LAUG 2.0 News

If you regularly search for a wireless networks,this I the product for you!
While the bundled airport software with OS X, can only give you a rudimentary determination of what networks are available and their signal strength. IStumbler is designed for the nerd that likes to know as much as possible what type of signals are floating in the neighborhood. It gives you the network name and a numerical value of the signal strength. It also tells you what kind of security the network has, the chipset/vendor of the wireless access point, as well as it’s Media Access Controller (MAC) address.

For those that war-dial, the program can also log the connections, thought that option is off by default. Finally,iStumbler can also help you determine and manage your Bonjour (the technology formerly known as Rendezvous) network.

Personally, I use it a lot when I’m in a cybercafe. Knowing the signal strength and noise ratios at a particular spot lets me find that sweet spot where I can both use my laptop on the internet, and effectively keep from spilling it on my Pismo.

In my work as a consultant,I find knowing the channel the base stations
are operating on is critical. Moving your network to a different channel often fixes networking problems and conflicts. Same is true with the chipset. Some routers don’t get along with certain wireless access card, and being able to track down those conflicts really helps. The interface is clear and easy to read. I used to use MacStumbler, but that program started showing it’s age and wasn’t as easy to read as iStumbler with it’s modern brushed metal interface.

The cost of the product is a $10 donation. The author describes it as “subscriptionware” you pay to help the product development continue. The product is not crippled in anyway but not having paid the fee, which is nice of shareware writers. IStumber can be downloaded at istumbler.net.

I’m going to review my experiences with Pages, the desktop publishing program from Apple. I’ve worked with Quark and Pagemaker, and was anxious to see how Pages stacked up. Pages comes either in the bundled software with your computer, or separately as the iWork suite, which includes Keynote as well. Pages is a newish program. It’s said that someday it may be a replacement for Appleworks. Well, don’t throw the Appleworks application out just yet. Pages is good, but needs some refinement.

When you first open Pages you are overwhelmed with these really cool templates. There are all kinds of professionally-designed files for home and school use, such as “Family Newsletter,” “Education Newsletter,” “Club Newsletter,”and such.

It also has stationary, resumes and other useful setups. It’s supposed to be able to read Microsoft Word documents but I’ve found the Word import can often make documents look unlike their Word originals. Of course,that’s probably more to blame on Word, because many of the Word.doc files I receive from PC users seem to be in a cryptic formula that can sometimes only be formatted correctly on a Windows-based Word application. But that is a whole ‘nuther issue.

My reason for purchasing Pages was to be able to make a newsletter for a club I’m involved with. I opened up the first club newsletter template and ‘lo and behold, it was a template for a British car club, which is the very type of club I was wanting to publish a newsletter for. At first all seemed to go well. I would take out the filler text and put in my own. I added my own pictures. It worked great. As one page would get filled up, it would flow into a new page. This happened with each page until I ended up with my eight page document.

Pages kept adding the pages, which was ok in concept, but the problem arose when a change was later made to an article and the CPU would work and work to make the text flow over however many pages I had created. A change on page 1 would reflow the text all the way through page eight. Moving one picture would result in a 15 second delay! Then you would want to change that and another 15 seconds. I was rapidly becoming exhausted with the wait. And I was running on a
relatively- fast G4 (1.33Ghz processor). I couldn’t understand how it could be slow since I used to run Quark on an PowerMac 8100 without any speed concerns at all.

Soon after the initial version of Pages was released, someone figured out that there were problems navigating through a long project and added a pane that has thumbnails of each page. You can click on them and it will take you to that page. When the page is selected, it is highlighted yellow. It was after that pane was introduced that I realized my 8 page document selected all at once as if it was one page. Try to delete page 4, for example, and the whole document would go with it. It was then I learned how to tame Pages.

I made a new document and added one new page at a time. Starting from a blank page and adding my elements that I cut and pasted from my monster eight page, page,I now had 8 separate pages. And with that,things got faster and easier and much simpler to use. However the strange end-of-page marker takes some getting used to. At this point in the maturity-level of Pages, it’s kind of like a puppy, eager to please but wetting the floor along the way. I think of myself as a power-user and when I became so frustrated by a simple thing like moving text around, I wonder how a less savvy user might be put-off by some of these frustrations. Either way,I’d give Pages a positive rating. For the money it has some flash and dazzle, but hopefully will grow up soon.

I know nothing about web design. Absolutely nothing. Enter Rapidweaver from Realmacsoftware. Rapidweaver is an all-in-one WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) application that allows even the most novice web designers to create professional standardized web sites.
The program is very easy to use and I was able to pick it up in a matter of minutes. It comes with several templates for creating everything from blogs and html to styled text pages. iLife integration is another great feature in Rapidweaver, allowing you to assemble photo and movie albums far superior to anything that Apple’s .Mac service creates.

While the application may have many features that the newer user might enjoy it also has some great under the hood features such as automatic RSS and podcast feed creation. This allows a user to create their own blog and podcast and syndicate the information and mp3s via any RSS reader and iTunes.

Rapidweaver’s only requirements are a Mac running 10.3 (Panther) or 10.4 (Tiger), an Internet connection, and some place to host the website. The program will host your site on your .Mac account, or on any FTP (File Transfer Protocol) enabled server you choose.

The application is available for download at realmacsoftware.com for $34.95.

4 out of 5 dog cows

Just about all of the maintenance utilities you would ever need are already on your Mac. Unfortunately, they are not all be initiated within the same program. There are many utility programs out there, in various price ranges, that perform most of those maintenance functions within one program. My favorite shareware utility is YASU. It is very simple to use and will perform the following tasks:

• Daily, Weekly and Monthly CRON jobs
• Repairs Permissions
• Updates Prebindings
• Clears system and browser caches.

Of course it doesn’t do “it all” but I’ve found that running this simple little utility solves just about any problem that I’ve run into.