The response echoed as if the entire audience was filled with people who had bought Apple at $13.

The Aug. 31 Seybold keynote was filled with demos and previews of Apple's new television commercials, offering the same creativity that has distinguished its TV spots since Superbowl contests sported single-digit Roman numerals.

Job's announcement of the new G4 chip featured whistles as well as applause.

Comparisons of Apple's new three-model, G4 business line against the Intel Pentium 3 -- using tests from Intel's web site to measure speed, memory bandwidth and realtime video compression on their own chip -- found the G4 well in the lead for speed, in part due to Apple's new Velocity Engine.

The audience seemed not displeased. John Warnock, chief executive officer and chairman of San Jose's Adobe Systems Inc., who followed Jobs onstage, said, "You have to love these machines. ... They're the fastest machines that run our application [Photoshop].

"The wonderful thing about having Apple back is that this industry is no longer boring. Thank you, Steve."

Is it surprising that more applause followed?

Jobs seemed enchanted with both the power and the beauty of his new progeny, which comes in this year's new look for business -- clear, silver and graphite (replacing years of bleak black, boring beige or tacky taupe).

Sustained performance is more than a billion floating-point operations per second; peak performance is 4-gigaflops (that's the equivalent of between four and eight, 32-bit floating point operations per cycle, with 500 million cycles per second). That puts it in good stead to be "the ultimate Photoshop machine." There's an Adobe Photoshop 5 plug-in delivered with every G4 to take full advantage of the high-speed CPU.

Apple will package a 400-megahertz central processing unit with 64-megabytes of random access memory and 32-speed CD-ROM; a 450-megahertz with 256-megabytes of memory and DVD-ROM; and 500-megahertz with 27-gigabytes of storage and DVD-ROM.

The 400-megahertz G4 model was shipping on the day of Jobs' keynote, while the 450-megahertz version was set to ship a few weeks later and the 500-megahertz model to follow a few weeks after that.

As Jobs went about showing off Apple's new technology, he whistled to himself -- a military march-like tune from the G4 commercial (in which it is explained that the G4, shown surrounded by tanks, is so powerful that the U.S. government will not allow its export to sensitive areas on the globe, but that the Pentium 3 is, well, safe).

I'd be whistling too if I headed the group that created not only the G4, but this list of new and improved:

What about content? Glad you asked: BBC World News, Fox News, Bloomberg Television, Fox Sports, HBO, NPR, The Weather Channel, VH1, Wbgh, ABC News, Espn, Rolling Stone music videos, Disney Channel, Rhino Records and Warner Records. Some of the content is available exclusively through QT-TV.

"It's the ultimate publishing system," said Jobs. "It's the best display in the world on the fastest computer in the world."

Then, of course, there was more applause.

An hour shared
As Tuesday's high-wattage techie speaker, Jobs had slightly more than an hour to describe his new line-up. Wednesday's four special keynote speakers, all publishing luminaries, shared that amount of time.

Norman Meyrowitz, president of Macromedia Inc. of San Francisco, noting that "what we know about the Web today is not the same as what we will know tomorrow," sketched four trends:

Tim Gill, chairman and chief technical officer of Denver-based Quark Inc., chose his Seybold forum to announce the new Avenue.Quark, designed to web-enable Quark XPress users and content.

"The Web is the most important thing to happen to the printed word since Gutenberg's press," said Gill. In the way that the printing press was able to reduce printing costs, the Web is able to reduce distribution costs, he said. And it produces an opportunity to increase revenue through content syndication.

Of Avenue.Quark, Gill said that "it erases the distinction between web and print publishers," because it puts content back on the high ground. While XML has made extraction possible, Avenue.Quark, available next year, makes the process automatic.

Playing to the audience most familiar to him, the editorial print folks who were scattered around the floor, he added, "And it returns the ability to retain editorial control of content."

Demo disks were available on the exhibition floor. Although Quark XPress 4.1 includes web tools, they have been designed mostly for developers.

"We have a simple commitment. We will provide the tools to help you move from print to Web, and to help increase revenue and reduce production costs."

