is “public,” (other users can access it), the iDisk also provides an extremely friendly way for a company to provide a smallish download, without any need for the usual binhexing. Asa grand finale, Jobs announced Home- Page, a tool which allows you to create a sim- ple Web sie based on the contents of your iDisk. He demonstrated the creation of a photo gallery and an “iMovie theater.” Dur- ing this demonstration, a rather alarming bug in Disk appeared—Jobs's iDisk mysterious- ly vanished from his desktop, replaced by a second copy of Apple executive Phil Schiller’s public folder. Getting the Cash Since Apple offers all these features for free, it had to get a bit creative financially. Unlike many, many other companies, Apple at least had the good sense not to rely upon advertising revenue; instead, it made a vast ($200 million) investment in EarthLink, apparently hoping that by mak- ing EarthLink the default ISP for new Macs, subsequent increases in EarthLink’s stock price will reap earnings. Finale At this point, nearly an hour into the keynote, the crowd was getting pro- foundly restless. Fortunately, Jobs had a few cards left to play. He introduced the new “Aqua” (that’s “Acqua” to the Wall Street Journal) interface that Mac OS X will sport (see “Future Mac,” this issue, p27). In addition, Jobs finally announced that he will continue his work at Apple as permanent CEO (or iCEO—he apparently still likes the moniker, even if the “i” no longer stands for anything in particular). Now that the keynote is over, the judgement of the Mac community will begin. It will be interesting to see which parts of the Internet strategy survive and which fall into the overflowing junkheap to which Apple has consigned many previ- ous “strategies.” Will you be able to send an iCard in ’01? Will KidSafe eventually lose its paranoia and become a useful tool? Only time will tell—is Interview with an Original Macsta © | Ice-T on Macs, MP3s, and the music industry. YY: might. not peg a gangster rap kingpin as a likely, technological vision- ‘ary, but rapper, actor, and musi¢: industry mogul {ce-T definitely is one. He was one of the first major artists to back the small and easily swappable MP3 music format pubiic- ly. He’s among the foremost innovators of digital music and vid- eo Internet distribu- tion with his Internet only music label Goro- her Records (http:// www.coronerrecords .com—but be warned, YOU AREN'T SEEING THINGS—right next to Ice-T is the this ‘site Is pretty TUG- joaded 8500 that anchors his studio, ged and not suitable si for children). What we like about him best, though, is that Ice-T (whom you might know from such rap hits as “Colors” and “OG” and from the movies New Jack City and Breakin’) is a Mac man. Ice-T is such a Mac fan that he recently invited us-to his estate high in the hills above Hollywood Boule- vard in Los Angeles. He gave us a tour of his in-home recording studio (complete with a decked-out Power Macintosh 8500 used for audio recording postproduction), and phi- losophized about music, the internet, and the record industry. After talking with Ice-T in his impressive enclave, we realized that Ice’s story echoes that of so many professional artists who love the Macintosh. He started his’ artistic endeavors on a Mac because it was the industry standard, and since he knows the OS, it’s now the platform he prefers for computing. Among ice’s: current projects: The all-Internet Coroner ‘record showcases up-and-coming artists’ MP8s and QuickTime music videos (both free from the content restric- tions that radio stations impose), and he has formed a relation- ship with Atomic Pop (http:/Awww. .atomicpop.com) for Intemet distrib- ution of his music via MP3 down- foads or CD purchases. Ice is also working with Mixman Technologies’ Mixman Studio (http://www.mixman .com), offering the software’s users tce-T songs broken down track by track—you can separate the drum- beat from the bass line, for exam- ple—and allowing fans to remix Ice’s ‘songs using Mixman. His next plans include an online fadio station, an online music video site, and a whole battery of other internet-based ventures. As he puts » it, “Anything you saw at one of those Webnoize Expos...we're doing ail of it.” As we said, though, the best part is that he calls Macs elegant and PCs “pieces of crap.” You can check out everything Ice-T is doing by watching our exclusive video inter- view with him on The Dise,-RC FIND AN INTERVIEW with Ice-T on The Disc. PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT CAPPS MAR/00 MacADDICT 19 Shareware Pick of the Month ("= ° = = The name of the | | The time when the internet Explorer 5.0 ee iDo Script Scheduler aohecaled byon! | veal il happen Microsoft o SHAREWARE FEE: $24.95 for Enhanced — http://www.microsoft.com/mac, Free a URL: http://www.sophisticated.com ef Those of you who don't insist on keeping your /products/ido/ido_ss.html REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 8 or higher hard drive a Microsoft-free zone just have to try out Internet Explorer 5.0. With a new interface, an incredibly fast new rendering engine (code- named Tasman), better standards support, and a killer media bar, Internet Explorer 5.0 is the fastest, most elegant Web browser out there. It also conspicuously lacks a shopping channel, for which Microsoft's ic business team | deserves an extra bit of praise. inally, the Unix world’s powerful cron (system timer) has made its way to the Mac as an easy-to- use utility. With iDo Script Scheduler from Sophisticated Circuits, you can set a time to run an AppleScript (or several scripts), even passing para- [The soript that runs and the : meters to it if you so desire. The iDo Het that get passed to it ee Ne eek utility works as a control panel, lurking § =< ed 2 coat toolbar, behind the scenes until the time comes | The main interface where you can 5 eee Sealer ee fort wifre ofisicans) When add, edit, and delete events re reatly to take over the Mac you upgrade iDo to the Enhanced (@ - a ; ‘Web browser market, Oh, version, you can schedule an att feat at at Matiiited urine on Seis and Microsoft got in trouble access two new event types—hot for in the first place? keys (scripts that trigger when you press a key combination) and idle Carrara events (scripts that trigger when MetaCreations the machine isn’t doing anything http://www.metacreations.com, $399 else). Here’s a look at its inter- As the next completely rewritten version of face.