CompuNotes Notes from The Cutting Edge of Personal Computing September 29, 1997 Issue 101 +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= To subscribe, send an e-mail to listserv@peach.ease.lsoft.com SUBSCRIBE COMPUNOTES-L FirstName LastName To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to listserv@peach.ease.lsoft.com SIGNOFF COMPUNOTES-L +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= CONTENTS My Notes: 1=> Our Other Mailing Lists, mailto:pgrote@i1.net 2=> This Issue's Winner! News: 3-> News of the Week, mailto:pgrote@i1.net Columns: 4=> Apple, The Same All Over?, Chris Ward-Johnson, mailto:chriswj@mostxlnt.co.uk Interviews: 5=> Interview with Tim O'Reilly, mailto:pgrote@i1.net Reviews: 6=> Product: Parsons' Membership Plus Deluxe 4.0 CD-ROM Reviewed By: Will Thompson, mailto:eb53112@goodnet.com 7=> Product: Photoshop 4.0 Reviewed By: Doug Reed, mailto:dr2web@sprynet.com 8=> Product: Quarterdeck WebCompass Reviewed By: Paul Baker, mailto:pbaker@facstaff.wisc.edu 9=> Product: Scripting Languages: Automating the Web World Wide Web Journal Vol 2. No.2 Reviewed By: Doug Reed, mailto:dr2web@sprynet.com --- BEGIN ISSUE 1=> Our Other Mailing Lists, mailto:pgrote@i1.net CompuNotes runs two other mailing lists you may enjoy! Clickables! sends you the latest on what is new on the web, while MCSE helps you pass your MCSE training and certification. CLICKABLES on LISTSERVER@compunotes.com - New, Excellent Web Sites Clickables is a new list distributed twice weekly with a listing of new web sites on the web. Each message you receive will be formatted for maximum surfing. The sites are broken out into topics such as Education, Computers, Chat, etc. You read a small blurb about each site so you can tell if it is something you want to click on. Hence, our name, Clickables. Clickables is a one way, moderated list. All you get is the highest quality information! We award two CLICKABLE AWARDS each week to the site we deem the most CLICKABLE! Start surfing the web for the best sites available! To subscribe, send e mail to LISTSERVER@compunotes.com with the following in the BODY of the message: SUBSCRIBE CLICKABLES Owner: Doug Reed, dr2web@sprynet.com MCSE on LISTSERVER@COMPUNOTES.COM MCSE Certification MCSE Certification is an open, unmoderated mailing for discussion, support and reference for those interested in obtaining their Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer certifications. The list owner is active on the list and provides a monthly FAQ as well as weekly notes. There will be a digest version. The info:noise ratio is very high as users who continually abuse the list are removed. To subscribe, send the following command in the BODY of mail to LISTSERVER@COMPUNOTES.COM SUBSCRIBE MCSE For example: SUBCRIBE MCSE Owner: Patrick Grote pgrote@i1.net 2=> Winner! This week's winner: ken@CARIBSURF.COM. 3=> News and Game Bits, mailto:pgrote@i1.net or mailto:dr2web@sprynet.com PG: Can't find enough IT Workers . . . Hmmm . . . PG: Oh, just wait for next week and my story -- Persona NonGrata on the Internet . . . http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/7258.html PG: Finally, someone who agrees with me about all this super racing to upgrade everything . . . PG: Want to hurl your computer out the window? Here is your chance? PG: CompUSA, "Hey we failed once. Let's try it again!" -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-TAKE A MOMENT TO READ ME -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= "Double Your Productivity!" FREE 10 page report that shows you how to leverage small changes in procedures into major growth in your business or personal life. This report is sent automatically to all new subscribers to VBNews. VBNews is a free weekly business newsletter written for the results oriented businessperson. Software reviews, networking tips, and feature articles about every phase of business. From people who've been there. No theory. No bizopps. And no trouble finding the articles between the ads. To get this powerful report - Subscribe Today! Send any e-mail to - mailto:double@just-business.com -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-TAKE A MOMENT TO READ ME -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= 4=> Apple, The Same All Over?, Chris Ward-Johnson, mailto:chriswj@mostxlnt.co.uk We are happy to introduce a new columnist to CompuNotes, Chris Ward-Johnson. Chris will be bringing an across the pond look at things to us! The following is his first column! The news over this side of the Atlantic is often the same as it is over there. This week it should have been 'Is Apple nuts or what?' and the answer's not 'what' here any more than it is over there. But Apple UK appears to have been on holiday for the past couple of weeks. Do they want to tell the British press what they think of Steve Jobs taking over as CEO in all but the job title? Were they as flabbergasted as us at the clawing-back of the Newton subsidiary when they'd even had the letterhead printed? Or did they just want to send us several copies of the press release about the new 350Mhz Macs and the UMAX OS licensing deal, carefully omitting to mention the word 'Motorola' at any and every point? You guessed it. Motorola themselves, however, are suddenly voluble on the point. Samer Roumier, Motorola's Vice President and Director of Commercial Operations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (he has a business card the size of an envelope) laid into them fiercely as he revealed that his company is to stop making and selling its Starmax Mac clones by the end of this year. There'll be no new machines, he says, not even the ones which they demonstrated at the recent MacWorld conference in Boston. No CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) machines, they won't ship any machines with OS8 loaded, only 7.6, and there'll definitely be no CHRP laptop – the machine which would have been the first ever Mac laptop made by another company. He wouldn't put a specific figure on how much Motorola has lost from the decision by Apple