PrintToPDF v2.1

is available for download. PrintToPDF makes PDF documents without the expensive Adobe Acrobat. [This utility by James W. Walker is well worth the $20 shareware fee.--Bill]

-- Holiday Weekend, September 2-4 --

[4:45p 9/3] Canceled Pro Keyboard Order Too Soon? Stephen Giles replied that he wasn't canceling his order because "I can live without the eject key for four months [and] I am more looking forward to having a forward delete key and three more function keys, not to mention bigger arrow keys." He wrote again and pointed out a claim on a MacCentral forum that using the "HID Library" extension from a G4 Cube allowed use of the new Apple Pro keyboard's volume and eject keys with his older Power Mac G4 Sawtooth. If that works, which I hope to confirm Tuesday, I wonder on which other Macs the HID Library switch works. This also raises the question as to why Apple couldn't simply provide the newer HID Library as a download after doing some appropriate testing. Surely that would be sooner than "early in 2001". [Update: This MacCentral forum contribution suggests all that is needed is the USB Device Extension 1.4.4.]

[4:00p 9/2] Canceled Apple Pro Keyboard Order: This morning I received an email from The Apple Store offering to cancel my order for 2 of the new keyboards. I had ordered them along with 2 new optical mice for use on my Power Mac G4/400(S) and B&W G3 despite knowing that there was no Power key as Macs Only! was the very first to publish. I had hoped that the new Eject key would function as a Power key with older Macs. However, when I got my G4 Cube three weeks ago I confirmed (there were lots of conflicting reports) that the key did nothing on older Macs, published the empirical observation and resolved to cancel my keyboard order.

The Apple Store email states that four keys do nothing on older Macs, the two Volume keys, the Mute key and, of course, the Eject key and this will not be resolved until early in 2001. Perhaps this means that the four keys will work with older Macs under the final version of Mac OS X or a future revision of Mac OS 9. The Apple Store provided a choice of canceling or continuing the order. Early 2001 is too long to wait for a fix so I canceled.