Kibbles & Bytes Blog

Way back when, the go-to word processor for me was ClarisWorks. In grade school I mastered its simple interface. I was able to make pamphlets and donation sheets for scouting bike-a-thons, keep team statistics for my youth hockey team in a spreadsheet and type out all of my homework. In a time before America Online, these would all print out of an original StyleWriter. Over the years I’ve transferred this time capsule of my childhood from double-density floppies, to high-density floppies, to zip disks, to jaz disks, to burned CDs, to external hard drives, and one day I finally consolidated all of it and emailed it all to myself using Gmail for relative perpetuity.

Eventually, ClarisWorks became AppleWorks when Apple bought Claris. AppleWorks functions under Snow Leopard but not under Lion, so if you upgrade you’ll need to give it up. However, the documents all remain accessible in Pages under Lion. I’m not really sad that AppleWorks is dead, unlike so many customers who’ve written in with similar nostalgia or, sometimes, panic; I’m just glad the documents are all still viable. There are way too many of them, but one of these days I expect they’ll all need to be converted to PDF, or whatever format seems to have the longest expected lifespan in a few years or so.

Things are similarly simple for those of us who used early Microsoft Office programs. Office 2011 will effortlessly open these ancient files, but don’t expect them to look perfect (not that the old Apple and ClarisWorks files always come out perfectly either).

What digital data do you value, and hope to access far into the future? What safeguards do you have to ensure its safety? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

One of the toughest things a technician has to do is tell customers that their hard drive has failed and recovering the data will likely cost thousands of dollars. A Small Dog customer brought in her 24-inch iMac earlier this month because it would not start up. It was on the bench and diagnosed as a failed hard drive a few hours later, and we contacted her with a few options: replace the hard drive under warranty and return the failed drive to Apple, or send the drive to DriveSavers for professional recovery.

DriveSavers is widely acknowledged as the most capable and best-equipped data recovery firm in the world, and our customer was happy to receive an external hard drive with 100% of her data mere days after sending in the toasted one. She was not happy about the bill, though, which was more than the cost of her computer!

We spoke at length on the phone about how all hard drives eventually fail and how she needs to have a backup system in place. She clearly understood what I was saying, and I made it clear that our conversation was not really about sales but about her protection. No backup drive was purchased.

Three weeks later, the warranty hard drive replacement has failed again. She didn’t back it up and has lost three weeks of work and simply cannot afford the pricey recovery again.

David Lerner, an owner of the preeminent New York City Apple Specialist and repair shop Tekserve, has in his email signature __”May you have 1,000 backups and never need one.”__ It’s a mantra we all should take seriously.

This is just one more sad story about 100% preventable data loss. Do yourself a favor and get a Time Capsule or an external drive, or even email important documents to yourself or stash them on your iDisk. A Time Capsule is much cheaper than a $2200 data recovery!

Lion is full of new features and interface improvements. Snow Leopard was, by Apple’s own admission, an evolutionary update meant to fine-tune existing technologies more than reinvent, or even invent. Lion is more about reinvention and the ongoing move to make Mac OS more like iOS. Here are three of the many advances.

I’m a huge fan of Spotlight, and Tech Tails #683 includes some advanced Spotlight features. These features remain, but Spotlight improves the search experience by showing a preview to the left of the highlighted item in the results menu. Go ahead and search for a JPG photo, and hover your mouse over a result. You’ll see a preview of the image. Pretty nifty. This works for many file formats.

Finder is due for a complete re-think if you ask me. It’s remained largely the same since the original Macintosh, with evolutionary changes along the way. I don’t have the answers, but this slick new feature lets you select a group of files and place them all in a new folder. Simply locate a folder with items that should be consolidated, and highlight them by command-clicking on each item. Alternatively, you can select a group of files that appear consecutively in a window, click on the top item and then shift-click on the last item. With your items highlighted, two-finger tap on your trackpad (or right-click with your mouse) and select “New Folder with Selection.”

Full-screen app viewing is a welcome reprieve from the visual clutter we’ve gradually had to accept. It’s like an extension of Safari Reader that works with any program that supports Lion’s full-screen mode. These programs live in their own Space once you put them in full screen mode, so you can just swipe your trackpad left or right with three fingers. The visual effect is just like Safari’s new back and forward animation, and its visual simplicity is appreciated. Even better, it works very smoothly on an entry-level 2009 MacBook, so even somewhat older hardware will support it in a satisfying way without jerkiness. If you happen to notice jerkiness in the animation, look into upgrading your RAM for immediate improvement system wide.