—DR Ce) Cone) Ray Dream and Infini-D, MetaCreations Car- tara 1.0 arrives on the scene with complete 3D : Lawsu it of the Month fred ingen aninaice capaivines. Carara 1.0 combines an intuitive and easy-to-use interface, a blazingly fast rendering engine, Online bookstore claims ownership of “one-click shopping” and @ price normal people can afford. Some res include a hybrid ray tracer, Amazon.com .com (the online subsidiary of Barnes and veral modelers, multiple particle systems. Vv. Noble) had created its own one-click fully 3D light so and real-time MetaBalls. rhesandnoble.com shopping feature, apparently believing fyou're into 3D, definitely give Carrara a try. Amazon wouldn’t get its patent—compa- t's sad, but there have been enough nies aren’t supposed to be able to patent MacinTax industry lawsuits recenily to warrant blindingly obvious ideas. With all the Intuit an ongoing report. The latest installment _ elements of the drama in place, Amazon f a , $29 ($49 for Deluxe) in the saga of the suits comes to us cour- _.com filed suit on October 20, claiming You're not going to escape it this year, tesy of Amazon.com, the always popular violation of its patent. either—taxes are just around the corner, and but never profitable online bookstore, ‘The Patent Office has already come 2 r what you do, the IRS wil with some help from those wacky folksin under fire for issuing absurdly broad share. This time, though, you can make sure the U.S. Patent Office. patents in recent years, on items from that share is as small as possible with the ‘To get our litle drama started, set the — online tournaments to information sales. newest version of MactnTax from Intuit, The Way-Back Machine for September 28 of Fortunately for Amazon.com, insanity 1999 version has a better inierview process, last year, when the Patent Office granted appears to have triumphed once more; a better Web integration, and easier navigation. Amazon.com a patent on “one-click US. District Court Judge issued a prelim- This year, Intuit is offering one state tax form shopping,” which lets a returning cus- inary injunction against Barnesandnoble free with your copy of MacinTax Deluxe. This tomer place additional orders with a sin- .com on December 1. We'll keep you is your chance to make sure The Man gets as gle action. Meanwhile, Barnesandnoble _ informed as the lawsuit progresses—S. little as possible DR 20 MacADDICT MAR/00 Inside the Saucer Section | Piles and Piles of Airport Info N ow that AirPort cards and base stations are becoming readily available, attention is turning from simply getting the devices to making them work well. We've been conducting our own tests and sweeping Apple’s site for information. Here's what we've found.—iS S| Ae | 1 i e - e e = ' ° a re H bd fae prt} 193° | oy N jaeae 4 HH HA 3 ee KEY e © Base station $ | i eal jeeeemm meses! Full signal strength 70 UN SURPRISE, Nama HHH Apple’s 150-foot S High signal strength range estimate was ¢ Moderate signal strength aunty oatteo — even in our a + Weak signal strength crowded offices. V4 S Sources of AirPort interference? Many owners of wireless devices (phones, computers, keyboards, whatever) develop a strange type of paranoia. Every kitchen appliance, television set, and family pet becomes the scapegoat for connection failures, Otherwise fearless people have been known to cringe at the thought of interposing a wall between their mobile device and its base station, This fear isn’t always unwar- ranted (except in Fido’s case)—a few common household devices can cause serious interference in the AirPort’s signal, resulting in slower connections and lower range. a te TO AVOID Active microwave ovens shouldn't be anywhere near AirPort devices—the potential for interference is great. * Older DSS satellite dish cabling tends to leak signal, possibly causing interference. (Newer cabling doesn’t have this prob- lem, so replace your wires if you're having problems). * Incase you haven't noticed, power lines, electrified railroad tracks, and power stations tend to do very, very bad things to radio recep- tion. AirPort is no exception—siay away from these sorts of instal- lations. Of course, if you live under transmission lines, you’re out of luck. * Some cordless phones use precisely the same technology (2.4GHz Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum) as AirPort— this, too, can cause interference. You can get back online by switching channels on your AirPort. © Metal objects are just as good at blocking AirPort's transmis- sions as they are at interrupting radio waves—steer clear of them if you can. Most of the walls and partitions you find around the home or office aren’t much of a worry when it comes to the AirPort signal, but a few types can present serious problems. Here’s how much you need fo worry: (Don't 't sweat it much: wood, plaster, nasi glass a MAR/OO MacADDICT 24 get info Linux: The Forbidden Fruit | Are You Ready to Command Line? or the truly geeky among you who can’t wait for Mac OS X with its hoity-toity buzzword compliance (preemptive multi- tasking, protected memory, and command- line access), there is another option—Linux. A creation of Linus Torvalds, Linux is a free Unix clone, several flavors of which run hap- pily on Mac hardware—both PowerPC and 680X0. Currently, two major versions of Linux work on a Mac: LinuxPPC (hitp:/Anww Jinuxppc.org) and Yellow Dog Linux (http://wwwyellowdoglinux.com). Both use up-to-date versions of the Linux kernel (the deepest plumbing of the operating system), and ship with all kinds of applications and services ready to install, from the famed Apache Web server to the almost unsung graphics application, GIMP. While LinuxPPC provides an easy-to-use installer (it boots from a CD and has a graphical interface with mouse control), the latest version seems to be missing some critical connections between the basic OS and the graphical interface—not everything works correctly. Yellow Dog Linux uses the less elegant Red Hat installer. Although this version may be more difficult to get up and running, once it’s there every- thing seems to work properly. For the adventurous, other Linux-on- Mac versions include: © MkLinux (http:/Avww.mklinux.apple .com)—Sponsored by Apple in the mid- 1990s, MkLinux runs on top of the Mach microkernel—a different version of the same microkernel that Mac OS X uses. Apple aban- doned Mach to work on Mac OS X, but fortu- nately a private group picked up the project (http:/Avww.mklinux.org). Those who own NuBus-based Power Macs may find relief with the MkLinux release—it's the only one that runs on those machines, © Debian (http:/Avww.debian.org)— This little gem lets you run Linux on 680X0 machines—very cool. Sure, you may think your old Centris 650 is too slow to do anything useful, but it'll make a dandy Web server running Apache under Linux. ‘The various versions of Linux that run on Macintosh probably won't replace the Mac OS anytime soon (due mainly to the lack of apps and the difficulties of installing and configuring Linux). However, they do an excellent job at several tasks the Mac OS isn’t well suited for, such as running a Web server. And by playing with Linux, you'll be getting ready to take advantage of Mac 0S X's true power when it ships. At its heart, Mac OS X will share many of Linux's features and idiosyncrasies. After all, both have Unix at their core—DR ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID “BUSY!” ROSS Update or Die | Mac OS 9 Requires a Little Preparation E ven on a Mac, upgrading to a new version of the system software can be a real pain in the butt—updates, conflicts, and mysterious glitches tend to attack the unwary, and Mac OS 9 ‘seems to have more than its share of these grem- lins. To help you out, we created a partial list of software with Mac OS 9, er... issues; look it over and update where you need to before upgrading your OS. (Most of the programs having problems either have updates available or will by the time you read this, so go to company Web sites for the latest drivers or patches.)