TidBITS#635/24-Jun-02
=====================

 Want ubiquitous wireless access to your email and the Web from a
 svelte handheld computer? Us too, and Jeff Carlson explains why
 the new Palm i705 is at least a step in the right direction. Adam
 returns from the 17th annual MacHack developers conference with a
 look at the future of the Mac world, and Matt Neuburg offers a
 short review of the powerful bookmark utility URL Manager Pro.

Topics:
   MailBITS/24-Jun-02
   Tools We Use: URL Manager Pro
   The MacHack Mirror
   Palm i705: Wireless Internet, If You're Patient

<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-635.html>
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MailBITS/24-Jun-02
------------------

**TidBITS Server Problems** -- Just a quick heads-up that we've
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 email is bouncing temporarily, we know and we're working on it,
 so there's no need to alert us further. [ACE]


Tools We Use: URL Manager Pro
-----------------------------
 by Matt Neuburg <[email protected]>

 After some years exploring the Web, most of us have collected a
 number, possibly quite a large number, of URLs that we keep
 squirrelled away for future reference, in accordance with our
 habits and interests. Such preserved URLs are often referred to
 as "bookmarks." Adam wrote a three-part article in 1996 on bookmark
 management software and techniques, but at the time I paid scant
 attention, since my browser of choice, Internet Explorer, handled
 them adequately, providing a hierarchical menu for choosing
 "favorite" URLs and an outline interface for arranging them. All
 that changed, though, in the move to Mac OS X. The problem was
 partly migrating my settings from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X and keeping
 them coordinated in case I switched back. But even more important,
 I no longer _had_ a browser of choice - in this brave new world, I
 have been experimenting with several browsers (Internet Explorer,
 Mozilla, OmniWeb, and others) that clamor for my attention. With
 abrupt clarity, I knew I needed a separate, browser-agnostic URL
 keeper to act as a central repository.

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1132>

 In this moment of need, Alco Blom's URL Manager Pro saved my
 bacon. I have been using it in various development versions for
 months now, but it has just gone final as version 3.0, which seems
 an appropriate opportunity to recommend it. And I most certainly
 do. To put it simply, if I had to list the top five utilities
 without which I could never have made the switch to Mac OS X,
 URL Manager Pro would be one of them.

<http://www.url-manager.com/version300.html>


**Laying Out the Garden** -- A URL Manager Pro window represents
 a bookmark file; you're not limited to one such file, but I like
 having just one that opens when URL Manager Pro does. The window
 displays an outline of folders (categories) and URLs within them;
 you can rearrange these as one would expect of an outline. You can
 add a note to each URL, as well as set various other options.
 Double-clicking a URL opens it in your browser; or you can drag
 it into a browser. But you don't need to work in URL Manager Pro's
 window just to open a URL; the bookmark file can also be displayed
 hierarchically in the program's Dock menu, and even, in the case
 of Internet Explorer, Opera, and iCab, as a normal ("shared") menu
 amongst the browser's own. (An accompanying "menulet," Mondriaan,
 lets you access a limited set of separately determined URLs even
 when URL Manager Pro isn't running.)

 Similarly, there are various ways to add a URL from your browser
 to the bookmark file. You can drag the address from the browser
 into the bookmark file; you can choose Add Bookmark from URL
 Manager Pro's Dock icon menu while the browser window is
 frontmost; you can choose Add Bookmark from the browser's shared
 menu if it has one; and in some browsers you can even Control-
 click a link and choose Add Link to URL Manager Pro from the
 contextual menu.


