Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac 1993 September/September 93.iso/Community/Media/US Magazine Index/MacWEEK 1992/MacWEEK 11⁄16⁄92

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MacWEEK 11/16/92
-----------------------
 Review: Mac IIvx seeks its place in line

 Midrange model mixes new with old

 By Rick LePage

While most of the machines in Apple's fall lineup have relatively
straightforward positioning, the Macintosh IIvx presents a bit of a conundrum.
Is it an extension of the lower end of the Mac line or is it a replacement for
Apple's aging stalwart, the Mac IIci?

Depending on your answer to this question, the Mac IIvx can seem like a
breakthrough machine or a dud.

The IIvx's specs sound impressive. About the same size as a IIci, the IIvx has a
32-MHz 68030 microprocessor, a 32-MHz 68882 math chip and a 32-Kbyte on-board
cache. The base-level IIvx comes with 4 Mbytes of RAM on the motherboard and
four SIMM slots, enabling users to boost total RAM to 68 Mbytes.

The IIvx has the most-impressive expansion capabilities in Apple's midrange. The
power supply has been beefed up over the IIci. The motherboard has three NuBus
slots and, in addition to a floppy drive and a one-third-height hard drive,
there's a front storage bay for a half- height, removable-media device, such as
a CD-ROM or tape drive.

In a break with the past, the IIvx has an accelerator slot in place of the
processor direct slot that Apple has been using in most desktop Macs since 1989.
The new model's slot is a subset of the cache slot in the IIci. We tested the
slot with a DayStar Digital Inc. PowerCache 50 for the Mac IIci, which holds
50-MHz 68030 and 68882 processors, and it worked fine, without modification.

We fault Apple for one change from the IIci's slot architecture. If you used an
accelerator in a IIci that did not have a math chip, the card would use the
motherboard's math chip. This is not the case with the IIvx. To boost math speed
with a IIvx accelerator, card designers will have to include costly 68882s on
their cards.

Even without add-in cards, the IIvx is tight inside, but Apple has done a good
job of designing the insides for easy access. The slots have been arranged so
you don't lose a NuBus slot if you add an accelerator card - a gotcha in
previous models. Access to the RAM SIMM slots, however, is not as easy as it is
in the IIci and Quadras, and the video RAM SIMM slots are hidden under the
drive-holding bracket.

Video. Because the IIvx has dedicated video RAM, you'd expect better performance
running internal video on the IIvx than you would get with a IIsi or IIci. While
the IIvx clearly beats the IIsi here, it doesn't really outpace the IIci. The
standard 512-Kbyte VRAM configuration supports Apple 12-, 13- and 14-inch color
displays in eight-bit mode. If you boost VRAM to 1 Mbyte, you get 16-bit mode on
those displays.

Overall performance. Although the expansion features of the IIvx are good, its
performance will have the most impact in day-to-day use. Several users of early
and prerelease versions of the IIvx complained about the machine's speed,
especially in comparison with the IIci. Based on the clock speed of the CPUs
alone, you'd expect the IIvx to be 28 percent faster than the IIci, but it's
not.

We ran extensive benchmark tests on similarly configured IIvx and IIci machines
and found that, for most business-level tasks, the IIvx was only slightly faster
than the IIci. And the IIvx did have minor problems with memory-intensive tasks,
such as QuickTime movie captures, which stress the memory system and CPU
extensively.

This is a result of a design decision Apple made with the IIvx: The internal
bus, which carries data between RAM and the processor, is clocked at 16 MHz,
half the speed of the machine's CPU. The internal bus on the IIci, on the other
hand, is the same 25-MHz speed as its main processor. This means that in
operations that make heavy demands on CPU and memory, the IIvx should be about
the same speed or slightly slower than a comparably equipped IIci.

Conclusions. If you believe that the IIvx is an attempt to take the place of the
Mac IIci just below the top of Apple's product line, then the lack of a speed
boost will be a disappointment, despite the better power supply, storage options
and video.

We do not share this view. The IIvx is best seen as a step up from the Mac IIsi,
offering better expansion capabilities and significant performance improvements
over that machine. Further, the IIvx with the internal CD-ROM is an attractive
package, presenting a nice balance of power and cost.

Apple currently is depleting inventory of the Mac IIci by sharply cutting its
price, and the company reportedly will discontinue the model when the next line
of CPUs is announced in February. We have seen Mac IIci models on sale for less
than $2,000, and until February there is the opportunistic question of whether
it's better to buy the IIci or the more expensive IIvx. We think the
improvements in storage capacity, power and video make a strong case for the
IIvx, especially for mainstream business applications, but right now the IIci is
an excellent machine available at bargain prices.

For users interested in multimedia authoring and graphics-intensive tasks, the
IIci is most likely a better CPU. Design limitations in the IIvx - specifically
the slower data bus - mean that it can't offer much, if any, improvement,
despite its faster CPU. But that is why Apple has the Quadras.


 Score Card

 Macintosh IIvx

 Apple
 List price:     $2,949*
 Overall value   ****

With dedicated video, three NuBus slots, an accelerator slot, a 112-volt power
supply and the capability to hold a half-height, removable-storage device (in
addition to a one-third-height hard drive), the IIvx rates high on the expansion
side. The performance of the IIvx, though it has a slightly faster processor, is
about the same as a IIci, which will be a disappointment to those who wanted
more. (Look for Apple's February CPUs to include a true replacement for the
IIci.) Overall, the IIvx is a very good value that becomes even better when you
purchase the package with the built-in CD-ROM drive.

 Performance             ***
 Features                ****
 Configuration           ***
 Compatibility           *****
 Documentation/support   ****

*For a model with 4 Mbytes of RAM, 512 Kbytes of video RAM and an 80- Mbyte hard
disk; $3,219 for a model with 5 Mbytes of RAM, I Mbyte of VRAM, an 80-Mbyte hard
disk and an AppleCD 300i internal CD-ROM drive.