—DR 8 Adobe Premiere (http://www.adobe.com) Expression (http://www.creaturehouse,com Retrospect (hitp://www.dantz.com) - —Update to 5.16 /download.html) —Update to 1.05, —Update to 4.1E g a Adobe Type Manager (http://www.adobe.com) Dave (http://www.thursby.com) ‘SoffRAID (http://www.softraid.com/lpdates. = —Update to 4.5.2 —Update to 2.5 html) —Update to 2.2.1 Fa AppleWorks (http://www.appie,com) Microsoft Office 98 (http://www.microsoft.com) | Stuffit (http://www.aladdinsys.com) z —Update to 5.0.4 —fun the Mac OS 9 updater —Update Stuffit Deluxe to 5.1.5; 5 Conflict Catcher (httpy/wwu.casadyg.com) | RealPC (htip:/wuwfw.com) Spats Stunt Expaniet tn Se E ——Update to 8.0.6 —Update to 1.0.9 ‘TechToo! Pro (http://Awww.micromat.com) 5 —tpdate to 2.5.3 a 22 MacADDICT MAR/OO IY Runes ern NI ell HIERPRINT CIRL SHOPS IN FROM THE PRINTMOBPHERE ow No Avo i Wee Hoe orc, AND CLEARS OUT THE HARDWARE CANC. : OFFICE SPACE BATTLE. bf HARDWARE CLUTTER/ HELP/ \’M TRAPPED/ MY OFFICE EQUIPMENT IS }f CLOSING IN ON Mes a ba | A MEP (MULTIFUNCTION PERIPHERAL) AND EFEATS THE HARDWARE GANG. POWERPRINT 5.0 SUPP. POPULAR MFPs AS WELL THANKS, POWERPRINT GIRL/ AS WRTUALLY ANY Po PRINTER. MY SPACE IS BACK AND | CAN STILL PRINT, ScAN, cOPyY AND FAX FROM MY MAc/ Available for both serial and USB port Macs § 'iMFOWAVE To get PowerPrint, visit your Apple reseller or contact Infowave directly at 888.826.7884 or www.infowave.com/print. ‘trademarks oF registered vadematk are propery of tei respective owners scrapbook scrapbook Every day is a holiday at MacAddict! Tchotchkes Galore by David Reynolds Co} a pretty regular basis, we get some fun—and not always computer-related—toys in the editorial offices here. Some are promotional toys from various companies, Aspyr Football while others come from readers. Either way, they're a blast, Here's a sampling of the ‘To commemorate the release of Madden gewgaws and doodads that make it our way. NFL 2000, Aspyr provided lots of Nerf footballs bearing its logo. Bondage Bunny A pair of our faithful readers sent in this toy Intel bunny with an added twist—he bound its arms and legs to prevent it from wreaking any havoc. ‘Thanks, Dan and Vin. Dinosaur and Iro They go so well together—i way—that we just couldn't res dinosaur comes from Andromeda (maker of fine Photoshop fiers), ‘comes from Rowenta Steam Iron ¢ i cool aqua-colored translucey came out before the iMac. 24 MacADDICT MAR/0O PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID REYNOLDS No matter what your taste in tunes, you'll dig the new CD-ROM ToolKit 4.0 from FWB Software. Now with full MP3 Support, our award winning CD-ROM driver gives you complete control over your music listening experience while sitting in front of your computer. Disco, rock, punk, or old junk—it all sounds better with CDT Remote. And with our graphic CDT Equalizer’, you can fine tune the sound according to your personal listening preferences. FWB's exclusive Cache-on-Demand technology uses idle RAM and disk space more efficiently to boost CD-ROM performance! So put on your boogie shoes and get to work with database, stock art, and game CDs that perform faster than ever. The ToolKirs High-Speed Device Drivers support all popular CD-ROM drives and formats. And you can optimize individual CD-ROM Pex) = performance even further with comprehensive cache setting features. | es £444 Ei Download your copy or upgrade MWeeam | Mac | today ot www.fwh.com! Outpost.Com MacWarehouse MacZone MacConnection 800-856-9800 800-255-6227 800-711-4335 800-986-2289 www.outpost.com www.microwarehouse.com www.maczone.com — www.macconnection.com cDw MacMall Fry's Micro Center 800-400-4239 800-552-8883 650-496-6000 800-743-7537 www.cdw.com www.macmall.com www.microcenter.com © 1999 FWB Software,LLC. FWB, CD-ROM ToolKit, CDT Equalizer, CDT Remote, and Cache-on-Demand are trademarks or registered trademarks of FWB Sofware. All her trademarks are properly of thei respective owners, Specifications subject to change without nofce. All rights reserved. -OFSNU OU Teeq < software Programming Doesn’t Have To Be This Difficult. It's REALbasic! REALbasic is the award-winning, visual, object-oriented BASIC development environment for the Macintosh. Our application is easy enough for beginners and pow- erful enough for professionals to use. Whether you want to learn (or return!) to programming, REALbasic is for you! Simply drag and drop user interface elements into your application’s windows and dialog boxes to create anything from a small utility to a large application or the next great game—faster and easier than ever before. Experiment, explore, learn, and innovate as you build your applications step by step while REALbasic handles all the details for you so you can concentrate on what makes your software great—your ideas! With the Professional Edition roduct_ Most Innovative Macworld $65 you can even access most databases and create applications that run on Windows. While REALbasic is easy to use, it’s also extremely powerful. Features like multi-threading, classes, inheri- tance, a powerful debugger, extensibility, VisualBasic project import, advanced dynamic recompiling compiler, TCP/IP controls, and multimedia tools make REALbasic the perfect combination of simplicity and sophistication. Go to www.realbasic.com NOW to download a FREE trial version or call 512.263.1233 for more information. @ REALbasic REALbasic is a trademark of REAL Software, Inc. ac OS X, which debuted at Macworld WY | Expo this January, has been almost a decade in the making. Since the early ’90s, Apple has been working on a mod- ern operating system—first as Copland, then as Rhapsody, and lately as Mac OS X (the user interface is code-named Aqua)—and it appears the company may finally be on the cusp of achieving its goal. Mac OS X will be more responsive, more stable, and far more powerful than its prede- cessors (including Mac OS 9), and it will run almost all older applications without requiring upgrades. But more important, Apple has com- pletely overhauled the user interface—and this one promises a lot of flashy eye candy and a completely different computing experience from anything you’ve ever encountered. In fact, according to Steve Jobs, when you see it, you will want to lick it. Apple plans to release a beta in spring and a final version this summer, and will ship all new Macs with OS X by January 2001. Here’s a sneak peek at the next big thing from Apple. MacADDICT 27 Eye Candy Translucent Menus and New Apple Menu ) ri File Edit View Special Help Home a i sHard Drive jj FireWire Drive Favorites Documents John's Public Folder QuickTime Movies Gumdropesque User Interface Widgets Where: | Documents soot late xa] Save imag Mac OS X Unveiled Here it is—the long-awaited first look atthe Mac OS Xuser interface. MacOS X’s new interface integrates the best elements of OpenStep into the Mac OS with style and flare. The Finder hasn't gone away, but it has undergone a | transformation, as has everything from window controls to scroll bars» Aqua | also showcases the ‘awesome graph- ics power of Mac OS X's graphics engine, known as Quartz. Built around | Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), OpenGL, and QuickTime, Quartz can generate,transparencies | and drop shadayis on the fly. Let’s take a look at Mac OS X’s_ | public face. 28 MacADDICT MAR/CD Finder Button Bar } Finder Back Button } fi Built-in Search vo ae deme View Switch Button }) eg ‘Documents lic} Tr , = lzaam GW rocknroll.MP3 a: wwwapple.com Folder casts we New Scroll Bars }) . e Architecture Outtake.mov Drop Shadows Galore } MAR/00 MacADDICT 29 The Genie Effect In a bid to waste processor cycles on eye candy like no OS before, Mac OS X animates min- imizing and restoring windows: with a feature the company has dubbed the “genie effect.” When you click the Minimize button, the window squeezes down into