What's wrong with software?
Opinion by Wayland Brown
Whether the title of this piece should be followed by a period, a question mark,
or an exclamation mark is open to discussion, so I have chosen not to use any punctuation.
Should one bear with me to the end of the piece, then one may want to return and
affix one as one sees fit. Thus Mac Monitor enters into the age of interactive journalism.
Every home computer owner has software which is central to one’s use of a home computer.
Here follows a tale of where I find myself in February of 1998 with four of my old
stand-bys: Microsoft Office, Now Utilities, Norton Utilities, and FWB Hard Disk Toolkit.
From last named to first.
FWB Hard Disk Toolkit: Incompatibilities
The software which one’s computer uses to communicate with hard drives and removable
storage must be maintained current. It must be compatible with the hardware and with
the current operating system. In the pages of Mac Monitor one has probably read about
what a mess one can get into when trying to mount SyQuest or Zip media with drivers
which are incompatible with one’s computer. Jim Alley has been eloquent in print
and in person about the trials of the labs at SCAD in this regard. Apple always commands
its customers to update their hard disk drivers before updating the installed operating
system. Failure to do so can cause anything from intermittent troubles to inability
to access the hard drive at all and perhaps data loss. I have always relied entirely
on FWB Hard Disk Toolkit and maintained the very latest version on my system and
disks, even when it has meant updating multiple Zip disks. But now two things have
happened.
In late January, 1998, I got an update letter from FWB inviting me to purchase the
latest version with complete compatibility with Mac OS 8. The price is reasonable,
about $37.50 including shipping. But Apple has now released Mac OS 8.1, and it has
the option for an entirely new and much improved file storage system. Undoubtedly
the “new” version of HDT which I am invited to buy will then need updating to a “newer”
$37.50 version, if the update is offered at all. On top of that, Iomega announced
a few months ago that irreconcilable differences exist between their Zip hardware
and HDT. I had used HDT rather than Zip Tools to format my Zip disks, just as I used
it when I had SyQuest, and I had then experienced no problems. But I have now. Intermittently
my system will not recognize a Zip disk and asks to reformat it. Aside from the Mac
OS 8.1 problem, then, I cannot use the “new” HDT to format my Zip disks, and I am
faced with the task of reformatting them all with Zip Tools 5.0.3, which Mike Barton
at AIS downloaded for me with his new ISDN connection (two minutes).
Where does that leave me as far as a formatter for my fixed hard drives? I cannot
use the Apple formatter because my hard drives are not all Apple branded. If they
were, then I would simply abandon buying a third-party product in favor of the latest
Apple release, even though it is not as full-featured as HDT. I am afraid that the
solution is...to be continued.
Norton Utilities: Money, money, money
For trouble shooting, file recovery, disk cleaning, and the like, I relied on Central
Point Software in my Apple IIe days, and I continued with every version of MacTools
until Symantec, then already the owners of Norton Utilities for the Macintosh (NUM),
bought Central Point and eventually discontinued MacTools in favor of NUM. Thence
I have kept a current version of NUM and used it frequently. When Apple released
System 7.6, I paid my approximately $55 for the latest version, which I believe was
3.2, and I was happy for a few weeks until I installed Mac OS 8 and found that I
again needed another $55 upgrade to version 3.5. That’s what we called the new math
when I was about 20: 3.2 + 1 = 3.5. Actually the math which bothered me was $55 +
$55 = $110, all in the span of six months. I have not yet recovered sufficiently
from my anger that Symantec, now with a market monopoly, did not offer owners of
3.2 a better trade-up value for 3.5, so I never upgraded and simply removed NUM from
my computer pending a decision. The second week of January, 1998, brought another
mailing from Symantec inviting me to upgrade to version 3.5 for $55, but, again,
I cannot think that 3.5 will work with Mac OS 8.1, which I may have already installed
before NUM 3.5 would arrive via UPS. Since NUM works at a low level with the file
system, the complete change of system with Mac OS 8.1 must mean that NUM 3.5 is not
going to be compatible with Mac OS 8.1. If — in the next section, you will understand
that qualifier — Symantec updates NUM for System 8.1, then I will buy the upgrade.
Now Utilities: Out to lunch
Both Jim Alley and I have praised Now Utilities since its inception. It is convenient
and slick, and it speeds one’s computing, making certain file tasks easy and efficient.