not to license OS8 to them and not to ratify any CHRP machines, but he did say that Motorola worldwide will take a $95 million charge because of the decision in its next annual report. "We are very disappointed because in June we reached an agreement in principle (with Apple) and they have changed their strategy on using OS8 on CHRP machines," he said. "We are very disappointed for this (the Macintosh) market too, we feel we've added value (and that) a very dull market has become more exciting. We were about to launch products that were really outstanding." He made no bones about his anger, and it was apparent that he believes Apple has only done it because they couldn't face the competition. Does he, I asked, blame Steve Jobs? After all, everything was hunky-dory until he came back. "There have been changes in the management of Apple," he said. "The CEO left, there is a new board, there have been a lot of changes. I can't attribute (what's happened) to one specific person, (Apple has) simply changed its mind." This week has been dinner with the ABM (Anyone But Microsoft') Club of IBM, Sun, Oracle and Netscape at one of London's finer eating establishments, l'Escargot (French for snail, the one item missing from the menu of haute cuisine). Of course, they all insist - probably correctly - that Microsoft wouldn't come along if they did invite them, but then would you walk into a room where six highly educated individuals were rubbing their hands at the thought of spending the next three hours trashing you, your company and your very way of life - and then ask you to pay half the bill? Actually these companies, or at least their London representatives, are extremely pleasant and you couldn't wish for finer, more intelligent company if you want to, as they described it, 'Kick the tyres of the future'. Java may or may not become the COBOL of the 21st Century, we agreed, but it's definitely the glue which is joining together yesterday's legacy applications and data to tomorrow's whizz-bang interfaces. People like the Swiss bank who are still running their business on a 27-year-old mainframe, but who want their staff to be able to access it via a web browser on new thin-client NC-ish machines. I say NC-ish because if you want to do anything sensible with one of these devices, our consensus was, you need huge wedges of RAM. Well, we journalists thought so anyway, the ABM think that something nearer 16MB rather than the 64MB we were plumping for. AOL and CompuServe make the news, if only for the opportunity it gives the UK ISPs to trash their pricing structures all over again - the tradition here is to pay a flat-rate 'all-you-can-eat' monthly fee with users limiting their on-line time because we have to pay at least 1p (1.6 cents) per minute for our phone calls. And, the Microsoft Network's Laura Jennings told us, they'd thought of buying CompuServe themselves back at Easter but, while "Microsoft is always looking for smart business opportunities that are in line with our overall business strategies, we tend to focus on companies that can bring a combination of great development talent and great technologies at the right price. After investigating this opportunity in the early stages, we made a strategic business decision to invest our resources internally." As if this 'You're not good enough for us' barb wasn't sufficient, Jennings also took a side-swipe at AOL, saying, "Like CompuServe, (MSN) appreciates our members' desire for privacy, non-intrusive third-party offers, and reliable access." Chris Ward is a British Computer and Information Technology journalist who writes for The Times (http://www.the-times.co.uk). Not, he insists, The London Times. "Ours is the original one - let the others distinguish themselves by pre-pending their city names to their titles," he says. He produces two weekly columns for it; Dr Keyboard for the paper's IT section Interface dealing with all readers' computer-related problems, and a second advising the readers of the paper's Secretarial section on how to get the best from their office computers. He also covers a wide range of IT topics for the paper, including watching Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and The Internet, mobile computing and telephony, IT education, computer security, piracy and more. From this week he'll be contributing a weekly column to CompuNotes on his view of the IT world from his side of the Atlantic - how it looks the same but different, how it looks different but the same, how the Brits pronounce schedule without a 'k' in it. You can reach him at chrisw@mostxlnt.co.uk. 5=> Interview with Tim O'Reilly, mailto:pgrote@i1.net If you use computers in a professional, technical capacity the name O'Reilly should mean something to you! The O'Reilly series of books such as Windows NT in a Nutshell and Windows 95 Annoyances are just some of the new creations from O'Reilly Publishing. Their standard fare has long been the very usable, very appropriate technical books they write. Never will you find so much applicable information from one source than in an O'Reilly book. We decided to interview the man behind the name, Tim O'Reilly, and see what makes the company hum. CN: Give us a brief history of how you came to publish the best technical books? SO: This is explained at www.oreilly.com/oreilly/tim.html, so I'd rather not repeat it here. Feel free to quote from it. CN: Where do you source ideas for books? SO: Historically, we've just written about tools that we use that seem important but that have been poorly documented. This was easy with UNIX--you could throw a stone in any direction and find a great program that was widely used but that had little or no documentation. A really good example was how we happened to be first with a book on the Internet. We'd been using UUCP, and when we switched to TCP/IP, we said: "Cool. Looks like all this stuff has never been written down." By that time we were big enough that we didn't write all our own books, so we started looking for someone who had already done some writing, found