Reviews @ Applelust

MacLinkPlus 13 For OS X

Reviewer: Pierre Igot
Date: August 19, 2001
Price: $99.95 / $39.95 upgrade (including versions that came free with Mac OS 7.5, 8.0 and 8.1)
Requirements: Any Macintosh running Mac OS X, or Mac OS 8.1 or higher.
Company: DataViz Software
Product Web Site: http://www.dataviz.com/products/maclinkplus/index.html
Contact: 203-268-0030, ext. 3075
Rating: Four and a half out of Five bites of the Apple

Free Your Files… And Your Mac Will Follow

It’s a tough life being a Mac user in a Windows-dominated computing world. No matter how much computer savvy you have, you are bound, sooner or later, to be faced with a situation such as this: a friend wants to share some file with you, but he has a PC and you have a Mac; somebody emails you a “.exe” file even though your “@mac.com” email address indicates quite clearly where your computer allegiance lies; a fellow worker sends you a WordPerfect file asking you to proof-read it, as if every computer user on earth was a WordPerfect for Windows user; a fellow Mac user sends you a Mac file, but it has a generic icon because of the Mac-hostile servers it has travelled through, and you are not quite sure what to do with it.

These are just some of the possible scenarios that you will inevitably find yourself in sooner or later if your computing activities include any amount of file transferring or file sharing — and, let’s face it, in this Age of the Internet, this includes pretty much everyone.

Some of those situations you might be able to solve by spending a certain amount of time training yourself on how things work on the Windows side of things, and by learning how to use various freeware tools designed to ease the pain of Mac users in a Windows world. But those tools will not help you with the more complex cases, such as how to open and edit a WordPerfect for Windows file with your Microsoft Word 98 for the Mac application — or, conversely, how to send one of your Word 98 files to a WordPerfect for Windows user.

Of course, Microsoft does pretend that they can help, but I humbly suggest you don’t waste too much time trying to use Office’s built-in “file translation” features. In my experience, they are buggy, and, even when they do work, the results are far from satisfactory. After all, you need to remember that it’s not in Microsoft’s best interests to help WordPerfect users continue to use WordPerfect, instead of forcing them to switch to MS Office just because of peer pressure.

It is, however, very much in DataViz’s best interests that people continue to use a great variety of only marginally compatible software applications. This is because DataViz is the company that has been providing us Mac users with the tool to deal with “foreign” files for over 15 years — and has become quite expert at helping us out.

MLPD New Icon While DataViz has been diversifying in more recent years (especially with its Palm software), MacLinkPlus is still the main software for which it is known to most Mac users. In fact, it used to be that you would even get a fully operational copy of the software when you bought a retail version of the Mac OS software. (This is no longer the case. You need to purchase MacLinkPlus Deluxe to have access to the functionality. However, DataViz does offer the $39.95 upgrade price to those users who own such a copy of MacLinkPlus, which is commendable.)

With MacLinkPlus Deluxe 13, DataViz takes the jump to Mac OS X, by releasing the first “Carbonized” version of their multi-million-unit selling software for the Macintosh. The company should be congratulated for doing so on such a timely basis, when others are still dragging their feet as if OS X were only a passing fad.

Installing the Software

MacLinkPlus Deluxe 13 still uses an installer, rather than the more and more common disk image procedure used by Mac OS X software providers. I am not sure why. However, users familiar with MindVision’s ubiquitous file installer interface should have no problems using the MacLinkPlus installer, which is pretty much identical to previous versions, except for its Aqua appearance.

The only major annoyance I found with this installer is that it still — inexplicably — requires that you quit all other running applications before installing the software. This used to be understandable when MacLinkPlus Deluxe was relying on system software extensions, under the classic Mac OS. However, the Mac OS X architecture is drastically different and, as we’ll soon see in greater detail, MacLinkPlus Deluxe is nothing more than a regular application.

MacLinkPlus Deluxe 13 installed

The installer doesn’t actually require that you restart once the installation is complete, so basically you end up having to relaunch all the applications that were open when you launched the installer. This requirement to “Quit All” is a minor annoyance, since it will only affect you once (when installing the software), but it’s still a bit strange, and one hopes that future versions will no longer require such a step.

Familiar Interface

The interface of the MacLinkPlus Deluxe application itself hasn’t changed much, except for its Aqua appearance. All the familiar elements are still there, including the main window where you may drag-and-drop files to be “translated” (or simply recognized or previewed without opening), and the “Translate” dialog with its default settings for file translation.

MacLinkPlus Deluxe's Interface

I was a bit disappointed to see that DataViz hasn’t made any effort to streamline the interface even more. Indeed, while it is pretty straight-forward as it is, in my experience, some people still get confused about a few things, especially the “Destination” setting (which defines where the translated files will be stored). MacLinkPlus Deluxe has a default destination setting, which, in version 13, is now a folder called “Translations” inside the “Documents” folder inside your user folder. (In previous versions, it used to be a folder called “Results” inside the MacLinkPlus Deluxe application folder.) The problem is that people tend not to know that they should change this default setting itself (in the “Preferences...” dialog), and they end up changing the destination in the main application window instead, where the change is only temporary and only “sticks” until you quit the application. (It then reverses to the default setting the next time you fire up the application.)

I suspect DataViz is aware of this, since they include a “Save Settings” button in the main application window, which in effect does the same as changing the setting in “Preferences.” But this still isn’t as straightforward as it could and should be. A better approach in my opinion would be to ask the user to set their default destination for translated files the very first time they start the application.

