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A database for fonts: Font Reserve, a recently updated application from DiamondSoft Inc. provides font management tools everyone can appreciate.
Easy scripting: Scripter, from Main Event of Washington, D.C., is a handy little program that expedites writing AppleScript code and then debugs it as well. Seybold show has little that's big, but much that's usefulSuppose they gave a really big expo and nothing much happened? I shouldn't characterize the floor show at Seybold San Francisco Publishing '97, held Oct. 1-3 in both wings of San Francisco's Moscone Center, as offering little. But it's not far from the mark. Oh, sure, the expo was big, even though both sides of Moscone were not bulging -- like some MacWorld Expos of the past -- and there were the requisite press conferences announcing several noteworthy new developments. And there was the usual spate of happenstance encounters and floor networking that goes on at all of these big shows. But it seems to this now-grizzled veteran of such shows -- and the emphasis is increasingly on the show part -- that no expo can be the nexus of the Next Big Thing anymore, because the Next Big Thing now has a virtual existence. The rise of the Internet has diminished the role these expos have in disseminating information: Thanks to the Web, anyone at any time of the night or day can fetch information that used to take several telephone calls and faxes to track down. Expos now are more important for seeing the virtual made more concrete. Perhaps we aisle-stalkers can ascertain what is vaporware and what isn't by attending these affairs. Then we write about them so you, dear reader, can have a glimmer of how it was -- a reality which still cannot be gained any other way, no matter how many web simulcasts with Quick Time video and Real Audio you see and hear. In my three days of aisle walking and press conference attending and real time networking, I did come across some Big Things. For busy executives, I offer a summary:
The idea of building a better mousetrap so that the world will beat a path to your door has led developers to make a whole new raft of tools to help get content on the Internet -- anything from building a better shovel for shovelware, to giving the shovel the functions of a Swiss army knife, to separating the shovel from the shoveling. Think FutureTense here for the high-end, i publish 2.0 for small operations.
Mac mavens
Steve Jobs, the once, maybe future -- and for now de facto -- head of Apple, gave a third-day keynote address. The day before, Bill Gates, the fella with Windows NT and other business software that runs on an ever-increasing number of computers, gave that session's keynote address. What they said didn't have that much effect on the floor exhibits, but for the first time, Jobs mentioned something that Gates didn't have and couldn't offer -- AppleScript. This newsletter recently detailed why AppleScript is so useful for getting a group of Macintosh applications to work together, as well as being easy to use and an integral part of the Mac OS (see The Cole Papers, October 1997). Determining why this enormous advantage of the Mac OS over Windows has not been properly marketed until now is like trying to figure out why baseball's five-year-old Florida Marlins can win a World Series while the poor Chicago Cubs haven't won since 1908. Go figure. Apple set out at Seybold to make people aware of this tool's existence, and it appeared to make great headway. If AppleScript has a low profile, even less visible is an application that makes it possible for virtually everyone to write good AppleScripts, Scripter from Main Event of Washington, D.C. Scripter will clean up and debug your scripts, as well as relieve you of having to do a lot of repetitive keyboarding. Scripter, along with the integrated scripting database ScriptBase, can allow a user to tie together the more than 150 Macintosh applications that are scriptable (i.e., support AppleEvents, the inter-application communications language), in just about any way you can imagine. The story of how AppleScript survived all the chaos at Apple could make a separate story or two. How Scripter hung on in the face of little or no market interest in it had a lot to do with the company president, Cal Simone, who fought hard for his product -- and prevented AppleScript from going the way of another innovative Apple technology, OpenDoc, which was just catching on when its development was essentially frozen. To see a demo of Scripter is essentially to be immersed in the world of Cal Simone. He has given most of his waking hours in the 1990s to this product, and he can demo it fast or slow, for techie or novice, and convince you it's the easiest way to do things on the Mac. The demos I saw on two different days made me want to start automating my workload with a passel of AppleScripts. Only time has prevented me from carrying out this task. No writer of AppleScripts should be without Scripter. It's not the best tool at what it does, it's the only tool that does what it does.