Ed Krol's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet, asked him if he wanted to write a book...and the rest is history. Now that some of the areas we cover are more mainstream, there are more publishers chasing the same topics. We generally try to avoid "marketware" and make sure that people are really using the software that we write about. But even when enthusiasm runs ahead of adoption, as happened with Java, honesty will get you far. David Flanagan, who'd worked with us on our X books, was interested in Java, but felt it was too early to write a hands-on Java book. He noted that nobody really had the experience to write the kind of "from the trenches" book O'Reilly is best known for. But he thought a quick reference would be really useful. Java in a Nutshell started out just as an annotated set of function signatures and other class info...but then David added a fast paced overview, and a phenomenal success was born...the book that many programmers feel is the only Java book they need. In the process, David also made us realize that the In a Nutshell line had real possibilities. UNIX in a Nutshell had been a bestseller for years, but when Java in a Nutshell also shot to the top of the lists, we realized that the computer market was changing. An increasing number of users have years of experience under their belts. A much faster paced treatment is appropriate... We also get a lot of ideas from readers. That's how we got onto Perl back in 1990 before it became the huge phenomenon it is today. Our big focus is not on trying to find what's hot so much as it is trying to create books that will be really useful. So that often gets us in early, and in deep with a community of users, who then help us figure out what kind of information they really need. } } 3) What are some of your best selling books and why? } Currently Java in a Nutshell and Programming Perl are at the very top of our list. Actually, all the In a Nutshell books are very strong (UNIX in a Nutshell has been on bestseller lists for five years now, Java in a Nutshell for nearly two. NT in a Nutshell is just out, but is blowing off the shelves.) This is related, I think, to the overall change in the computer book market I adverted to above. The Perl books are strong because Perl really is "the duct tape of the Internet" (Hassan Schroeder). Programming Perl, Learning Perl, Advanced Perl Programming, Mastering Regular Expressions are all incredibly successful, and advance orders for our upcoming Perl Resource Kit are huge. See the Perl white paper I wrote recently (on ) for more on why we think perl is one of the most important technologies around. But even beyond these two areas, there is still incredible strength in our UNIX line--books like Learning the Vi Editor, Sed & Awk, Essential System Administration, DNS & Bind, Sendmail, and many others just keep on selling in astonishing numbers. The second edition of UNIX Power Tools (just released) had back orders as high as just about any book we've ever released. Our web books--from HTML: The Definitive Guide and JavaScript: The Definitive Guide to Web Client Programming with Perl and CGI Programming on the World Wide Web are also really strong. And our new NT and Win95 books are really doing well too. The new Annoyances series is phenomenal (Windows Annoyances and Word Annoyances are both on bestseller lists already.) So I guess I can say we're strong across the board. We're having a great year--proof that focus on real needs can cut through the clutter even when there's a lot of over-publishing going on. CN: Where did the inspiration for the art work on your covers come from? SO: The credit belongs to Edie Freedman, our creative director. When we published our first books, we had one cover--a brown paper cover with the image of a nut on it (you see it still in the Nutshell Handbook logo). But by the time we got up to seven books, we realized that people couldn't tell the books apart from a distance. We hired a freelance graphic designer to do covers for us. She came up with something typically geometric and high tech. We had a company meeting on a Friday afternoon (we were about fifteen people at the time) to discuss the covers, which ended when I said that I felt that they just didn't fit our image, which was more down to earth. We decided we'd just have to start over. One of our writers, Linda Lamb (who now heads our medical book publishing operation) took the problem home to her housemate, who was a graphic designer at Digital. Edie thought that the UNIX programs had strange names...they reminded her of strange beasts... Linda came in on Monday with Edie's ideas. At first, they seemed like a real risk. But we put them up on the wall, and the more we looked at them, the more we liked them. Edie of course has now worked for us for about ten years, and has gone on designing all our great covers. There was a recent Wall Street Journal article on this whole topic...Sara can give you the URL. It was very nicely done. (Since the WSJ is subscriber only we have put this up on our website at ) CN: O'Reilly's is more than a book publisher. What is the history behind your web server software? SO: Well, we've always thought of our core business as solving information problems rather than publishing books. (This is kind of like the old saw: if railroads had realized they were in the transportation business, they'd be airlines today.) So when we created GNN, which was the first real commercial website, we found that internet access was a real problem. People wanted to use GNN and the web it gave them access to, but they couldn't figure out how to get there -and a software package, rather than a book, was the easiest way to get there. We created Internet in a Box via a joint venture with Spry. It was the first commercial internet access package. Anyway, that gave us some experience with developing software, so the next time we saw a gaping hole in the market, we decided to tackle it ourselves. Basically, the problem we saw once Netscape took off was that 85% of the