MacWEEK 11.16.92

News Page 1

(c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

-----------------------
 News: Carousel taking a spin at Comdex

 By Carolyn Said

Las Vegas - Adobe Systems Inc. this week will make a major move to establish and
dominate a new industry: electronic document distribution.

Code-named Carousel, the technology, to be unveiled at Comdex/Fall '92 here,
will let users interchange formatted documents across Mac, DOS, Windows and Unix
platforms.

"Adobe changed the graphic arts industry with PostScript. Carousel has a similar
kind of potential in the bigger world of information," said Brian Corrigan,
senior industry analyst at BIS Strategic Decisions Inc. of Norwell, Mass.

Carousel technology, which Mountain View, Calif.-based Adobe has been publicly
discussing for more than two years, promises to let users electronically
transmit complex documents, with font metrics and graphics information intact,
regardless of the originating application or platform.

The first Carousel products, which sources said will ship in mid-1993, will be
drivers that let users save documents as Portable Document Files (PDF), plus a
viewer application for reading and printing PDF documents.

The viewer, which incorporates Adobe's new SuperATM and multiple-master fonts to
handle font substitution, will allow users to annotate documents with comments
and to navigate by searching for keywords or clicking on thumbnail views of
pages. Analysts said they expect Adobe to price the viewer at less than $100 to
encourage its widespread use.

For Mac users, the driver capabilities will be contained in the new PostScript
Level 2 driver expected from Adobe and Apple next year.

Beyond the initial driver and viewer, Adobe reportedly plans a series of
products that add new features to Carousel, including more-sophisticated
navigation, such as hypertext links, and the capability to edit text and
graphics. A fax-modem utility will let users transmit PDFs.

Adobe will use the text-retrieval technology it recently licensed from Verity
Inc., also of Mountain View, to enhance Carousel's search capabilities. Verity's
engine lets users create search filters with an object-oriented query language.
It offers an optional interface to SQL relational databases.

Also on the drawing boards are an optical character recognition product, which
will let users scan in a printed document and save it in PDF format, and
extensions that will add sound and video support to the Carousel format.

Carousel also will create opportunities for third parties. Lotus Development
Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., has licensed Carousel technology, sources said, and
this week will demonstrate transmission of Carousel documents from cc:Mail and
Lotus Notes.

Users who had seen demonstrations of Carousel said they could foresee it
eventually becoming an integral office tool. "Electronic documents created by
different applications are useless unless you have [the originating]
application," said John Gustafson, systems specialist at 3M Corp. of St. Paul,
Minn. "[Carousel] would give us a neutral format so we could view them for
review and markup. Universal document distribution could solve a lot of
problems."

Chuck Bigelow, president of Bigelow & Holmes Inc., a type-design company in
Menlo Park, Calif., said, "If you assume that graphics, design and typography
add real value to a printed message - which they do - then Carousel brings that
value to electronic communications."

One major benefit for users - and trees - would be reducing document printing.
"Our research shows that 6 percent to 13 percent of a corporation's revenue is
spent on preparing and printing documents," Corrigan said. "When you start
distributing them electronically, you save a huge amount of money."

MacWEEK 11.16.92

News Page 1

(c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.


-----------------------
 News: ESD servers due next year

 '060 and PowerPC models slated for '94

 By Mitch Ratcliffe

Cupertino, Calif. - Two Macintosh servers, one designed to provide faster
AppleShare performance and the second a high-speed imaging server, are under
development in Apple's Enterprise Systems Division and will ship next year,
sources said.

Apple CEO John Sculley reportedly told analysts at a briefing last month that
the servers will be only the first step in a new push to support the company's
corporate users. He also said Apple will ship servers based on Motorola 68060
and PowerPC processors in 1994.

The imaging server is said to dovetail with Apple's QuickDraw GX imaging
architecture and the ColorSync color-calibration extension running on Macintosh
clients. The server will render gray-scale and color images faster than the
clients could.

The server should ship by summer, sources said. The ColorSync rollout is
expected at Macworld Expo in San Francisco in January. QuickDraw GX reportedly
will make its debut at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in May.

The server hardware itself is described by sources as a Quadra 950 with multiple
network interfaces and accelerated disk I/O, including support for RAIDs
(redundant arrays of inexpensive disks), sources said.

The file server hardware is not expected to ship until March at the earliest
because the AppleShare software that will run on it is still being fine-tuned.
Apple will ship the server with a stripped-down version of A/UX, Apple's Unix
implementation, instead of System 7, allowing it to deliver more-efficient disk
caching than the Macintosh operating system could.

The major obstacle to the server introduction has been the difficulty of porting
a version of AppleShare to A/UX, sources said.

The company reportedly tried to run AppleShare in A/UX's System 7 emulation mode
on an early version of the server. The resulting performance was as much as
one-third slower than a standard Quadra 950 running AppleShare under System 7,
sources said. The attempt to port AppleShare to A/UX reportedly did not begin
until late last summer.

The servers fill two niches that Apple has pursued since it launched the
Macintosh family. The imaging server should sell well to large desktop
publishing sites, said one analyst who attended the Sculley briefing.

But the file server has a harder row to hoe, the analyst said, because large
corporate users are unlikely to regard a souped-up Quadra as the be-all and
end-all of servers.

"This gets back to the issue of how Apple's been banging its head against the
corporate wall for almost 10 years," he said. "They aren't likely to fare well
in environments that are 80 percent IBM and only 20 percent Mac."

Apple reportedly will try to sweeten the appeal of its AppleShare server
hardware by including an A/UX-compatible version of Oracle Corp.'s Oracle7
database.

MacWEEK 11.16.92

News Page 1

(c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.