I was hoping that DataViz would seize the opportunity, with this new upgrade, to make such changes, but it looks as if they have focused most of their efforts on carbonizing the existing application, which is understandable at this stage.

Slightly Inferior Performance

The preview version of MacLinkPlus Deluxe still runs fine under Classic in OS X, so I thought it would be particularly interesting to compare the performance of MacLinkPlus Deluxe 12 under Classic with the performance of MacLinkPlus Deluxe 13 under Carbon.

In my (rather informal) tests, the performance of MacLinkPlus Deluxe 13 appears to be not as good as that of MacLinkPlus Deluxe 12 under Classic (which is on par with the performance of MacLinkPlus Deluxe 12 running under OS 9). Translating a moderately large WordPerfect file into an RTF document takes a few more seconds in OS X than it does in OS 9/Classic.

Unless you often have to translate very big files, however, you are unlikely to be very much affected by this relative “hit” in performance. Most files only take a few seconds to translate anyway. And MacLinkPlus Deluxe has been able to run as a background application for a long time, so you shouldn’t hesitate to switch to something else if the process takes a bit of time.

As well, it is quite possible that the performance hit is due to OS X itself, which is a bit of a slouch at present. We will see how things improve with the 10.1 release in September.

Even More File Formats

With each new version of MacLinkPlus Deluxe, DataViz has always made an effort to update its file format palette so as to support newer formats. Version 13 is no exception, with added support for formats such as files created by Microsoft Word and Excel 2001 for the Mac (the Word 2001 file format is different from Word 98, regardless of what Microsoft says) and Word and Excel 2002 for Windows, also known as the components of the Office XP suite of applications. (Version 12 added support for AppleWorks 6, Lotus 1-2-3 Millennium, WordPerfect 9, and Quattro Pro 9, as well as all the formats recognized by QuickTime.)

In my personal experience (working mostly with text files, often in WordPerfect for Windows format), MacLinkPlus Deluxe’s file translation output is far superior to what’s offered by Microsoft Word. It is not perfect and using file translation will always require a certain amount of document cleaning-up and fine-tuning, but the compatibility provided by MacLinkPlus Deluxe is invaluable.

If you are using Microsoft Word 2001, however, I recommend that you do not use the “Microsoft Word 2001” file format provided by MacLinkPlus, and instead opt for the “Rich Text Format for Mac” (RTF for Mac) setting when translating files coming from the PC side (this format preserves most of the formatting and tables, including styles, etc.). In my experience, word processor files converted to the Microsoft Word 2001 file format using MacLinkPlus can cause application freezes when opened in Word 2001. Given the respective track records of Microsoft and DataViz in bugs affecting their software, I am very inclined to blame Microsoft Word 2001 for this (I had no such problems with Word 98). Regardless, if you experience such freezes, you might want to try the RTF format instead of the Word 2001 format.

Mac to the Rescue

On several occasions, I have been able to help out Windows-using colleagues, thanks to MacLinkPlus Deluxe. You see, while file extensions might seem to be a pretty straightforward thing, there are still quite a few Windows user out there who don’t realize what they are for and who change the names of their files not realizing that it renders them unrecognizable. I have seen (and received), for example, WordPerfect files named something like “Letter.001”. Send a file named like this to another Windows user and he will have no idea what to do with it.

With MacLinkPlus Deluxe, however, no matter what the file is called, the application will analyze and recognize its contents, and it will therefore be able to “guess” what program it was created with. It will then offer to “fix” its creator/type information and you can use the application to “translate” the file into a format — with an appropriate file name — that you are sure your Windows correspondent will be able to use. I have thus had several opportunities to come to the rescue of two Windows users who were unable to share files with each other — all thanks to my Mac and my copy of MacLinkPlus Deluxe!

If Apple persists in imposing file extensions on Mac OS X users (and there are currently signs that they will), then maybe there will be a significant market opportunity for DataViz to design a tool that will help solve the problems that file extensions can generate.

Lost Functionality in Mac OS X

Unfortunately for those who liked the great flexibility provided by MacLinkPlus Deluxe, it should be noted that, due to current limitations in Mac OS X itself, DataViz is unable to provide support for alternative ways to access MacLinkPlus Deluxe’s functionality.

As indicated in the ReadMe file included with the software, “Mac OS X does not currently support Mac OS Easy Open or File Exchange, the technology in previous versions of the Mac OS that allowed Finder-level translations. Because of this, MacLinkPlus translators cannot be used in conjunction with a drag-and-drop to a Document Converter or an application or a double-click on a document for which you do not have a corresponding application.”

Similarly, OS X currently doesn’t support third-party contextual menus in the Finder. It is impossible, therefore, to control-click on a file and access MacLinkPlus Deluxe’s functionality that way.

The only way to translate files with MacLinkPlus Deluxe is to use the MacLinkPlus application. This is an unfortunate inconvenience for those who liked the other approaches, but DataViz can hardly be blamed for OS X’s limitation.

Conclusion

Apart from very minor interface quibbles, it’s hard to find anything at fault in MacLinkPlus Deluxe. As the version number indicates, this is a very mature application, and the fact that it has been optimized for Mac OS X is a clear indication that DataViz intends to continue to play a leading role when it comes to helping computer users share files with each other.

Rating: Four and a half out of Five bites of the Apple