people using the web were doing so on Windows--without access to a web server. That meant that the web was fast becoming the world's largest read-only groupware system--a contradiction in terms. We realized that if the future of the web was on Windows, there needed to be a low-cost web server on that platform. Bob Denny had this great freeware http server for Windows. We got together with him to create WebSite...and with it, the whole web server market on win32 platforms. Microsoft was a big booster at first, till they realized they wanted the market for themselves... CN: With the popularity of NT and IIS why would someone choose your web server product? SO: There are several reasons. First of all, WebSite is simply a better server. It supports more options for developers, has better documentation, is easier to set up and use, and is powerful enough for any site that NT itself can handle. While IIS is nominally free, the real cost of setting up a server is measured in time and sweat. Second, WebSite runs on Win95. This is incredibly important. Both Netscape and Microsoft are so focused on the big dollars of the enterprise that they overlook some of the fundamental dynamics that will eventually make the web as ubiquitous as e-mail or desktop computers. When we originally created WebSite, we used the slogan "Everyone who has a web browser ought to have a web server" and we still feel that way. The whole focus on web sites aimed at millions of potential users misses a major point of the web--the original vision of Tim Berners-Lee, in which people would be able to share documents with each other. As Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft once pointed out, there are millions of documents created every day for only a few readers, but only a few that will have millions of readers. Yet everyone's strategy overlooks the millions of documents aimed at small audiences. In that sense, we feel the market is still catching up to our vision. CN: Do you hold any hope for commercial success of electronic publication of books? SO: Absolutely. Our recent release of Java In a Nutshell deluxe edition and WebMaster in a Nutshell deluxe edition (each of which bundles a CD/Web version of five additional books on-line) has been extremely well received. These collections are selling like hotcakes at $70 apiece. Having a tangible packaged product as a carrier for an on-line product is still important at this stage, until pure on-line consumers (to use a line from Ted Leonsis of AOL) "get in the habit of reaching for their wallets." So yes, we expect this to be an increasingly important part of our business. CN: Describe your computer setup . . . SO: I assume you mean me personally. I use a Sun workstation. I still do most of my text editing with vi (or sed and awk :-), and use mush for my e-mail. When I'm on the road, I use a win95 laptop, but I have MKS toolkit so I still have access to my UNIX tools. } } CN: With success comes rewards and perks. What is your favorite reward or perk? SO: Boy, that's a hard one. There are so many things I like. Probably the best one is that I can invest in people and ideas. I've launched a travel book publishing company (with my brother), and have added consumer health books to my core business. I've also spun off a number of other companies (such as LikeMinds, which is in the collaborative filtering space.) And in my core business, there continue to be great opportunities for people to learn and grow. It's really wonderful to have a company that creates a good living for people doing work that they enjoy. CN: Where do you see the internet going in the next five years? SO: I think it will become even more ubiquitous. Probably the most important direction is what I'm now calling "infoware" -- the trend towards using information products as interfaces to business processes or decision-support applications. A web site like Amazon, or UPS package tracking, is really the front edge of a whole new industry that will be layered on top of the software industry like software is layered on top of the computer hardware industry. That's probably a bigger topic than I can get into now. I need to write a white paper on this. I've done a number of talks, but haven't written it all out. 6=> Product: Parsons' Membership Plus Deluxe 4.0 CD-ROM Reviewed By: Will Thompson, mailto:eb53112@goodnet.com Reviewed on: Pentium 90, 32 MB RAM, Windows 95 Requires: 386, 8 MB RAM, Windows 3.x, CD-ROM, Mouse MSRP: $129 (plus $5 shipping) "Membership Plus" is described as a "trusted, reliable and affordable church management software with [a] financial accounting package" and it is. Considering that there are really five programs on the CD-ROM that seamlessly integrate into a total membership management program and it becomes very affordable. Only time would tell for "trusted [and] reliable" but it never gave me a problem, and I worked at trying to cause problems. Parsons' may be limiting their market by describing it as "church" management software as it would easily adapt to any organization that tracks members, meetings, finances, and addresses. With 20 customizable data fields and over 200 pre-defined and custom reports, it could be used by a bowling league, baseball team, country club, or parent-teacher group as well. The first bonus you get with Parsons' "Membership Plus 4.0 " is "MoneyCounts 9.0", a "Quicken" look-alike bookkeeping program (Not surprising as Parsons' and Quicken are both owned by Intuit). Pop the CD-ROM into your drive and Windows95 automatically starts the install program and the other bonuses show up, Parsons' "Address Book 4.0", their "Interest Vision SE", and the Borland Database Engine Configuration Utility. These programs can be installed in Windows 95, 3.x or NT, just click on your choices and follow the on-screen instructions. This is very handy as the included manuals only have "Install from Disk" procedures and don't mention the CD-ROM at all, their only downfall. I just let Windows95 install everything in the default directories which was quick and painless. A