May 2009 General Meeting
© Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 31, no. 4, July-August 2009, pp. 24-29.
May brought one of the longest General Meetings in the entire 30-plus year history of the Pi. The meeting started at 9:30 with the usual Question & Answer session, and then progressed to a superb overview of the quarter-century history of the Macintosh, complete with a working museum display of Macintosh hardware and software. The 2009 Washington Apple Pi Photo Contest award winners were then announced, and after lunch, an Apple representative provided a nice overview of Apple’s present and future. Five hours after it started, the meeting came to a close.
Questions & Answers
Q: Directions to the meeting were not all that great.
A: The Pi Webmaster was given an address, and that address was put on the Web site. Little did he know the address was for George Mason University as a whole, and was clear across the campus from the meeting site. Thank goodness for GPS.
Q: What is the best way to archive E-mail?
A: There are lots of ways, depending on what you mean by “archive.” If you have a MobileMe or Google Mail account, you can just leave everything on the server; both offer ridiculous amounts of space for mail. If you are using Apple Mail as your E-mail client, you can select multiple messages at once – hundreds or thousands if you wish – and save it as a single file, including attachments. After saving the message, you can then delete them from your active mail. Apple Mail will save multiple messages as an .rtfd document, which can easily be read by TextEdit, Pages, or Microsoft Word. Since these archived messages are just very large documents, you can open them up and use the Word or Pages, or TextEdit Find commands to search for things, or use Spotlight to search for items without even opening the files. The files can be copied to other drives, burned to CD, or archived in some other fashion.
Naming such files so you can find them also requires thought. Mail you sent in April 2009, for example, should be named something like Sent Mail 200904.rtfd. Naming files with the year first and then the month ensures that the files will be sorted correctly; if you named things Sent Mail April 2009, it will be clumped with August 2004 and close to December 2007.
Q: I do things differently. I find where the mail program stores stuff, and then I make a duplicate of that.
A: What you are describing is really a backup strategy, rather than an archiving strategy. Archiving is a method of saving for posterity; backup is a way to keep a copy of your working mail in working condition.
Q: Mail keeps asking for my password, even after I’ve told it the password. It isn’t remembering what I told it.
A: The problem isn’t Mail, but Apple’s Keychain. Keychain is the Mac OS X password management system, and at some point, Keychain was told that your password is X, but the mail server thinks it is Y. Apple Mail is using your password provided by Keychain to get your mail, and the mail server is saying, “No, that isn’t right.”
The way to overcome this constant nagging is to open up Keychain Access (in your Utilities folder), find the setting for Mail, and type in the correct password. Apple Mail stores any passwords in Keychain; the mail server stores them on the mail server. The passwords must match to avoid nagging.
Also, beware of possible confusion if you have multiple mail accounts. Mail can access multiple accounts at once, and display everything in one window. When you reply to a given message, make sure which mail account is asking for a password. If your Pi account asks for a password and you re-confirm your MobileMe password, and even reset it in Keychain Access, the Pi’s mail server will not be impressed, and still prompt you for a valid password.
Q: I have five Macs. They’re generally working well, but one is giving me problems. When I take it to the Apple Store Genius Bar, they restore everything back to factory defaults and it works fine, but when I go home and put my stuff on it, the problems return. The computer was under Apple Care but that has expired. What can I do now?
A: Your question has many parts, but first a question for the audience: how many of you have more than one Mac? (More than three-quarters of the attendees raised their hands). The difference between “armed” and “armed and dangerous” is having more than one Mac. With one Mac, you are armed; with multiple Macs, you are definitely dangerous.
If your problem is a maintenance issue, yes, there are third-party dealers that will work on a Mac after Apple Care expires. But there is a cost: good diagnostic skills are expensive, and a problem that requires a lot of time can quickly cost more than the market value of the machine being repaired. This is why, incidentally, Apple Geniuses tend to restore your Mac to factory defaults. They can get it working – without your data. They can do that reliably. If problems occur once you restore your data, the problem is with your data, and fixing such problems can take many hours of time. Apple Geniuses generally will not do this, but third-party dealers will – at a cost.