**Tough Row to Hoe** -- URL Manager Pro's weakness is the
 inconsistency of the implementation of its features across
 different Internet programs. The chief fault lies, of course,
 with those Internet programs, of which some support shared menus
 and some don't, some support certain Apple events and some don't,
 and so forth. It's confusing, and made more confusing by URL
 Manager Pro itself. You never quite know what a menu item will
 do, because the same words mean different things in different
 places. For example, Add Bookmark in the shared menu brings up
 a dialog for modifying the URL information before entering it
 in the bookmark file; Add Bookmark in the Dock menu doesn't;
 Add Bookmark in URL Manager Pro's own menu creates a blank URL;
 and there's no Add Bookmark in Mondriaan at all. Come to that,
 why is Mondriaan so different - why isn't it simply a menulet
 version of URL Manager Pro itself, providing access to the
 bookmark file, as an alternative to the Dock and the shared
 menu? In general, the details of how one accesses functionality,
 such as the names of menu items, could use some rethinking.
 The situation isn't helped by a manual that's vague, poorly
 structured, and not always complete.

 Nonetheless, URL Manager Pro is a powerful program, full of
 surprises and usually anticipating your needs; most users will
 probably require just a fraction of its power. It can be set to
 watch and record your browsing in a history list, so you can later
 recover a URL you forgot to add previously. It can import all the
 links within a Web page or email. It can validate links. I could
 go on and on - its abilities are too various to list here. Try it
 and see for yourself.

 URL Manager Pro runs natively under Mac OS 8 or higher (2.4 MB
 download), including Mac OS X (2.2 MB download). It costs a mere
 $25, or $11 to upgrade from version 2. For $37 you can register
 both URL Manager Pro and Alco Blom's other shareware utility, Web
 Confidential, on which I also depend for storing and retrieving
 user account and password information (see Adam's review - "Web
 Confidential: Securing Information of All Sorts" in TidBITS-441_).

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05020>
<http://www.web-confidential.com/>


MacHack: The Ghost of Macintosh Future
--------------------------------------
 by Adam C. Engst <[email protected]>

 The MacHack developers conference - the 17th of which was held
 last week in Dearborn, Michigan - is tremendously unusual. The
 keynote starts at midnight, wireless (and wired) Ethernet access
 is available throughout the lobby of the venue (the Holiday Inn
 Fairlane), and the age of the attendees ranges from those in
 elementary school to those approaching retirement. But despite all
 this, the most salient fact about MacHack for the non-programmer
 is that it shows where the Macintosh industry will be heading.
 Macworld Expo is the ghost of Macintosh present, MacHack is the
 ghost of Macintosh future. (And much as historical trivia is fun
 to bat around, there won't be a ghost of Macintosh past conference
 as long as the Macintosh world remains viable and continues to
 move forward.)

<http://www.machack.com/>


**People** -- For those of us who have come to at least the last
 few iterations of MacHack, the absences of other long-standing
 attendees was initially disturbing. Well-known programmer after
 well-known programmer didn't show up, but as the reasons came
 forth, it turned out that most of the missing people had been
 kept away by work deadlines, not a lack of interest in the Mac
 or a switch to another platform. Attendance in general was down -
 not surprising in this economic climate - but a large number of
 first timers helped to swell the ranks to a total of about 270
 attendees. A good number of these folks were Unix users, and
 although Mac OS X's impact on the overall base of Mac users is
 still in an early phase, it's clear that within a few years, the
 migration of Unix and Windows users to the Mac will make the Mac
 community significantly more diverse. Whether or not it will also
 be larger in proportion to the overall computing world remains
 unclear, but there's no question that Mac OS X improves Apple's
 chances of increasing market share.

 Related to the influx of Unix users were the two keynotes - the
 first from publisher Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly and Associates and
 the second from Slashdot's Rob Malda (known online as CmdrTaco).
 Tim has recently become a Mac user thanks to Mac OS X and a
 Titanium PowerBook G4 given to him by Apple, and O'Reilly is
 publishing ever more Macintosh books as their core audience of
 Unix geeks increasingly starts relying on Mac OS X. O'Reilly
 is even holding a Mac OS X conference in late September of
 2002 - I'll be speaking there.

<http://www.oreilly.com/>
<http://slashdot.org/>
<http://conferences.oreillynet.com/macosx2002/>

 Another positive sign for the future was the presence of the many
 "yoot" - students at all stages of education who attended the
 sessions, networked with the older programmers, and participated
 in the Hack Contest. Although some have attended more MacHacks
 than I have, many others were at their first MacHack. That's just
 too cool - there isn't another industry event that I know of where
 kids are not only encouraged to attend, but are treated as peers
 by the best in the business. Talk about investing in your future.