last bonus on the CD-ROM is the multimedia tutorial, which requires a soundcard and speakers. A Windows 3.11 install was almost as easy with a few more mouse clicks to get it going, still very easy. While it is possible to run everything on a '386 with only 8 meg of RAM, it is very slow. I'd recommend a Pentium with 16 megs of RAM as a practical minimum, especially when you have the three main programs running at once. The Borland Database Engine (BDE) Configuration Utility is used once to import from other Windows programs such as "dBase for Windows", "Excel", "Quattro Pro for Windows" or any other format using a standard dBase IV file format. It then runs in the background to connect the database files from each program and to export data to any other similar data format program. The hardest part of these programs is data input so this ability to import is very useful and easy to do. Otherwise, data entry is a lot of typing, tedious at best, so I just imported from a churches existing database and was running smoothly in no time. Once set-up, "Membership Plus" is easy to use with it's "type once, entered in all programs" interface. With all its' custom fields, you can enter anything you want to keep track of for each member, even scanned photos. The amount of reports you can create is staggering and only limited by what you search for, assuming you have the data field set. The context-sensitive help and "wizards" assist you in creating reports, setting up groups, mail merge and even printing a pictorial directory for your members. Want to know how many single men over thirty-five attend your Tuesday night Bible Study more than ten times over the past eight months? How about women in the Friday bowling league with averages over 200, have two children in the nursery and have improved ten points? No problem, start a "wizard", input your criteria and click OK, you've got it. The hardest thing about "Membership Plus" is deciding what you want to track and how to print it! However it does provide simplified filters for basic to advanced reports to aid you. With all its' features, perhaps the best way to get a feel for this program is to download the "Membership Plus for Windows Demo" available from Parsons at http://www.parsonstech.com/infocentral. This 5.4 meg file will give you a an idea of how it works and integrates with "MoneyCounts" and "AddressBook" These add-in programs deserve a full review themselves so I'll only say they work seamlessly with "Membership Plus". Many of their program are available on-line so it's worth a visit. A handful of "freebies", changed often, are also there and you can sign up for their catalog. I did and have gotten it with a $10 discount coupon. As Parsons is a mail order outlet, the List Price is the street price so use your coupon. Another way to save is to use the "Download Zone" on their website. No shipping charges, usually $5.00, you can use the $10.00 coupon and you get the software immediately. Their site uses "the latest encryption technology" for credit card and order information safety for peace of mind. All Parsons software is covered by a 30 day "satisfaction guarantee" so if you don't like it, send it back for a full refund. I'm not sure how this would work with downloaded software but I'm sure it wouldn't be a problem. I contacted Parsons via e-mail for technical support and received a prompt reply to my imaginary problem. I didn't have any problems so I made one up to test them. A test of the 800 order line showed the sales staff to be courteous, knowledgeable of all products, and helpful in ordering. You can't lose with any Parsons product so I recommend checking out any software that may fit your needs. "Membership Plus" is going to the church I used for this review and they are looking forward to using it. Parsons Technology, Inc. Installation/Ease of Use: Gold User-Friendliness: Silver Quality: Gold User: All 7=> Product: Photoshop 4.0 Reviewed By: Doug Reed, mailto:dr2web@sprynet.com Requirements: Windows, 386, 16MB RAM, VGA, CDROM, 25 MB HD space Recommended: Windows 95, Pentium, 32 MB RAM, 24-bit color MSRP: $895 Most everyone remembers the old Porsche ads where they proclaimed "Porsche - there is no substitute". Adobe's Photoshop is the Porsche of graphics programs; once you've tried it you will be very reluctant to go back and use something else. Photoshop has long been known as the graphic artist's tool of choice for computer designed graphics. The explosion in popularity of the World Wide Web has created a huge market for small, fast-loading but good looking graphics. Lynda Weinmann, in her book , lists Photoshop as her choice for a graphics tool for creating graphics for the web. In reference to the rather high cost of Photoshop, Weinmann makes the comment - "Just bite the bullet...you won't regret it". She's right. Installation is a snap; put it in the drive and go. Adobe states that Photoshop 4.0 will run on a 386 with 16 MB of RAM running Windows 3.1, but then recommends that for realistic graphics work you should at least have a Pentium running Windows 95. I can't say how well Photoshop runs under Windows 3.1 but can say that it ran flawlessly under Windows 95 despite heavy usage on my part. With all of my web design work on both my own home page and the CompuNotes website, Photoshop has become the most-used application on my computer. What amazes me is how quickly and easily Photoshop is able to create great looking graphics. Anyone with any passing familiarity with graphics programs will immediately notice a lot of things about Photoshop that are familiar, and a few things that are not. The workspace consists of a gray background with both a toolbar and a number of tool menus (also called rollups) on the left and right sides of the screen, respectively. Adobe includes a tutorial both in the Photoshop manual and on a separate CD; if you are new to Photoshop I highly recommend that you use both before attempting to strike out on your own. Layers are the key to creating great looking graphics with Photoshop; while