The hacking of the iMac's internals continues. Just a couple of days ago, we made a quick reference to a Sparq drive (that 1 GB removable drive by Syquest) that was available for the iMac. That caused a little confusion, since the official iMac-compatible USB Sparq drive, in all its translucent red glory, is definitely not yet shipping. No, we were referring to the new unit now available from iDrives, which is not a USB product-- though it's still iMac-compatible. You can read all about it at theiMac.com.

Since this drive doesn't use the hot-swappable plug-and-play USB interface, you have to jump through a few hoops to hook one up to your iMac. It ships with an adapter that plugs into a space on the motherboard and has a cable that runs to the expansion panel on the side of the iMac. Once you've got the adapter installed, the drive just plugs right into the new port in your iMac's port bay. And apparently whatever mystery interface iDrives is using (it's not USB, SCSI, or PCI), it's reportedly about 30% faster than USB is.

By the way, iDrives has more than just a Sparq drive-- they also have a $99 floppy drive and a $349 4.3 GB hard drive available, which connect to the iMac the same way. (You can in fact have all three connected at once.) All three are available right now, and there are really only two catches. The first is that you have to be willing to open up your iMac and plug the special connector onto the motherboard-- iDrives claims its a simple, fifteen-minute no-solder-required operation, but since it's not an Apple-authorized motherboard modification, you can wave bye-bye to your warranty. The second catch may be the real deal-killer, though: from looking at the pictures on the website, the iDrives units appear to be beige. That's right, they'll clash with your iMac and if Jeff Goldblum ever comes over to your house for coffee and sees your external iDrive, he'll laugh at you. Are you willing to take that risk? (iDrives is working on more iMac-friendly styles, which are expected out by the end of the year, along with non-USB iMac-compatible Zip drives, Superdisk drives, and CD-RW's.)

Mac OS 8.5 is cool and all, and we like Sherlock, the newly-revamped and newly-renamed version of Find File that is the focus of all the 8.5 hype. Searching the Internet right from Sherlock is a lot of fun, and it definitely saves time over traveling to separate search pages to enter your search criteria over and over again. And the plug-in architecture lets you add any Internet search engines to Sherlock just by writing or downloading a plug-in and dropping it into the right folder. However, there are some criticisms of Sherlock floating around out there that are definitely valid; many of these have been already addressed by third-party hacks, and we expect that Apple will fix other problems in its next release of Sherlock, which we'd guess will show up in January's Mac OS 8.6 update.

The most obvious feature that Apple inexplicably forgot to add to Sherlock was a method to organize search engine plug-ins into sets, similar to how Extensions Manager lets you define sets of extensions and control panels. As things currently stand, whenever you want to search using Sherlock, you must individually click on which engines you want to use; it'd be a lot nicer to choose a "Games" set that automatically selects only six game site search engines, or a "Mac" set that activates eight Mac site searches. You get the idea.

Now, a lot of third-party workarounds already exist to add this functionality, none of which we've yet tried-- but we did notice that Apple has quietly posted its own workaround, which uses Applescript to allow the use of sets in Sherlock. We haven't given it a try yet, since the installation and set-up is a little involved; you have to download the Applescripts from Apple's web site, install the OSA Menu Applescript extra from the Mac OS 8.5 CD-ROM, and then add the downloaded Sherlock scripts to the OSA menu. Apparently, when you're finished, you'll have a cute little script icon in the menubar which will include a submenu to let your create, edit, activate, and delete Sherlock search sets. Unfortunately, it seems as though this implementation controls which search engines appear in Sherlock's list, but not which ones are checked, so we're not sure how useful this really is. Still, some of you Sherlock maniacs out there might find it to be useful. Search away!

Ah, Halloween-- that wonderful holiday when kids dress as little pirates and axe murderers and run around extorting the neighbors for candy. Personally, we love it. But this year, something is waiting in the shadows... and it wants your data. While a great many of us are puttering along nicely running Mac OS 8.5, all is not well in Macville. By now you may have heard about this strange phenomenon that seems to have affected a small percentage of the population of upgraders; installing Mac OS 8.5 has seemingly destroyed their hard disks utterly and beyond repair. (By "beyond repair," we mean that in some cases, not only was no data recoverable from the trashed disk, but the disk itself could not be reformatted-- at least according to some reports.) Official word of this bizarre and dangerous behavior first hit the airwaves in the form of a warning at Umax's site, in which they warn users that they experienced six lost disks when testing Mac OS 8.5's "golden master" version.

"So what?" you may be saying. "I don't have a Umax clone." Well that's just fine and dandy, but the problem isn't limited to Umax clones. In fact, Umax reports that of the six disks they lost, two were Apple-branded drives installed in Apple-branded Macs. And since then, this problem has struck several users in the field, albeit a tiny fraction of the total number of users of Mac OS 8.5. We strongly recommend that all Mac OS 8.5 users read MacInTouch's special report on this issue to be as prepared as possible, although it's maddening that in all the reports, there don't seem to be any definitive common factors that can be isolated as causing the problem.

Incidentally, if you upgraded to 8.5 and haven't yet noticed any problems with your drives, don't unclench just yet; the problem may be a sort of lurking horror. At first, the drive may appear okay under 8.5, but over time the performance may degrade and eventually the disk may disappear from the system altogether. (Not <>Iphysically disappear, of course, though that would be pretty cool.) Pretty scary, huh, kids? How's that for a Halloween nightmare? Data loss! Woooooo! OOOOOOO!! All we can say is this: back up your data. Don't be sorry later.