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Peak idea: Compass Informaton Systems offers Tibet, a Newton-based application for transferring images from a digital camera to anyplace with a modem. Macworld illustrates again why the Mac is here to staySAN FRANCISCO -- The sun is not setting on the Macintosh, but the strains of a confused and cloudy 1997 were definitely being felt at the 17th Macworld Expo Jan. 6-9 in Moscone Center. For Mac-o-philes, the winter gathering is the closest thing this community has to a forecast of the future and a celebration of things past. I did try to take some time to stop, look and listen in four days on the Expo floor to see if some sense could be made of the conflicting reports about the state of Apple. Unable to interview the grand poo-bah and acting CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, to ascertain what his plans really are, I can state with certainty that the Mac will be around to prove it can face the year 2000 without a shred of new code or an expensive OS makeover. The OS makeover is well under way, but not because of Y2K. Rhapsody is here, and while not yet a symphony, it definitely is running applications, although it is just in its developer's release incarnation. But the inroads of Windows, particularly NT, were also evident, as in a booth with Quark XPress 4.0 running on an Extreme Graphics MacFriendly Windows NT workstation, or the debut of Windows 98 Office for the Macintosh -- as Apple and Microsoft seemed to dash back to the future in their new cooperative relationship. In the mid-'80s, when the Mac was new and Microsoft was not the 800-pound gorilla it has grown to be, Word for the Macintosh was one of the first pieces of software from a third-party developer that showed what a grand machine the Mac was. And in those days, Microsoft needed the revenue the sales of Word brought to the fledgling company. Alas, today the roles are reversed. One doesn't have to listen too hard to realize that outside of education and publishing, the Macintosh doesn't have much more than a token presence in the world of business. Recognition of that was hard for the Macintosh community to stomach, when the Mac OS was vastly superior. But that was before Windows, first 3.1, then 95 and NT. It's a fact that all the top-selling Macintosh software is also available on the Windows platform, while plenty of Windows software has no Mac version. The solution for an increasing number of businesses is to scrap Macs and go with a Windows-based system. This correspondent finds that appalling, particularly in the world of publishing, where there are plenty of reasons to hang onto those old Macs. So listen up! The Macintosh isn't a dead platform, and here are the top eight reasons direct from the floor of Macworld Expo (my editors didn't give me enough space for 10 reasons):
Elaborating
Rhapsody, briefly, is the new Apple OS for the millennium. It is being developed in NeXT's OpenStep environment, fortuitous since Apple bought NeXT for a cool $400 million. This development software is basically all that's left of Jobs' venture after he left Apple. Under Jobs, NeXT went from being a computer manufacturer with an innovative UNIX-based OS to a software company. But I digress. In the Rhapsody OS, there is the "modern" OS "yellow box" with preemptive multitasking, multithreading and memory protection, UNIX features that let a whole bunch of things go on at once. For backward compatibility with older Macintosh applications, the Mac OS runs in another part of Rhapsody, the "blue box." Helios Software GmbH of Garbsen, Germany, jumped on the Rhapsody train early. Its server products -- EtherShare 2.5, EtherShare OPI and PDF Handshake -- were running easily in the Rhapsody yellow box at both the Helios booth and the Rhapsody Developer Pavilion. A real-world, UNIX-based application, it was no great surprise to see Helios running on Rhapsody, since the company provided server solutions for the original NeXT platform in 1990. In fact, the Rhapsody Developer Pavilion was littered with several old NeXT system software developers.
New software
In conjunction with EtherShare 2.0 Opi, PDF Handshake and the Helios ColorSync XTension enable Quark XPress to work with Acrobat PDF files just like it does TIFF and EPS, i.e., like any other placement file. PDF files are color-matched and separated in an automated fashion that is particularly useful when advertisements are submitted in PDF form. Certainly worth a look. Another worthy software addition is SpeedShare from Qdea of St. Paul, Minn. This simple, inexpensive software is ideal for two Macs with just dial-up Internet connections to share files using asynchronous TCP/IP, which enables the computers to start a transfer and then get back to work. One Mac needs to be the SpeedShare server, which can have any number of clients. At $49.95 for one server and client, this is an ideal solution for small papers that want to get stories back to the office without dealing with a lot of communications protocols.
