Virtual PC News — This week, Connectix plans to ship Virtual PC, its Pentium emulation software (see TidBITS-374). Early reports have been positive, and it seems that – at least for those who have the necessary hardware – Virtual PC has become a real alternative, not only for running the included Windows 95, but also any other Pentium-compatible operating system.

According to Connectix, the lower-end version, called Virtual PC Windows 3.11/MS-DOS Version, works on any PowerPC-based Mac running at 100 MHz or faster, with a recommended 24 MB RAM and 200 MB disk space. Those interested in Virtual PC Windows 95 Version need a Power PC-based Mac with at least a 180 MHz Power PC 603e chip, or any 604 or 604e, plus a recommended 32 MB RAM and 300 MB disk space. Both versions require Mac OS 7.5.5 or later. Connectix also notes that a big Level 2 cache helps performance. Retail pricing is expected to come in around $159, and there is a $25 rebate for SoftWindows users. Connectix — 800/950-5880 — 415/571-5100 — 415/571-5195 (fax) — <[email protected]> [TJE]

<http://www.connectix.com/html/connectix_ virtualpc.html>

WebCollage — Last week – and before we’d reported on version 1.0 – StarNine released WebCollage 1.01, a new version that supports 68K Macs and corrects several bugs. The software enables webmasters to place "dynamic graphics" on Web pages. A dynamic graphic is an ordinary GIF or JPEG that includes one or more updating elements such as data from a Web page or the result from searching a database. Using a user-defined schedule, WebCollage updates images and uploads them to a Web server. For instance, StarNine has worked with Nasdaq to make a graphic template for creating dynamic graphics that display updating stock prices. WebCollage comes with extensive scripting support and is especially worth a look if placing CGIs on your Web server is difficult. Currently priced at $199, WebCollage minimally requires a 68020-based Mac, System 7.1, 2.5 MB RAM, and QuickTime. A 30-day evaluation copy is available as a 2.6 MB download from the StarNine Web site. StarNine Technologies — 800/525 – 2580 — 510/649-4949 — 510/548-0393 (fax) — <[email protected]> [TJE]

<http://www.starnine.com/webcollage/ webcollage.html>

My latest book, The Official AT&T WorldNet Web Discovery Guide (Osborne/McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0-07-882336-6, $24.99), should hit the shelves any day now. Despite the corporate-sounding title, it proved to be an interesting project. It felt like a second-generation Internet book for me, because a quarter of the book was devoted to helping readers learn how to search the Internet, and in another quarter of the book, I tried to show how I use the Internet in my everyday (non-computer) life. (Frankly, that portion of the book is heavily autobiographical.) Those two topics – searching and everyday usage – strike me as where the Internet is evolving in useful ways, as opposed to the over-hyped technologies being shoved down our throats.

<http://www.osborne.com/int/attdisc.htm>

Another interesting aspect of the project proved purely technical. This is an Internet book, not a Mac or a PC book, and the AT&T WorldNet CD-ROM that comes with the book contains Macintosh and Windows software. But (and this is a big but) AT&T WorldNet wanted the general Web screenshots to have the window dressing of Internet Explorer for Windows 95. Their book, their call, and I sat down to figure out the best solution to this problem.

PC Compatibility Card — My first attempt was an Apple PC Compatibility Card. They’re a bit pricey and I didn’t know anyone using one, so I was pleased when a friend from Apple offered to lend me one that he thought was a final prototype unit. I struggled through the installation sans full documentation and disks (luckily, all the software was downloadable from Apple’s FTP site), and after one major stupid move, made it work. My stupid move involved the PC Setup control panel complaining that it didn’t have enough memory to load properly. Thinking myself more clever than the average bear, I used Conflict Catcher to re-order PC Setup ahead of my other extensions and control panels. Dumb, very dumb. Since PC Setup then loaded before CD-ROM and Ethernet extensions, the PC Compatibility Card couldn’t see the CD-ROM or the network. It took me some days to figure that one out.

Overall, I was impressed with the PC Compatibility Card. Speed seemed good (speed was the main reason I hadn’t seriously considered SoftWindows, and this predates Virtual PC), and I loved the fact that it uses Mac files as PC hard drives. Want to boot from your E: drive, or maybe your L: drive instead of the standard C: drive? Just swap the files in the PC Setup control panel. Try that on a PC! I even got the network working (although Apple’s DOS software is confusing – not up to Apple standards in terms of interface and documentation, even under DOS).

