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Listen to the Quark: Here a sound resource is imported into a Quark Immedia document; the sound plays on any machine using the Immedia player, which can be embedded into the document or distributed freely. Company troubles aside, the Macintosh faithful persevereAs the Macintosh mouses its way into its second decade, MacWorld Expo 1996 seemed as much a reflection of the enthusiastic confusion that marked the Macintosh's trials and tribulations in 1995 as it was a celebration and buying orgy for all things Macintosh. Apple Computer, Macintosh's parent, took some heavy financial buffeting in the fourth quarter of 1995, but that news didn't curb attendance at this annual four-day affair, held Jan. 9-12 in San Francisco. Even though the threat of massive layoffs at Apple lurked in the background, nearly 72,000 people registered. As usual, your correspondent didn't cover any of the concurrent conference sessions, but stuck to the expo floor to see what was going on. And a crowded floor it was: On the show's first day, it seemed as if at least half the registrants tried to wedge into Moscone Center around 1 p.m. Never in my 12 years of attending these affairs have I seen the floor more crowded. Here is some of what I saw and heard on that stuffed floor.
Paradigm shift
Desktop publishing in 1986 begat electronic publishing in 1989 or so; now, the third generation is on the Web -- publishing, browsing, serving. Yes, the World-Wide Web is spinning off into the 21st century, just an HTML markup or two away from rainbow's end and the pot of gold that should result in device-independent electronic multimedia documents. So where does that leave traditional newspapers? At MacWorld Expo 96, there was still plenty of big hardware and software on display solidifying the new publishing equation for the downsized '90s. The equation? Quark XPress + Adobe Photoshop = Pagination.
Quark's focus
Why learn another software package or three when, for most electronic publishers, Quark XPress is already familiar? That was the question at Quark's home in Denver, and from that sprang Quark Immedia, a multimedia publishing application. It sits on top of Quark XPress 3.32 like a mega-XTension, adding sound and motion to the usual suite of Quark design tools. The demo is impressive, with the pages of Rolling Stone magazine coming to life with the aid of animation and sound added from extensive libraries in that same drag-and-drop method that has always been used in Quark libraries. You also get libraries of buttons, and easy animation tools to make things hop, skip and jump all around the page. And by tying in a Web browser to the Immedia Viewer, you can browse Web pages not created in Immedia. The Immedia Viewer functions like the Adobe Acrobat Reader, allowing non-owners of Immedia to view Immedia documents. The viewer can be embedded in a document or downloaded separately for free. Regular Immedia users need at least a 68030-based Mac with access to a CD-ROM drive (those Immedia libraries take up a lot of space). The Immedia Viewer can run on an old Mac II or a '386-based PC processor, although there were none of these older-generation computers at MacWorld. If all newspapers lost their newsprint supplies tomorrow, Quark Immedia would be a quick way to get Quark-paginated pages onto the Internet without jumping through too many hoops, aside from upgrading to Quark XPress 3.32.
Apple's focus
In one of those, Apple has helped support one of the first marriages of traditional journalism and the new technology by funding Salon (http://www.salon1999.com/). Salon is an on-line magazine staffed by several top editors who left the San Francisco Examiner to see if the Web was able to support such a heady intellectual venture. At MacWorld Expo, Apple had two sites, the Developer Pavilion (10,000 square feet) and the Apple Pavilion (11,000 square feet). Both were crowded, but the interest in the developer pavilion seemed just as robust at the end of the show as on the first day, despite the rumors of layoffs and the possible sale of Apple to a third party, such as Sun Microsystems. OpenDoc technology, which enables developers to write system-independent software, was being shown, as was a Speech Recognition Manager software development kit. The new Apple Power Mac 7500 and 8500 models include the Speakable Items Utility, which allows the user to give some commands to the computer by voice rather than by mouse or keyboard. As more applications incorporate this technology, the voice will become a third input device for many repetitious commands on the new generation of Macintoshes. Apple, which made sure the world knew it ranked No. 1 in product reliability in a December 1995 PC World survey, demonstrated prototype PCI PowerMacs running prototype PC Compatibility cards using either Pentium or Cyrex '586 processors, to show the cross-platform potential of the Macintosh. The '486-based DOS Compatibility Card proved a popular option for customers who wanted to replace or add to an existing suite of PCs. "It shows how Macintosh personal computers stand out by fitting in, keeping customers' options open," said Apple's cross-platform product line manager. That's how one knows its 1996, not 1984: The computer that was introduced as standing out by not fitting in now touts the fact that it fits in better than any other computer. Is the personal computer market getting more mature, or less colorful? Jean Louis Gasse was a colorful top executive who left Apple to help found Be Inc. From Be Inc. has sprung the BeBox, which is sort of like a NeXT computer on steroids, with no software. The BeBox has yet another GUI operating system and two PowerPC 603 processors running at 66 MHz. Able to process sound and video data in real time, it features built-in TCP/IP for Internet-heads, an integrated database and advanced client-server technology. Worming my way into the crowd surrounding the BeBox, I received a plastic pocket protector for my pens and pencils with the printed slogan, "We Be Geeks." Its multitasking capability seemed to enable the BeBox to run every bit of software that the Be Geeks had created. Does this hardware have any use in a newspaper environment? Maybe, if it could run Windows and/or Mac software and replace a half-dozen employees with its true multitasking. It was at least a colorful sidelight.