the use of layers is hardly unique to Photoshop, the implementation and manipulation of layers is substantially improved over any other graphics program I've seen (including Corel Draw, Picture Publisher, and Paintshop Pro). Copying a portion of one image to another is incredible easy -simply draw a mask around the area you want to copy and then drag it to the new image; Photoshop creates a new layer in the new image and plops the copied portion into it. Using a variety of sliders and menus, you can quickly make adjustments to the opacity of the layer, the color, or even apply special effects like Gaussian Blur. If you look at the new logo on the CompuNotes web site, that was designed with Photoshop and took all of ten minutes to create. Simply stunning! Another reason for the great popularity of Photoshop is the wide availability of a number of "plug-ins" from third-party vendors. There are a huge number of these available and add all kinds of functions that aren't included with Photoshop. Most of these consist of special effects type manipulations, such as creating a drop shadow. If you can dream of a way to manipulate an image, odds are that somebody has created a Photoshop plug-in for it. Adobe includes the "Alien Skin" plug-in on the Photoshop CD, which contains the ability to quickly create drop shadows. For those of us who design for the web, Photoshop includes support for JPEG, GIF, and PNG images, although it is quite as intuitive or easy as it might seem to use. You cannot directly save an image as a GIF, for example, you must export it. Similarly, if you don't flatten an image (remove the layers) before saving a JPEG image, the result will be unviewable in the average web browser. It took me a fair amount of time to figure that last bit out; no where in the documentation in the manual, the help files, or even on Adobe's website does it mention this little "trick". Similarly, while the manual and help system give lots of tips for reducing the size of JPEG images, there is very little information about how to reduce the size of a GIF image. This became critical to me when I was creating a new CompuNotes banner for LinkExchange; the file size can be no greater than 7 KB but the new banner was 8 KB. Nothing I tried seemed to work; in most cases, in fact, it seemed to increase the file size. Through perseverance, I was finally able to reduce the size of the image without noticeably altering the image. Given the increasing numbers of people who are using Photoshop for web graphics, Adobe should considering revamping their manual and related on-line documentation to help Photoshop "newbies" create small, viewable web graphics. But this is a relatively minor problem, and relates nothing to the performance of the software itself, which is superb. If you are new to Photoshop, I would highly recommend that you go out and buy a book on using Photoshop. The manual and tutorials go a great ways towards teaching you how to use Photoshop, but they expose you to only a very small portion of the ways to actually manipulate images and tricks that can be done. For example, the back of the Photoshop box shows a really slick image of a skyscraper with fish from an aquarium plastered onto the walls of the building. The plastered image of the fish even followed the contours of the building! I wondered how they had managed to create that image; while reading one of Lynda Weinmann's other books, Deconstructing Web Graphics, I came across how to do that (you have to "multiply" the layers together). Photoshop is definitely the Porsche of graphics software; swift and easy to use, but loaded with incredible power for creating incredible looking graphics. I give it top honors in all categories, because Photoshop deserves it. For graphic artists and web designers, Photoshop is more than worthy of consideration; if you can possibly afford it you should definitely get it. If you'd like to test drive it, a demo is available on Adobe's web site (http://www.adobe.com) which contains all the features of the registered version but doesn't allow you to save your work. If you'd like to see a small sample of what it can do, check out our website at ! Adobe, Inc. Installation: Gold Ease of Use: Gold Quality: Gold User: Web Designers & Graphic Artists 8=> Product: Quarterdeck WebCompass Reviewed By: Paul Baker, mailto:pbaker@facstaff.wisc.edu Reviewed on: 486 SX-33, 16 MB RAM, 2X CD-ROM MSRP: $49.95 Quarterdeck, maker of CleanSweep, ProComm Plus, and Fix-It, also offers an automated Web search engine and reference tool: WebCompass. If you spend a lot of time doing research on the Web, WebCompass is worthy of your attention. WebCompass searches multiple search resources simultaneously (for example, Yahoo, HotBot, and AltaVista). Its searches include not only the Web but also FTP sites, Gopher sites, and intranets. You can use it to search when you first create a topic, or you can schedule it to search automatically. OK, I hear you thinking, with all the good search engines out there already, why the need for Web Compass? - No two search engines have the same database, so you get different search results depending on the engine you use. - Despite your best efforts, most searches turn up tons of irrelevant information - During its searches, WebCompass generates summaries and keywords for each document it finds that matches your search criteria. This gives you greater control over the information: You can either go through the hit list as is, or organize the documents into your own personal database. To use WebCompass, dial your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and establish the connection (if you have a dial-up connection). If you have a Local Area Network Connection and are using use Windows 95 or NT 4.0 or greater, just double-click the WebCompass icon in the Windows desktop. When the Welcome screen displays, you create a new search topic. The New Topic Wizard asks you to type in a descriptive name for the topic and to select an appropriate search resource category (for example genealogy). Then