You can also learn to do it yourself. Apple and Peachpit have combined to publish an approved course on Mac OS X 10.5: Apple Training Series: Mac OS X Support Essentials. The book guides you, lesson by lesson, through the protocols of checking your computer and fixing common problems, and tells you how to avoid problems in the future.
Q: I used to depend on the Tuesday Night Clinic for maintenance. What is the status of the Tuesday Night Clinic?
A: That’s not a question the Q&A moderator can answer; the status of the Tuesday Night Clinic is in the hands of the Pi Board of Directors. [At this point Pi President Bob Jarecke stated that an update on the Tuesday Night Clinic would be posted on the Pi forums, the TCS, at http://tcs.wap.org/.]
Q: Are there some sites that tell you how to do maintenance yourself?
A: Yes, there are such sites – but any recommendation of such sites needs to come with a caution. These sites tend to be visited by people with problems, and they tend to give the impression that every Mac operating system since System 1.0 in 1984 has been a disaster. You need to have a certain level of expertise before you visit these sites; otherwise, you won’t be able to separate fact from hysteria.
In addition to the book mentioned, Apple also has do-it-yourself manuals and guides published on the Apple Web site (see the Resources section at the end of this article). Finally, don’t forget that the Pi hosts, usually twice a month, Clubhouse Saturdays. These meetings often have some kind of theme, but much of the time is spent on questions and answers, and troubleshooting problems that people might have.
Usually, you can learn a great deal – at the Pi General Meeting Q&A session, or at a Clubhouse Saturday – by just listening. Good computer maintenance isn’t a question of secret or arcane knowledge, but more of a protocol, a sequence for problem-solving. For example, when someone says they are having a problem with a Mac – almost any problem – launch Disk Utility and check the disk with the Disk First Aid tab. Verify the drive. If the drive verifies correctly, then look elsewhere. But if the drive will not verify, don’t even think of doing anything else before fixing the drive.
The second useful thing to do is to launch TextEdit, or Pages, or Word, or almost any program, and save a file. Then in the Finder, select the file and Get Info. If the date of the file is wrong, there may be a problem with the battery. If the icon is wrong, or some other attribute is wrong, there might be a different issue. But check the quick, easy, simple stuff first. Learn what these quick, simple, and easy checks are, and what to look for, and what to do if you find a problem.
Q: I was dragging things from the iTunes browser window to places on my hard drive and it suddenly stopped. It sometimes starts up again, but why is it stopping?
A: I’ve never tried to drag an iTunes file out of the browser window to someplace else; I don’t know why you’d want to do that. But in any case, why would it seem to hesitate or stop?
iTunes, as it turns out, is complicated. It may not look like it or appear to act like it, but iTunes is a Web browser. It is also a complex database system. It is an application for meta-tagging (i.e., adding additional information to a file to describe the file; the files in this case tend to be songs). It is a library. It is a network application. And in particular, if the Web or network parts of iTunes are busy (iTunes is updating your iTunes Genius settings or busy downloading album covers or something else), iTunes will stop doing everything except play music and sound files.
Q: I have a first-generation iPhone, and when I try to type an “R” it goes to one side or the other. This happens in Mail and in other applications, too.
A: The problem is you have it in English Cockney mode, and it tends to drop “R” and “H” and certain other letters…
Seriously – the iPhone probably has a corrupted setting. So, first off, re-sync it with your computer, to make sure everything is backed up. Then reapply the last update, or take it to an Apple Store Genius Bar and they can reset the iPhone. Then resync it with your computer to copy everything back, and life should be good.
Pi Happenings
President Bob Jarecke went over the logistics of using George Mason University as a meeting space. This is a new meeting venue for the Pi, so he wanted to check on what people thought of the location as well as explain some logistical issues. Individuals have to pay to use the George Mason parking garages, but the Pi has purchased vouchers; members are requested for donations to defray the cost. The meeting space itself is very nice, with adult-sized seats, but no food or drink is allowed in the auditorium. A more precise set of directions will be posted on the Pi Web site prior to the next meeting, to cut down on the number of people wandering around at random in Northern Virginia.