-----------------------
 News: ESD servers due next year

 '060 and PowerPC models slated for '94

 By Mitch Ratcliffe

Cupertino, Calif. - Two Macintosh servers, one designed to provide faster
AppleShare performance and the second a high-speed imaging server, are under
development in Apple's Enterprise Systems Division and will ship next year,
sources said.

Apple CEO John Sculley reportedly told analysts at a briefing last month that
the servers will be only the first step in a new push to support the company's
corporate users. He also said Apple will ship servers based on Motorola 68060
and PowerPC processors in 1994.

The imaging server is said to dovetail with Apple's QuickDraw GX imaging
architecture and the ColorSync color-calibration extension running on Macintosh
clients. The server will render gray-scale and color images faster than the
clients could.

The server should ship by summer, sources said. The ColorSync rollout is
expected at Macworld Expo in San Francisco in January. QuickDraw GX reportedly
will make its debut at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in May.

The server hardware itself is described by sources as a Quadra 950 with multiple
network interfaces and accelerated disk I/O, including support for RAIDs
(redundant arrays of inexpensive disks), sources said.

The file server hardware is not expected to ship until March at the earliest
because the AppleShare software that will run on it is still being fine-tuned.
Apple will ship the server with a stripped-down version of A/UX, Apple's Unix
implementation, instead of System 7, allowing it to deliver more-efficient disk
caching than the Macintosh operating system could.

The major obstacle to the server introduction has been the difficulty of porting
a version of AppleShare to A/UX, sources said.

The company reportedly tried to run AppleShare in A/UX's System 7 emulation mode
on an early version of the server. The resulting performance was as much as
one-third slower than a standard Quadra 950 running AppleShare under System 7,
sources said. The attempt to port AppleShare to A/UX reportedly did not begin
until late last summer.

The servers fill two niches that Apple has pursued since it launched the
Macintosh family. The imaging server should sell well to large desktop
publishing sites, said one analyst who attended the Sculley briefing.

But the file server has a harder row to hoe, the analyst said, because large
corporate users are unlikely to regard a souped-up Quadra as the be-all and
end-all of servers.

"This gets back to the issue of how Apple's been banging its head against the
corporate wall for almost 10 years," he said. "They aren't likely to fare well
in environments that are 80 percent IBM and only 20 percent Mac."

Apple reportedly will try to sweeten the appeal of its AppleShare server
hardware by including an A/UX-compatible version of Oracle Corp.'s Oracle7
database.

MacWEEK 11.16.92

News Page 1

(c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.


-----------------------
 News: ESD servers due next year

 '060 and PowerPC models slated for '94

 By Mitch Ratcliffe

Cupertino, Calif. - Two Macintosh servers, one designed to provide faster
AppleShare performance and the second a high-speed imaging server, are under
development in Apple's Enterprise Systems Division and will ship next year,
sources said.

Apple CEO John Sculley reportedly told analysts at a briefing last month that
the servers will be only the first step in a new push to support the company's
corporate users. He also said Apple will ship servers based on Motorola 68060
and PowerPC processors in 1994.

The imaging server is said to dovetail with Apple's QuickDraw GX imaging
architecture and the ColorSync color-calibration extension running on Macintosh
clients. The server will render gray-scale and color images faster than the
clients could.

The server should ship by summer, sources said. The ColorSync rollout is
expected at Macworld Expo in San Francisco in January. QuickDraw GX reportedly
will make its debut at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in May.

The server hardware itself is described by sources as a Quadra 950 with multiple
network interfaces and accelerated disk I/O, including support for RAIDs
(redundant arrays of inexpensive disks), sources said.

The file server hardware is not expected to ship until March at the earliest
because the AppleShare software that will run on it is still being fine-tuned.
Apple will ship the server with a stripped-down version of A/UX, Apple's Unix
implementation, instead of System 7, allowing it to deliver more-efficient disk
caching than the Macintosh operating system could.

The major obstacle to the server introduction has been the difficulty of porting
a version of AppleShare to A/UX, sources said.

The company reportedly tried to run AppleShare in A/UX's System 7 emulation mode
on an early version of the server. The resulting performance was as much as
one-third slower than a standard Quadra 950 running AppleShare under System 7,
sources said. The attempt to port AppleShare to A/UX reportedly did not begin
until late last summer.

The servers fill two niches that Apple has pursued since it launched the
Macintosh family. The imaging server should sell well to large desktop
publishing sites, said one analyst who attended the Sculley briefing.

But the file server has a harder row to hoe, the analyst said, because large
corporate users are unlikely to regard a souped-up Quadra as the be-all and
end-all of servers.

"This gets back to the issue of how Apple's been banging its head against the
corporate wall for almost 10 years," he said. "They aren't likely to fare well
in environments that are 80 percent IBM and only 20 percent Mac."

Apple reportedly will try to sweeten the appeal of its AppleShare server
hardware by including an A/UX-compatible version of Oracle Corp.'s Oracle7
database.

MacWEEK 11.16.92

News Page 1

(c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.


-----------------------
 News: ESD servers due next year

 '060 and PowerPC models slated for '94

 By Mitch Ratcliffe

Cupertino, Calif. - Two Macintosh servers, one designed to provide faster
AppleShare performance and the second a high-speed imaging server, are under
development in Apple's Enterprise Systems Division and will ship next year,
sources said.

Apple CEO John Sculley reportedly told analysts at a briefing last month that
the servers will be only the first step in a new push to support the company's
corporate users. He also said Apple will ship servers based on Motorola 68060
and PowerPC processors in 1994.

The imaging server is said to dovetail with Apple's QuickDraw GX imaging
architecture and the ColorSync color-calibration extension running on Macintosh
clients. The server will render gray-scale and color images faster than the
clients could.

The server should ship by summer, sources said. The ColorSync rollout is
expected at Macworld Expo in San Francisco in January. QuickDraw GX reportedly
will make its debut at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in May.

