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This Old Mac » Late Night PowerBook 5300ce: Flash Hard Drive: Wonderful post by Holden Scott, who successfully managed to replace the noisy 1.1 GB internal drive of his PowerBook 5300ce with a SanDisk Ultra II 4 GB CF card. Of course to do that it’s necessary to obtain a CF-IDE adapter and to pre-format the CF card before installing it. Holden used a PowerBook 1400c with CD-ROM module to install Mac OS 8.6 on the card (using a PC Card CF adapter, of course). His instructions are well written and detailed, and are fully documented with clear photos. Good job, Holden.
Another ResEdit-related tip!
Taken from MacUser, June 10, 1994 issue. At that time, MacUser magazine used to keep a Help section titled Quick Tips, where Peter Jackson published tips and tricks from the readers. This tip is from Donald McLintock from Oxford.
When I switched from System 7.0.1 to System 7.1, I found that the Finder had reverted to some bad habits. The Window zoom animation and the delay before an icon name can be changed after clicking on it, which I had removed from my old System using the SevenFor7 utility, were back. And the same utility did not work on System 7.1, presumably because the new Finder stores data in different places.
However, you can use ResEdit to get rid of these quirks. To remove the zoom rectangles, open a copy of the Finder in ResEdit and open the CODE resource with ID 4. At offset 78 you will find the sequence 48E7 1F38 — you can search for this sequence to find the right one. Change this to 6000 00E6, and the rectangles will be gone.
Similarly, the icon-naming delay can be removed by opening CODE resource 11 and changing the 5DC0 sequence at offset A34 to 50C0.
Watch Bob Staake Creating A Cover Of ‘The New Yorker’: The amazing thing is that Staake still uses Adobe Photoshop 3.0 under System 7. I heard it through the grapevine, where the grapevine is Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing. (Small peeve: Mr Frauenfelder writes Mac OS 7, while it should be written System 7 — the label “Mac OS” was used from version 7.6 on.)
Here’s another video of Staake at work. It’s wonderful how he manages to create beautiful illustrations starting from simple forms, and achieving the final results by addition and subtraction.
(Via Daring Fireball.)
UPDATE: He actually uses Mac OS 9 in the Classic Environment under Mac OS X, not System 7, as he himself clarified over Twitter.
Today, also thanks to the advent of iPhone, touch-screen and multi-touch technologies have never been so popular. People like to finger-point, and if an interface hasn’t some part involving gestures or touching or tapping or tap-dragging, it isn’t cool enough.
I knew touch-screen wasn’t invented just yesterday. What I did not remember was that something of that kind was available for the Mac fifteen years ago. Another search in my small pile of MacUser magazines uncovered a product review by Nigel Grey in the August 6, 1993 issue. Mac ‘n’ Touch by MicroTouch is “a touch screen which fits a wide range of monitor sizes”.
From the review:
MicroTouch’s Mac ‘n’ Touch is aimed particularly at programs that require screen-pointing using your finger, rather than finer control using a stylus. This kind of approach is useful for educational purposes, using Apple’s At Ease interface, say, or in a point-of-information system where the user can interact with the program without having to use a keyboard or a mouse.
The Mac ‘n’ Touch uses a capacitive sensor rather than pressure, which means it will only work with your finger rather than a plastic stylus, for instance. However, a special stylus which has the same capacitive effect as human flesh will be available soon from MicroTouch for around £15.
The monitor used for the test and the review was a then-discontinued 13-inch Apple Colour Display, but according to MicroTouch the touch-sensitive screen could be installed on monitors ranging from 9” to 21”. Don’t think this add-on screen was something ugly-looking, like some anti-glare covers we used to see on many PCs and Macs of the era:
The whole installation is inside the monitor’s case, and the only difference you’ll notice is a socket at the back of the case which connects the screen into the ADB port. [...] The monitor connects normally to the video card or built-in video, and MicroTouch will upgrade your existing monitor or supply a new one with Mac ‘n’ Touch already installed.
The driver software includes a control panel, which lets you calibrate the screen by simply touching the four corners of it.
A procedure Newton users are quite familiar with, by the way.
The preference controls allow you to set the cursor offset, so you can determine its distance from the end of your fingertip, and choose how the screen responds to taps: for example, whether an application opens with one tap or two.
The interface has various modes of operation: Liftoff, Tap, and Drag. The first acts like a mouse button would: with the finger on the screen, the ‘button’ is down, while lifting the finger registers a click. Tap mode is used to drag objects and pull menus down by keeping the finger on screen; the clicking is made by lifting the finger and tapping the screen again. The Drag mode is similar to the other modes, but if you want to select-drag and highlight you do something again very similar to a gesture that also the Newton featured (albeit using a stylus): you hold your pointing device, the finger, and drag.
The verdict on the Mac ‘n’ Touch was generally positive:
Overall, the Mac ‘n’ Touch worked very well. The only problem was that our screen had an optional anti-reflective coating, which was great at cutting out reflection but interfered slightly with the Trinitron tube’s shadow mask wires, which produced a slight shimmering on the screen. But, if you are going to use Mac ‘n’ Touch as a multimedia front end, where people aren’t going to stare at it for hours, then this shouldn’t be a problem.
Of course, in 1993, this was quite an expensive technology. The upgrade for 9-inch to 17-inch screens was £918; for 17-inch to 21-inch screens, £968. And a 14-inch monitor complete with touch-sensitive screen was £1,395.