add any additional query terms you wish, to help WebCompass zero in on the documents you want to find. Other ways to create topics in WebCompass are by using the Quick Topics toolbar and by using the Create Related Topic command. WebCompass begins searching for the Web topics you created. The search takes a few minutes, depending on the speed of your Internet connection and the number of search resources used. (I'm using a modem and AOL as my gateway to the Web, and the process works fairly quickly for me.) When the WebCompass "Agent" searches, the toolbar displays what is happening, for example, "Agent is currently doing 7 tasks--Searching Yahoo for Genealogy.'" If you have something else to do for a few minutes, just configure WebCompass and send it to work. To create advanced queries, type an equals sign ( = ) before a query term. This tells WebCompass to pass the term to the search resource (AltaVista or whatever) without modification, allowing the creation of advanced query terms that take advantage of specific search resources. For example, the following query would work well on AltaVista: ="major league baseball" +Dodgers+ "National League" -Angels. When the search is complete, you see a list containing a brief description of each document and a list of keywords it has found. The "Relevance" column on the Document List pane shows the document's relevance to its topic from 1 to 100, reflecting the document's similarity to other documents in which you have shown interest. (For many of the searches I've conducted, the highest relevancy rankings have been in the 30% to 40% range. Perhaps giving the Agent more time to search would result in some documents with higher rankings.) WebCompass constantly adjusts its relevance ranking to reflect your interest in a particular document. So, what do you do with all this information you've found? First, You can use your Web browser to view the "hit list" of the documents, or any individual document, that WebCompass retrieves. Just click the name of the topic you wish to view, select View URL/Topic in Browser, and your browser displays a listing of the topic. This list includes the topic name, the number of documents, date it was created and by whom, the URL, a summary, the relevance ranking, and the number of images and hypertext links it contains. At this point you can organize the documents by creating related topics that act as sub-folders. Related topics share keywords and phrases that WebCompass extracts from its analysis of each document. When you organize a topic, WebCompass automatically moves the documents that fit under each new related topic. (Documents that don't fit under any of the new related topics remain under the parent topic.) For example, my "genealogy" search produced many documents about "pedigrees" which I organized into a subcategory. As it turns out, most of the "pedigree" URLs listed related to animal pedigrees, which was irrelevant to my interest, so I deleted that subcategory from my database. My search results for genealogy were as follows: 325 Documents about 'genealogy' 94 Documents about 'pedigree' 43 Documents about 'family' To find topics and documents in a WebCompass database you've created, open the database and enter the term you wish to find. If you find a topic you want to activate, just drag and drop it to activate it. You can print documents from a topic in a list that includes the document title and URL. Saving a Web Compass topic in HTML format from within your Web browser produces an HTML document that you can view in any Web browser, and can transport via sneakerware from your home machine to office machine, for example. The "Follow Links" feature helps you find other documents relevant to your topic. If you tell WebCompass to Follow Links on a page of bookmarks appropriate to your topic, it will begin searching those sites and adding many relevant documents to the topic. You may want to add your own comments about a document. WebCompass lets you write notes or reminders to yourself, or comments about some part of the document. WebCompass comes prefigured with several popular search resources, but you can configure WebCompass to use any search resource you like. Do you hate banner ads? You can turn them off when you perform a search! WebCompass omits the banners by default, but you can turn them back on if you REALLY want to see them. The software comes on a CD-ROM; if you lack a CD-ROM drive, Quarterdeck will send you 3.5" diskettes. The 84-page user guide is well written and well organized. Minimum system requirements: IBM or compatible 486 with 8 MB RAM Windows 95 or Windows NT Six MB hard disk space 32-bit Web browser 32-bit Winsock for Windows 95 or NT Internet connection Quarterdeck Corp. 9=> Product: Scripting Languages: Automating the Web World Wide Web Journal Vol 2. No.2 Reviewed By: Doug Reed, mailto:dr2web@sprynet.com MSRP: $29.95 US/$42.95 CAN (single issue) Once upon a time, a very short time ago, the Internet was a sparsely populated realm that consisted mostly of academics who exchanged e-mail and occasionally downloaded a file via FTP or searched for information with a gopher. Along came Tim Berners-Lee, who brought us the World Wide Web, HTML, and the Web Browser. This all occurred about five minutes ago :^) To oversee the development of the web, a standards approving body was formed called the World Wide Web Consortium (also known as W3c). When ever you hear of HTML 2.0, or HTML 3.2, it was the W3c that was responsible for creating and producing the recommendation that details those standards. As a means of communicating both with other members of the W3c as well as the Web designing community, the W3c created the World Wide Web Journal, a quarterly publication (actually published by O'Reilly & Associates). The WWW Journal is intended as both a look at new technologies and an indication of the direction that the W3c (and consequently, the Web) is going. This latest issue of the World Wide Web Journal, published by O'Reilly, covers the various methods by which developers