EXCLUSIVES

The Mac OS X Conversion Kit: 9 to 10 Side by Side
Words by Ric Getter
March 2004

Enterprise-wide conversions to OS X are getting more common. Fortunately, there's an ingenious new book that can help OS 9 users make sense of OS X.

With its unique design and layout, The Mac OS X Conversion Kit: 9 to 10 Side by Side by Scott Kelby will get just about anyone familiar with the original Mac OS, in a position to be productive in almost no time. With lots of full-color screen shots and friendly white-space, the book lays out each operation on facing pages_OS 9 is on the left; X on the right. Need to change printers? Page 132 shows the operation with the traditional Chooser. Page 133 explains the pull-down menu in the Print dialog. Both pages provide an appropriate screen shot and a clear explanation. The following page pairs show how to add and share printers.

Even when there's no one-to-one correlation of features between 9 and X, Kelby offers something of a workaround. He laments the lack of color-coded labels in X, but as an alternative he shows how a Comments column can be added to the List view of a folder.

The bulk of this 271 page book is comprised of a side-by-side, function-by-function reference. The last three chapters ("Don't Freak Out," "20 Cool Little Things you Couldn't Do in Mac OS 9", and "20 Little Things Apple Changed Just to Mess with Your Head") are fairly brief, but offer some very useful guidance for getting comfortable with OS X. They are well worth a look after you figured out how to change your printer and connect to your server (and have gotten used to the author's whimsical chapter names).

If you're making the jump from 9 to X, Conversion Kit is a great place to look after you leap. If you're in IT and about to make the change on an enterprise level, you may want to look into case-lot pricing. In my years of reading computer books, I've never seen one with the side-by-side approach taken by Conversion Kit. It's such a simple idea and so totally obvious and effective as a solution. I find myself asking, "Why didn't I think of that?" Luckily for a lot of people, Scott Kelby did; and I'm quite certain that this won't be the last time you see a book like this.

The Mac OS X Conversion Kit: 9 to 10 Side by Side by Scott Kelby, Peachpit Press (www.peachpit.com), 271 pp, $29.99, ISBN 0-7357-1354-5

The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time by Douglas Adams
Review by Chris Mace
March 2004

British author Douglas Adams is well known as the creator of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, but perhaps less known for his Mac® obsession, though he wrote about it quite often. (Once, his PowerBook® having died, he mused that it was a funny notion to name something after its most major shortcoming and that the PowerBook was like Greenland in that respect.)

After Adams' death, a close friend decided to see what could be salvaged from the army of Macs that Adams had owned and found about 2,500 items on several hard drives, including 11 chapters of a third Dirk Gently novel, published here as The Salmon of Doubt, along with selected writings including interviews, essays on science and technology, letters, articles on the genius of Bach, power adapters, the letter Y, Macs, atheism, and a lament about having to wear shorts as a tall youth.

The first two Gently books, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, are spoof detective novels and the third continues in that vein. It's delightfully funny, very English, and characteristic of Adams to have nearly every sentence be a punch line or in the service of setting one up.

One evening Gently summons the courage to read his bank statement and finds that someone has been wiring money into his account. He feels that whoever has hired him knows his unconventional ways and so he begins sleuthing after someone at random to begin work on the job as yet unspecified.

Eventually his case takes him to Los Angeles, through the nasal membrane of a rhino and to a future dominated by real estate agents, as Adams explained in a fax to his editor, while "the emergent properties of complex systems form the background to his baffling and incomprehensible case."

This is a generous read, and Gently makes great company. Fans will want to pick this up, and it's a good introduction to a great writer. It's just too bad the book had to end when it did.

(Published in paperback 2003)
Pan Macmillann: £6.99
www.panmacmillan.com