Webster's Macintosh Translators Page

OK, I have my own ideas about non-Macs and their quality of life. But suddenly I am online and faced with documents from that foreign environment, where it seems everything is a text file distinguished by suffixes like .zip, .uue and all that. For anyone getting bored already, let me say now that I found a translator for .AVI to Quicktime movies, (which you can ask me for if the preceding ftp link doesn't work) since I never did find an FTP site but got it from a newsgroup. For anyone still looking for solutions for the usual translation problems, read on.

As it turns out, lots of Mac files are also just text, but we have a file signature that identifies the type and creator of each file. This is used to determine what the icon will be as well as what will be willing to try to open it. Raw files imported from the other side of the net (or off a DOS CD) arrive as type: TEXT and need to be changed according to the actual file type, as determined by the suffix. If, however, you find yourself needing to do this very often, you probably need to fix your file mapping preferences in your downloading software.

  • Quick Info (freeware, 14k, 384k Ram req'd) is a really nice green button on my desktop that opens the signature for editing. I drop a "good" file first to determine the correct creator and type, and then stacks of others to be changed to match. GIF and JPEG files can be changed so they'll be appropriately recognised, and Midi files can now be opened by Movie Player (w/QT Instruments) and saved (after accessing the "options" dialog, or you will get a text movie) as a no-picture music movie of maybe 5k per minute playing time. Alt.binaries.sounds.midi newsgroup is a great place to find those files.

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The rest of these goodies reside in their respective folders, with original packaging (docs, readmes and whatnot) nested inside my "helpers" folder in my "Internet" folder somewhere on my disk. An alias to the actual application lives in a different "helpers" folder and "Internet" folder in my Apple Menu Items.

We are all netsurfing Macintosh folks here now, right? Next step is open up Stickies or any other text editor, type a character, a return, and a character. Now, select and copy (or cut) the return character, leaving the other two characters untouched, and go back to the "Internet" folder in your Apple Menu Items, which you left closed on the desktop, and click on the name of the folder and twitch your mouse so it will highlight right away. Hit the left arrow, or click before the word Internet in the name box, and paste in that return character. Yikes! The name disappeared! Paste in another one for good measure. Now click somewhere else, so the name comes back. Great! Now this is an item that will always float mysteriously to the very top of your Apple menu. If this was all amazing stuff, get MacWorld Mac & Power Mac Secrets, 2nd Edition (David Pogue and Joseph Schorr.) Just the CD is worth the price.

  • uuUndo (freeware, 45k, 250k [to 350k] Ram req'd) is my favorite for handling .uue files.
  • I like UnZip (freeware, 216k, 600k Ram req'd) better than any other freeware I've found for dealing with the .zip compression popular in the clone world.
  • For viewing GIFs and JPEGs I particularly like JPEGView. It's postcardware, 756k, 800k Ram req'd but I seem to have mine set to 5000k for opening really big files or copying them to the clipboard or something. It has a really nice slide show option, and has a zoombox and drag box (lower right corner) I didn't discover for far too long. In the case of 'corrupted' files, it complains and warns the user of an impending crash, which almost never happens.
  • Sparkle Fat is, at 1.4M, aptly named but it plays MPEG movies and is free. I haven't used it much. It needs less than 2M Ram to run.

If there's anything else that should be here, please tell me! Note, however, that there is no way I could ever produce the kind of resource that's provided by Adam Engst's monumental Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh. Now out in the Third Edition (and online, no less!), this one book is the source of everything one needs to get a mac hooked up to the net, and his FTP site is always the best. (I did once have other sources for most of the software on this page, but they disappeared. Most of these links now go to ISKM's archives.)

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Last revised:
June 18, 1996
 RSVP Any and all feedback is encouraged and will be answered! mslavin@shore.intercom.net
This page's URL is http://www.intercom.net/user/mslavin/Foreign_Translators.html
mslavin@shore.intercom.net (Michael Slavin, AKA MBSWebster@aol.com)
This page is copyright ©1995 Michael Slavin, and is not affiliated with any entity other than the author, who assumes sole responsibility and credit for this page. Nonprofit groups are welcome to use any part of these pages if full credit is given. All others will need to contact me. No profit has been made from any of these opinions, which are solely my own. Publication, product, and company names may be registered trademarks of their companies. Any comments, complaints, or suggestions should be directed to myself.
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