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Macintosh SIG
by John Willner, NOCCC , Willner@earthlink.net - July 08, 2002 at 16:50:47:
After setting up the projector and lap top computer, several questions about OS X were asked. One was about whether the apple icon at upper left of screen could be used to denote whether or not the software application was carbonized or written only for OS 9 and earlier. It can, but a deeper question is, "Can one tell which type of program one has before opening?" One of the reasons is that it takes time for Classic mode to come up, and one might be better off from a performance standpoint by booting in OS 9.2 anyway. If programs are stored correctly in the hierarchical folders of OS X, that may be a good clue. However, we really did not resolve the question. Many of us are still in the mode of discovering this operating system’s capabilities and ways to get around.An old copy of "Spring Cleaning" , version 3.5 was installed just to see how it performed under OS X. It triggered the Classic Mode startup session, but ran flawlessly. Claire Lemire gave a very good presentation on the capabilities of "Spring Cleaning". This is a great program that you can love to hate if not careful. It can get one into trouble by deleting the wrong duplicate files or eliminating aliases that really are needed by programs that share resources. However, it has many useful capabilities, including the ability to find files of the same type, fix aliases, search for duplicate files, find empty folders, locate FAT binary files wherein the 68K versions are no longer needed, check for damaged files, and remove unwanted fonts or help data. During her presentation cache files were emptied on the fly.
We also took a look at iClean, and discussed ways to eliminate unwanted cookies. This is another one of those useful free programs. While hard drive memory and RAM tend to be bigger than ever, it is amazing how fast file space is constantly being taken by unwanted entries. On the laptop computer especially, the hard drive capacity is not so large as to allow one to ignore this problem.
A new visitor who is considering a Macintosh for his wife was concerned about networking to his other computers. Among the many suggestions was the use of the Apple Store brain trust. We have two Apple Stores in Orange County (Fashion Island and South Coast Plaza), and both have Brain Counters at the right rear of each store. Both have been tested several times over the past several months with outstanding results. These people have enormous knowledge and T-1 lines to download the latest updates.
Next month we will continue exploring OS X capabilities. If Apple sends CDs with information of interest, those files will be displayed.
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