The server hardware itself is described by sources as a Quadra 950 with multiple
network interfaces and accelerated disk I/O, including support for RAIDs
(redundant arrays of inexpensive disks), sources said.

The file server hardware is not expected to ship until March at the earliest
because the AppleShare software that will run on it is still being fine-tuned.
Apple will ship the server with a stripped-down version of A/UX, Apple's Unix
implementation, instead of System 7, allowing it to deliver more-efficient disk
caching than the Macintosh operating system could.

The major obstacle to the server introduction has been the difficulty of porting
a version of AppleShare to A/UX, sources said.

The company reportedly tried to run AppleShare in A/UX's System 7 emulation mode
on an early version of the server. The resulting performance was as much as
one-third slower than a standard Quadra 950 running AppleShare under System 7,
sources said. The attempt to port AppleShare to A/UX reportedly did not begin
until late last summer.

The servers fill two niches that Apple has pursued since it launched the
Macintosh family. The imaging server should sell well to large desktop
publishing sites, said one analyst who attended the Sculley briefing.

But the file server has a harder row to hoe, the analyst said, because large
corporate users are unlikely to regard a souped-up Quadra as the be-all and
end-all of servers.

"This gets back to the issue of how Apple's been banging its head against the
corporate wall for almost 10 years," he said. "They aren't likely to fare well
in environments that are 80 percent IBM and only 20 percent Mac."

Apple reportedly will try to sweeten the appeal of its AppleShare server
hardware by including an A/UX-compatible version of Oracle Corp.'s Oracle7
database.

MacWEEK 11.16.92

News Page 1

(c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.


-----------------------
 GA: DayStar card charges Photoshop

 DSP board to speed filters, functions

 By Neil McManus

Flowery Branch, Ga. - DayStar Digital Inc. this month will release Charger, a
NuBus card with a digital signal processor that accelerates Adobe Photoshop
filters by up to 23 times.

Priced at $949, Charger uses two programmable AT&T 16A digital signal processing
chips to speed up often-used Photoshop filters. The board will ship with a
variety of filters, including High Pass, Despeckle, Gaussian Blur, Blur More,
Sharpen, Sharpen More, Sharpen Edges and Unsharp Mask.

With the release of Adobe Photoshop 2.5 in January, DayStar will offer a free
software upgrade that will let the Charger accelerate several native Photoshop
functions, including resize, rotate and resample.

Adobe Systems Inc. last week announced that it has licensed Photoshop 2.5 code
to a handful of accelerator-board companies, including DayStar, SuperMac
Technology, Spectral Innovations Inc., Newer Technology and RasterOps Corp.
Digital signal processor (DSP) and RISC accelerators from these companies will
be able to speed Photoshop 2.5 features, such as brushes, color conversions and
Magic Wand.

In DayStar tests, the Charger on a Mac II performed an Unsharp Mask on a
2.8-Mbyte Photoshop image 1,000 percent faster than the Mac II alone. The
Charger performed a two-pixel High Pass operation 1,700 percent faster than the
unaccelerated Mac II.

DayStar's Charger will come bundled with the full version of PicturePress 2.5, a
$199 image-compression program from Storm Technology Inc. of Mountain View,
Calif.

PicturePress 2.5, which ships this month, taps the Charger's DSP to compress and
decompress images quickly using the JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
standard. The Charger speeds PicturePress by up to eight times, DayStar said.

Version 2.5 of Storm's PicturePress adds several new features, including
automated batch processing; CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) compression from
within Photoshop; and support for Encapsulated PostScript-JPEG files, which can
be decompressed by PostScript Level 2 output devices.

Like SuperMac's $999 ThunderStorm board, the DayStar Charger is based on Storm's
PhotoFlash DSP accelerator.

DayStar Digital Inc. is at 5556 Atlanta Highway, Flowery Branch, Ga. 30542.
Phone [phone]; fax [phone].

MacWEEK 11.16.92

GA Page 38

(c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.


-----------------------
 ProductWatch: On-line news gives information on demand

 Managers who know how to make a good query can save time and money in the long
run.

 By Jeff Ubois

On-line information services have become indispensable sources for many
corporations in the daily quest for strategic information. Yet sorting out the
terabits of information published everyday around the world and deciding how to
give users access to that information can be a daunting task.

When a required source of information is available through only one vendor,
making the choice between the different services is easy. For most managers,
choosing among the different on-line news services is a matter of making
trade-offs between cost, ease of use, search capabilities and the type of
information required.

What's available. Information on-line ranges from general news feeds such as The
Associated Press and United Press International wire services, to highly
specialized financial, technical, scientific and trade publications. There are
more than 4,000 different databases now available on-line. The on-line services
vary greatly in their content, cost and search capabilities.

At the low end are consumer-level services such as Prodigy Services Co.'s
Prodigy, General Electric Co.'s GEnie and America Online Inc.'s America Online,
which offer low-cost access and menu-driven interfaces.

The consumer-level services may be good for companies that want to make them
available to large numbers of users, but they lack powerful search capabilities.
They typically offer headline news from a few major sources such as AP or UPI.

Midlevel services, such as CompuServe Inc.'s CompuServe, NewsNet Inc.'s NewsNet
and Dow Jones & Co. Inc.'s Dow Jones News Retrieval, offer a wider range of
contents, such as access to specialized news sources and trade journals. These
ser-vices cost more and take a few hours to learn but let users make
more-sophisticated queries than consumer-level services.

High-end services, such as Dialog Information Services Inc.'s Dialog and Mead
Data Central Inc.'s Lexis and Nexis, require special training classes and can
cost several hundred dollars per hour to access.

These services provide databases geared to specific industries, such as aviation
or petroleum; legal information, such as patent records or case law;
directories, such as Moody's or Standard and Poor's; government information,
such as the Commerce Business Daily; and news from trade journals, newspapers
and wire services.