are bringing "automation" and interactivity to web sites. Scripting languages have actually been in use on the web for quite some time, primarily in the form of Perl (which is still the dominant scripting language). Anytime you've submitted a form, or built and sent a greeting card, it has probably been through the use of Perl and the Common Gateway Interface (also known as CGI). Featured in this issue of the Journal is not only an interview with Larry Wall & Tom Christiansen, lead Perl developers (Larry is the creator of Perl) but also four technical papers on using Perl and CGI. However, both Microsoft's and Netscape's scripting languages (VBScript and JavaScript, respectively) are also featured in technical papers. In general, the issue presents a fairly balanced opinion of the various scripting languages, since the W3c itself has not committed to one particular language. The layout of the book resembles that of the W3c's own website (http://www.w3.org). The book begins with an editorial by Rohit Khare, editor of the WWW journal, who talks about both the intent of this issue (to present these languages to the community) as well as the W3c's stance on adopting a single scripting language. The W3c will not choose a single scripting language, but instead has decided to focus on how these scripts are embedded into the HTML documents that are viewed on the web. In this manner, the W3c can both embrace the use of a scripting language to create an interactive web site while also embracing diversity. After Khare's little spiel comes the interview with Larry Wall and Tom Christiansen. The interview is both humorous and serious; Larry and Tom present a light-hearted view of why Perl has been so successful on the web and the challenges it faces in not only JavaScript and VBScript, but also Java. After the interview with Larry and Tom, the book presents two "Works in Progress", initiative under investigation by the W3c. Phillip Hoschka describes his desire and goal to bring real-time multimedia to the web, while Jim Whitehead discusses the Webdav group's attempt to create collaborative authoring for the Web. For those of you who don't know (I didn't), collaborative authoring means that when you and a co-worker independently modify a page the changes made by both are combined. The next section of the book includes three reports on different topics related to automating the web. First up, Dave Raggett discusses how to embed a client-side script into a HTML document. The second report, written by Vincent Quint and Irene Vatton, present the W3c's own web browser, Amaya, which serves as an experimental platform for examining client-server issues. The final report is written by Phillip Hoschka, and goes into more depth concerning the issue of real-time multimedia on the web. The final section of the book is the technical papers, a series of presentations about the use of scripting languages on the web. The first paper covers VBScript, Microsoft's entry, while the second paper covers JavaScript (Netscape's entry). The paper on VBScript is more useful, since it includes a discussion of not only the client-side of scripting but also a discussion of how to use VBScript as a server-side language (both VBScript and JavaScript, like Perl, can be used server-side, but client-side is more common). The third paper takes a look at Python, another server-side scripting language, while the fourth presents yet another language, Curl. The fifth paper, written by Lincoln Stein, a Perl guru of some note, talks about the use of the CGI.pm module to create CGI scripts with Perl. This is followed by Ron Petrusha's discussion of Win-CGI, the primary means of doing CGI programming in Windows, and why it is still a viable alternative in the increasingly diverse area of scripting on the web. This article presents an excellent discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of server- and client-side scripting (including issues like server load!), as well as the various languages involved. The next paper covers the issue of designing web robots with Perl. Finally, the last two papers deal with creating gateways (CGI) and using scripting languages to access or modify databases on the web. My first impression of this information was that it was somewhat dated - after all, JavaScript was first introduced in 1995 and VBScript in 1996, and I am very familiar with JavaScript. However, the information on Perl was brand new (never mind that Perl came about a long time before JavaScript or VBScript!). As with any book in which individual chapters are written by different authors, the pace of the book is uneven and disjointed, with some chapters indispensable and others forgettable. Nevertheless, this issue of the WWW Journal is indispensable for providing the Web designing community with a fair and unbiased look at all of the ways one can create an interactive website. O'Reilly and Associates 103 Morris Street, Suite A Sebastopol, CA 95472 1-800-998-9938 http://www.ora.com Installation/Ease of Use: Gold User-Friendliness: Gold Quality: Gold Audience: Web Page Designers from novice to expert +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= Managing Editor: Patrick Grote -- mailto:pgrote@i1.net Assistant Editor: Writer Liaison: Doug Reed-- mailto:dr2web@sprynet.com Archives: ftp://ftp.uu.net/published/compunotes/ Website: e-mail: mailto:notes@compunotes.com fax: (314) 909-1662 voice: (314) 909-1662 +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= CompuNotes is: Available weekly via e-mail and on-line. We cover the PC computing world with comprehensive reviews, news, hot web sites, great columns and interviews. We also give away one software package a week to a lucky winner for just reading our fine publication! Never dull, sometimes tardy, we are here to bring you the computing world the way it is! Please tell every on-line friend about us! CompuNotes B440 1315 Woodgate Drive St. Louis, MO 63122 notes@compunotes.com (C)1997 Patrick Grote +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= END OF ISSUE