Cupertino, Calif. - The Newton personal digital assistants Apple will begin shipping this summer will let users send messages around the world at the tap of a pen.
Known as Newton E-mail, the electronic-mail software is expected to be built into all versions of the new handheld device. It will work with the 2,400-bps modem attachment that will be shipped with the first Newton devices, as well as the more-advanced communications capabilities expected in later models.
To support Newton E-mail, Apple is reportedly establishing a dedicated host mail system accessible via SprintNet, a worldwide telecommunications network that provides local, toll-free access from most cities. An Internet gateway will let users communicate with virtually all other mail services.
Newton E-mail will let users transmit data objects such as memos and notes, names and addresses, calendar events, and to-do items. While viewing any of these objects, users will be able to select Mail from a menu or write, for example, "mail John Smith" on the screen. That will turn the object's contents into a message preaddressed to John Smith if that name appears in the user's contact database; the sender's name and return address will be automatically entered in a header.
Messages may take one of two forms: text only and text plus Newton objects. The text-only option will create messages that can be read on any computer. The second option is for messages to other Newton users; it transmits an exact duplicate of the object, which can then be used in the recipient's PDA.
The system will store outgoing messages in an Out Box when the user is off-line; once a connection to the Newton E-mail host is established, pending mail is sent and mail waiting in the user's Newton E-mail In Box is retrieved.
Newton users will have several shortcuts at their disposal to hide some of the complexity of E-mail. If the user writes "mail John" on a note-pad item and only one John exists in the address book, the note pad's contents will be addressed to that John. If John prefers to get his mail via AppleLink and that information is stored with the sender's address book, the message will automatically be addressed so it will be routed through the Newton E-mail host system to John's account on AppleLink.
Access to the host mail system, like other E-mail services, will require an account password, and the Newton itself has a password feature that prevents unauthorized use. Newton E-mail, however, lacks advanced security features such as authentication and encryption.
Newton E-mail is one part of a four-tiered communications system. Users will also be able to send faxes via a fax modem; print to AppleTalk printers; and "beam" to another Newton using wireless radio transmitters, which are expected to be standard on some models.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
News Page 1
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
News: Newton momentum building
By Andrew Gore
Chicago - Apple last week marked the first anniversary of Newton's debut by offering a few more details about future directions for the personal digital assistant.
The company and its partners discussed plans for Newton devices at the Consumer Electronics Show here.
> Delivery. Newton will ship this summer and for less than $1,000, according to Gaston Bastiaens, vice president and general manager of Apple's Personal Interactive Electronics (PIE) Division.
Sources said the device will have a 20-MHz ARM RISC processor; a 320-by-240-pixel, 3-by-5-inch reflective LCD screen; a half-duplex, point-to-point infrared transceiver; and an AppleTalk-enabled serial port. Powered by four AAA batteries, Newton will have one PCMCIA slot and a tiny 2,400-bps external fax modem.
> Desktop connectivity. Apple has said it will offer software that lets Newton download data to a Mac or Windows-based computer. The software, code-named Docker, will come in two flavors, sources said: a simple backup program and a more sophisticated product that emulates Newton's planner and Rolodex functions and is AppleScript-savvy.
> Technology alliances. At CES, Apple announced partnerships with three regional Bell operating companies - Ameritech Corp., BellSouth and US West.
According to a prepared statement, Ameritech said it plans to offer Newton fax and voice-messaging services, including notification, message delivery and random access to messages. BellSouth will test prototype Newton phones for Apple. According to sources, the RBOC is already testing Apple phone devices that don't use Newton technology.
US West will explore screen-based telephony and telephone services for Newton devices.
> Sharp PDA. Apple's first Newton partner and the PDA's manufacturer, Sharp Electronics Corp., got its 2 cents in at CES, as well.
According to Gil DeLiso, Sharp director of marketing, the consumer-electronics giant is "in the final stages of refining the product and getting it ready to produce."
Sharp's PDA will ship in the third quarter and, except for a few cosmetic differences, will be identical to Apple's Newton. It should be able to use Newton software and peripherals. It will also offer docking software and an external fax modem.
Sharp's device, which might not use the Newton moniker, will be available through consumer-electronics, office-products and mail-order channels. It will also be sold directly to corporate customers. Sharp is looking at establishing its own network of value-added resellers to develop custom solutions for corporate and institutional customers.