the dock like a genie shrinking back into its bottle— you get the reverse effect when you remove an item from the dock. These screen shots, taken from a movie on Apple's Web site, show how the effect works, GLICK THE YELLOW Minimize button to trigger the genie effect. THE WINDOW flows into its place on the dock, and the icons move apart to make room. How nice of them! THE WINDOW becomes just another tile in the dock, awaiting a mouse click fo unbottle it. Brand New Apple Menu ‘This Mac OS icon shows up where we'd usually expect to see an Apple menu. This menu replaces the Apple menu, and it holds application-related items. Translucent [eelle ; Rein ae is one of many bits of “Joo! — how cool our graphics engine is” tomfoolery that Apple has f shoved into OS X: Open menus are now slightly translucent. Here’s a more useful addition: When you move windows around ~ 4 while you have menus open, the H menus don’t disappear. Just Eye Candy Z] This Apple icon appears in a very odd loca- @& | tion—rint in the center ofthe menu bar. lam! It's there for aesthetic reasons. Finder Back Button Expert users have always known that you e press Command-up arrow to move to the folder containing the topmost window. OS X makes this functionality a bit easier—the Finder window provides a back button reminiscent of those found in browsers. Finder Button Bar OS X adds a row of buttons to Finder windows, allowing quick access to some important locations in the file system. The Computer button goes to a newly added layer beneath the volumes (reminis- cent of My Computer in Windows). This layer pre- sents a window containing some of the desktop’s traditional denizens—hard drives, network volumes, and CDs. Home opens the user's home directory—on a shared computer, all users except its owner can only make changes inside their designated “home” folder (as in most Unix-derived systems). The Finder button bar also offers one- click access to other useful locations, including the Apps, Docs, and Favorites folders, and other users’ home directories (labeled as People). AIGRIEIIRIE Inside the Plumbing Despite the name, Mac OS X bears New Finder Mnnee Apple has replaced our vintage 1997 Finder with a totally new, OS if X-native version. The changes look extensive, but we'll have to wait until summer to see exactly what’s new. View Switch Button = OS X’s Finder provides three views: ©0@ || Icon, list, and a new Browser view GO || reminiscent of Os X Server. The View button simplifies switching from one view to another by cycling through views. Built-in Search Search. | OSX builds a simple search capability =} directly into the Finder. Folder Path Menu Another power-user trick almost totally hidden in the current Finder is the ability to command-click a title @ [Documents cs to see the entire bread-crumb trail of folders in which the current window resides. OS X makes this feature obvious by placing it close to the top of the Finder. Enormous Icons =. Mac users may find OS X Server's 128- | Bap) | by-128-pixel icons tremendously dis- bad concerting—they're 16 times bigger (=| than their Mac OS equivalents. Though Image | these huge icons made it into Aqua, fear not—Jobs demonstrated the ability to shrink them to much smaller, more eye-pleasing sizes. New Scroll Bars A still image can’t quite capture the beauty of these new scroll bars. They appear to ripple slightly as you drag them—an appropriate visual effect for an OS named Aqua. Single Window Mode Button Ifyou click this button at the right side of the title bar, OS X goes into Single Window Mode, shufiling all other windows into the dock at the screen's bottom. As the user switches windows, the old window drops back into the dock while the new window pops up. operating system, never really took off; If Aqua were all Mac OS X had to offer, it would be a bit like OS 8—a solid step in the evolution of Mac operating systems, but not terribly remarkable. Only when you take into account the underpinnings of the new OS does X’s revolutionary nature become apparent. 30 MacADDICT MAR; | almost no relation to the Mac OS we've been using since 1984. OS X most closely resembles NeXTStep, the operating sys- tem NeXT first introduced (under CEO Steve Jobs) in 1986. NeXTStep (at various points called OpenStep and Mac OS X Server), although highly regarded as an under Apple’s auspices it will now have another shot, this time with a much larger user base. NeXTStep has always offered the core features the Mac OS lacked—pro- tected memory, preemptive multitasking, and a well-implemented system for assign- ing memory to applications. Now, with This icon—presumably the Trash Can—sports a retro stainless-steel wire-basket look in OS X. The ‘Trash can always anchors the right side of the dock. in drop shadows at a fundamental level—every window has its own drop shadow, complete with a semitransparent alpha channel. The dock, strongly reminiscent of the OpenStep dock (and somewhat similar to the Windows Task Bar, which came later), holds your open applica- tions and minimized windows, and grows and shrinks as you add or remove items. When the dock fills up (it can hold up 10128 items), the icons shrink to fit; rolling the mouse over items in the dock magnifies them for easier identification, Pop-up windows meets The Matrix. New le Dialog The new Save dialog box slides out of its associat- ed window, and it’s nonmodal—that is, it doesn’t take control of your Mac until you perform an Save as: ‘Autumn Where: (Documents & Save image preview Carbon and Aqua layered above it, OS X should provide all of the Mac OS's advan- tages with none of its drawbacks. The Browser For the most part, Aqua strongly resembles the current Mac OS, albeit with vastly superi- or visual effects. However, some changes to the GUI run deeper than making close boxes resemble drops of cough syrup. In particular, Apple has added a view called the Browser that can, in some situations, provide a very powerful way to navigate through files. In file viewer parlance, a browser is a columnar view in which each column con- tains the contents of the folder selected in the previous column. With a browser, you can quickly tunnel through a series of nested fold- ers and deal with several nesting levels simul- taneously in the same window. Power users will love this view (as will OpenStep fans—the browser is one of the most popular features of NeXT’s operating system), but novices are best advised to leave it alone—tt’s all too easy to get hopelessly lost in the depths of your ‘operating system while you're just trying to have a quick look around. Oh, the Things You Can’t See So you think you've seen it all? Think again. Apple unvelled a feast of other cool Mac OS action. Notice that the dialog box is semitranspar- ent—except for the text. Default buttons now pulse like a colorful strobe light, rather than just having a double black border. ne Volume Slider At last the obnoxious ana- log-style volume dial in QuickTime 4 has gone by oa the wayside. In the pre- view version of Mac OS X, the Quicktime player sports a normal-looking volume slider—and a set of controls that make sense. Plus, the notoriously hard-to-use favorites drawer is conspicuously absent, B go in Mac OS X, too. Use this title-bar icon as a proxy for the open window. To drop an item into the window, for example, just drag the item onto the icon; or you can drag the icon to the desktop to create a shortcut. We've seen these icons in title