There was only one problem. Windows crashed constantly, especially when I copied files. I tried everything I could think of, but my deadline loomed, so I reluctantly removed the card. I could assume only that I had a slightly defective or unfinished card, and I didn’t have time to buy and test another card in the event that Windows crashes continued.

The Pentium 150 — So, I decided that the safest move was to buy a PC clone. A store near here called Computer Stop builds machines from components for reasonable prices, and my Internet provider uses them for Linux boxes. From the Computer Stop, I ordered a Pentium 150 with 32 MB of RAM and a 2 GB disk. It cost about $2,300, which was a little less than a comparable Mac system, but not much less. I specifically got a 150 MHz Pentium, so I could claim (to people who didn’t know that I was comparing apples and oranges) that this PC was theoretically equivalent to my Power Mac 8500 running at 150 MHz.

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

After I brought it home and stuffed it into a tiny desk in the corner (I’m not worried about the ergonomics, as you’ll see in a moment), I managed to get the PC up and running, as well as onto my Ethernet network and the Internet. For the most part connecting it was easy, mainly because I’m good at configuring Macs for the Internet, so I know what all the numbers mean. Irritatingly enough, it seems that Windows 95 requires that you restart the PC if you change even the smallest network or video setting.

The first order of business after putting the PC on the Internet was to purchase and install Farallon’s Timbuktu Pro. I wasn’t about to jump back and forth between my Mac and this PC, and it’s easy to buy Timbuktu Pro online with a minimum of fuss. That enabled me to run the PC in a window on my second monitor and use my primary monitor for writing chapters in Nisus Writer. (I later converted these chapters to Word 6 via DataViz’s crash-prone but effective MacLink Plus translators, since Osborne had specific requirements that necessitated Word 6.) Luckily, I was using a Kensington TurboMouse trackball (the older two-button version, not the current four-button unit), so I could set the second button to emulate the PC’s right mouse button. Otherwise I would have had to use the Command key to trigger the second mouse button, which is awkward.

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

Once I’d slaved the PC to my Macintosh, I wanted to integrate it into my backup scheme. Crashes weren’t infrequent on this PC, considering how little I used it, and (no matter what) I wanted good backups of my screenshots. Even more confusing, this PC always tries to run ScanDisk after a crash, and it makes me crazy to answer ScanDisk’s questions about lost fragments that might or might not be part of files. If I’d been using the PC Compatibility Card, I would have saved all the screenshots to a folder on the Mac that I could have defined as something like the K: drive. Luckily, Dantz Development has a Windows 95 version of Retrospect Remote (now called Retrospect Client). A Macintosh-based Retrospect backup server can back up the PC, and the PC version looks and works almost the same as the Mac version.

<http://www.dantz.com/dantz_products/clients_4_ windows.html>

The PC was in daily use for a few weeks but only for a short while each day, so I wanted Retrospect to back it up whenever it was on. I added the PC to my Backup Server script, which we normally use only for our PowerBooks that appear on the network briefly, and that strategy worked well. The only drawback (other than the fact that Windows 95 seems to change all sorts of files for no reason at all) was that Retrospect on the Mac can’t handle filenames longer than 31 characters, whereas Windows 95 can have longer filenames. Retrospect 3.0 renames the files and tells you that it’s done so, which is nice, but quickly fills up the log file. This is fixed in the forthcoming Retrospect 4.0.

All Was Not Well — Then came my first nightmare problem. The PC started freezing shortly after boot. Sometimes it even rebooted itself! I did everything I thought might help: I re-seated SIMMs, shut off startup programs, reinstalled Windows 95… and I couldn’t trace the problem. Finally, a hunch told me it was related to the network, and indeed, the machine never crashed when it wasn’t connected to the network. I tried moving the 3Com PCI Ethernet card to a different slot – bad idea. Windows 95 wanted to reinstall the drivers for the card at that point, and I couldn’t find a disk with them, or rather, with the one file I didn’t have. Eventually, I managed to download the complete driver set from 3Com’s Web site via my Mac and get it to the PC, but overall, I was frustrated and unimpressed. Talk about plug and pray!

