Kyocera Smartphone Review
I think that in general I have found the product to be quite useful. I am a 4th generation Palm user and the integration is good. I have solved the battery problems by carrying a spare. One of the absolutely great facts is that it is a wonderful phone. I live in the hills in No. Ca. and have never gotten phone reception with either Nokia or Motorola. The 6035 works pretty well. When it does go to analog, however, the battery drains immediately.
Here are the problems. The worst is the display. Since Kyocera is a display manufacturer I would have thought that they would have produced a pretty good product, but after using a Palm Vx this is like going back to the original Palm or worse. They put the reset button under a little door on the back of the phone, which means that you have to completely undress the unit of it’s leather cover to reset. The voice recognition is acceptable but not as good as the Samsung product.
All in all the poor display has me waiting to see what the Samsung I300 will be like.
—Doug
Mac OS X 10.1—First Impressions
OS 10.1 is good enough for me to make the switch away from 9.x. I am not a power user. I use this machine mostly for e-mail and Web, and 10.1 is great for that. 10.0 was a toy and not really usable in my opinion, but this is great.
—James Arnold
• • •
Regarding file extensions being mandatory, this from Apple’s File Name Extension Guidelines:
“Applications should support ease of interoperation with other operating systems and Internet services by saving files with file name extensions.”
OS X has, from the get-go, provided full support for type and creator codes and applications can choose not to use extensions if that is desired. Apple is recommending, however, that extensions be used. OS X is a much better net citizen than the classic Mac OS in that the conventions of the rest of the computing world are respected by the Mac operating system.
As for the compressed Geneva font, while unattractive, it does allow more characters to appear in a file name, which given OS X’s 256 character capacity would be most advantageous. From my standpoint, OS X’s font handling is far superior and more powerful than the legacy font handling system in OS 9. While the OS X Finder lacks a few of the niceties of the OS 9 Finder, it adds far more than it takes away. Connecting to file servers is now where it has always belonged, in the Finder. Chaotic Desktop types like me can now view the Desktop in list view. Multi-column view puts those despicable flippy triangles to shame for burrowing deep file systems and the customizable Finder bar is very slick for quick access. Overall, the positives far outweigh the few remaining negatives.
This is not to say that there aren’t remaining issues to resolve in OS X. The main issue is the availability of applications. If a user’s core applications are native and their complement of hardware can support it, I would unreservedly recommend that a user crossover now. Esoteric quibbles about file typing and font spacing (Jeez, I hope you don’t use Geneva for anything but the Finder) pale in comparison to vastly greater stability and multi-tasking that really works.
—David Chilstrom
As I said, supporting file extensions is good so long as we can turn them off if we don’t want them. The main problem is that Apple has made type and creator codes optional. Not setting the creator code degrades the user experience. Not setting the type code has the effect of making file extensions mandatory, as in the TextEdit case.
The font issues don’t really apply to file names since the Finder’s font isn’t configurable. In any case, I’d hardly call the compression a feature (since it can’t be turned off). I use Geneva for everything from writing to Web browsing, and I recognize that that’s unusual. However, Geneva is also common in the user interfaces of popular Carbon apps like BBEdit and Internet Explorer, and the metric problems seem to apply to other fonts as well.
Whether the changes to the Finder add up to a plus or a minus is certainly a matter of preference. However, I can find no good reason for Apple not to preserve the niceties of the icon and list views. The columns view is very nice for some uses, but it can’t show as many icons as icon view or the contents of multiple folders at the same level, like list view.
There certainly are lots of reasons to switch to OS X, and I’ve done that even though one of my main applications (Mailsmith) isn’t native. The usability issues with 10.1 aren’t show-stoppers like they were with 10.0, but they are real and should not be ignored. —Michael Tsai
TCP/IP Gaming in a Mixed Network
—Jimbo
If you have distinct IP addresses that should not be a problem. If you try to play on computers on a LAN behind a DSL or cable connection or something like that: one way that comes to mind is port forwarding. Use IPNetRouter or some such that lets you define what port requests from which IPs should go to which machine connected to each hub. In the game setup enter a port upward of 1024 that is not commonly used and play away. —Dierk Seeburg
Copyright © 2001 the ATPM Staff, editor@atpm.com. We’d love to hear your thoughts about our publication. We always welcome your comments, criticisms, suggestions, and praise. Or, if you have an opinion or announcement about the Macintosh platform in general, that’s OK too. Send your e-mail to editor@atpm.com. All mail becomes the property of ATPM.
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