"Corporate customers are very interested in looking at technology that overcomes ease-of-use barriers," DeLiso said. "It's not going to do much good to outfit your sales staff with the best mobile-computing technology if they're going to leave it in their car."
> Content. PIE announced that it will produce and distribute interactive media. PIE's publishing group will offer business, general-reference, entertainment and education titles. It will also provide cross-platform media-development tools for creating titles that run on Macs, Windows machines and Apple PDAs.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
News Page 1
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
News: Apple soliciting users to test pen PBs
By Andrew Gore
Cupertino, Calif. - Apple is inviting all comers to apply to be field testers of its first pen-based and wireless PowerBooks.
Under a new program called Emerging Markets and Technologies, Apple is seeking "customers with specific business needs that have defied traditional mobile-computing technology," according to Mark Orr, the program's product-line manager.
Orr said Emerging Markets and Technologies needs testers in two areas:
> Pen-based Macs. Apple first publicly discussed its pen-based PowerBook Duo prototype last month at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif. Code-named Hancock, the unit is already being tested in the field. Orr said Apple wants to expand the number of test sites significantly this summer.
Apple's pen technology currently works with unmodified System 7.1. An extension lets users control the Finder and enter menu commands with pen gestures. For example, a "flick-up" gesture - a single upward pen stroke - entered over a window in the Finder could be used to make the window scroll up.
Orr said Apple hasn't yet determined what gestures will perform which functions. Hancock also supports handwriting recognition and digital ink, a data type that combines a bit map of what's written on screen with information about stroke velocity, weight and direction.
According to Orr, the current version of the pen extension works with most shipping Macintosh applications. Using unmodified MacWrite Pro, for instance, a user could write text into a document as well as type it.
"Unlike [GO Corp.'s] PenPoint, where there is really no installed base [of software], the Mac operating system is very mature and has a very rich suite of application and development tools that can be used with pen-enabled systems," Orr said.
Apple will encourage test sites to develop their own pen-savvy applications. According to Orr, popular Mac development tools, such as ACI US Inc.'s 4th Dimension, should work well with a pen.
Apple this summer will release a preliminary pen application programming interface for in-house and commercial developers.
The company will use the results from this test to determine the final design of pen-based PowerBook models. Although Orr wouldn't comment on a release date, he said Apple will definitely release Mac pen technology as a commercial product.
> Wireless PowerBooks. Apple is experimenting with a variety of wireless communications technologies for PowerBooks, including analog cellular and CDPD (cellular digital packet data), plus radio-frequency local- and wide-area networking.
Orr said his group will field-test some of these wireless technologies later this year.
The big unknown, he said, is what customers will accept in performance and capabilities - and for what price. Sending data via cellular technology, for example, can be quite expensive. Paging, although it doesn't support voice, is much cheaper.
Another question is what interface will work best for voice: Do users really want their PowerBook to act as a telephone, or would they prefer it to store and forward messages, like a network-savvy answering machine?
"We're trying to understand real-world usage patterns, which include what people are trying to do, how people are trying to do it and what that costs," Orr said. "It's only when all three issues are really addressed [that] we have a solution."
Customers and developers interested in participating in the Emerging Markets and Technologies program should send their request via the AppleLink address PEN.IDEAS.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
News Page 1
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
News: Adobe readies sweeping Illustrator upgrade
By Bruce Fraser
The long-awaited Adobe Illustrator 5.0, currently in beta testing, is the most sweeping revision so far of Adobe Systems Inc.'s popular PostScript illustration program. Version 5.0 leapfrogs the Windows-based Version 4.0 with new tools, new plug-in filters and major revisions to the user interface.
Many of the new features seem designed to attain parity with Illustrator's main competitor, Aldus FreeHand. For example, Version 5.0 adds layers, a pressure-sensitive calligraphic Pen tool and the capability to edit artwork in Preview mode.
Illustrator 5.0 makes extensive use of floating palettes. The Layers palette, which resembles the Channels palette in Adobe Photoshop, allows you to create, delete and manipulate layers. You can temporarily make layers nonprintable and switch between Artwork and Preview modes independently for each layer.
When working in Preview mode, you can select filled objects by clicking anywhere inside them, unless you disable Area Select via the Preferences command. You can also turn the display of the selection outlines on and off.
The painting controls have changed considerably. The Paint Style command now opens a floating palette, which you can leave open at all times. The palette is divided into three panels. The first contains a set of paint swatches, which can contain up to 255 custom or process colors, blends, or patterns. You can't, however, store stroke or line attributes in a custom color swatch.