Many databases are offered by more than one service, and some services offer
gateways to other services. In addition, the Internet and wireless
communications are beginning to play a larger role in accessing on-line news
information.

Practical applications. The wealth of news available on-line can do a lot more
than satisfy idle curiosity. Competitive intelligence, marketing, research and
customer support are some of the areas in which companies use these resources.

Paul Senatori, a senior marketing analyst at Alameda, Calif.-based Ingres who
functions as an information manager for the company's sales department, uses Dow
Jones News Retrieval to arm the company's sales staff with information about its
rivals.

"I use it to monitor competitors' activities in the relational database market -
everything from press announcements to stock price movements," Senatori said.

Senatori has set up "clipping files" on Dow Jones that automatically grab
stories that mention the names of his competitors. "I get six to 12 stories a
day," Senatori said. "An interesting application is to try to gauge when my
competitors are going to make a product announcement."

MTV, the rock-oriented music video cable station, like many companies, finds
that going on-line can save time and money. According to Chris Bell, on-line
research consultant for MTV News in New York, rock and political news stories
are clipped electronically using Nexis' Eclipse service and automatically
forwarded to the appropriate reporter.

Costly info. The most common complaint about on-line services is their cost.
While doing an on-line search can save days of library research, $100 for a
20-minute on-line session usually induces sticker shock.

However, most services offer discounts for nighttime access. High-end services,
such as Dialog and Nexis, also offer training classes that include strategies
for reducing costs through efficient searches.

Another strategy is to centralize where possible. Because of the higher cost and
higher level of skills required to operate high-end services, many companies
rely on their corporate librarians or designate someone as an information
specialist to handle access to services such as Nexis.

However, designating one person, such as Ingres' Senatori, to gather information
on-line and feed it to others also can be effective with midlevel services. At
$200 to $300 per month, Senatori's on-line bill is high for one end user but low
when divided among all of the people to whom he passes the information.

Build effective searches. Matching the services' search capabilities with your
users' level of sophistication is crucial.

While Senatori acts to shield end users from the complexity of on-line services,
Bell has moved to put access to Nexis directly in the hands of anyone who wants
it.

But Bell, who is also president of Max Computer Systems, a New York- based
software consulting company that has developed HyperCard front ends for Lexis
and Nexis, said training is crucial. "Anyone can learn to sign on and navigate
the service, but learning to create an effective query is the key."

Bell said effective file clipping usually requires complex search strategies and
takes some trial and error to develop. "I just sit for an afternoon and work on
a search until it provides the most hits and the fewest numbers of 'miss-hits,'
" Bell said.

"If you enter 'Clinton and Gore' you could overflow with 500 articles a day, but
with modification you can get it to the point where it is giving you back what
you'd expect."

Perhaps most difficult is finding a user interface easy enough to learn yet
powerful enough to select only relevant information. So far, most interfaces are
either simple but not very powerful, or powerful but too complex. "I'd like to
see improved user interfaces with all these services," Senatori said.

Despite their obvious utility, on-line information services aren't going to
eliminate print, radio and television as the primary news media any more than
desktop computers have created the paperless office promised in the late 1970s.

But for managers willing to spend the time and money, on-line news services
provide a powerful supplement to these traditional sources of information. And
in the right hands at the right time, information is priceless.


 Product Info

 America Online Inc.
 America Online monthly fee: $5.95 with one free hour; hourly fee: $5 to $10
 8619 Westwood Center Drive, Vienna, Va. 22182-2285
 Phone [phone] or [phone]
 Fax [phone]

 ClariNet Communications Corp.
 ClariNet monthly fee: $35 for a single user; 15 users: $52.50; noncommercial
home license: $15 per month; Newsbytes only, monthly fee: $10 for a single user;
100 users: $83 per month; site licenses available
 P.O. Box 1479, Cupertino, Calif. 95015-1479
 Phone [phone] or [phone]
 Fax [phone]

 CompuServe Inc.
 The CompuServe Information Service monthly fee: $7.95 for unlimited access to
30 basic services; access to other services: $12.80 per hour and up
 5000 Arlington Centre Blvd., P.O. Box 20212, Columbus, Ohio 43220
 Phone [phone] or [phone]
 Fax [phone]

 DataTimes
 DataTimes sign-up fee: $85; monthly charges: $15 with on-line charges of $1.16
to $1.91 per minute or $75 with on-line charges of 69 cents to $1.19 per minute;
flat fee pricing available
 14000 Quail Springs Parkway, Suite 450, Oklahoma City, Okla. 73134
 Phone [phone] or [phone]
 Fax [phone]

 Dialog Information Services Inc.
 Dialog sign-up fee: $45; annual fee: $35; hourly rates: range from $24 to $312
plus per-record charges; knowledge Index sign-up fee: $40 plus 40 cents per
minute (only accessible after hours)
 3460 Hillview Ave., Palo Alto, Calif. 94304
 Phone [phone] or [phone]
 Fax [phone]

 Dow Jones & Co. Inc.
 Dow Jones News Retrieval sign-up fee: $29.95; annual fee: $18 per year after
first year; 60 cents to $2.16 per minute plus download fees
 P.O. Box 300, Princeton, N.J. 08543-0300
 Phone [phone] or [phone], Ext. 139
 Fax [phone]

 GEneral electric co.
 GEnie monthly fee: $4.95 plus $18 per hour prime time (8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern
time); $6 per hour after hours
 P.O. Box 6403, Rockville, Md. 20850-1785
 Phone [phone]

 Mainstream Data Inc.
 Mainstream Newscast: Costs vary between $50 to $1,000 per month depending on
the news wires selected
 420 Chipeta Way, Salt Lake City, Utah 84108
 Phone [phone]
 Fax [phone]