The best of the rest
For a list price of $29,950, the Scitex SmArt 320 can scan transparencies or reflective media at up to 5260 dpi in most PostScript or Scitex formats. There's multiple image scanning, on-the-fly unsharp masking, moiré elimination and more. This is a one-pass CCD device that can scan up to 11.8-by-17-inches on its big flatbed, but you'll have to pack plenty of RAM into the Mac that runs this behemoth -- the scanner application alone consumes 16 megabytes. Not a bad deal, but Linotype-Hell offered a show special that was almost other-worldly. The package includes the Opal large-format scanner, which can scan up to 17-by-12-inches at 400-by-800 dpi resolution; Linocolor Lite software, a Photoshop plug-in; scanner calibration software; a full copy of Adobe Photoshop 3.04; Cumulus photo database software; the Quark ColorSync XTension, and CodeCryptor protection software, to prevent unauthorized use of digitized scans. You can't get super high-resolution out of Opal, like you can with the SmArt 320, but if you aren't putting out a coffee table tome, the difference to the untrained eye would not be that apparent. Besides, the software was excellent, allowing for gang scans which then could be adjusted as individual items, and the software would remember the adjustments for each scanned item. And, you can mix transparencies and reflective art in the same batch. The show price was $8395. Was it a loss leader -- or the deal of the century?
It has a cute little black antenna that flips up like a flag on a rural mailbox to aid reception. You can send your data, then switch over to voice to confirm the arrival with a simple call. Since the PhoneCard supports the Jabra Ear Phone, you don't need a handset, since the Ear Phone is both a speaker and microphone smaller than the similar device that fit in Spock's ear in the original Star Trek TV series. It's an astounding combination that could nestle in a package of cigarettes, yet allows voice, data and fax capability in computers that can accept PC cards. If the digital equivalent of talking and chewing gum at the same time is an important part of telephony for you, then 3Jtech's Modem Talk box can handle it ... that is, send data and talk at the same time on a normal phone line. Of course, there has to be a Modem Talk box on the receiving end as well. This piece of hardware is transparent to all Hayes command set modems. Hook one up between computer and a 14.4 or faster modem, press a button, and a parallel voice channel is squeezed onto the data channel. Naturally, this extra channel causes some speed degradation, but the full data stream width is regained by closing the Modem Talk channel.
We found one possibly costly drawback: Many of the new formats are incompatible with the old. Iomega had lots of clever buttons at MacWorld, and the Zip drive. Less than $200 will buy 100 megabyte of storage on a 3.5-inch disk that's a bit thicker than a floppy and is not compatible with any other removable storage media, including the new Jaz drive from Iomega. The Jaz has two sizes of disk, 540 megabyte and 1 gigabyte, on a disk that's a bit wider than 3.5 inches. SyQuest, not to be outdone, responded with the 135 megabyte EZ135 and was showing the 1.3 gigabyte SyJet drive, which will also read and write special 650 megabyte disks. None of these disks can be used by the high capacity magneto-optical (MO) disk drives that can also handle 650 megabyte and 1.2 gigabyte carts. Then there are the lower cost 230 megabyte MO drives and the Mcd 540 megabyte diskette storage device from Nomai-US of Boca Raton, Fla. -- cheaper than magneto-optical, but more expensive than the Jaz or SyJet drives. The bottom line: none of the new SyQuest storage items can be read or written to by the old SyQuest drives, even the older SyQuest 3.5-inch drives (105 and 270 megabyte). Nor can the old Bernoulli Iomega drive disks be accessed by the newer Zip and Jaz drives. The cost of storage per megabyte continues to drop, which is good, because multimedia, 24-bit color images and 16-bit sounds all take up plenty of room on a hard disk. But with internal 1 gigabyte SCSI hard drives selling for $229 at MacWorld, storage space is no longer at a premium. If you can't afford a new Macintosh, perhaps a new hard drive is more do-able.
This wealth of material shows that the Macintosh, if overstocked in some models, is certainly still much loved. It continues to be a robust, evolving platform that may eventually outstrip the vision that Apple's top executives have for it. Maybe it's done so already. -- George Powell
3JTech, From THE COLE PAPERS, February 1996, Copyright © 1996, All Rights Reserved. |
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