 Of course, the yoot who attend MacHack are, as with the children
 of Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegon, above average, with a
 significant level of Macintosh and Unix knowledge. Nowhere was
 that more clear than with Adam Atlas, a 12-year-old who took
 second place in the Best Hack Contest (more on that next week) and
 presented a session on REALbasic, and Andy Furnas, a 14-year-old
 from our home town of Ithaca who is a member of next year's
 MacHack organizing committee. These bright, engaging kids are
 creating their own future, hopefully in the Macintosh world,
 and if MacHack can play a role in that, all the better.

 Last, I was heartened to realize that no matter what the future
 holds for the Macintosh, if MacHack is any indication, community
 will remain important. The Macintosh itself has many
 distinguishing features, but a strong, vital community is
 difficult or impossible to create intentionally; let's make
 sure we don't lose the one we have.


**Hardware** -- The selection of hardware was also indicative of
 where we'll be heading, at least in some ways. Titanium PowerBook
 G4s and iBooks dominated, with a few scattered PowerBook G3s and
 colored iBooks thrown in for good measure. Obviously, portable
 computers are far more likely to be taken to a conference than a
 desktop machine (although Jorg Brown brought a new iMac that was
 animated for the hack contest), but a significant number of the
 programmers said that their Titanium PowerBook G4 was also their
 primary machine. Plus, a number of Unix users who have switched to
 the Mac said that part of the decision, after Mac OS X itself, was
 the fact that Apple makes cool laptops. Computing is becoming ever
 more portable, and although there's a constant trade-off between
 size and screen real estate, it's worth keeping an eye on anything
 that improves the portable computing experience.

 AirPort cards were nearly ubiquitous, though the volunteers who
 set up the MacHack network still provided Ethernet hubs at many
 of the tables in the hotel lobby for the folks with the earlier
 models of the Titanium PowerBook G4, which had terrible AirPort
 range (reportedly somewhat better in the most recent models).
 Wireless networking has been on a steep adoption curve ever since
 Apple introduced AirPort several years ago. It's appearing in many
 locations, such as trade shows, libraries, and airports, and the
 way things are going, the lack of wireless Internet access will
 become more surprising than its presence within a few years.
 Perhaps we'll see it on airplanes, in supermarkets, and even city
 parks - I'd say the sky is the limit, but in fact, the limiting
 factors for wireless networking are more physical and political
 (see "Peering into 2002's Tea Leaves" in TidBITS-612_ for my
 wireless prognostication).

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1210>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06688>


**Software** -- On the software side of things, Mac OS X was
 equally as prevalent as Apple's newer laptops. A few people
 were still running Mac OS 9, and one brave soul even brought a
 PowerBook Duo 280c running System 7.6 for his hack (which modified
 the Chooser's display of file servers so you could tell which ones
 supported AppleShare over TCP/IP rather than AppleTalk), but it
 was clear that developers had taken the none-too-subtle hint from
 Apple that there's no point in developing for Mac OS 9 any more.

 Mac OS 9's status for developers was hammered home during a
 tongue-in-cheek session from Apple's Keith Stattenfield, who
 was the development lead on Mac OS 9. His session, entitled "The
 Future of Mac OS 9," consisted mostly of slides listing euphemisms
 for "dead." Keith summed up with an emphatic, "It's dead!" and a
 mock-concerned "Really?" from the audience had the entire room
 laughing. On a more serious note, Keith did reassure developers
 that Classic will be around for years, and bugs in Mac OS 9 are
 still being investigated to improve Classic, QuickTime, other
 components, and even Mac OS 9 itself if a sufficiently serious
 problem is discovered. Plus, Apple is looking at ways of improving
 Classic - I hope they'll consider letting users save the state
 of Classic like you can do in Connectix's Virtual PC rather than
 starting it up and shutting it down all the time.