 Mead Data Central Inc.
 Nexis monthly fee: $50;
 Nexis and Lexis monthly fee: $125; on-line charges vary; volume discounts
available
 P.O. Box 933, Dayton, Ohio 45401
 Phone [phone] or [phone]
 Fax [phone]

 NewsNet Inc.
 NewsNet annual fee: $120; hourly fee: $60 to $90
 945 Haverford Road, Bryn Mawr, Pa. 19010
 Phone [phone] or [phone]
 Fax [phone]

 Prodigy Services Co.
 Prodigy monthly fee: $14.95, unlimited on-line time
 445 Hamilton Ave., White Plains, N.Y. 10601
 Phone [phone] or [phone]
 Fax [phone]

 Ziff Desktop Information
 ZiffNet and ZiffNet/Mac monthly fee: $2.50 for access to basic services;
 hourly fee: $12.80 to $22.80 for other services
 25 First St., Cambridge, Mass. 02141
 Phone [phone]
 Fax [phone]

MacWEEK 11.16.92

ProductWatch Page 91

(c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.


-----------------------
 Review: Premiere 2.0 vs. VideoFusion

 Editors make fast work of QuickTime

 By David Poole

Two new editing systems will greatly affect the way graphics users put QuickTime
to work.

Adobe Premiere 2.0 and the first release of VideoFusion Ltd.'s VideoFusion are
both feature-rich QuickTime-editing and special-effects environments. Both
products compete with and, in their own ways, leave behind DiVA Corp.'s
VideoShop, which has not been upgraded since its first release.

Despite QuickTime's lingering limitations for digital video, the payoff from
these editing applications is that they mimic the traditional video-editing
process at a fraction of the cost: You can cut, copy and paste segments of
video, create smooth transitions between video segments and take advantage of a
host of special effects.

If you need to go beyond simple video comps or presentation clips, you can use
add-on hardware to create full-screen QuickTime movies that you later can record
onto videotape via single-frame controllers such as the Diaquest Inc.'s DQ
Animaq.

These programs offer special effects that rival those in high-end systems:
Premiere offers sophisticated titling, layering and keyframes; and VideoFusion
ups the ante with effects that include warping, morphing and animated filters.
For the presenter, the result is powerful communications; for the artist, the
result is fresh forms of video art.

The second Premiere. Version 2.0 of Adobe Premiere contains many new features
that make it a more powerful and productive artistic tool.

Premiere has four main windows: Project, Construction, Clip and Special Effects.
You load movies, sounds, animation and graphics into the Project window, which
serves as a holding pen for all the elements used in a production. You drag
elements from the Project window into the Construction window, where you can
load them into the A video, B video, Super (superimpose) or Audio tracks and
organize them along a time line. Premiere lets you easily insert transitions
between QuickTime segments by dragging an effect from the Special Effects window
into the fx track of the Construction window. You can change the direction and
parameters of the transition and preview these settings in a pop-up dialog box.

The Super track lets you superimpose graphics, animation and video segments over
the elements in your A and B video tracks. You can layer elements in a number of
ways, using everything from alpha channels to chroma keying, with controls for
extending the tolerance of the key color. Premiere also supports three channels
of audio and includes the capability to fade segments in each channel
independently.

Motion, filters and titling. A new addition to Premiere is the Motion command,
which gives you practically unlimited control over how a QuickTime segment,
graphic or title is moved on, off or around the screen. This command lets users
resize, rotate, distort and animate elements with user-defined keyframes.
Examples include moving a graphic or video segment along a path that simulates
the motion of a leaf falling off a tree, or simply zooming in slightly on a
movie to crop out an unwanted area. Furthermore, you can save and load motion
settings for reuse in other projects. Premiere lets you add keyframes that offer
precise control over the path of your moving element.

Premiere contains an expanded set of built-in filters, including a number of
filters that allow you to distort a movie or graphic over time. You also can
load and save parameters for many of these filters, so you can store an effect
for future use. Premiere lets you stack filter settings and apply multiple
filters to the same piece of footage. Perhaps the best feature in Premiere is
its capability to combine motion, filter and transparency settings, allowing you
to move filtered graphics over background video.

Premiere has built-in titling capabilities that let you create and animate
titles and control stroke and fill colors, drop shadows and opacity. The titling
function takes advantage of both TrueType and PostScript fonts and works with
Adobe Type Manager, so text appears smooth and anti-aliased. Like the
graphic-animation tools, you can set multiple keyframes for a title and stretch
an animated title so it plays for a specified duration. Using multiple-master
fonts, you can animate the size, weight, width and optical scale of type for
interesting effects. While Premiere's titling capabil-ity is limited when
compared with dedicated systems or character generators (you can't rotate text,
for example), it is very good in most situations.

Extras on the set. Premiere offers limited hardware control for digitizers,
video decks and edit-decision list (EDL) export (see story, next page), as well
as support for Adobe Photoshop plug-ins and Aldus Corp.'s Gallery Effects.

A Filmstrip extension to the Export menu lets you save files so you can open
them in Photoshop for rotoscoping (painting over individual frames). This
feature works by creating a document containing every frame of the exported
movie segment. This is an impractical option for full-screen work or for movies
of more than 10 or 15 frames. In general, Photoshop isn't well-suited to the
demands of editing sequential frames, and we hope Adobe can come up with a
better solution.

Premiere is a well-rounded application, although we did find a few problems with
it. It does not always import PICS files properly. When you apply some of the
filters, such as Ripple and Bend, on large, full- screen documents, they do not
translate properly from the Preview window to full screen. Also, we noticed
artifacts in full-screen filter animations and motion tests, which indicated
that anti-aliasing in this area could be improved.

Premiere offers only one channel for supers - this is a drawback for animators,
who often need to work with numerous layers of superimposed or composite
graphics.