25 Years of Macintosh
Travis Good then introduced Robert “Bo” Huttinger for a review of a quarter century of Macintosh computers. Huttinger has a private museum of Macintosh hardware, virtually all of it in working condition. Since he was a child when much of this hardware was released, getting everything to work shows a considerable mastery of both current and obsolete technology.
Bo’s Keynote-based slideshow (most of it is available on the Pi Web site; some brief video clips are not included) was an interesting mix of Macintosh flash and dazzle and a few inside jokes. He started with a melodious chord that signaled, on some of the first Macs, a hardware error. Control of the slideshow was via an application he wrote, running on an iPhone. There is something both charming and funny, watching a relatively young man talk about a quarter century of Macintosh computing, all controlled by a mobile phone that thinks it is a Mac.
In the beginning, the Macintosh came with 128K of RAM and a single 400K floppy disk drive. On that single floppy were MacWrite (a word processor) and MacPaint (a drawing program). The screen was black and white, 512 pixels across by 384 pixels down. All this cost $2,495. If you wanted to print anything, you used an ImageWriter dot matrix printer (manufactured by C. Itoh Electronics) that cost an additional $1,000.
While this may be unimpressive by current standards, in 1984 the Macintosh was earthshaking. Information technology gurus dismissed the WIMP (Windows Icons Menu Pointing device) interface, claiming that “real computer users” used command line-driven programs. Despite this hostile reception, the original Mac soon became an icon in its own right of “progressive” and “user-centric” computing. Significantly, none of the computer companies that competed with Apple and the Macintosh still exist except IBM (which has famously “left” the personal computer market) and Compaq (which is a division of Hewlett-Packard).
The next big earthquake in the computer field came in 1986, when Apple introduced the LaserWriter. If the ImageWriter was a good way to print graphics in 1984, the LaserWriter was a good way to print professional-quality graphics. Macs moved out of the computer enthusiast world and into the world of publishing, where they are firmly entrenched thirty years later. The LaserWriter essentially killed off the typeset printing world, ushered in the world of the professional computer graphics artist, created the desktop publishing universe, and, ironically, gave a major boost to computer networking. These very expensive ($7,000) computers included a network interface, so offices instantly discovered they could make the printers more cost-effective if every computer was networked. The office local area network was born.
In making the Macintosh graphical, Apple changed not only computers, but also computer peripherals. Bo specifically called attention to flatbed scanners that allowed non-artists (as well as artists) to take flat objects and create bitmap images that could be manipulated by the Mac. The introduction of the Macintosh II in 1987 brought color to the Mac, and soon there were color scanners as well.
While Apple didn’t have the first digital camera, the introduction of the Apple QuickTake 100 in 1984 was essentially the beginning of the end for film cameras. With a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, it was just a fraction of the resolution of the camera in Bo’s mobile phone (an iPhone), but it instantly captured the imagination of photographers, computer hobbyists, and even scientists. Scientists, for example, were fascinated with the camera’s ability to take photos under computer control, and the QuickTake 100, 150, and 200 soon found themselves in laboratories where they were used to collect all manner of scientific data.
While Bo has a complete set of QuickTake cameras, he is especially fond of a rare QuickTime Video Conferencing Camera 100. Introduced in February 1995 and discontinued in 1997, this camera, as the name implies, was designed for video conferencing. The entire kit, complete with a NuBus card, cost $1800, but Bo’s working model still produces extremely clear color video, provided you happen to have an appropriate 20th-century Mac in working order. By comparison, the Apple iSight camera (also out of production) retailed for $149.
Along the way, Apple popularized technology that is now considered standard on computers, and has even gone so far as to move away from some of these former standards. Apple was the first company to include 3.5” drives on personal computers; now, they don’t. Apple was the first to include CD-ROM drives on personal computers; now, all their computers use DVD drives. The mouse has made dramatic strides, moving from the “bar of soap on a rope” original Mac mouse to today’s wireless mice with built-in roller balls; on laptops and the iPhone and iPod touch, the mouse has given way to “virtual mice” via trackpads and touch screens. Apple was the first company to introduce beige computers. After the entire industry moved to beige computers, Apple famously moved away, and beige is now considered positively antique.
