Such a commodious desktop space is ideal for engaging in some kind of research, using search-engines and following multiple leads, putting together multi-media documents, reading one document while others are downloading, etc. For instance, when I was developing this site I typically ran the following applications simultaneously (all with their windows visible at once):

A text editor with several html text-documents open (I actually use BBEdit for this, not MS Word).

Fetch, a Mac program application that makes FTP file transfers to a UNIX machine (here: my ISP) look and feel like Mac operations. (The 400 files of this site actually reside on my ISP's Sun Sparc machine, so when I make changes to them locally, I have to copy them up to the ISP server for them to be seen by others.)

Canvas, a graphics editing program, used for instance to scale the screen-shot above to 1/3 its original size.

GIFConverter, a graphics-format conversion program, for instance to change the output of Canvas's Macintosh-"pict" graphics file format into the cross-platform GIF format for use on the Internet.

Sagem-ISDN PPP, a desk accessory that monitors the state of the 128-k connection to my ISP. (In the picture above it can be seen in the upper right-hand corner of the "inner" screenshot, peeking from behind the painting of Bach with his sons.)

Navigator Web browser to see the end result.

Frames work just great on Macintoshes (at least with Netscape), as I was reminded at the San Francisco Mac World Jan 1998, where all the pages I saw made elaborate use of frames, but my PC friends say there are problems on Windows machines. It does no good for me to say "Get a Macintosh". I intend to improve the site so that eventually it can be enjoyed by all types of users.

Specifically, a combination of too small a screen and too large a type font can lead to problems for non-Mac users with the left-most panel, the "What to see" menu, since they can't "grab" the text frame and slide the unseen part into view the way Mac users can. My adding a scrollbar to the frame would solve this problem, but spoil the aesthetics. My planned solution is to have the menu be a set of button bars of fixed size which will show up properly on even small screens, but that's for the future (I have to learn how to do it first!). The large right-hand panel is always used for content; should the content be too broad for your screen, you can choose the "New window with this Frame" popup-menu item (if Navigator).

Music

For listening to the music offered here, be sure your computer's stereo-sound output is connected to a good wide-range stereo system. If you don't hear music now (Bach, English Suite 3, VI), you're not set up for music at all.

The music comes in from the Web in the form of Midi files (xxx.mid), not digitized sound (for instance, xxx.au or xxx.wav). Midi files are like the old player-piano rolls, whose perforations indicated the pitch, loudness, and duration of each note, except that Midi specifies also the instruments (there can be many), and they are in stereo. Midi files thus contain the sound of a performance in extremely compact format. That's why the files download so fast considering the length of time they take to play. Macintoshes have built in Midi-to-synthesized-sound translation. PC's will have to have a good 3rd-party sound card. All of the Midi files at my site have been culled from the Net from sources too numerous to mention. I confess, however, to having altered the allotment of instruments to voices in some of the Bach files to bring out their contrapuntal aspect.

Please understand that I do not view Midi files as a substitute for digital recordings or live performances. Rather Midi files, containing all the notes in an immediately accessible form, offer the music lover another way to "read the score". They are a substitute for the sheet music, so that while one can enjoy listening to a Midi file, no one should expect it to sound like a live performance. -- Hey, they're better than a scratchy record!

Files

The growth of the site can be seen from the following table showing the number of files and links at successive times.

File type	Jan 1998	Feb 1999	Jan 2001	Apr 2001
html files	117	250	311	401
midi files	61	180	260	263
mp3/wav/aif/ra files	2	2	21	30
graphics files	44	190	312	493
total files	224	622	904	1187
Link type	Jan 1998	Feb 1999	Jan 2001	Apr 2001
Internal	114	396	680	1140
External	53	228	312	537
Page counter	0	40	72	152
total links	167	664	1064	1829

I am developing the site using OmniWeb in Mac OS-X, and its pages look better with that browser than with Netscape Navigator or Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

For performance reasons make sure your browser uses its cache to the maximum. One so often hears that "the Net is slow", the cause of poor browser-performance being, however, more often slowness in painting the screen (result of having a slow local computer system) or having to retrieve some files again from over the Net, rather than retrieving them from the browser disk cache (result of having too small a cache limit).

So in Netscape you would want to set the Advanced/Cache Preferences setting for "Page in cache is compared to page on network" to either NEVER or ONCE-PER-SESSION. Set the "Disk cache" to some large number. I have mine set to 50000 KBytes.

The Last Word

It goes without saying that if your computer and Internet connection are not super fast, as I suggest they should be, you can still enjoy this site. You'll just need more patience. To increase your appreciation of the utility of having multiple large screens connected to your computer, I end this page with another screenshot from my system.

Details: The screenshot below is 2304 x 870 pixels at 24 bits of color information per pixel, standard Mac 75 dots per inch, and the video ram used by the two PCI video cards is 64 MB. In the 1st screenshot (above), the left-hand window, showing "Technical Details About This Site" is 938 x 848 pixels. To obtain the large Hubble picture of Star Birth seen at the right of the screenshot below, I merely dragged the image from the Navigator window to the desktop, then double-clicked on the resulting file icon, which opened the picture-file using the free utility JPEGView. I then typed JPEGView's "Maximum Size" keyboard equivalent (cmd-M) to get the large view.