Overall, Premiere performs quickly and intuitively, and it is currently the best
application available for QuickTime editing.

Cool fusion. VideoFusion concentrates on special effects rather than editing.
Like Premiere, it uses a Time view for editing movies, but it also offers a
powerful Storyboard. You can use the Storyboard to arrange clips and apply
transitions and effects to graphics and movies.

Several options are available in each of these views: The Storyboard view offers
Color, Filter and Combine menus that let you apply powerful special effects and
filters. The Time view allows you to cut and order segments and place and
control sounds.

All of VideoFusion's effects can be "tweened" over time. For example, you can
apply a red filter that gradually changes to blue or a filter that fades the
video from color to black and white. While Premiere's keyframing offers precise
control over the path of moving elements, VideoFusion offers programmable
motion, with the capability to save settings. We like VideoFusion's motion
controls, but we wish they were combined with keyframes.

One of VideoFusion's major strengths is its capability to perform operations on
separate channels. For example, the Threshold and Slice filters allow you to
extract data from the RGB (red, green, blue) or HSV (hue, saturation, value)
channels of a movie. The controls for color and filter operations have
adjustable thresholds, so you can extract more or less of a value from a movie.
You can colorize movies or map them to an entirely different palette. There also
are Convolve and Shape filters that allow custom filtering for sharpening or
blurring a movie.

While Premiere lets you apply multiple effects to movies simultaneously,
VideoFusion lets you perform only one operation at a time. You must create a new
movie for every effect you add -Ja process that can range from slow to
stultifying. Using QuickTime's new Compact Video compressor, a five-second
160-by-120-pixel clip can take five minutes or more to compress on a Mac IIfx.
Even with the standard Video compressor, such a clip takes more than a minute to
compress. This will be less of a limitation as hardware accelerators add support
for QuickTime video compressors, but for now, it makes for slow going with
VideoFusion.

Special effects. The most exotic filter effects in VideoFusion are the Pan/Zoom,
PZR (pan-zoom-rotate) and Warp filters. Pan/Zoom allows you to move and resize
video segments up, down, left and right on your screen. The PZR function gives
you programmable 3-D control over the movement and positioning of video
segments. You can tilt your video around any axis, exaggerate its perspective,
zoom it off in space and otherwise control its flight path with complete
freedom. Rotation values can be determined by clicking and dragging, or you can
enter them numerically for precise control. As with many VideoFusion effects,
there's a library of prebuilt PZR moves, so you can try an effect, preview and
modify it, and save new settings for later use.

Warp treats your movie as if it were being played on a stretchable rubber sheet.
It allows you to create funhouse-mirror, stretch and swirling effects. The
Warping Grid, which provides a visual reference for manipulating video, can be
subdivided and manipulated in any manner you like. This is indispensable for
animators and special-effects artists.

Merging movies. VideoFusion offers a variety of methods for combining movies:
Transition, Blend, Mix, Chroma key, Arithmetic, Logical and Morph functions all
offer different ways to combine two video segments. Many of these techniques
offer ways to use color, hue, saturation and brightness values as a part of the
function of combining movies. The Transition command offers a library of
standard wipe patterns, such as Barn Doors and Band Wipes, to move from one
piece of footage to another. You also can combine three movies via the composite
function, which allows you to superimpose data from one movie over another,
using a third movie, known as a "Traveling matte." Traveling mattes are
generally black-and-white or gray-scale footage, used in the same manner an
alpha channel is used for compositing in Photoshop.

You can use a PICT or PICS file's alpha channel for compositing movies, but the
process is awkward and time-consuming: When you open a graphic or animation and
convert it to a movie, a button allows you to import only the alpha channel as a
separate movie which then can be used as a black-and-white matte or Traveling
matte. It would be preferable if the Composite filter simply recognized a file's
alpha channel the way Premiere does. Though VideoFusion opens PICT and raw image
files, we also would like to see direct support of Photoshop files, which could
open the way to new and interesting channel effects.

VideoFusion supports both static and dynamic morphing. Static morphing allows
you to morph from one image to another; dynamic morphing allows you to morph
between two separate pieces of moving footage - for example, changing a running
dog into a running horse. This is the first time we've seen dynamic morphing on
a Macintosh. Although it is time- consuming, dynamic morphing is a powerful
capability.

Like Premiere, VideoFusion can export film strips to Photoshop for rotoscoping.
It also offers eight tracks of audio that let you add plenty of sound effects
and other audio elements to a production, although it doesn't allow you to fade
audio tracks up or down at your discretion, which Premiere does.

Video Fusion supports only AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) and AIFC (Audio
Interchange File Compressed) sound files, but we think most serious users will
own Macromedia Inc.'s SoundEdit Pro or a similar application that lets you
import and edit sound files and export in these formats.

VideoFusion's effects are high-quality, so full-screen work shouldn't suffer the
anti-aliasing problems associated with Premiere's motion and filter effects.
Also, like Premiere, movies can be exported to numbered PICT files, which is
crucial for transferring animations to videotape. The biggest disappointment in
VideoFusion was its lack of direct alpha- channel support in graphics and
animation files.

VideoFusion is not a do-all editor - it lacks titling, keyframes, hardware
support and EDL export - and for basic editing, Premiere does a better, faster
job. But VideoFusion is a very powerful special-effects program, and serious
QuickTime users will want it in their studio.

Conclusions. Both Premiere and VideoFusion deserve credit for offering Mac
animators and video producers a new form of creativity. DiVA's VideoShop is the
only QuickTime editor geared toward presentation authoring, but its editing
capabilities have lagged significantly behind Premiere since their
near-simultaneous introduction, and VideoFusion's effects surpass VideoShop's.
While all three programs perform basic video editing, Premiere is the strongest,
mainly because it addresses editing in a straightforward and intuitive fashion.
Also, Premiere is the only program that can import and export video via device
control and export EDLs for high-end production. Beyond this, its alpha-channel
support, PostScript titling and animation controls are nice bonuses. The
anti-aliasing needs improvement, a few bugs linger, and its device- control
capabilities could go a lot further. But Premiere has positioned itself well as
the Photoshop of QuickTime.