The second panel in the Paint Style palette has all the controls for defining process and custom colors or for choosing colors from any of several libraries, including Pantone (spot and process), Toyo, Focoltone and TruMatch colors. You can also choose any blends, gradients or pattern fills that you've defined; set the stroke weight; and control overprinting and knockouts for each color.
The final panel has the controls for setting line attributes such as cap and join style, miter limit, and dash patterns. You can collapse the palette so that any of the three panels is visible.
You can apply the settings in the Paint Style palette either by selecting an object and clicking the palette's Stroke and Fill buttons or by using the new Paint Bucket tool. The advantage of the Paint Bucket tool is that you don't have to select the object. You just click on it with the Paint Bucket tool. Double-clicking the Paint Bucket lets you set attributes. You can set this to apply any or all of the characteristics found in the Paint Style palette.
The same options can be set independently for the Paint Bucket's companion tool, the Eye Dropper, which picks up any or all of the above attributes from an existing object. You can toggle between the two tools by holding down the Option key. Together, they provide a fast and flexible way of transferring paint attributes from one object to another.
Illustrator now offers linear and radial blends and gradient fills. You can fill a path with a gradient without resorting to masked blends, as was previously necessary. The Gradients palette lets you create blends quickly and easily between two or more process or custom colors. Another new tool, the Gradient Vector tool, lets you control the direction of gradient fills and their starting and ending points. The range of possible effects is vast, and operation of the tool is efficient and intuitive.
Text features are mostly unchanged, but text alignment, hyphenation, hanging punctuation, and word and letter spacing can now be set from the Paragraph palette. In addition, font, size, leading, tracking, baseline shift and kerning controls are available in the Character palette.
The final noteworthy new feature is the introduction of plug-in filters that resemble Photoshop's. There are several types of filter. Some of the more intriguing are the Pathfinder filters, which let you combine, add and subtract two or more paths in various interesting ways; the Distort filters, which let you roughen an object's shape for a hand-drawn look or apply free perspective distortion; the Select filters, which let you quickly select all objects with the same fill color, stroke color, stroke weight or Paint Style; and the Stylize filters, which have names like Bloat and Punk. Bloat curves all the line segments outward by a specified percentage, while Punk turns all the control points into spikes.
One surprising omission in Illustrator 5.0 is the lack of support for PostScript Level 2 pattern resources. Pattern fills in the new version are the same as those in previous versions and cause RIPs (raster image processors) just as much difficulty. No mention of Level 2 is made in the prerelease documentation we received.
Also, while this revision of Illustrator goes significantly beyond the current version of FreeHand in most areas, it still requires Adobe Separator to produce color separations.
All in all, though, this is a very useful upgrade. Some lovers of Illustrator's squeaky-clean interface may by confused by the plethora of palettes, but we suspect their dismay will quickly turn to enthusiasm when they discover the speed and flexibility the new interface features offer.
Illustrator 5.0 is scheduled to ship sometime this summer for $595. Upgrades from Version 4.0 will be $149 until Aug. 31 and $199 thereafter.
Adobe Systems Inc. is at 1585 Charleston Road, P.O. Box 7900, Mountain View, Calif. 94039-7900. Phone (415) 961-4400; fax (415) 961-3769.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
News Page 1
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
News: White House opens up to electronic mail
By Henry Norr
Washington - Computer users can now send their opinions and advice to President Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and a handful of congressmen via electronic mail.
The White House announced last week that for the first time in history it is directly connected to the Internet.
Clinton's new Internet address is president@whitehouse.gov, while Gore can be reached at vice-president@whitehouse.gov.
In a statement the White House posted on-line last week, all E-mail messages will be read and automatically acknowledged, but the system is not yet capable of sending "a tailored response" to individual messages.
For now, according to Jock Gill of the White House Office of Media Affairs, the system will extract only general statistics about messages sent to the chief executives. But he said, "We're working as fast as we can" to improve the system's analysis and reporting capabilities.
Most commercial on-line services offer gateways to the Internet. But Gill said the White House will continue to maintain accounts on a number of services. On CompuServe, the White House address is 75300,3115; on America Online, it is Clinton PZ.
Gill declined to say whether the White House E-mail facilities include any Macs. "We have to be nondenominational," he said. "We're all the people's president, not just one brand."
Separately, the House of Representatives' Committee on House Administration announced a pilot program called the Constituent Electronic Mail System.