Fun with fonts
I have been a Font Reserve user since version 1.0, and with version 1.02, which shipped in September, most of the bugs have been eradicated. Font Reserve puts all your fonts -- except the few you keep in the system folder -- in a database. En route there, all fonts are checked for corruption, printer and screen fonts are matched, and families are grouped. Once fonts are in the database (which can be invisible, to prevent tampering in a network environment), they can be examined in numerous ways, viewed at different point sizes and checked for duplicates. A Quark XTension shipped with Font Reserve automatically opens all fonts in a Quark document if the font is in the database. The Finder-like interface for examining and sorting the fonts is easy and intuitive. It's a faceless background application, which means that it adds nothing to the system, and is always running. It does take about three megabytes of memory to run, and the XTension has a few minor bugs -- as well as the annoying feature of reexamining all open Quark documents if you go from Quark to the Finder and then back to Quark. This is a font tool that makes it easy to bring order out of chaos. And speaking of chaos, Xaos Tools Inc. of San Francisco presented Flash Box, a product that might cause some turmoil if the interface and graphic manipulation technology behind it is applied to some as-yet unannounced higher end product in 1998. Right now, Flash Box is an inexpensive product ($59) that does some of the same things that MetaTools' Goo does -- image alteration -- but without having to convert the file to a special format. Working with standard Mac and PC formats like JPEG and TIFF, special effects are applied quickly via an interface that's simple, but pure Macintosh. The company previously had released Photoshop plug-ins and graphics software that works on Silicon Graphics and Sun workstations, so this is the first foray by Xaos into the lower end of the consumer market. Will this software make photo manipulation by novices so simple that reporters will be able to double as photographers and clean up their own digital photos as well? It's too soon to tell, but the technology should bear watching next year. One product that's been watched for some time, XPress 4.0, at last is really in beta, and may actually be shipping by the time you read this. Quark's demos for XPress 4.0 at Seybold seemed to be near or at capacity, while its demo for the Quark Publishing System (recycled from last year) was sparsely attended some of the times I passed by. (Quark did redesign its booth, making it more open and inviting.) Quark opened its arms to Digital Equipment Corp. of Merrimack, N.H., the maker of those hyper-fast 64-bit Alpha chips that execute gigaflops of instructions in mere nanoseconds. As Bob Farquhar, Quark global partner manager at Digital, said in the October announcement, "We've embraced the fact that there's no such thing as too much computing power in the publishing industry." The next generation of Windows NT, 5.0, will positively scream on DEC workstations, which will be able to run Quark XPress 4.0. At last -- a stable and robust server for Quark. With a more robust database and QPS porting to Alpha as well, Quark may draw even more customers in the future. I saw a demo of XPress 4.0 running on an Alpha NT workstation. It could be a demo of the future -- of Quark, the Company, and XPress, the Application.
Web publishing
For full-fledged, big-time publishers, there are FutureTense of Acton, Mass., and DynaBase from Inso Corp. of Boston; i publish from Design Intelligence of Seattle is good for mom-and-pop operations. FutureTense and DynaBase put content in a database, where it can be flowed into any number of web page templates for different editions or different times of day, or to facilitate delivery of breaking news. DynaBase seems to be a more full-featured product, emphasizing dynamic publishing and the ability to extensively manage web server content. Future Tense has the same idea, but without needing a specialized server. The easy-to-use i publish is the multimedia publishing tool for people who don't want to know anything about multimedia. One person can do anything, from a newsletter to a presentation to a web page, just by switching templates. You can design your own, but the point is to repurpose the content automatically so you don't have to switch point size or know anything about GIFs for your web page as opposed to EPS files for your newsletter. It's all done with a non-designer in mind. -- George Powell
Apple Computer Inc., From THE COLE PAPERS, November 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved. |
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