bars before (Mac OS 9 has them), and they're ready to ures a new set of window controls—from left (é) (3) (6) to right, they are the Close button, the Minimize button, and the Maximize button. Roll the mouse over these widgets, and an X, a minus sign (), and a plus sign (+) show up in colored circles. The red Close button closes the window, the yellow Minimize button sends it to the dock, and the green Maximize button works like the zoom box in older versions of Mac OS. This doesn’t seem very intuitive, but neither were the original close and zoom boxes. A New Way to Save Mac OS X changes the way you save documents by associating the Save dialog box with the window containing the data you're saving. The semitransparent Save dialog box slides out at the bottom of the title, and it doesn't tie up Mac OS X until you press the Save or Cancel button, as in previous versions of the Mac OS. Here's how this cool animation looks. CLICK THE | Fea CLOSE widget in an unsaved document's window, and the Save box appears. Whe ae you caring ti? THE SAVE DIALOG BOX slides out from the bottom of the title bar—like the Star Wars Opening credits in reverse. THE NEW SAVE panel unfolds, all ready to go—and it even looks freshly starched (and semitransparent). The default button pulses with color, X features during January's Macworld Expo that the screen shot doesn’t make evident. Perhaps the most amazing (and un- Windows-like) feature of all is the improved stability and crash immunity. In OS X, when. an application crashes, it doesn’t bring down other applications or the whole sys- tem along with it. In addition, a new font panel allows users to organize fonts easily into collections—and, of course, to buy new fonts via the Internet. Finally, in the “it's about time” category, you no longer have to activate windows to shut them. Jan Sammis and David Reynolds survived Macworld Expo to write this feature—thanks in part to Jack in the Box. MAR/00 MacADDICT 31 KILLING TIME WITH 20 MAC me PROJECTS YOU CAN Do IN 20 MINUTES OR Less! PROJECT 1: SET Up A Wes CAM In just 20 minutes, you can be among the elite few...uh...million people who have a Web cam on their desks. Point your QuickCam or other video source at your desk, at the cat’s bed, or out the window. Next, install a Web-cam program such as CoolCam ’($20, http://members.aol.com/yuv422) or SiteCam ($149, http://www.rearden. com/sitecam) so the world can watch your desk, your cat, or your window. They will just throng to see it all. You don’t even need a fast Internet connection to serve those scintillating images. Either program can periodi- cally upload images to an FTP server BY KEVIN Ss AVETZ at your ISP, where you can easily make them part of your Web page. If you have bandwidth to buri you can send out streaming video the office. Or maybe you're at home, waiting or time-lapse QuickTime around for a ride. Or dinner won't be ready for a movies generated by your Web cam. s}0e!oad oz It's 4:40 p.m., and you're getting ready to leave while. For whatever reason, you've got 20 minutes to kill in front of your Mac, and you're just itching to do something useful with all those seconds (that’s 1,200 whole seconds, folks). You could spend that time aimlessly surfing the Web or play- ing with the Jigsaw Puzzle. Or you could embark on a project, complete it in 20 minutes, and per- haps learn a new trick or two in the process. Doesn't that sound more exciting than degauss- ing the monitor repeatedly? Sure, you won't get that cool flashback effect, but you might accom- plish something more worthwhile. Good souls that we are, we’ve come up with 20 Find software mentioned takes 20 minutes or less. Think of them as practi- in this article on The Disc. projects you can do with your Mac, each of which cal time-killers, if there is such a thing. So pick one, try it, and make the most out of every moment. Or if you have a whole day and nothing else to do, you can complete all 20 in less than seven hours for a real sense of accomplishment. TLLUSTRATIONS BY MIKE CRESSY (00 Mac: 133 20 projects PROJECT 2: INDEX A FOLDER Sherlock's Find By Content function is the best way to search for a snippet of text since the bloodhound came along. Problem is, it won't work until you've indexed your hard drive—and you need to update that index from time to time. Unfortunately, building an index of a large hard drive can take hours—many, many, many hours. How can you create or update the index for a folder or two quickly? Control-click a folder or several folders and choose Index Selection from the contextual menu that pops up. Your Mac will dutifully (and quickly) update the Sherlock index for just those items. It’s a lot faster than waiting for the whole she- bang to process. So &, AmeckeoOmieev40 Applictone ESRD f ~ oa Open ny t y Move To Trash canes Mecper! f rites ements Label > Duplicate indexing Pragres: Make Alias Add To Favorites Updating Index of“ Pending!” | Find Similar Files “Indexselectio (Cancet-J Time remsining: About 6 minutes Ine: Big ener ve sin STE OS LF THROUGH your chosen items with the Index Selection command. PROJECT 4: CREATE A DicITAL SLIDE SHOW WITH YOUR PHOTOS You probably have graphics files littering your hard drive, so why not use them to cre- ate a digital slide show? The quickest way is with Graphic- Converter ($35 shareware, http://www.lemkesoft.com). Toss all your images into a single folder. Feel free to mix and match file formats. te (aT) Launch Graphic- Scape Converter, Choose the Slide Show function from the File menu (Command-D). Find your picture folder and choose any image in it. Tweak the options to your taste, A simple toolbar allows you to control the flow, or you can let the pro- Qsearcarpicure 1 QStarewith selection @ rencom order gram show random pictures at timed intervals. PROJECT 3: MAKE YOURSELF INTO AN ICON How about squeezing your face into a 32-by-32-pixel square and making an icon of yourself? Sounds painful, but it’s actually pretty cool. You can create a miniature self- portrait with any image editor. If you need a little assis- tance, use clip2icns, a shareware utility that helps create 32-bit icons (http://www.mscape.com). Here's how to do it. Find a pic- ture and scale it to a 32-pixel square. You'll also need to create a mask for it. (A square, all-black mask works well for portraits.) Copy It to the Clipboard. Launch clip2ions and choose New icon File. Press Insert to save the Clipboard as an icon. You've been iconified! Now you your lit. tle clone onto count- less folders and files. 