Hardware a-plenty
Reudo, of Niigata, Japan, has a software/hardware combination that can connect your Windows notebook computer (RedEye) or digital camera (R Link Duo) to a desktop Mac. IrDA (infrared) port speeds can be much faster than comparable serial port transfers, and the R Link Duo connection supports many varieties of digital cameras. From Imacon ApS of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Imacon Inc. of Fremont, Calif., comes the newest drum scanner, which looks more like a little tower of scanning power than a traditional drum scanner. With Imacon's FlexTight scanning technology, the days of struggling to mount a slide or transparency on the curved surface of a drum are over. This innovative approach to scanning eliminates the need for a drum cylinder or glass plate between the scanning device and the light source. The heart of the FlexTight approach is a patented flexible magnetic holder for slides or transparencies up to 4-by-5-inches that feeds an image into the scanner and flexes it around a rotating drum directly underneath the lens above. No highly trained operator needed, and no cleanup afterwards of tape or gels from the cylinder. This scanner also does reflectives up to 8¢-by-12 in 14-bit scans per RGB color from 72 to 4800 dpi. It's a single-pass device with a SCSI-2 interface, for a suggested price of $16,995. It seems to offer the best of both flatbed and drum scanners with virtually no fuss, thanks to the magnetic FlexTight holder. For the latest and greatest in flatbed scanners, Linotype CPS of Hauppauge, N.Y., had a new contender, the Circon, which will be shipping this spring. At around $15,000, this large format 14-bit RGB scanner with a SCSI-2 interface has the advantage of Linotype's highly regarded software, in addition to a triple lens system that enables it to scan at three resolutions, up to 2400 dpi actual or a whopping 14,400 interpolated through software.
Clones
The SuperMac line made by Umax Computer Corp. of Fremont, Calif., unveiled the J710, a desktop model advertised as the smallest form factor available, with a built-in 24-speed CD-ROM, standard 10/100Base-T Ethernet, a 200 MHz PowerPC 604e processor, a 3 gigabyte IDE hard drive, 32 megabytes of random access memory, external stereo speakers and a small bundle of included software, keyboard, mouse -- but no monitor -- for about $1600. Processor upgrades to the G3 Power PC 750 motherboard are a snap (literally) with a zero insertion force socket. Such a reasonably-priced machine is a powerful argument for continuing diversity in the Mac market, and for keeping clones alive.
Older Macs live!
The Macintosh tradition of keeping old Macs running (a recent survey found nearly 22 million Macs in use around the world, of the 27.6 million sold since 1984) received a hefty boost at Macworld with the announcement of Power PC 750 upgrades for the first generation of Power Macs, the 6100, 7100 and 8100 series. The booth occupied by Newer Technology Inc. of Wichita, Kan., was constantly crowded with early Power Mac buyers wanting to find out about the MAXpowr G3 Cpu card for those early machines. The card comes in two speeds, a 210 MHz version for $580 and a 240 MHz for $820. The cards will plug into the processor direct slot on the motherboard, and early results showed speeds nearly the equal of the new Power Mac G3 models. The PDS cards should be shipping by the time you read this. If not, Sonnet Technologies of Irvine, Calif., also was showing Crescendo G3 upgrade cards for the older 6100-8100 Power Mac line. Software assists in the auto-configuration of the two models offered, the 231-240 MHz with a 512 kilobyte backside cache for $699 and a 257-270 MHz with a 1 megabyte backside cache for $999. Sonnet's cards are more expensive because they include an on-card PDS slot, so existing PDS cards can continue to be used. (Accelerator cards have been known to have compatibility problems in certain configurations, so check with the manufacturers for the latest information, since these cards have only started to ship in the last month.)
AppleScript
Newspapers have found it a real time-saver for automating procedures that involve more than one application. You absolutely, positively cannot do anything like it in Windows. (Though the much more complex Frontier, from Userland Software of Palo Alto, Calif., is now available for Windows as well, it is not for the faint of heart.)
Concerning the Newton
The product is Tibet, and we quote: "A breakthrough new technology that allows photographers to share their images immediately with anyone, anywhere in the world." All you need is a cell phone, a digital camera (for now, the brand must be Agfa) and a Newton device. This software allows you to take images from the Agfa camera, annotate them with caption, time and date, and send them on to the office, web page or whatever. Although the MessagePad or eMate can display just 16 levels of gray, the color information is transmitted intact, or can be stored on a PC card in the Newton. The Newton operating system took a lot of flak at first, but the handwriting recognition has greatly improved, and with Tibet for $49.95, it's easy to have a functioning bureau anywhere that weighs in at around three pounds (spare batteries not included).
Iomega
Look at the company now: Maker of the now market-dominating Zip and Jaz removable drives, Iomega had the most notable floor presence with thousands of bags, buttons and clickers. It was like being in a forest of crickets. And cool products, none shipping just yet: the 2 gigabyte Jaz drive, with backward compatibility with all the 1 gigabyte disks, the Click! drive for PDAs, digital camera and hand-held computers, and the Buz Multimedia Producer. The Click! drive, with its low-cost 40 megabyte mini-disks which weigh 10 grams and will cost less than $10, will certainly give PC cards some competition as a storage device. The Buz Box device will retail for $199, and come with software that will make it easy for everyone with a Mac to jump into multimedia with full-screen video input and output and stereo sound. It's always a challenge to condense days of wandering the floor into wondering whether I have mentioned enough of the highlights. These are interesting times for the Macintosh, which will not just quietly occupy its niche in the computer market. It's definitely alive and kicking. -- George Powell
Apple Computer Inc., From THE COLE PAPERS, February 1998, Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved. |
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