So far, however, only seven congressmen have signed up for the mailboxes. Information is available at congress@HR.house.gov.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
News Page 3
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
News: SuperScope II speeds data analysis
By Raines Cohen
Somerville, Mass. - GW Instruments last week shipped a major upgrade to its SuperScope data acquisition, analysis and presentation application.
SuperScope II, a complete rewrite of the 4-year-old original, lets users create virtual instruments and digitize, analyze, plot and store to disk continuous streams or discrete blocks of waveform data.
No programming is required for many analyses; users can simply drag a wave object, for example, into a graph icon to display it. Users can also set up an on-screen journal where data is recorded and draw connections between components to link them.
The program works with the company's MacAdios I/O cards as well as with National Instruments Corp.'s cards, serial devices and IEEE-4888 instruments.
GW Instruments said a SuperScope II user can create an oscilloscope with 11 mouse clicks, a spectrum analyzer with 17 or a strip-chart recorder with 16. Users can edit the menu bar and other interface elements to create custom applications built on SuperScope II.
Users can also go beyond the 80 built-in waveform functions either by defining their own objects and routines or by using HyperCard externals. Think C source code for the program's application programming interface is also included.
An entry-level version of SuperScope II sells for $750 but does not allow programming of pulse analysis, filter and advanced-waveform functions. A more complete package is $1,490, an open version that includes object code costs $2,990, and a five-Mac site license is $2,500. SuperScope users can upgrade to Version II for $500.
"We used [SuperScope II] for thermocouple measurements," said beta-tester Keng Leong, an engineer at Argonne National Labs of Argonne, Ill. "We also use [National Instrument's] LabVIEW, but it was too slow and we don't need all the fancy graphics."
GW Instruments is at 35 Medford St., Somerville, Mass. 02143. Phone (617) 625-4096; fax (617) 625-1322.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
News Page 4
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Gateways: 1988 still in the future for X.400
By Nathalie Welch
Exchanging X.400 text messages is possible for most Mac users only through their LAN-based electronic-mail packages. But a newer implementation of the mail and messaging standard is bringing advanced X.400 E-mail and other new services right to the Mac desktop.
An advanced X.400 implementation would let users create E-mail containing both text and graphics, access an integrated enterprisewide X.500 directory service to address the message, or choose alternate delivery methods. Users could also receive work-flow information pertaining to the status of a project and access off-line message repositories from their desktops.
But the catch is that products supporting the new services are just now becoming available, especially for the Mac. Mac managers, therefore, must familiarize themselves with the new X.400 implementation to decide when and how they will move to it.
Global mail network. Originally established in 1984 by the Consultative Committee International Telegraph and Telephone, the X.400 standard specifies a format for E-mail addresses that lets mail systems and gateways exchange messages without understanding their contents. It is compliant with the Open System Interconnection reference model for global communications and includes support for an X.25 packet-switched network or asynchronous dial-up lines.
In 1988 the CCITT revisited the X.400 specification and produced an interlocking set of new or improved functions, including transmitting and redirecting multimedia documents, tapping integrated X.500 directory services, and accessing off-line Message Store repositories. These new functions can be directly accessed from a user's desktop. Other benefits of the 1988 revision include E-mail security features and the capability to transport Electronic Data Interchange and voice mail over an X.400 backbone.
"Companies don't need to rush 1988 X.400 migration if they are personally enjoying their current setup," said Daniel Blum, principal at Rapport Communication, a consulting company in Takoma Park, Md., that developed a report on 1988 X.400 migration for the Electronic Mail Association of Arlington, Va. "But if a company is just starting from scratch and has done little with X.400 at this point," Blum said, "it would be like buying a used car to implement 1984."
Many people, however, do buy used cars. Frank Prabel, a product manager with Apple's Enterprise Systems Division, said, "More than 90 percent of X.400 customers are using components based on the older 1984 implementation."
1984 specification. In November Apple released its $3,000, single-connection MacX.400 SD (Single Domain) and its $5,000, multiple-domain MacX.400 servers, both of which are based on the 1984 specification. Instead of Apple developing User Agents (UAs) to its servers, client access is provided by third-party E-mail packages that require gateways to move the mail from the Macintosh E-mail server to the Message Transfer Agent (MTA). UAs are the client components used to create and read mail, while MTAs transport the messages.
