Mousehole Report

By Rusty Hodgee, Mousehole BBS

Pagemaker Boo-Boo

MacGeorge

Dave must have them pretty shaken up at Aldus with all his bug reports [during beta testing -Ed.]. It seems Aldus has a batch of Pagemakers 1.0 shipped to dealers which contain nothing but demo disks (I got 2). If you buy a pagemaker, check the system disk at the store and make sure it's not a copy of the demo!

Long Beach Apple Fest Mousehole

Rusty Hodge

Okay, here goes: Sunday, 15 Sep, 7:30 pm the (and I quote) "MouseHolePizzaFest" (yes, 1 word), is set for Me'n'Ed's Pizza. Bring your own power strip. More later this week.

Apple's Hard Disk Rumors

Mac Scotty

I talked to someone at Apple today and was told that the new 20 meg hard disk [from Apple] will be released sometime around Sept. 16. The price is around $1600! The sales reps are going in for training on Monday!!

Helix versus OverVue

Bob Denny

Use Helix! OverVue is a distant 2nd for small jobs. By the time you get good on it, version 2.0 (I am beta testing it now!) will be out with 25 new tiles, picture fields and maybe some speed-up. You won't regret it.

Bizarre Occurrence

Fred Condo

Chalk this up to weird stuff: My internal drive suddenly decided that all disks, formatted or not were unreadable, and that, futhermore, nothing could be formatted. In a last ditch attempt to allude an Apple Dealership's inflated repair prices, I yanked the battery, thereby clearing the parameter RAM. A MIRACLE! Yup. Fixed it! Now all I wanna do is get my hands on the programmer whose program (I don't know which it was) fooled with my sacred parameter RAM...

More on Data Bases

Deirdre L. Maloy

So far as I know, Omnis 3, Helix and MacLion are currently the only RELATIONAL databases. Omnis 3 really isn't as powerful as it is billed to be; MacLion has a powerful but frustrating programming language; Helix is very Mac like. I use MacLion myself (c'mon, how many databases give you toolbox access??)

Japan Macs

MacGeorge

Next time you are in Japan, check out their Macs. In order to fit the Japanese Kantana into the Mac, Mac's in Japan come with Hyperdrives from Apple!

Searching Resource Files

Burrill Smith

I have a resource file and I want to see if it contains a CODE resource with an ID of 1. If I do an _OpenResFile(Filename) and then a _GetResource( Code, 1), the resource manager searches all the resource maps. I can do a _HomeResFile and see if the CODE 1 resource it finds belongs to me, but I'd rather restrict the search to just my resource file. _UseResFile restricts the search, but since my resource file was opened last, it gets eliminated from the search first. Is there a simpler way?

There is no simpler way. Why the concern about restricting the search (the maps are all in memory)? Note that if you only want to know whether a certain resource is in a file, but don't want to actually load it into memory, _SetResLoad(False) before calling _GetResource and then _SetResLoad(true) when you want to return to normal resource operations.

-Steve Brecher

Microsoft's Typographer

Tim Celeski

Typographer, for those of you that are interested is a new composition program from Microsoft. I've been alpha and beta testing the program for some six weeks now. Cost is a major difference between it and pagemaker as it is $195. It has unlimited document size, whereas Pagemaker is limited to 16 pages. It has increased ability to deal with headers and footers, automatic baseline jump, adjustable word spacing (kerning though slightly limited in this release), footnoting capacity, indents, tabs, search and replace and increased ability with hyphenization. I think it has a very nifty way of re-fiting text, which is a little awkward with Pagemaker. It is as simple as drawing a box; it fills with text - if you don't like it, you simply change the size or shape of the box, and it re-fills it!

The real comparison is how is it different to use? From my own graphic designer's point of view, Pagemaker is easier to design in. Typographer's text handling is quite sophisticated (it doesn't use word wrap, rather it uses a much more sophisticated technique common to real typesetting equipment - the author wrote software for Allied linotype - consequently the whole line and each word in it is taken into consideration in regards to spacing). Another advantage may be speed - it was done entirely in assembly.

Draw Bugs

MacoWaco

When I group two boxes with some text and then move the group around, the text shifts and changes position. I then have to ungroup and realign the text. Is this a bug or what?

You aren't dreaming. I detest that text positioning bug. It's a crippling problem It also shows up if you duplicate a group containing text objects several times (to place multiple copies at evenly spaced locations, right?) The damn text drifts out of line. No way to use grid either, as it doesn't seem to snap to it.

-Bob Denny

MacFest Boston Report

Steve Brecher

Here's a few things at Boston that cought my eye: Challenger showed a MacDraw like program in 3-D that allowed stretching a whole side of a house from plane or vertex of lines. Mac to midi interface with overlay of up to 32 tracks on the Mac with perfect replay. Outrageous! Tpypographer from Microsoft that looks like MacPublisher and Pagemaker fused together. Abatron was the hit of the show with a conversion program that translates Apple 6502 assembly programs into Mac 68000 programs automatically. Only ten minutes to create a running Mac version of an Apple game. Bill atkinson was sitting on the floor in front of me and was impressed as I. Apple games Robotron and Sabotage were converted from scratch. Abatron also showed a Scantron 300 for $2400 that scans at 300 dots per inch (like thunderscan) and makes postscript, paint or pagemaker compatible output file for the laserwriter. Microconversion has a four megabyte RAM board that is Hyper compatible! The new 20 meg hyperdrive was shown (20% speed increase).

Amiga Reaction

Rusty Hoge

What do you think of the Commodore Amiga?

(1) Commodore what???

(2) Sorta like a toy Mac - like it but not serious

(3) Love it!

(4) Don't like it (generic negative reaction)

Mousehole Voting record: 55 total votes to date: 1. 5% 2. 52%

3. 23% 4. 18%