But one no longer has an option in this case, because Now Software chose not to update
the program to work with Mac OS 8. Jim Alley runs some components of the latest version
with his Mac OS 8, but I have chosen not to take the risk. [No longer. –Editor.]
Even if one is successful for a time, Now made it clear that Now Utilities is not
supported for Mac OS 8. Now that Now has been purchased by the owners of Eudora,
perhaps a new version will be offered. I was very hopeful; however, since it has
been months since the purchase with no definite announcement, hope begins to fade.
I have learned, though not happily, to get along without Now Utilities. My hope,
yet, is that here, too, I can say “to be continued.”
Microsoft: Business as usual?
Microsoft Office was my mainstay for a long time, specifically Word 5.1a and Excel
4.0. Excel 5.0 was a step backward for me, but I managed fairly well with it; however,
Word 6.0.1 was an unmitigated disaster. Long-time readers of Mac Monitor may remember
that I was asked to review three — I think it was three — books on Word 6 when it
came out, and I wound up contacting the authors to see how they wrote the books since
I couldn’t get the program to run. One of them told me quite honestly that she didn’t
really write the book from personal experience with 6 but from what MS said that
6 would do and her long-standing expertise with 5.x. The other two refused comment,
and I did not specifically quote the one who risked it. Now comes the promise of
Office 98, and I am anxious to return to MS for word processing. I have never found
Word Perfect to be very stable. Even after five years’ use, I can still unexpectedly
have a document turn onto a bowl of word hash and not be able to do anything to get
back to where I was before the tragedy. And either I have not learned ClarisWorks
well enough or Word is more powerful. But the upgrade price is going to be in the
vicinity of $300 for Office 98. And I really don’t need all of the stuff I will have
to buy just to get Word and Excel. I can see it coming now — Bill Gates will claim
that Office is fully integrated so that I cannot remove any of the components without
disabling the entire suite. Whatever, as I write, I cannot afford $300 for the upgrade.
On my Wintel machine I upgraded to Office 97 for about half of that price. Why is
the Mac version almost twice as expensive? If I have the $300, I will probably take
the risk, but, as before, to be continued.
A final note. Eudora, Fetch, and Netscape Navigator are still stalwarts of my Internet
activities, but for how long. Netscape faces big losses and layoffs because Microsoft
gives the competing product away. With both Communicator and Explorer including e-mail
and ftp clients, will a largely illiterate public long want to pay for Eudora or
take the trouble to fetch Fetch? [Speaking of literacy, subscribers of Jones Communications
cable television will have by now received a newsletter wherein Jones tells us that
being literate no longer means that one can read and write but now that one can watch
television, specifically their cable services. Almighty God, have we sunk to that?
I am afraid perhaps.] I have not touched on FileMaker Pro, PageMaker/QuarkXPress,
Illustrator/ FreeHand, and the like, because I am far from qualified. Jim Alley says
essentially that PageMaker 6.5 is an unstable disaster, and we all know how Quark
treats the world. Illustrator 7 has been universally bombed by reviewers, and Adobe
seems less and less interested in the Mac, in inverse proportion to the volume of
verbiage they use to assure us otherwise. What mark of punctuation do you now choose
for the title?
Wayland Brown is in the autumn of life, which he finds colorful, as autumns are meant
to be! He recommends growing old to everyone, especially in light of the alternative.
He can be reached at <wb@premierweb.net>.
OPTIONAL SIDEBAR:
Software has gotten worse
Software has gotten worse; computers have gotten slower. The drive to coerce users
into buying unneeded upgrades has resulted in bloated tools to do simple things.
Bad software has often canceled out gains in hardware speed. I realized this recently
when I talked to a secretary who complained that her word processor used to be faster
and easier to use before she got a Windows/ Pentium machine. A computer may be faster
in theory, but if it’s not more convenient from a human perspective, the gain is
illusory. It’s not a quantity problem, but a quality problem. We’ve even reverted
to the command-line interface — complete with cryptic “=strings.*” — for important
tasks like searching the Net. Meanwhile, the desktop interface is becoming more cluttered
and confusing, thanks to Microsoft.
From “Taking Stock,” Wired 6.01, January 1998, by Jaron Lanier. In addition to being
a composer and computer scientist, Lanier is said to have coined the phrase “virtual
reality.”
Reprinted from the Savannah
Macintosh User Group's Monitor Newsletter, Jim Alley, Editor.
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