Odds and Ends: Address Book International Fax Numbers

"I just downloaded and installed iCal from the Apple Site onto my iBook with OS X 10.2 and lots of RAM. When I tried to launch it. It crashed. I tried several times with the same result. I restarted my computer, since that often corrects launch problems with new software. Now it caused my system to return to the login. I restarted with the OS X 10.2 install CD and ran the correct permissions check from the Disk Utility. When I rebooted, iCal still caused my system to return to the Login screen."

Charles Sholdt adds:

"I installed iCal this morning and get the dreaded 'The application iCal unexpectedly quite' message. I’ve reinstalled twice with the same results."

UPDATE: Potential fix Keith Damiani notes a workaround that worked flawlessly on his system:

"Turns out the dreaded HelveticaNeue.dfont must be present in the library/fonts folder; many users have removed that to prevent conflicts with their own postscript version of Helvetica Neue, but it seems iCal requires the .dfont in order to launch. Sure enough, when I put it back where it came from, iCal ran perfectly."

Apple has announced that starting in 2003, new Macs will only boot into Mac OS X, though the ability to run Mac OS 9 applications will be retained in the Classic environment.

While developers like Microsoft and Adobe are apparently enthused by Apple's push for adoption of its operating system, users who rely on applications that only work properly when a system is booted under OS 9 are less excited. Posters in the MacFixIt forums write:

"I just bought some software for OS 9 and have no intention of upgrading. My copy of Jaguar sits on the shelf after the ink bug forced a clean install. I reverted completely back to OS 9."

In addition, Apple's subsidiary FileMaker Inc. annonced that future versions of FileMaker Pro would be developed only for Mac OS X - much like Microsoft's Office development roadmap. The company plans that the new FileMaker 6 line will be its last developed for Mac OS 9.

What's your opinion? Is Apple alienating a thriving portion of its loyal customer base, or dropping weight and moving forward? Let us know.

Address Book International Fax Numbers Mitch Alland notes that the Address Book included with Mac OS X offers severely limited support for international fax numbers:

"Address Book is that it does not provide for a conveient way of entering international fax numbers, particularly for someone who travels abroad frequently. Compare the Adress Book to the old Global Village fax software: GV allowed the user to enter the country/city code for each fax number; it also provide to enter the country code from which country the fax was being sent, so that if one was in that particular country the coutnry code would be stripped, so that one did not have to re-enter the fax number each time one went to another country. It seems that Adress Book was written for the convenience of e-mail. As I travel to Africa and other less-developed countries, I often have to send faxes, and for this purpose, I find Adress Book brain-dead."