Letter from the CEO – Unfinished Business

By Robert Pritchett

2007 has been a rough and tumble year, but we are still living and breathing and looking forward to 2008.

 

Of Best-Laid plans?

 

With fear and trembling, I installed the Family Pack version of Leopard and sat back as the program did its magic of archiving and installing. Amazon had sent it a full two weeks earlier than it had reported it would do.

 

My Leopard installation experiences were captured by Michael Potter in his For Mac Eyes Only Episode #49 - “The Best Laid Plans”.

 

Apparently I had an internal hard drive that had issues that needed to be fixed, so the drive was not recognized, until I ran disc utilities and fixed the problems not seen in Tiger but apparently by Leopard’s own DVD. Then there was the indexing thing that took a while and finally the drive became visible so I could let the program install itself.

 

I became immediately aware of the fact that Leopard does go back and uses hooks into the “Previous Operating System” folder to get things like driver kernels that make the VerticalMouse 2 from Evoluent work using the Universal USB Driver X to continue to function properly. I discovered that sad fact after I had removed the “Previous Operating System Programs” folder and trashed it. Well, everything was working before I removed that folder!

 

I had to remove Preferences for all the browsers I use in order to view the websites that have video links to work at all. FireFox came up with a blank screen. I mean really a blank screen! And I had to remove it and all preferences to reinstall it from their website. I discovered that some of the browsers had been updated. I also found that there are some misleading steps to QuickTime posted online as to what can be removed from the Internet plug-ins folder and what can be left alone. In my case, removing the QuickTime Preferences from my User Folder did the trick. (Removing the plug-in for the web for QuickTime was not a good move.)

 

Mail.app quirks – at least on my machine, I noticed that certain Email messages end up in Drafts and yet I’ve successfully sent them (or at least I think they were sent). Perhaps that will be resolved with the next general release of the OS or a security update?

 

Since I could not wait for Adobe to get off the dime and fix the Print-to-PDF issue, I did some exploring by going to the Adobe forum and reading how their “fix” was to do my work in InDesign CS3 and print to PostScript and from there to PDF. Not! (Yes, I do have a legal copy.) So I discovered the Apple Discussions thread entitled “Can’t get back to PDF Printer” and scrolled down to find Charles Dyer’s entry about CUPS-PDF. It worked – sort of.

 

The simple MS Word documents with graphics bloated to humongous size, so I had to get into Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional and reduce their size considerably. And it took a while, but I didn’t have to wait until January 2008 to “Print to PDF”! See, I couldn’t get Distiller to “work” and it hung and paused the simplest of files in Mac OS X until I switched printers from Adobe Acrobat to CUPS-PDF.

 

By the way, the “Print-to-PDF” issue did not go away even after updating to 10.5.1, so this puts the issue of the Adobe PDF Printer squarely in the lap of Adobe. Doesn’t it seem just a little strange that an independent can figure out how to make the “Print-to-PDF” work and Adobe has to wait to make it the last thing they fix in CS3 (Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional will be updated to version 8.1.2 in late January 2008)?

 

Meanwhile, Tom Yager over at InfoWorld gives Leopard a “Perfect 10”. And here is Dennis Seller's comeback.

 

No more AABA

 

As of January 1, 2008, I will no longer be part of the Apple Authorized Business Agent team. The program is being terminated by Apple, so in reality everyone who was a part of it are being disbanded and encouraged to participate in the http://www.apple.com/channel/ and join the Consultants, Resellers and Store Affiliates http://www.apple.com/storeaffiliates/ instead.

 

Apple killed off the LinkShare Internet sales venue and signed up with the Commission Junction Network instead. My beef with CJ is that if you have no sales in 3 months, they terminate you and you have to struggle mightily to get back on with them. I have not attempted to do so again. It takes too much time and effort to keep trying to sell through CJs. The 2% gain by selling Apple products on the macCompanion website could be worth the effort – maybe – except I and others were burned as AABAs, so what makes CJ referrals any different an experience, now that Apple is using them for Internet sales outside their own extremely successful online store site?

 

The contract those of us signed as members of the AABA was so restrictive as to who we could sell to, that it was extremely difficult to even consider this process as a way to generate a means of steady, reliable income – especially since Apple was cannibalizing sales through the AABA contacts and buyers (bypassing the agents and going directly to the prospective buyers without giving credit for the face-to-face process instigated by the Authorized Apple Business Agents). And yes, that is documented!

 

I did manage to get an NFR copy of Leopard for my troubles – which I promptly gave to a well-deserving staff member, since I had already purchased the family pack that so far has only been installed on one machine.

 

Dennis Sellers quoted me in his AABA article in Macsimum News.

 

You may still purchase Macs through our affiliation with Amazon.com on our website now and after January 1, 2007 – http://www.maccompanion.com

 

By the Numbers

 

Wayne Lefevre did a great job using Numbers to organize a list of all the reviews we’ve done this year. That can be found in this issue of macCompanion.

 

Movin’ On

 

For the last littIe while, I have been spending most of my time being a baker of glutenless (no wheat, barley or rye) baked goods for folks who have a special gene that keeps them from enjoying those grains – in fact those grains make them very, very ill and so by eating a tasty diet of non-gluten foods, folks can have a healthy sustainable life again. I’m happy that they can be happy. My time is being absorbed as Store Manager and “Partner”. We just set up the Glutenless Maximus website and updated the Giggles Gluten-free Custom Bakery and Deli site.

 

However, my heart is more into the 3-Rivers Synergy Centre and we had our first Alternative Energy User Group meeting in Richland, WA. Heck, I was even on the KVEW evening news that night and as a result, we had around 30 people show up for it.

 

So you may see fewer of my contributions to macCompanion magazine in the Mac side of things but more in the Greenware side of things, as we press forward in preparation for whatever is going to happen in 2012.

Just how prepared are you?

 

May 2008 be peaceful and prosperous for you and your families.

 

May we all be blessed! Everyone!!