VideoFusion excels at more creative effects. It offers a wider variety of
features for manipulating video, such as its morphing, Warp, PZR and
channel-filtering operations. And the quality of effects in VideoFusion is the
best available.


 Score Card

 QuickTime authoring tools

QuickTime editors have come a long way. Two new releases excel at editing and
special effects, although neither program excels at both.

> Adobe Premiere 2.0 from Adobe Systems Inc. is the most comprehensive
QuickTime-editing program. It emulates the traditional video-editing process and
offers a healthy array of special effects. Its extensive export capabilities
address the widest range of users, and the user interface and documentation are
clear and sensible. Despite low-quality filter and motion effects, it is still
the best example of what a QuickTime- editing application should be.

> VideoFusion 1.0 from VideoFusion Ltd. focuses more on special effects than
editing features. The program has a great array of effects and many of them,
such as PZR (pan-zoom-rotate) and Warp, are programmable to operate over time.
While VideoFusion performs only fairly with alpha channels, its other effects
are excellent. The primary limitation of the program may be that it needs to
compress a new movie for every effect applied, which is a potentially daunting
process. Nevertheless, the program serves as a clear indicator that digital
video will be a new art form, not just another way to address the video-editing
process.

                         Premiere   VideoFusion
 Overall value           ****       ****
 Version tested          2.0        1.0
 Price                   $695       $649
 Performance             ***        ***
 Ease of use             ****       ****
 Features                ****       ***
 Documentation/support   ***        ***


 System 7 Compatibility

                         Premiere 2.0   VideoFusion 1.0
 Balloon help            No             No
 TrueType                Yes            No
 Publish and subscribe   No             No
 Apple events            No             No
 32-bit addressing*      Yes            Yes

 *According to vendor.


 Product Info

 Adobe Systems Inc.
 Adobe Premiere 2.0: $695
 1585 Charleston Road, Mountain View, Calif. 94039-7900
 Phone [phone] Fax [phone]

 VideoFusion Ltd.
 VideoFusion 1.0: $649
 1722 Indian Wood Circle, Suite H, Maumee, Ohio 43537
 Phone [phone] Fax [phone]

MacWEEK 11.16.92

Reviews Page 77

(c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.


-----------------------
 Mac the Knife: Tomorrow's tricky transition

The Knife's neighborhood militia spent most of last week in a state of low-grade
but nonstop celebration over the fact that San Francisco will remain a land of
Giants. According to the Knife's sources, most of the rest of the nation was
more interested in some sort of transition allegedly taking place in Little
Rock.

While appreciating both events, the Knife was much more interested in
contemplating what the next year will bring for his beloved Apple. Now that the
company's 1993 plans are in place, there's little doubt that the new year will
be one of corporate transition. In fact, the transition could be as momentous
(and risky) as the mid-1980s when Apple more or less bet the farm on a little
toy computer called Mac.

Two completely new platforms have already been announced: Newton and Sweet Pea.
Neither of these will rely on the Mac operating system. There's also the small
matter of keeping the revenues flowing while the company makes the shift from
CISC to RISC - and making sure that third- party software developers will stick
with Apple through the transition.

No matter how you cut it, all these changes represent major challenges to
Apple's hopes of retaining its position as one of the nation's great modern
success stories.

Billion-dollar B.O. Then there's the problem of delivering on products already
announced. The Knife reports that the back-order situation is deteriorating
rapidly. Some sources claim the dollar value of Apple products ordered but not
delivered is approaching $1 billion. While this paltry figure won't attract the
attention of the Ross Perots of the computer industry (or is Ross already the
Perot of the computer industry?), it does represent nearly 7 percent of Apple's
current annual sales.

But there are hopeful signs that Apple is moving to relieve this success-induced
problem. For example, the Knife has learned that Apple has decided to offload
PowerBook 145 manufacturing to Acer Electronics in China.

There also are rumors that things aren't running all that smoothly at the
Fountain, Colo., facility. All in all, it seems somewhat unfortunate that
spiraling expenses forced Apple to close the Fremont, Calif., plant. But there's
always hope. Maybe the Acer deal will be a huge success, and Apple will find a
company that actually can manufacture Quadra 950s in quantity sufficient to meet
demand.

Say you want some resolution? Clearly, it's time to improve the resolution in
the video-capture game. Radius is close to announcing a daughterboard for its
$2,395 VideoVision. For about another $2,000, you'll get true 640-by-480-pixel
resolution (as seen on NTSC TV, as they say). The key to this higher level of
resolution is the new C-Cube 560 chip. Unfortunately, sources familiar with all
things C-Cube tell the Knife that the 560 won't be available in quantity until
March. That means that the new Radius daughterboard won't be available in
quantity until then, either. Same goes for SuperMac's Digital Film upgrade
because it, too, will use the 560.

Gummy business. Late last week Guy Kawasaki announced that the deal to sell the
GUM PowerBook utilities to Symantec Corp. was done. The only remaining question
is what to call the product now that it has a new home. Sources say the new
owner will rechristen the product Norton PowerBook Enhancements, completely
ignoring the Knife's suggestion that it be called Gordon's Utilities for
Macintosh.

If you're planning to hand out MacWEEK mugs during the holiday season, you'd
better think twice unless you have a really big bag full of tips. Let the Knife
be the judge at [phone], fax [phone], MCI (MactheKnife), AppleLink
(MacWEEK) and CompuServe/ZiffNet/Mac.

MacWEEK 11.16.92

Mac the Knife Page 158

(c) Copyright 1992 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material
may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
-----------------------