A switch in my head finally clicked, and I turned off Retrospect Remote. No crashes. Something had changed on the PC such that whenever my Backup Server script tried to back up the PC, the PC crashed. I uninstalled Retrospect Remote (it does that cleanly), then reinstalled it, and everything worked again.

Transferring Files — If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll remember I had my manuscript files on the Mac in (eventually) Word 6 format, while most of my screenshots were TIFF files on the PC. (I had a number of Mac screenshots as well, which I took with Snapz Pro and converted to TIFFs with the free clip2gif – see TidBITS-372.) How then to get them to my editor who has a PC and uses cc:Mail, which deals with attachments haphazardly?

<http://www.ambrosiasw.com/Products/ SnapzPro.html>

<http://iawww.epfl.ch/Staff/Yves.Piguet/clip2gif -home/>

I had almost no trouble sending Word 6 files to her via email (using uuencoding in Eudora Pro) and ironically, she commented that she had less trouble receiving files from me than most people. (Amusing, given I was using the Macintosh versions of Eudora Pro and Word 6, after converting the files from Nisus Writer.) Despite this luck, nothing I did from either the Mac or the PC would get a TIFF file through cc:Mail intact. So, I set up a password-protected folder on an internal email and FTP server, and sent my editor the full URL, with the username and password built in. She couldn’t use an FTP client because of a corporate firewall, but luckily Netscape Navigator was able to download the Zip files containing my screenshots.

When I had to move screenshots between the Mac and the PC, I used the Exchange feature in Timbuktu Pro. Unfortunately, drag & drop doesn’t work between the Mac and the PC (at least between the versions I used), and Timbuktu Pro under Windows 95 doesn’t support long filenames! I had named all my Mac screenshots with nine character filenames, so Timbuktu Pro deleted a character when I copied them to the PC. That drove me nuts.

Impressions — After working with the PC and Windows 95 for a few months (mostly using Internet Explorer and Internet Mail and Internet News, since those are the programs AT&T WorldNet now recommends for its users), I have to say that Windows 95 is usable. It’s not good, and I’m amazed by the interface atrocities it contains. But it is usable.

For instance, clicking the Start menu (which looks like all the other buttons on the Taskbar, despite being a menu) to get to the Shutdown command is so backwards it isn’t funny. Restarting the entire computer to make a small networking or video change is a pain in the posterior. You can minimize a window to an icon on the Taskbar or maximize it to take up the entire screen, but you can’t zoom the window to the "appropriate" size, as you can in most Mac applications. Perhaps it’s just my Mac habits, but I found moving and copying files confusing, because you use the left mouse button to move files and the right to copy them. At some point I needed to print all the screenshots in a chapter, so I selected them, right-clicked to bring up a pop-up menu, and chose Print. I figured they’d print in filename order, or in chronological order (which was the same as filename order). Instead, they printed in random order. I asked some Windows gurus about this, and the best suggestion was that Norton Utilities has a directory-sorting utility that might help. I opted instead to print each screenshot as I took it.

Will I use the PC on a daily basis? No, definitely not. I have not found anything I want to do on the PC that I can’t do just as well or better on my Mac. The PC feels clunkier and slower, even when I use it directly rather than via Timbuktu Pro. If I had a lot more time, I’d probably try playing with Linux, Windows NT, or OpenStep, but it’s not worth the effort for my interest level.

That said, I’m glad I have the machine. It’s best to know more of what you’re talking about when you criticize something. Although I’m unlikely to become a Windows expert, I can check claims made by Windows users to see if they’re blowing hot air. And, to be honest, from an economic standpoint I make much of my livelihood from writing about the Internet. There’s little difference between using a Web browser on a PC or on a Mac. If I limited myself to writing about the Internet from the point of view of the Macintosh, I’d have a harder time finding publishers, especially since the Mac book market is being swallowed in the same self-fulfilling prophecy that destroyed retail Macintosh software in computer stores. If, as a Mac user, I can ensure the Macintosh gets a fair representation in cross-platform books that sell well, that’s better than writing purely Macintosh books that few people read.

Watching the Web authoring field change is like watching a volcano-studded island. Sure, you get a few months of calm, but then a spurt of new product releases wreaks havoc on the landscape. TidBITS hasn’t reviewed many Web authoring programs lately, and it’s time to correct that lapse. In this multi-part series, I plan to discuss much of the Web authoring software that has come out recently, with a focus on products that I think are most notable.

