iCab on 68K Macs
Love your e-zine, which I’m reviewing for Andover News Network’s “TechMailings” site at the end of the month.
I have one quibble, as a fellow Mac user, though. I work on an ancient machine of the 68040 series (Yes, I plan to get a G3 this spring/summer!), and have not found iCab as stable as your recent review states.
Though I love many of the outstanding features of this browser, I have gotten lots of Type 4 errors from its most recent version—and a few crashes as well. The PPC version may be stable, but the 68K sure ain’t. (I still gave them a sterling review which appears later this month at my IT Manager’s Journal site.)
Keep up the great work! Fight back for the Mac!
Rod Amis
The article “iCab—A Browser You Can Like” that appeared in ATPM 5.04 was not meant to be a review of iCab. We will publish a complete review, including an evaluation of 68K stability, as soon as iCab goes final. For now, we can be thankful that iCab even runs on 68K Macs. Try that with your favorite 4.5 offering from Microsoft or Netscape! —MT
Impressed
I must say I am impressed. My only regret was finding out that you’ve been around since ’95! I have been a Mac user since ’85 and currently work in a PC corporate environment with a sacred, token Mac at my side but a PC in front of me. I have been a subscriber to the paper and ink version of Macworld for some time and find your online magazine a true “find.” I read about ATPM on Andover News and had to check it out. I am currently an art director with an electronic media group producing computer based training and have worked in printing as a prepress technician with Macs and PCs. Hope I can contribute somehow, someday! Keep up the good work!
Paul Von Rinehart
paul.v.rinehart@boeing.com
There They Are
In his letter “Whither Mac Applications?” (ATPM 5.04) KJ bemoaned the absence of certain apps for the Mac. He stated that Flight Simulator wasn’t available, yet there was a version of MS Flight Simulator available for Mac. I don’t know if it’s still available though.
Omnis 7, and especially Omnis Studio, are heavy duty RAD Database development tools which allow fully relational multi-user databases to be created using either its own native database or many SQL databases (Oracle, DB2, Informix etc). It appeared originally for Macs in 1985 and is fully cross-platform as well as having many object-oriented features. Oracle certainly was available for Mac and to the best of my knowledge still is, not to mention Lotus Notes/Domino etc., etc.
To claim the Mac world suffers because ‘Worms’ is not available for it is surely stretching things a bit too far. This game would be considered old hat by most PC gamers, and there are many excellent games available for Macintosh. True it would be nice if more games manufacturers produced original games for Mac and/or issued Mac versions simultaneously with PC versions.
As far as low end-page layout programs go there are also lots of options. For example ClarisWorks/AppleWorks have most of the features required and are cheap and easy to use. Anyone requiring more features than they provide would be better off opting for professional packages such as QuarkXPress.
The range of applications available for Mac is great, although I would love to see more Mac-only developers producing innovative and imaginative software rather than the glut of overpriced, over featured, crash-happy apps such as Microsoft Office and IE. I just started using iCab and it’s great. Fast, small and with almost all the features required. We need more software with this philosophy.
Paul Smyth
smythp@indigo.ie
Low-Cost DTP Option
Your people might look at Ready.Set.Go or Viva or Layout Workshop which is really low-cost at $10. http://www.ekera.com
John Cail
jcail@home.com
Word 98
Just caught up with your Word ’98 Web page and couldn’t agree more! About half my colleagues use ’98, the rest, including me, Word 5.1a.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly, I’ve found that Word 5.1a (with the ’98 converter PIM) does a far better job of reading Word 98 files than vice-versa (graphics get squashed, etc.).
To me, Office 98 is a complete disaster. Luckily the academic edition only cost me $120.
1) No support for EGO (Edit Graphic Object) means Word is now virtually useless to chemists/biochemists who use in-line ChemDraw etc. graphics (no rapid double-click- open-edit-close-box routine, one needs to cut and paste between apps).
2) Tables—if you paste a picture into a table it pastes over the table, by default. You need to go through a bloody dialogue box (BDB) to change to insert mode each time.
3) EndNote—no longer a nifty integrated PIM, now just an add-in menu button that opens the EndNote app.
4) Find in File—Word 5.1 has the best and fastest system-wide word searching feature I’ve ever seen (which few people even seem to know about!). In Word 98 you need to navigate an extra BDB to do a find-in-file and, more importantly, you no longer get the results in-context (i.e. occurrences readily available in context in a small plain text window).
Also Excel has new very stupid default features that you’re probably not interested in, and PowerPoint is still the joke it always was.
Finally, though I’ve tried and really do like Nisus 5.1.x—in some ways Mac software at it’s best—I cannot use it for my normal work because of the hopeless way it (and AppleWorks) does tables (and deals with tables from Word docs).
Vincent W. Bowry
We’d love to hear your thoughts about our publication. We always welcome your comments, criticisms, suggestions, and praise at editor@atpm.com. Or, if you have an opinion or announcement about the Macintosh platform in general, that’s ok too.
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