February 2001, Vol. 12, No. 2

My sympathies for the travails of traveling reporters were always genuine, but when I was a newspaper systems editor, those travails were merely stories told over a beer or three.

Upon leaving daily newspapering and becoming an Industry Consultant, I found myself on the road far more often than I cared to realize.

The horrors of slogging through airports carrying tons of baggage finally became real to me.

In the early days of being a consultant, I didn't even take along a laptop computer, for a couple of reasons: First, I wasn't making enough money to be able to afford a laptop, and second, Apple Computer -- the makers of my beloved Macintosh -- didn't seem to be interested in anything except the "Portable Macintosh," which was a hefty 16 pounds and cost more than $6000.

But as Apple began to learn that there was money to be made in the laptop world (if the machines were light enough and cheap enough), I bought a PowerBook 160, which sported a 10-inch passive matrix grayscale screen, a 68030 central processing unit and 4 megabytes of random access memory. Oh, and it weighed just less than seven pounds.

When the 160 fell by the wayside, a 1400 took its place; when the 1400 sprouted legs and walked off on its own, a G3 Wallstreet became my traveling companion. Both those machines weighed in at right around seven pounds.

Now, seven pounds doesn't sound like much weight. But when you add a couple of spare batteries, the power supply, a handful of cords -- not to mention the carrying case itself -- all of sudden you've got a 20-pound millstone you're carrying around your neck while racing through O'Hare or Dallas-Fort Worth.

I have been sending mental vibes toward Cupertino in recent months, hoping and praying that Apple would bring forth a lightweight laptop computer.

At Macworld Expo last month, my dreams came true: the Titanium PowerBook G4.

The specifications are awesome: a 400- or 500-megahertz G4 PowerPC central processing unit, 1 megabyte of cache, a DVD-ROM player (movies on airplanes without the bad words cut out) and the normal networking connectivity. In addition, with a huge screen (15.2 inches) and a one-inch thickness -- and let’s not forget the five-pound weight -- the Titanium looks to be the machine of my dreams.

But not all dreams are pleasant -- the nightmare aspect of the Titanium PowerBook is that the top-level machine (30-gigabytes of hard drive, 266-megabytes of random access memory and a spare AC adapter and extra battery) costs about $4000, if you could get one, and reports are that you can't (think mid-March for deliveries, say those in the know).

But there were other announcements at Macworld Expo that were interesting to the publishing systems person -- Correspondent George Powell gives us a compete look-see at both the trade show as well as the presentation by Apple chief Steve Jobs.

Next, you'll find that I've done some traveling already this year, with a visit to the Newspaper Association of America’s annual SuperConference, held in suburban Orlando, Fla. Certainly the highlight of the pre-press segment for me was the presentation by David Underhill, the multimedia guru for Chicago’s Tribune Co. Underhill -- and Tribune -- seem to have the right ideas about multimedia and convergence. There were other good presentations at the meeting as well, which I detail inside.

Also on the agenda at the SuperConference was my old friend Chris Feola, who is the chief of technology for Belo Interactive of Dallas. Feola made a presentation on some new technology -- they call it VelocIT -- which he and his staff have dreamed up, and after he spoke, I asked if he would write you an article about it. Done and done.

Feola’s technology depends upon the notion of data interchange, which means it’s time again to chat about the variations on eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Copy Editor Aimee Beck, who has been on the case with NewsML and News Industry Text Format (NIFT), takes us into the world of financial data and discussions about how we will publish that information in the future.

All told, a pretty good issue. But a whole bunch of you will have to renew for me to be able to afford the titanium toy.

-- David M. Cole, dmc@colepapers.net