Some Sage Advice

A good friend of mine (and client) has updated his company’s website. It is nicely done and feature lots of new information about his products. Medtrition/NNI is a local company that makes nutritional dietary supplements for  healthcare and home use.

If you are the last remaining user of QuarkXpress, please stop and switch to InDesign. Quark is the worst company on the planet right now and they don’t deserve to be in business anymore. Case in point, our last phone call to Quark. We had to reinstall Quark on a machine and it wouldn’t activate over the internet (what a surprise…). So I had to call Quark. When you call the toll-free number given on the activation screen, you are presented with 3 options:

1. press 1 for Quark’s fee-based support and be prepared for a $39 fee on your credit card
2. press 2 for Customer Service
3. press 3 for Sales

So I pressed 2 for Customer Service. I was greeted with, “Thank you for call Quark Customer Service. Please be prepared for a $39 fee to speak to customer service.”

What!!! So I have to pay to talk to customer service?? So I held on a got an obviously “not-American” customer service rep with a distinctive accent. I explained to her about not being to activate Quark and I needed an activation code. She replied with, “That will be $39.”

“WHAT!!! YOU WANT TO CHARGE ME $39 TO ACTIVATE SOFTWARE THAT I OWN???”

“Yes.”

So I asked to speak to her supervisor. I was given the same lame answer. So I asked to speak to her supervisor. She said she didn’t have one. “So you own Quark??” “No.” “Then let me talk to someone above you.” “There is no one else.”

This went on for several minutes until my blood pressure reached critical levels. She finally offered me email activation that would only take 15 minutes or so. So I tried it.

Well, three hours later, the activation came through. Three hours. That is three hours with a machine out of production because of Quark’s arrogance and lack of customer support.

So please Quark, do us all a favor, and close your doors.

Apple has released a knowledge base article describing the key commands and what they enable when pressed during start-up:

• Press C during start-up: Start from a bootable CD/DVD, such as the Mac OS X Install disc.
• Press D during start-up: Start the Apple Hardware Test when the Install DVD 1 is inserted in your Mac’s drive.
• Press and hold (Command + Option + P + R) until you hear two beeps: Reset the NVRAM.
• Press Option during start-up: Loads Startup Manager, enabling users to select which volume they would like to boot from. Pressing N will show the first bootable Network volume as well.
• Press the Eject button, press F12, or click and hold the mouse or trackpad button: Ejects any removable media.
• Press N during start-up: Attempt to start from a compatible network server (NetBoot).
• Press T during start-up: When two Macs are connected via FireWire, this will start one in FireWire Target Disk Mode (two Macs with FireWire ports are required).
• Press Shift during start-up: Starts your Mac in Safe Mode, temporarily disabling log-in items.
• Press (Command + V) during start-up: Starts in Verbose Mode.
• Press (Command + S) during start-up: Starts in Single-User Mode.
• Press (Option + N) during start-up: Start from NetBoot server using the default boot image.

Apple recommends pressing the start-up key combinations immediately after hearing the start-up tone.

Why does Apple does this all the time? They remove key features and technologies from their hardware and software making it even more difficult to do normal, productive tasks. With the release of Snow Leopard, Apple has once again dropped the ball by removing Appletalk altogether.

You may say, “So what?” Well, there are plenty of people still using Appletalk in production environments to access shared volumes or to print to Appletalk printers. For me, the printers are the bigger issue. I have many, many people still using Appletalk printers.  The beauty of Appletalk printers is that they are automatically discovered on the network, and, the big advantage, is they know what is installed and communicate that back to the Mac. Bonjour/Rendevouz printers don’t do that!

Apple’s solution is to print to these printers using IP Printing. What a joke! First of all, you must assign the printer a fixed IP address (how many non-techie users can do this?), then you must know all the options installed in the printer (RAM, extra trays, etc). You must then MANUALLY setup each printer on your network for IP printing. On some corporate networks, there may be hundreds of printers to setup.

Way to go Apple!

More and more companies are using Windows servers and SMB shares in a networked environment. This poses a few challenges for Macs. One of the biggest problems is with older, T1 fonts (Postscript). When these fonts are moved from Appletalk shares to SMB shares, they can lose their resource fork and become unusable. They will appear on an SMB share on a Mac as a Unix Executable File with a file size of 0KB.

Here are a few workarounds to this problem.

1. If a font is copied from a Mac to a share via AFP, you can only read it using AFP. If you then mount the share as SMB, the font is corrupted.
2. If a font is copied from a Mac to a share via SMB, you CAN read it using SMB! It is not corrupted.
3. If a font is converted from T1 to OTF, it works either way since Open Type fonts don’t use a resource fork.
4. The problem occurs with existing files on Mac shares. If the Mac share is simply converted or mounted as SMB, the fonts get corrupted. However, it appears that if a Mac mounts the share as SMB and copies the files, they are not corrupted. What the Mac does is copy the data fork as a regular, visible file, and the resource fork as a hidden file. This maintains the integrity of the font. The danger is that Windows users with “Show All Files” turned on, can see the invisible resource forks. If they are deleted then the font is damaged.
5. If the fonts are converted to OTF, then this is a non-issue as OT fonts don’t have a separate data and resource fork. One easy way to convert all T1 fonts to OTF is to use a $99 program called FontXChange. It is fast and can convert and repair fonts.