Choose Your Poison — In choosing software for making Web pages, you generally trade easy layout for precise control, and most products fit neatly in a range between those two ideals. When choosing software, it’s important to match your requirements to that range.

Our Web site is a great example of one that leans toward precise control. Because our pages stick around for so long, we avoid newfangled techniques that look great in modern browsers but have a greater potential to break in the future. A Web authoring tool that creates HTML behind the scenes make us nervous, because we can’t control what it’s doing. Also, in our seven-year history, we’ve undergone two major conversions of back issues: HyperCard to setext, and then setext to HTML. This has taught us the value of uniform formatting – it’s easier to run macros on uniformly formatted documents. We also don’t have bosses breathing down our necks, so our site can evolve slowly.

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

In contrast, webmasters creating sites that must go up overnight or that will have short lives have neither time nor incentive to worry about perfect, uniform HTML. These people require quick, easy layout.

For instance, programs like NetObjects Fusion offers easy layout – page layout always occurs on a grid, and you can drag page elements to any location. The grid converts to an HTML table behind the scenes. You cannot edit HTML within Fusion, and you would not wish to – the table tags are extremely complex. (Although Fusion 2.0 ships with the free BBEdit Lite, BBEdit Lite is for use with "external pages," which cannot be edited in Fusion.) However, Fusion makes it easy to prototype and assemble a site rapidly.

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

<http://www.barebones.com/freeware.html>

Next come tools like Adobe PageMill. PageMill expects you to work in a view that works like a word processor – you can’t drag stuff around willy-nilly as you can in Fusion. There is an HTML view for editing HTML directly, but you get the impression Adobe doesn’t understand why you’d want to. The HTML from the likes of PageMill is usually human readable, though it tends to lack the uniformity required for automation.

<http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/pagemill/ main.html>

Finally, the spectrum ends with HTML editors like PageSpinner, where you work with HTML directly and see the visual results secondarily in a Web browser. Such an application makes it easy to create uniform, precise HTML, but you may have trouble visualizing what you are doing, and experimenting with layouts will be time consuming.

<http://www.algonet.se/~optima/pagespinner.html>

A program that spans the divide between easy layout and precise control is GoLive’s CyberStudio Pro. CyberStudio Pro gives you an optional grid for drag-it-anywhere layouts, and it also provides quick access to the underlying HTML of any page.

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

Of course, there are other criteria for choosing Web authoring software, like whether you want to learn HTML, whether you tend to include a lot of plug-ins, whether you require site management features, and so on. Whatever your requirements, the rest of this installment will fill you in on PageSpinner 2.0.1 from Optima Systems and glance at cascading style sheets, a cool HTML specification.

A Great Value — At $25, PageSpinner represents one of the best shareware values I’ve seen. At first glance, PageSpinner is deceptively simple. After launching, it displays a new document, populated by the HTML skeleton of a Web page. A simple toolbar holds basic options for tagging for the likes of bold text and horizontal rules, and a quick tour of the menus shows commands for styling text, setting up a table, and so on. A new user might read the fairly good Apple Guide-based description of how HTML works, and then plunge in using these immediately obvious options. Alert users will quickly identify modern features like an FTP upload (via a link to Fetch or Anarchie, though no download or integrated on-server editing), forms, and frames.

Options Galore — PageSpinner’s preferences offer a startling level of flexibility. For instance, if you don’t want to see a new document when you start up, you can instead show an Open dialog, show a New dialog (which has extensive page setup features), or do nothing. Another notable setting is whether the bold and italic toolbar buttons set bold and italic tags, or strong and emphasis tags. In PageSpinner you can set whether Return or Command-Return automatically inserts a paragraph tag (you can use paragraph end-tags also, if you like). PageSpinner also has sensible keyboard shortcuts for inserting line breaks and horizontal rules.

Those who frequently work with upper-ASCII characters will love how PageSpinner treats these characters. One option keeps them in the document as they are typed on the Mac. Another converts them to the ISO 8859-1 character set, often used internationally. Save a file in either of these two formats, and the characters will look the same after the save. Finally, upper-ASCII characters can be converted to HTML entities, which, though correct, are awkward to read within an HTML document.

Another option that speaks to PageSpinner’s flexibility is the User Tags feature, which enables users to create up to 18 tags of their own.

