OS X Pages - A warm and fuzzy feeling

Apple - Support - Pages

I fired up my free trial vesion of OS X Pages (I'm keeping my Office trial in reserve until I really need Office -- if nothing happens in 6 months I'll remove it). I've no idea if it's any good, but there are some things that give me a warm and fuzzy feeling.

For one, the files are Packages. I opened one and found gzipped document, I opened that and found XML I could open in a text editor. Transparent file formats. Very good.

For another, I really liked the strong styles support and the elegant templates. How refreshing after Word's utterly bodged up style sheets and exceptionately ugly templates (Microsoft is clearly unwilling to hire anyone with taste).

Ok, so the first thing I got was a missing font error message. I know it's got to be as buggy as all get out. I'm still going to give it a try.

PS. It probably helps to know that "Pages are actually sections with section breaks." In other words, pages are document components with associated styles, a template is a set of such components. Once you know Pages are really "sections" (in Word parlance) then this document fills in the rest of the pieces (sections/Pages inherit from the currently selected section/Page):

If you want different parts of a document to have different margins, headers or footers, numbers of columns, master objects, or page-numbering schemes, you can divide the document into sections by inserting a section break. Section breaks are useful when dividing a document into distinct parts, such as title pages, chapters, and indices.

When you add a section break, the new section always starts on a new page.

To insert a section break:

1. Click where you want the new section to begin.

2. Choose Insert > Section Break.

The new section has the same formatting as the previous section until you change it...

To remove a section break, click at the beginning of the line that follows the break and press the Delete key.

Tip: You can see where breaks occur in your document by showing formatting characters (also called "invisibles"). To show formatting characters, choose View > Show Invisibles.

George's Macintosh Tips: a man after my own heart

These are his personal notes, made publicly available. All look interesting. A man after my own heart: George's Macintosh Tips.

His network assessment work is excellent. Note this surprising conclusion (which I think may be true for my home too):

The 802.11g standard supports data rates of up to 54 Mbits/sec. Again, the maximum achieved rates are usually half that. One would suppose that in normal usage, 802.11g would perform 5 times faster than 802.11b. However, my experience says that this isn't necessarily so. When dealing with my cable modem, 802.11g has worked WORSE for me than 802.11b.

Worse?? How can that be?? Both rates are much faster than my cable modem can support so that the wireless rate should not figure into internet related performance at all, however, it indeed does and in an unexpected way. I base my throughput data in this section on internet related speeds, not computer to computer speeds. Since we use relatively little computer to computer networking, getting the most out of the cable modem is the most important rate for us. If we have to move really large amounts of data, then we use firewire target disk mode instead which is 10 times faster than even 802.11g could promise.

Based on accumulated experience and a range of real world tests, I have concluded that, overall, the older standard of 802.11b actually works better than 802.11g in my particular network configuration and environment. Maybe 802.11g would work better with really strong signals, but at 2 and 3 bars on the Apple Airport menu bar icon, 802.11b produces consistently better data rates.

Why is my G3 iBook draining the battery so quickly?

I've a thread going on this at the Apple discussion site. My G3 iBook is sucking down my new battery. Recent changes include:

1. a new hard drive (15GB -> 40GB) with expert disassembly.
2. changed LAN encryption from WEP (pathetic) to WPA 1.
3. restored OS image using Carbon Copy Cloner.

Things I've tried include:

1. Reset PMU.
2. Zap PRAM.
3. Repair permissions (no problems, this never seems to work)
4. Deleted the .plist for power management.

Here's part of the recent thread. Comments welcome!

Apple - Discussions - Power drain after drive upgrade?

I did some research and the drive power demand increases typically measure out at about 2%. Sometimes newer faster drives consume less power than older slower drives!

I could imagine that Panther might have some trouble with optimizing sleep on some of the newer complex drives (which are really full-fledged computers with databases, operating systems, algorithms,etc) -- if I can't figure out anything else I'm going to upgrade the iBook to Tiger. (I hear it works pretty well if you disable Spotlight and maybe the widgets.)

More interestingly now I'm focusing on WPA wireless encryption. I changed my LAN's encrytpion from (so broken) WEP to WPA around the time of the drive switch. I notice the G3 iBook doesn't support WPA 2 (10.3.9, latest version AirPort) -- makes me wonder if there's a CPU math constraint that the G3 can't meet. That in turn makes me wonder how well the vector-less G3 actually does with WPA. If the CPU is churning that would increase heat, turn on fans, etc.

I'm going to install some tool for CPU resource utilization and study what's happening with WPA, the compare to WEP.

Update: this is a very interesting evaluation of encryption and performance, but not particularly looking at power consumption.

Update: Using OS X's monitor tool and the freeware (forget name) dashboard app I can see my iBook CPU is working quite hard to do web page access. I'm suspicious that WPA is a bit much for a 600MHz G3. Too bad -- since it works very well with XP SP2.

Removing those cursed Microsoft Windows toolbars -- removing COM and other Add-Ins

I updated an old post on removing Add-Ins like Adobe Acrobat and Yahoo Desktop Search from Outlook and other apps: Gordon's Tech: Removing those cursed Microsoft Windows toolbars. The way to do this in Outlook is particularly obscure. Sorry -- you have to read through the updates to get the latest story.

OS X synchronizatioin utility

FOR neXtSoft QuickSync Folder and Device Synchronization Utility. AutoSync folders, great for iPods, hand helds, PowerBooks, Jump Drives and Networks Including .mac, Windows Networks and ftp

Microsoft had a sync facility in Windows 98, 2K and probably still has it in XP (maybe 95)? I tried it once but never trusted it. People have trouble implementing sync. This sounds a bit sympler; I wonder if it uses the psync source.

QuickSync is the easy folder sync utility for PowerBook and hand held owners. QuickSync can be used with jump drives, Hand helds, iPods or users of any other device that mounts as a drive on your desktop. This application can be used to keep your mp3 collection or important files up to date. QuickSync features Single or Bi-direction sync, automatic sync which detects devices as they are plugged in, the syncronizes the selected folders automaticaly. QuickSync is drag and drop aware, easy to use and cost effective.

Encyclopedia Britannica Dashboard widget and firefox search plugin

Encyclopdia Britannica Technical Support

Next thing you know the freight trains will sprout rocket engines. Britannica gets sexy (in a geekish sort of way) with widgets and firefox search plugins. I guess I'll have to reenable Dashboard on my iMac.

The amazing thing, however, is that their new RSS feed has over 150 bloglines subscribers. Wow.

I'd mostly forgotten I pay Britannica each month for their service. It's kind of been a charitable act. Maybe they're actually thinking about how they could be useful. Or maybe Google has agreed to buy them ...

The official way to move an iTunes library

iTunes: Moving your iTunes Music folder

I've done this in the past and it's worked quite well.