Blocky black-and-white graphics and tinny sounds have given way to 24-bit color images, high-definition movies, and very rich, vibrant sound. Instead of simple memos written in MacWrite (MacWrite couldn’t produce anything longer than a few pages), our Macs today hold tens of thousands of music files, hundreds of thousands of photos, hours of video, complex databases, and whatever else we might collect, all at the same time. Large sections of this digital wealth can be shared with our televisions (via AppleTV) or with an iPhone or iPod touch. This digital wealth can also be pushed out to share with the rest of the world via Apple’s MobileMe service, or any number of other Internet services.
And what did this quarter century of innovation and progress lead to? Bo pointed out that the next meeting topic, on the photo contest, is wholly Mac-centric. While Macs didn’t take the photos, Macs were hugely responsible for the development of scanners (used to scan in older photo entries) as well as digital cameras (used for the majority of the entries), and Macs were used for sorting, selecting, and touching up the entries.
2009 Washington Apple Pi Photo Contest Winners
Travis Good then introduced the 2009 Washington Apple Pi Photo Contest winners. His presentation started with a review of the winning entries from the 2007 Photo Contest, arranged at the front of the room. He also named the contest judges, Kent Mason, a landscape and nature photographer, and Cynthia Keith, a garden and natural landscape photographer. Cynthia was able to attend the meeting, and offered occasional comments on the winning entries. The individual award winners are listed elsewhere in this Journal.
Cynthia did call attention to the “Best in Show” entry, Jerry Eisner’s “Water view from the Kennedy Center.” The contest rules allowed for minimal photo editing, and Eisner’s entry is so dramatic as to call into question how it was eligible for an award. The answer: it is an infrared image.
Long associated with security and military cameras, infrared also has great possibilities for artistic photography, as Eisner’s entry shows so spectacularly. As Travis ended the awards presentation, audience members were busy writing notes to themselves, wondering if their cameras supported IR photography.
Then came lunch – an excellent pizza – followed by…
Apple in mid-2009
Apple graced the May meeting in the form of Aaron Davis. Aaron is a regional Apple representative for the education market, mostly focusing on universities. Given that “education” can mean anything from laptops for freshmen to the Virginia Tech Power Mac G5-based supercomputer, System X, Aaron has a vast range of responsibilities.
But not, alas, all that much confidential information. Apple likes its field representatives to be bright, friendly, and helpful, so Apple corporate makes sure their reps are as starved for information on future products as everyone else. Otherwise, the representatives might helpfully offer some secret information, such as – we don’t know. And neither did Aaron.
Despite such a handicap, Aaron gave a genuinely interesting overview of Apple’s explosive growth this century. It is the current market leader in MP3 players (the various iPod models), the largest music retailer on the planet (eclipsing even Wal-Mart), and the only major computer firm to have made significant increases to its installed base over the past several years. And it has tens of billions of dollars in the bank.
What was most striking about Aaron’s talk was that he spent most of his time discussing the company, and not the technology. He didn’t demonstrate any hardware or software, he didn’t offer any great deals on anything, and he didn’t say anything that Mac zealots couldn’t have read somewhere else. Yet it was a stellar presentation; the audience gave him an almost unnerving intense focus. He packaged up the known, said it was good and getting better, and that he – like almost everyone else – couldn’t wait for the forthcoming World Wide Developers Conference.
And after five hours, the meeting came to a close.
Resources
Apple Training Series: Mac OS X Support Essentials,
http://www.peachpit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321489810
Apple manuals,
http://support.apple.com/manuals/
Apple legacy product manuals,
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305118
Apple service parts for Do-it-Yourself,
http://www.apple.com/support/serviceassistant/overview.html
Apple “Find out how,”
http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/