1D: For more icon- creation inspiration and tips, visit http:// www.iconfactory.com, olipboard Item Icon -16455 Item Icon \ ECE (Bctract }|[ insert Kevin is an Icon Project 5: UPDATE YOuR SOFTWARE Ifyou've got software—and you look like someone who does—chances are at least one of the programs on your Mac is out of date. In fact, we'd bet on it. The good news is that software developers constantly update programs to add fea- tures and stomp out bugs. The bad news is that they don't come to your house personally to install the latest versions. So take a few min- utes to check your system for software in need of updating, Visit http:/Avww.versiontracker.com, a site that makes it easy to find the latest version of thousands of Mac programs. You can download a patch by following a link. If you don’t know what ver- sion you have now, click the app’s icon and choose Get Info from the File menu (Command). VersionTracker can also notify you via email whenever an update comes out for your software. PROJECT 6: CREATE ROLLOVERS FOR YOUR WEB SITE How about using your copious free time to spruce up your Web site with rollovers? These cool tricks make a graphic undergo a change when you move the cursor over it. Or you can make help text appear when you point to a particular part of the page (ala Microsoft's Too! Tips.) You can create rollovers using JavaScript or Cascading Style Sheets. Since you don’t have alll day, it’s fastest to throw the problem at a Web graphics editor such as ImageReady or Fireworks. We'll show you how to do it via JavaScript in ImageReady. STEP 1: Open ImageReady and create a button you want to put on your Web site. This is the normal state of the button—how it appears when the Web page loads. C) = mm Button psd @300% (Original) == i 36iK 7166 byes GE Ze STEP 2: Click the Create New Rollover State to create five more buttons representing various icon conditions: Over (when you roll the mouse over the button), Down (when you press and hold the mouse button while the cursor is over the button graphic), Click (when you click the mouse button while the cursor hovers over the button graphic), Out (when you roll the mouse away from the button graphic—usually the same as the normal state), and Up (when you release the mouse button—usually the same as Over) [AER Ti ‘Out= Up» Cheery _— STEP 3: The last part is easy. Choose Save Optimized from the File menu, and ImageReady exports the proper HTML and images into whatever folder you select. Then you can open the HTML file, copy the JavaScript code, and paste it into the HTML file where you'll be using the buttoh. Button_o1 wT BT [<7 ial 0 ee Q button SS 6 Items, 2.6 GB available Date Modified 4 [2 Button.htm! Today, 4:39 PM [-] vw @ imeges Today, 4:39 PM. FB) Button_o1-click.gif button_o1-downsit Todey, 4:39 PM $B sutton_o1-over sit Today, 4:39 PM GB) Button_o1.oiF Today, 4:39 PM Today, 4:39 PM SEI Project 7: ERGONOMIZE Your WORKSTATION Thinking about your posture at the computer can be excellent preventive medicine, Take a moment to make sure your keyboard and mouse are within easy reach and you don’t have to strain your neck to see the monitor. Here are some questions to ask yourself. How is your posture at the computer? Are your shoulders hunched? (They shouldn't be.) Are your feet flat on the floor? (They should be.) Do you crook your neck to one side to hold the phone while you type? (You shouldn't.) Do you hang your head forward while typing? (Don't This can strain your back muscles.) Adjust all the com- ponents of your workstation accordingly. Then read the Typing Injury FAQ at http://www.tifaq.org to learn about carpal tunnel syndrome and other repetitive-stress Injuries that typing and using,a mouse can cause. Project 8: OPTIMIZE Your BROWSER Hf your Web browser has been acting pokey lately, it's time to whip it in to shape. Start by clearing its cache and setting it to a reasonable size—5MB is per- fect in most cases, less is fine if you need to save disk space (but if you're down to 5MB of free hard drive space, you might consider upgrading). If you have RAM to spare, create a RAM disk via the Memory control panel and use it as the brows- er cache for extra speed. To adjust your cache settings in Netscape Communicator, choose Preferences from the Edit menu, then Cache from the Advanced tab. In Microsoft Internet Explorer, choose Preferences from the Edit menu, then Advanced from the Web Browser tab. It you use Internet [& Sa vemony Explorer, take advantage Dik Coe ofits Forms AutoFilifuno- | Gale falta] tion. To set this up, choose AutoFill Profile Bee from the Preferences win- ) eu dow. Fill out your name, Gow ‘estimated size i B872K. ‘Seleot Hard Disk ‘valabe for use on isk? Ram Disk address, and other to use for a RAM disk sundry details. Next time ne you need to fill out a Web Sen = om ExsovecnsiutDovn RAD 8 form, choose AutoFill Forms from the Edit menu. Press Command- se04, Disk Cache size is caloulated when the computer starts up. The current @ Macintosh HD. S 35m ‘Available bult-in memory: 121M (em } Percent of avaliable memory, equal sign (=) to fillinthe USE THE MEMORY control panel to create a RAM forms automatically. If you don’t usually use Java-enabled sites, consider turning off Java support in your browser. This eliminates the annoying Java startup wait you must otherwise endure when visiting random Web sites that subject you to useless Java tricks, plus you don’t run the risk of Java-related crashes. Of course, if a new site doesn't work as advertised, you may have to turn Java on again to use the site. disk for your Web browser. MAR/00 MacADDICT 35 spofosd 02 20 projects PROJECT 9: RECORD New System SOUNDS When Sosumi and Simple Beep have worn out their welcome, it’s time to create your own system sounds. Plug in your micro- phone or pop a favorite CD into your CD-ROM drive. Now open the Monitors And Sound contro! panel. Press the Sound button and select the input source. Next, press the Alerts button, then click Add. Use the controls to record your sound, but remem- ber to keep it short—preferably under a second, two at most. Sound really eats up memory and hard drive space. For a more elegant recording interface, as well as the ability to convert sounds from other formats, try Ultra Recorder ($20 shareware, http://members.aol.com/ejc3/Ultra.html). PROJECT 11: DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL NEw STUFF Spiff up your Mac with some new software. Point your Web brows- er to one of the many excellent Mac file archives, download some intriguing item, and try it out. Ifyou have a 56-Kbps modem, you can download about 8MB in 20 minutes. CNet’s Download.com (http:// download.cnet.com) offers a daily download spotlight, as well as a list of the site’s most popular downloads. Or try InfoMac’s Hyper- Archive at_http://hyperarchive.lcs .mit.edu/HyperArchive.html—it's one of the oldest and largest Mac software archives, although its interface won't win any design awards. Another software archive, Macupdate (http:// www.macupdate.com), offers a prominent listing of new software, with detailed information about each app. If your Mac is new, visit The Download Zone (http://w3.trib.com/~dwood /software.html), which offers a small selec- tion of handpicked software basics, includ- ing graphics viewers, Internet clients, and utilities. 