 It is worth noting that although the developers were using Mac
 OS X, and I didn't hear much complaining about the basics of the
 operating system, there were plenty of specific complaints about
 details of Mac OS X. In many of those cases, it was clear that
 Apple knew about the problems and was working hard to fix them -
 Mac OS X is a huge project, and it takes time to implement, test,
 and integrate fixes. The next major release of Mac OS X, codenamed
 Jaguar, should include a wide variety of improvements when it
 appears in a few
months.


**Keynote Thoughts** -- As a closing thought, I'd like to pass on
 the list of editorial filters that Tim O'Reilly said the editors
 at O'Reilly and Associates apply when determining whether they
 should cover a new technology. To catch O'Reilly's interest, a
 technology should:

* be network related (by network, I think they mean networks
 of people, not computers),
* engender a real need for information,
* have grassroots support,
* inspire passion,
* have deeper social implications,
* have professional practitioners, and
* have a possible business ecology.

It also helps O'Reilly's decision if the technology is also:

* disruptive, not just evolutionary,
* enabling of other technologies,
* at the right point in its life-cycle, and
* being adopted at an accelerating rate.

 It's easy to see how these requirements applied to the Internet
 back in the early 1990s, and Tim said that he felt the next big
 thing was going to be looking at the Internet as a platform rather
 than a network (this is what people are thinking about when they
 talk about Web services). Now think about how these filters might
 apply to Mac OS X. For the most part, it meets the requirements,
 though I'm not sure it's possible to say that it's a disruptive
 technology at the moment (at least in the sense O'Reilly means -
 it's certainly been disruptive to many people in the more common
 usage of the word).

 If we were to take MacHack to the logical extreme, we'd all be
 spending time in groups of friends and colleagues, continually
 inventing the future with tiny Mac OS X-based Macs that exist as
 much on the Internet as they do in the physical world. Science
 fiction? Certainly, but the same would likely have been said not
 all that many years ago of where we are now.


Palm i705: Wireless Internet, If You're Patient
-----------------------------------------------
 by Jeff Carlson <[email protected]>

 "It's great living in the future," a friend of mine is fond of
 saying, which for me over the past few weeks has been embodied
 in using a Palm i705 wireless handheld. The successor to Palm's
 clunkier but groundbreaking Palm VII, the i705 offers wireless
 Internet access nearly anywhere, in a device that's slightly
 larger than my old standby, a Palm Vx. Waiting in my car for my
 wife to leave work, I can find out which movies are playing in the
 area or check my email without finding a WiFi-equipped Starbucks.
 However, as with other expectations of living the future - silent,
 non-polluting, air-cars guided automatically by computer come to
 mind - the i705 is also grounded in the realities of the present,
 specifically when it comes to the speed (or lack thereof) of
 working online.

<http://www.palm.com/products/palmi705/>


**From VII to i705** -- Altogether, I'm primarily impressed with
 the i705's size: the Palm VII was a modified Palm III with an
 extended top containing the wireless radio. Activating the
 wireless access required you to lift an antenna, which added
 another five inches or so to the height. The i705, in comparison,
 is a slightly thicker Palm m500. The antenna is now a curved bump
 at the top of the unit, more like a raised eyebrow than the Palm
 VII's flat Frankenstein forehead.

 The i705 has a grayscale screen, 8 MB of memory, an infrared port,
 and a Secure Digital/MultiMedia card slot for using removable
 storage cards or add-on devices such as Palm's Bluetooth Card. Its
 built-in rechargeable battery on my unit was surprisingly robust:
 even after having the wireless radio activated all day (more on
 that later), battery drain was negligible, and even regular use
 of the device didn't affect battery life much (unlike my Palm Vx,
 which has a much shorter battery life than it used to). It runs
 Palm OS 4.1, which means you get the full complement of organizer
 software such as Date Book, Address Book, To Do List, Memo Pad,
 and Note Pad.

