Deep within the Apple campus, a small group of scientists is developing technologies it hopes will sharpen the company's technical edge. While not all its efforts graduate to prime time, some of the work by Apple's Advanced Technology Group has been hailed as keystones of innovation.
According to sources, ATG is currently working on projects such as the search engine in Copland, object-oriented programming (OOP) tools, system software aimed at the educational market and easy-to-use multimedia applications.
Several ATG undertakings have found their way into consumers' hands. They include QuickTime VR; QuickDraw 3D; ColorSync; Rosetta, handwriting recognition technology in Newton 2.0; and the recently released Chinese Dictation Kit.
Sources said several of ATG's latest initiatives will be incorporated into forthcoming products. A new search engine, code-named V-Twin, is part of Cyberdog and may see widespread use as Copland's search engine. Described as an information-access tool kit, V-Twin is able to distill long text documents into their most salient elements.
Another ATG project, known as Calico, is a storyboard application for planning movies. The application features tools for drawing, annotating movies and recording sounds. Calico may be released as a commercial product.
KidSim is an ATG-developed, OOP language that lets children build their own simulations. With KidSim, students can create objects and characters and simulate movements and behaviors.
ATG's efforts to provide users with newfangled authoring environments are not solely aimed at education.
SK8 is a multimedia environment sometimes called an object-oriented dynamic authoring language. Built on LISP, SK8 has been rumored to be a future version of HyperCard and the front-end to ScriptX. It was reportedly used to create the first version of KidSim and has been moved out of ATG and into Apple's development-tools group.
While some ATG projects have come to fruition, others have died on the vine. In years past, ATG efforts mostly ended up as fodder for splashy demos by Apple executives. For example, Apple Senior Vice President David Nagel three years ago demonstrated a technology code-named Piles that was a 3-D interface for organizing documents; the project was ultimately killed.
While in the past ATG would typically work on projects for several years, the group has been streamlined to work on hardware and software projects that take less time to develop. Now the group is charged with moving technologies out of the garage and into real products.
With KidSim, kids can create objects and simulate their behaviors.
ATG's search engine, V-Twin (top), can summarize text and reduce it to its three most important sentences. With Calico (bottom), ATG's story-boarding tool, users can draw and annotate movie scenes.