0 O 0 New font suitcases item, 2.568 available Charcoal Sia (New font suitcases tiem, 4:7 8 aval Font Stationery New font suitcases 2 items, 2.5.68 available Font Stationery Al My Garamond Fonts Put that CD burner to good use by burning a CD of your favorite songs in MP3 format. Then you can listen to tunes on your Mac without clogging your hard drive with those corpulent MP3 files. If you haven't visited MP3.com yet, do so (http://www .Mp3.com). You'll find great (and legal) recordings in every musical genre. Or log out and copy songs from your own CD collection as MP3 files onto a CD-RW for your own use. Remember copyright law, though—those songs must be for your use only, so you can’t give those CDs away. PROJECT 14: CREATE AN INTERACTIVE MP3 JUKEBOX Once you've got a disk full of MP3 tunes, it's time to play DJ. Use an MP3 player to arrange your files into playlists. Rearrange the songs on your favorite album or assemble PROJECT 15: BUILD A Custom HoME PAGE You may be one of the only people left without a Web page. You don’t have to know HTML or even have a mas- sive Pokémon collection to deserve a home page (and if you do have a massive Pokémon collection, your name must be Mark Simmons). If you have 20 minutes and something moderately interesting to say—or even if you want to rant incoherently—you can and should make yourself a little page on the Web. You'll need a Web page editor, so download a trial version of Freeway from http://www.softpress.com (or check one of our past discs for a free version) and get to work. Every issue has at least a couple of these—often several. Are we talking about taunting references to Prison Guy? Yeah, those too, but we really mean How To, the section of the mag that gives the nitty-gritty on how to accomplish something useful. Try one—tt will take less time than a master’s degree, and you'll probably learn more, too. Recent issues have explained how to make interactive QuickTime movies, use your PowerBook as an external hard drive, and do amazing tracks from various artists. Go ahead and create several playlists, one for each genre you enjoy: a jazz mix and a techno mix, for example. Here’s how to do it with QDesign MVP ($20 shareware, http:// www.mvpsite.com). STEP 1: Choose New from the File menu to tricks with Photoshop. You'll often find the needed programs on The Disc, start a new playlist. (ce = STEP 2: For each MP3 file you'd like to add to the playlist, click the Add button, then choose the song file. so you can get started right away. STEP 3: When your song list is complete, click Save and name it. Ee Pop Song.mp3 syofoid oz 20 projects PROJECT 17: WRITE STEVE Joss A LETTER Take 20 minutes to let the big boss of your favorite computer com- pany know what's on your mind. His email address is sjobs@apple.com (or so says Nikki—it may go into a vast collection of unread email). Or you can always send items (letters, pictures, worldly offerings, and so forth) via snail mail to Steve Jobs, Apple Computer, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 95014. Project 18: CLEAN Out Your Harb Drive AND SYSTEM FOLDER When was the last time you opened your System Folder? Do you know what goes on in there while you're not looking? Installers leave fonts and SimpleText duplicates behind like rats leave drop- pings. Programs wantonly create preference files, cache folders, and help files. Detritus from long-forgotten ‘software piles up. Take a few minutes and clean it out. A quick glance in the System Folder may reveal entire folders you can toss in the Trash. My own Mac’s system folder was harboring a ColorSync Profiles folder (although l've never used and will never need ColorSync), a Spell Catcher folder (although | stopped using Spell Catcher a year ago,) and a Eudora folder (ditto), Also try Preference Packer (available from http://www. spextreme.com), a tool for removing unnecessary items from your Preferences folder. While you're in the cleaning, disinfecting, and ordering mood, peruse other folders looking for space wasters. A game you no longer play—trash it, A beta version of a crash-prone email client—nuke it, Clean up the mess you've created on your Mac’s hard drive. 38 MacADDICT MAR/OO PROJECT 19: MAKE YOuR OWN STICKER Here’s a 20-minute activity that’s fun for adults and kids alike. Visit the stationery store (or just sneak into the office supply room—! won't tell) and get some sheets of sticky labels. They come in all shapes and sizes, from return-address format to full-page sheets. Put them in your printer, load up some graphics-editing software, and create your own stickers. You can grab clip art from a favorite Web site or even create your own with a graphics program. Finally, you've got a use for the color cartridge in your inkjet printer. Project 20: SAY SOMETHING SMART IN A CHAT ROOM Joining a chat room can be a great way to waste—er, spend some time and meet people. Drop by http:// chat.yahoo.com for easy-to-use Java-based chat. If you're an America Online member, you'll find AOL's own chat rooms at key- word People Connection. Or you can try the granddaddy of Net chat—Internet Relay Chat. Visit http://www.irchelp.org for a helpful guide to IRC as well as a roundup of Mac IRC clients. There's also a very cool set of chats at World Without Borders (http://www .worldwithoutborders.com). When Kevin Savetz (savetz@northcoast.com) has 20 minutes to spare, he can be found playing old video games with MAME (Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator), learning to fly, or napping. Kevin also writes the weekly Geek for Sale column at AuctionRover.com. Before Columbus, sailors stuck pretty much to the same old standard routes, fearing they would fall off the edge of the world and be eaten by sea monsters, Fortunately, Christopher didn't believe in “standards.” Once you see everything Canvas™ 7 offers, the old standards will begin to look merely standard. With its ingenious Sprite technology, vector illustration flows seamlessly into image editing and typography. So you can create brochures, diagrams, and retouch photos within a single creative application. Or build « pixel-perfect web page with optimized web graphics, mouse-overs nd animated GIFs — no extra utilities required, and no limits to what your imagination can explore. It’s time you experienced EXCUSE? the til of discovery. Order Caves 7 today at wa. denebacom/macadict Or cll 1.800. 7DENEBA for tho reser nearest you e With hundreds of other features, 30,000 clip art images, 2,450 fonts and anew, unbelievably low price, there is no excuse simply the most complete solution for all your print and internet graphic design i needs.” z CANVAS? No comparison FIND SEISMIC DUCK 1.4, Franklin 1.1.4, MPj Astro 1.5.2, Gerry’s Attraction 2.063, Curvas Pro 3.0.1, Conics 0.9.2, MacMolecule2 Lite, a MacBreadboard 1.1 demo, xTuringMachine 1.3, Weather Tracker 3.0.4, and Planet Earth 2.1.2 ‘on The Disc. (Watch for The Disc icon—we've marked the apps that are on The Disc.) science can be a pesky thing. There you are, about to show the world that you're easily the best coach in the history of football (or at least in the history of Madden 2000), when a little chirp- ing voice in your head wonders just when you're planning to squeeze some real work into your busy schedule of dawdling and procrastination. While it’s tempting to crush that pesky cricket (or at least start hammering away at Ambrosia’s latest, hoping to send it as an appetizer to Jason Whong), there's an alternative to life as a con- Scienceless sociopath or as a humorless worka- holic drone. A slew of applications that are vastly A though it’s handy to keep around, a con- 40 MacADDICT MAR/00 (| FOR TECHIES i by a z ro a Wi E < a 5 < > = 7) > a Zz @ - < 4 e a 2 a entertaining (from a sufficiently geeky perspective) also have a reasonable claim to being educational, thus keeping the irritating pangs of your nearly moribund work ethic at bay. After all, you’re not just wasting time—you're learning math and science (in theory, anyway)! Before you read further, be advised that the key phrase here is “a sufficiently geeky perspective’— if you can’t even stand the thought of science, you'll find these apps as entertaining as a long, slow tax audit. Assuming that the ungeeky have gone off to work on some 20-minute projects, let's take a look at the cream of the current crop of Mac- based techie toys. ©} PHYSICS y mina Dean Dauger http://www. physics.ucla.edu/~dauger $20 Dean Dauger is the current master of physics shareware, | and Atom in a Box