<http://www.palm.com/wireless/bluetooth/>

 Also new in recent Palm handhelds is Clock, a time and date
 display activated by tapping a clock icon on the silkscreened
 area. It's a handy feature, but with an unfortunately inconvenient
 method of activation. The Palm m100 series uses Clock much better:
 with the device powered off, pushing the scroll-up button displays
 the time. On the i705 (as well as the m500 series), you must
 either pull out the stylus to tap the teeny clock icon, or have
 great fingernail dexterity. On the plus side, you can set an
 alarm using Clock, which means my Date Book should no longer
 be cluttered with mid-day appointments titled "Wake Up."

 The silkscreened Calculator button has been replaced by a star
 icon, which is confusing until you learn that you can set any
 application to launch when you tap it. This button remapping
 capability has been around for quite some time, but I'm guessing
 people didn't know to take advantage of it, so Palm created
 this Favorite App button. (To change how it's mapped, go to
 Preferences, choose Buttons from the pop-up menu at the upper-
 right corner, then choose an application from the pop-up menu
 to the right of the star button icon.)

 Also remapped are the two right-most plastic application buttons.
 Formerly the To Do List and Memo Pad buttons, they now launch
 the MyPalm and MultiMail applications. As a longtime Palm user,
 I consistently hit one of these to bring up the To Do List or Memo
 Pad, but I'm sure I'd adapt over time. My short-term compromise
 was to remap (again, in the Prefs application) the MyPalm button
 back to the To Do List, but leave the MultiMail button alone.


**Without Wires, but Not Without Strings** -- Using the Palm i705
 without enabling the wireless access would be like leaving a
 sports car in the garage. However, you should factor in the
 service costs in addition to the $450 price of the organizer.
 Palm offers two pricing structures for its Palm.Net service.

 The Associate Plan costs $20 per month and covers up to 100K of
 data transferred during the month, plus $0.20 per kilobyte above
 that. Unless you're especially skimpy on your wireless access,
 this plan is ridiculous. I did not deliberately try to max out
 the wireless usage, and still chewed through 441K during one month
 of use. Under the Associate Plan, that would have cost me $68.32
 in addition to the $20 monthly fee. Ouch.

 The Associate Plan may just be Palm's way of enticing users to go
 for the better (though still not cheap) Executive Unlimited plan,
 which for $40 per month offers a flat rate for as many kilobytes
 as you can pull down. Palm also offers an Annual Executive
 Unlimited plan, which ends up costing $35 per month if you
 prepay for a full year's service.

<http://www.palm.com/products/palmi705/wireless.html>

 You'll also need to consider geographic availability of Palm.Net.
 If you live in a major metropolitan area in the United States,
 chances are you'll have coverage (see Palm's maps at the link
 below for more detail). However, as with cellular phone coverage,
 Palm.Net could prove elusive at times. One afternoon, my wife and
 I were trying to find a restaurant that I hadn't been to in years,
 so we pulled into a parking lot and did a Google search. No
 connection. So I drove around while she held the Palm, waiting
 for the connection to improve, until she finally asked with a
 smirk, "Can you go to an area with wireless access, please?"
 I could only reply, "Yes, I think I see some access up ahead."
 After about a mile or so, the signal strength picked up, and
 we were able to get the restaurant's address.

<http://www.palm.com/cgi-bin/coveragemap.cgi>


**Web Clipping** -- When the Palm VII first appeared, the only
 service options were based on per-kilobyte usage. To reduce the
 amount of data transferred, Palm developed what it calls Web
 Clipping, a novel method of downloading only the information
 you need. Instead of loading a Web page that's been designed
 for computer viewing (i.e., chock full of graphics and ads), Web
 Clipping uses Palm Query Applications (PQAs) to send and receive
 data. Essentially, these are small programs that let you perform
 a specific request, such as retrieving movie show times (using
 Moviefone) in a specific area code, listing recent news headlines
 (via CNN, ABC News, USA Today, and the PR Newswire), or a number
 of other quick bursts of information. PQAs are basically just Web
 forms that grab specific information. On the i705, Palm rolled a
 number of PQAs into one MyPalm application to provide an Internet
 portal. You can also download other PQAs from the Web - PalmGear
 links to all sorts of Palm software, and has created a PQA that
 can download and install other PQAs over the i705's wireless
 connection.