Just Kitting — What makes PageSpinner a great value isn’t its basic feature set, or even its flexibility. PageSpinner is less a program and more an HTML Assembly Kit – much like a Young Scientists’ Chemistry Kit, with helpful instructions and easy projects for creating your very own quivering goo. It also has advanced projects, and those require exploration to find.

PageSpinner provides an HTML Assistant (accessed via a menu or you can just keep its window open), which has plenty of in-context help and gives working examples that you can paste into a document. Examples range from basic HTML (such as setting up links or headers) to advanced topics like JavaScript and frames. I’ve found the Assistant a great way to refresh my memory, and also a helpful stepping stone to learning new tags.

PageSpinner uses extensions (these work like plug-in modules, not system extensions) to add new features, and those who want to venture past the basic feature set will note an extension (plus help) for creating cascading style sheets (technically known as Cascading Style Sheets, Level 1, or CSS1). In its full implementation, CSS1 can flexibly specify fonts, sizes, position, blank space, colors, and more. Most measurements can be set specifically or generally (for instance, a font size could be 18 point or "extra large"). CSS1 is partially supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer and – in theory – will be robustly supported in Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Communicator 4.

<http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/REC-CSS1>

Style sheets have two compelling features. First, they work much like style sheets in a word processor – to change the look of every heading in a document, you change it once in the style sheet, not 50 times in the document. Style sheets can apply to a page section, an entire page, or even an entire site. Second, they separate structure from style, so pages can have simple HTML but still display in visually oriented glory in CSS1-savvy browsers (and, yes, at least in current examples and the spec, you can turn off style sheets in CSS1-savvy browsers, if you wish).

Other PageSpinner extensions help with creating JavaScripts, inserting Java applets, and handling Netscapisms like snaking columns and spacer tags.

PageSpinner unfolds further if you examine the files that come with it. I found directions for setting up "include" files (these are not server-side includes). An include file acts as a container for information referenced from within an HTML file. For example, if a group of Web pages all end with the same content, you could put that content in an include file. Then, on the Web pages, you’d simply add a pointer to the include file. Should you wish to change the content, you change only the include file and then update the entire group of pages, a much faster process than modifying each page by hand. Includes can also quickly update the time or date.

There’s also a collection of sample AppleScripts that link PageSpinner to other applications. For example, one script turns the contents of a Eudora mailbox into a sensibly organized Web page (this works best for smaller mailboxes). More generally, sample scripts show how to create Web pages from FileMaker Pro, HyperCard, and 4D Server. I generally shy away from scripting; however, when exploring PageSpinner, I easily created my first JavaScript and modified the AppleScript that turns Eudora mailboxes into Web pages. I feel as though PageSpinner helped me wedge open a heavy door.

Team Player — As icing on the cake of PageSpinner’s you-can-do-it attitude, PageSpinner is a team player. For example, PageSpinner doesn’t come with a spelling checker, but you can link its Check Spelling command to any clipboard-based spelling checker. More impressively, PageSpinner comes with a hierarchical Web Tools menu, loaded with commands that you configure to match popular non-commercial utilities that ably supplement PageSpinner’s feature set.

But What About…? PageSpinner has a few problems that need fixing: drag & drop for words isn’t smart about inserting an extra space to accommodate a dropped-in word, the Find and Replace feature can’t search on "whole word only," (so a search for "test" also finds "testing"), and there are a few references to an Alt key in the dialog boxes. Perhaps my main criticism of PageSpinner is that its documentation is scattered among numerous documents – there’s no uniform way to access the information.

In terms of price, PageSpinner’s closest competitor is the shareware HTML Web Weaver Lite, from Miracle Software, which costs $25 ($15 educational). HTML Web Weaver Lite feels rougher than PageSpinner in overall use and lacks key features like tables, frames, and forms. You might also compare PageSpinner to the freeware BBEdit Lite 4.0.1 from Bare Bones Software, which – when supplemented with appropriate BBEdit extensions – is a serviceable HTML editor with a price that can’t be beat.

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

<http://www.barebones.com/freeware.html>

Feature-wise, PageSpinner compares most directly to BBEdit 4.0.4 and Miracle Software’s commercial World Wide Web Weaver 2.1 (W4). Next week, we’ll check out W4 in more detail (especially its cool auto-preview feature) and note some of BBEdit’s key HTML features. (For a full review of BBEdit, see TidBITS-365.)