is possibly his finest creation. This decep- j tively simple program | plots the electron cloud around a hydro- gen atom, The various wave states of the electron are stunningly beautiful, but the amount of mathematics required to understand them is daunting. This program does the math for you, allowing you to gain at least an aesthetic appreciation of the wave states. It's certainly not enough to get you through a sopho- more-level quantum mechanics course, but at least you'll see the lovely shapes involved. An option to View Phase As Color offers help to physics students who want to see what's going on—for others the view just makes a pretty image prettier. if you'd rather play games, type “atomwars” to get one of the coolest Easter eggs we've seen. ATOM IN A BOX lets you rotate this beautiful representation of an f orbital so you can examine it in three dimensions. Fresi Dean Dauger http:/mww.physics.ucla,edu/~dauger Postcardware Imagine a tiny ball lamp, emitting only a single wavelength of light. Imagine an object in the path of the light emission, near the lamp itself, if light weren't a wave, you'd see a simple shadow on a screen placed beyond the obstruction. Try this experiment in the real world, though, and you get a beautiful set of fringes as the light takes various paths around the obstruction, interfering IF YOU CREATE YOUR SETUP CARE- with itself, The mathemat- FULLY ENOUGH, you can recreate this ics behind these phenome- sort of pattern at home. Just shine a na is somewhat intract- cheap laser pointer through a pinhole able (intractable is math- aperture, then place a round obstacle speak for “really, really in the path of the emerging light. hard to do”). Dean Dauger came up with a clever way to solve the math quickly on his Mac, which led to a very cool program. Fres- nel Explorer can generate the pattems you'd see if you conducted the experi- ment described above— and their exquisite beauty Offers a rare pleasure. Microprojects http://www.total.net/~mpj $25 If you're looking for a traditional planetarium-type program, MPj Astro is a must. For the amateur astronomer, this program's a ‘ blast: It can quickly render star . charts for any position and time, WHEN YOU WATCH THE SKIES, MPj including such details as the cur- Astro tells you exactly what rent positions of Jupiter’s four You're seeing. easy-to-spot moons and the configuration of Saturn's rings. It will even help you know when to expect meteor showers. Paul Peters http://www.vbe.com/~ppeters/franklin.htm| Freeware Ever try to visualize the electric field around an n=9 linear multipole? The answer is probably somewhere between “Huh?” and “No!” for the vast majority who have never set their sights on science or engineer- ing. That's a shame—the field describes a beautiful, almost floral shape that looks like an artist's cre- 2 = ation, yet has a simple mathematical ADMIT IT—even if you hate origin. Franklin gives the nonscien- physics, this is simply gorgeous. tist a peek at what scientists, mathe- maticians, and engineers are talking about when they describe the beauty of mathematics. Dean Dauger http:/Awww.physics.ucla.edu/~dauger $20 With full texture-mapping support and an elegant look, Solar System Sim lets the user build a solar sys- tem, then simulate its life cycle. Building new solar systems with this program can be a bit tricky (a copy of CRC's Handbook of Chemisty and Physics wouldn't hurt), but the stunning graphics and relatively deep set of options make this program a wonderful toy. A lot of thought has gone into It—even the starry background is accurate, and you can use it to orient yourself. en YOU'VE GOT TO LIKE ANY PROGRAM that puts up a dialog box like this one. MAR/00 MacADDICT 41 CO} MATHEMATICS Gerry Beggs Postcardware Gerry’s Attraction @® HERE'S THE LORENTZ ATTRACTOR from an unusual, side-on perspective. Edward N. Lorentz, a meteorologist, was using a relatively simple set of three equations to model convection in the atmosphere around 1963 when he discovered (to his surprise) that the equations were extremely sensitive to initial conditions. Tiny variations in where he started the simulation led to vast differences in its evolution. In an attempt to figure out what was going on, Lorentz plotted his ‘system's evolution over time, and found that despite the sensitivity to initial conditions, it tended to describe a definite shape. Lorentz called this shape a “strange attractor” and began to study its properties, heralding the field that’s been popularized as chaos theory for the last decade. Gerry's Attraction gives the user a good look at two of the most famous strange attrac- tors: the original Lorentz Attractor and the Rossler Attractor (a beautiful, fountainlike ‘structure that arose from Otto P Rossler’s work ‘on chemical kinetics). The program traces up to 5,000 points following either set of equa- tions, from an initially random scatter to their final organized flow in one or the other attrac- tor. As with many programs of this ilk, the results are amazing to behold. Gerry's Attraction lets you wander freely about the attractor {as if you had encountered it while playing Marethon).. Mike Epstein $15 SuperGraph http:/;www.bozosoft.com/supergraph When we first decided to compile a list of the best shareware science apps, we weren't going to include any graphing programs. So many of these apps fail to reach even the stan- dard of the Mac OS's Graphing Calculator that we thought the category | simply wasn't worth covering. 4 SuperGraph was the first product to prove us wrong. It's a very unusual beast: Instead of plotting the equation you type in, it shades each point on the graph according to how close to an THAT'S RIGHT, IT’S NOT A expressed as y=f(x). math looks like, 42 MacADDICT MAR/00 FUNCTION! SuperGraph lets you plot equations not easily equation solution it is. SuperGraph can therefore plot many equations that can’t simply convert into the y=f(x) form most graphing programs require. The program correctly plots x2+-6y2 =1 as an ellipse, without cutting off the bottom half as most programs would. SuperGraph is a wonderful toy for a student taking an analytic geom- etry course, as well as anyone who just wants to see what his or her Curvus Pro 1.3.1 @ Arizona http:/wew.curvuspro.ch $40 Whereas SuperGraph performs an unusual type of graphing well, Curvus Pro does pretty much everything else well, Curvus Pro is the Popeil Pocket Fisherman of graphing programs— you name it, Curvus does it. The program supports almost every type of graph that ever kept you up late in a math or science course. This is simply the deepest mathematical plotting program we've ever seen. Those who enjoy torturing defenseless graphing programs (you know who you are—we've seen you late at night trying to confuse the hapless Graphing Calculator) will love this one. CHECK OUT HOW WE SPECIFIED this surface—you name it, Curvus can plot it. 3D-Filmstrip Richard Palais http://rsp.math.brandels.edu Freeware The difficulty involved in learn- ing mathematics often hides the beauty that it can describe. Richard Palais’s 3D-Filmstrip is a stunning tour of the forms mathematics offers. The layper- son may not find all aspects of this program readily accessi- ble, although we think it ren- ders enough beauty to satisfy even the most math-phobic reader. THIS TORUS (rendered in 3D- glasses form) is only the tip of 3D-Filmstrip’s iceberg. Conic Sections @ Brian and Aidan Cully hitip:/wwwjalacy.