<http://www.palmgear.com/software/>

 Despite Palm's deliberate bandwidth belt-tightening, I found
 the i705 to be surprisingly slow. You access the built-in PQAs
 via the MyPalm application, and even clicking any topic from the
 main screen requires a new connection and data transfer; I don't
 know what it could possibly be asking for, since it's apparently
 loading only the built-in Web form. For example, testing as I
 write this, it took 18 seconds between tapping the News link to
 displaying a page with four PQAs listed. Tapping the CNN option
 causes a 10 second pause before listing a main page with CNN's
 links. I tap the new Top stories link, wait 14 seconds, and a
 page of headlines is displayed. I tap a headline, wait another
 25 seconds, and am finally given the text of a 2K article. It's
 taken me roughly a minute to get to a single news story.

 The MyPalm application also offers a straightforward browser to
 connect to regular Web pages, but that's more painful to use. You
 cannot switch to another application while MyPalm is downloading
 Web content, so you're left watching the steady pulse of the
 round progress indicator (which doubles as a stop button during
 transmission) as you wait for data to load. Several times, the
 i705 lost contact with the server when viewing Web pages,
 resulting in partial pages. Amazingly, there is no Refresh command
 to reload the contents of the page, so you have to go back to
 the previous page, tap the link for the article you want, and
 hope it loads on the second try. If you arrived at your partial
 page by writing its URL, the address isn't saved, so you have
 to write it again.

 Unfortunately, MyPalm seems to be the only choice for Web
 browsing; other Palm OS browsers such as Handspring's Blazer
 didn't work over the Palm.Net service in my testing.

<http://www.handspring.com/software/blazer_overview.jhtml>


**Email** -- Far more useful is the included MultiMail
 application, which you can use to access your Palm.Net email or
 any other POP or IMAP account. When you tap the Get Mail button,
 you're given the option of retrieving full messages or just the
 Subject lines of the mail waiting on your server. You can also
 choose to skip larger messages (the default limit is set at 50K -
 that's half of your monthly allotment if you're on the $20
 Palm.Net plan), retrieve only unread mail, or ignore attachments.

 Messages stay on the server by default, so anything you've read
 will show up later (marked as read) in your email program on the
 Mac. If you delete a message on the handheld, you have the option
 of deleting it on the server as well, which means you don't have
 to look at the same spam twice.

 The i705 also includes an option to schedule when the radio is
 activated, which is handy for checking email automatically: you
 can choose to keep it on all the time, activate it manually each
 time you need it, or set a block of active time such as 8 AM to
 6 PM. Using a form on the my.palm.net Web site, you can instruct
 Palm's server to check your accounts every day or every hour, then
 forward the messages to the handheld. When new mail is waiting,
 the handheld can sound an alarm, vibrate, flash its indicator
 light, or perform a combination of all three.

<http://my.palm.net/>

 You can also set up filters to control which messages are
 downloaded, though they are confusing to create and mostly
 ineffective. Unlike the filters found in most Mac email clients,
 you can't specify a filter to ignore messages (such as spam);
 instead, you can only choose which messages to accept. So, I could
 create a filter that grabs any message from Adam or Geoff, but not
 one that avoids spam messages with "viagra" in the Subject line.
 Even so, I found the capability to check email remotely to be the
 most important for me, and it was workable to grab a list of
 message subjects and manually filter those.

 It's also worth mentioning that the i705 includes an AOL Instant
 Messenger client, but frankly the device's performance made me
 snicker when I considered how "instant" the messages would be,
 so I didn't test it out.


**The Future Is Almost Now** -- If you need compact wireless
 Internet access, the Palm i705 is a good device that also acts
 as your personal organizer, as long as you're not expecting to
 do it quickly. And if wireless connectivity outweighs some of
 the inconveniences of Palm's built-in software, you'll be happy
 to have a more compact device to carry around.



$$

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