Gill doesn't expect print to disappear, but does anticipate changes in what is and isn't printed: "Packaging won't be affected by the Web," he said. Guess that explains why Quark is also introducing its own packaging-specific print application, code-named Wrapture.

Charles Geschke, president and chairman, Adobe Systems Inc., said, "The future is here, and we must use current technology to create our own future."

After tossing down that gauntlet, he explained that while Adobe will continue to focus on technology and specific products, there is also an "ecosystem of third-party providers because needs are so complex that no one can provide all you need."

Adobe is committed to serving the needs both of those from the print world, who understand the Web as a distribution medium, and web folks, who see it as a new paradigm or medium. It wants to help both advance and enhance their products and leverage them into new revenue options.

With that in mind, Adobe has partnered with companies such as Cascade Systems Inc. of Acton, Mass., which provides cross-media functionality for revenue. It also is embellishing its own products to make digital commerce more workable, and to help publishers protect content they may put on the Web. Partnerships with e-commerce companies should provide an Acrobat Reader users with the option (currently in pre-beta) of buying content, for "superdistribution" or single-user use, probably as early as the fourth quarter.

Robert Stein, CEO of Night Kitchen in New York, began his 15 minutes (of fame or not, only history will tell) by saying, "In all of these talks, I haven't heard the words 'author' or 'reader.'"

Stein, cooking away with two other long-time colleagues, has been trying to figure out how to make technology for those people.

"Coming from publishing, I realized that, to mix a metaphor, they needed a much broader palette than they'd had before," he said.

Not a techie, Stein nonetheless got religion when he visited The Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and he started a company called Voyager to explore how to do that. And as he sat writing an article on intellectual tools for Encyclopedia Britannica, he said he realized that the book is the one medium where the reader is in control (perhaps we can find it in our newspaper hearts to forgive his omission).

What he began to seek was an electronic device that allowed readers the same active role -- highlighting, dog-earing and all the other kinds of loving activities in which readers engage to preserve a world in which they're immersed, and which exists only between them and their book, only at that moment.

Stein and his colleagues sought expanded books, where the reader could have "the richer and broader set of navigation and annotation tools." Finding none, he said, he decided "to invent the future by recreating the past."

Realizing that electronic publishing was his passion and dream, he decided to chart a course -- the device he envisioned would have, at minimum, these four characteristics:

In the early days of Voyager, he said, authors would drop off manuscripts, which would be coded by expensive programmers, and would be ready for market several months later -- without the participation of the author.

That's changing, largely because he believes that authors should be able to participate in the design of the pages their readers encounter. That's when -- and why -- he and his colleagues left Voyager to start Night Kitchen.

Now there were additional criteria: The solution had to be truly cross-platform (the Big Word at Seybold this year) and distribution-medium independent.

The new template-driven TK3 technology that Night Kitchen is developing allows a rich panoply of treats for author and reader:

The product is aimed at the personal digital assistant category of computing. Both readers and authors can create by dragging and dropping objects into an accompanying electronic notebook. The product accepts "assets" in multiple formats and rastorizes fonts so they appear the same on Macs and Windows machines.

Night Kitchen currently is seeking beta users who want a chance to develop their own projects, although they must be fairly well thought out. Application forms are at the Night Kitchen web site (http://www.nightkitchen.com/).

Maybe it's time to dust off that Great American Novel you've come close to finishing more than once, and put the TK3 technology to the test. And it might be an interesting time for Mr. Flat-Panel Roger Fiedler and Night Kitchen chef Stein to put their heads together.

-- L. Carol Christopher

Adobe Systems Inc.,
(408) 536-4281;
Apple Computer Inc.,
(408) 996-1010;
Cascade Systems Inc.,
(978) 795-7000,
e-mail: info@cascadenet.com;
Macromedia Inc.,
(415) 252-2000;
Night Kitchen,
(212) 787-3536;
Quark Inc.,
(303) 894-8888,
e-mail: aselvia@quark.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, October 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.