MacEdition Pro News : January 24, 2003 Up, up and away!
by MacEdition Staff (feedback)
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Grab ’n’ go!
Those who live life on the run or find themselves in places with limited Net access will find there’s another tool on the market that lets you whack copies of your favorite sites and pack them away for viewing later.
Max Programming released Web Dumper, a US$14.90 shareware utility which can copy over entire Web sites at the tap of a trackpad.
With Web Dumper you can download entire Web sites off of the Internet, and save them on your hard drive for later offline browsing. Downloaded Web sites are saved on your hard drive with their directory structure intact. Web Dumper automatically downloads HTML documents along with their embedded pictures, sounds, movies and so on while it screens them to look for any enclosed links to other documents.
Web Dumper lets you select which kinds of file you want to be dumped between more than 60 available standard types, the folder depth level, how links must be processed and if it must re-link your HTML documents for offline browsing.
Interested parties can grab Web Dumper in either an OS X or Classic variety from the Max Programming site.
First class has its perks
Hey, if you’re hopping across the pond, you may not need to whack a stack of sites to get your online fix.
British Airways is working feverishly on stringing 15,000 feet of Cat-5 cable through one of its Boeing 747-400 aircraft in order to pick up a satellite-feed Internet relay that will allow its first-class and business-class travelers to hook up to a pipe that the airline says is 10 times quicker than your standard 56K connection.
“Not only can passengers surf the Internet while on board but they can send and receive real-time emails and access their corporate networks,” said Martin George, director of marketing for British Airways. “With our research showing that 75 percent of business travelers take laptops on board with them and most of those who carry laptops are interested in having Internet access during a flight, we are confident that the trial will be a success.”
The three-month trial run of the BA service is scheduled to take off Feb. 18. The trial will be conducted on the airline’s London-to-New York service. Anybody going should grab a copy of LimeWire ’cause I don’t think you can break any copyright laws in international airspace.
Extra baggage: no fee
Those lucky enough to make the trans-Atlantic hop might also want to pack one of Western Digital’s newer, bigger, better hard drives.
The venerable hard drive manufacturer began shipping a new series of drives built upon its new 80GB-per-platter technology. The upshot of this is that buyers now get more storage in drives the same physical size as the smaller mechanisms currently in machines.
The new 7200RPM drives ship in sizes from 80GB to 250GB. Western Digital will have a second family of drives out on the market next month which will feature an 8MB cache and an industry-leading three-year warranty.
A glowing ’Pod
No, it’s not some weird take on a prop from a science-fiction movie. It’s a case for your iPod that glows in the dark.
ackNowledge released the glowing case in seven new colors. The design is based upon a non-glowing iSkin model the company had out earlier.
Made of 100 percent durable high-grade silicone, the iSkin iPod Protector offers unmatched protection against scratches and dirt caused by everyday handling. Its unique anti-slip grip helps to prevent users from accidentally dropping their iPods, making it one of the most practical yet appealing cases available.
The case has the benefit of being vented to allow for heat dissipation, has little rubber feet that come in handy when using the device in disk mode, and is washable. The iSkin sells for US$24.99 and can be bought online or through a variety of dealers around the world.
Drivin’ faster
Few things in life are more irritating than waiting around for some pokey printer to spit out your precious hard copy.
In that vein, Helios Software has released a set of printer drivers for OS X that put some pop in that plodding output device.
Integrated within the Mac OS X Print Center, the new Helios TCP/IP driver supports Service Location Protocol (SLP) browsing, enabling the easy selection of printers via the TCP/SLP Chooser list or by IP name/address. It also automates PPD (PostScript Printer Description) installation from the Helios print spooler.
Helios TCP/IP printing offers some great advantages over printing via AppleTalk:
- Print from local or remote TCP/IP networks without AppleTalk support
- Faster printing by using TCP/IP instead of AppleTalk PAP (great performance improvement using 100-Mbit and faster networks)
- Enables secure remote printing
The drivers work in conjunction with Helios’ print spooler software, which is part of its workflow management family of software.
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