About This Particular Macintosh 6.04 - eDisk

There is little to report about the casing. At therear, you will find the mains and USB connectorsand a connector for the transparency adaptor(mini DIN—like an old Apple modem port connector).On one side is a neatly designed lockingcatch for use when transporting the unit. At thefront is a conveniently placed on/off switch. Ofcourse, being a USB device, this switch is actuallyuseful. SCSI devices have to be switched on asthe computer is started, but USB devices can be switched on and off as required.In the front top corner is a small button that is potentially very useful, but which reveals thescanner’s major weakness—its bundled software. The button is intended to be used like the‘copy’ button on a photocopier. Put something into the scanner, press the button, and thesoftware loads, enabling you to say what you want done. It offers all the obvious choices,such as print it on paper, OCR it to text, and load it into Photoshop.What actually happens is that it loads an application called Presto! PageManager. Over theyears, I have come across many poor quality ports of applications originally written for PCs.I can’t recall ever having coming across a more irritating port than this one. Not only does itignore most of the interface conventions developed by Apple, but it performs poorly andslowly.Examine the screenshot; it looks quite ghastly. To say it is utilitarian would be to give falsepraise, as utilitarian implies usefulness. Note that there are two separate Help menus at thetop of the screen. One offers access to the help system; the other turns balloon help on andATPM 6.04 ← 82 → Stuff: Epson Perfection 1200 Photo