Gateways for Apple's MacX.400 servers include InterCon Systems Corp.'s Dispatcher/MacX.400 connection to CE Software Inc.'s QuickMail, as well as StarNine Technologies Inc.'s forthcoming Mail*Link gateways for QuickMail and Microsoft Mail for AppleTalk Networks. The gateways, like the Apple MacX.400 servers, are based on the 1984 X.400 implementation.
To take advantage of 1988 X.400 functionality, native UAs must reside on the Mac desktop. "Basically, migration from 1984 to 1988 will not have a big impact on products that are seeing the X.400 backbone through a gateway," Blum said.
But since existing E-mail systems will be around for quite some time, customers are likely to still value the X.400 gateways for Mac-based E-mail packages.
"People will gradually realize the benefits of native X.400 user agents, which are no degradation or loss of information through the gateways," Prabel said. "Therefore, the gateway market will start declining as the native UA market ramps up."
Prabel expects X.400 customers to migrate to 1988 specification in the 1994-95 time frame. "This is when Apple is planning to migrate to 1988. Apple will probably offer an update for customers who already have MacX.400," Prabel said.
Apple's 1988 X.400 update solutions are likely to include third-party components. "Apple is currently considering getting parts of source code from an external X.400 supplier," Prabel said, "because productizing the 1988 X.400 specs is such a vast undertaking."
First with Mac access. In July, Los Angeles-based Isocor is expected to ship what it claims is the first 1988 UA for the Mac. Isopro for Macintosh will bring core features such as E-mail, file transfer and multimedia document handling directly to the Mac desktop (see MacWEEK, April 12).
David Knight, Isocor vice president of sales and marketing, said that although the Mac audience is just now warming up to X.400, several companies have invested heavily to bring out 1988 X.400-based messaging servers.
Rapport's Blum said: "Most of the native X.400 products coming out are 1988-compliant. I am not even sure if there are any native 1984 X.400 products running on the Mac, just gateways. The ones coming out now are all 1988."
The Wollongong Group of Palo Alto, Calif., recently released its PathWay Messenger client, which, when used with its PathWay Messaging Services mail server, lets Mac users exchange E-mail with X.400 message-handling systems.
"PathWay Messaging supports the Message Transfer Kernel listed in the functional group profile for 1988 X.400 MTAs," said Doug Ambort, PathWay Messaging product manager, "and we are well on the way to full migration to 1988, but in no way is it a full implementation of 1988; that is just not possible yet."
WorldTalk Corp. of Los Gatos, Calif., has an X.400 gateway based on the 1988 implementation, but it still brings Mac users into the corporate backbone via Mac E-mail packages such as Microsoft Mail and QuickMail.
"Our WorldTalk 400 Gateway is a full implementation of 1988 X.400, which could be expanded," said Mark Stieglitz, vice president of marketing at WorldTalk. "But nobody has written programs that would expand even the basic new features of 1988 X.400, such as keeping track of attachment names as it goes through the gateway."
Companies must migrate. Before being able to reap the benefits of the expanded standard, companies would have to migrate to 1988 X.400 components, including messaging backbones, gateways and user interfaces.
"We had been using a 1984 X.400 gateway for MCI from Soft-Switch since 1989," said Steve York, manager of enterprise infrastructure support at Hughes Aircraft Co.'s Long Beach, Calif.-based Enterprise Information Systems Division, which has about 1,500 Macs and 2,500 IBM PCs or compatibles. "We wanted to go to an in-house backbone, and it made sense to go with the newer 1988 standard."
York said that with native 1988 X.400 UAs and native MTAs his company did not have to contend with complicated gateway technology.
"A higher degree of functionality and robustness is possible when you don't have gateways," he said.
York said that functions his company would like to see on the desktop include support for X.500, object identifiers, transfer of multimedia documents, as well as messaging security and authentication. "We are looking to start the process in the second half of the year," York said. "And throughput and reliability are the key things I am looking to 1988 X.400 to provide."
Paying the piper. The costs associated with migrating to, or building from scratch, a 1988 X.400 system can include planning and evaluation, direct purchase costs, deployment and conversion costs, maintenance costs, and costs associated with retraining users and administrators.
"If talking about a smaller environment, costs could be between $5,000 to $10,000 for a new low-end 1988 X.400 server," Rapport's Blum said. "But for a large multinational corporation with multiple gateways to many proprietary E-mail systems, it could get into six or seven figures."
Although the cost of a move to the new standard is high, companies that fail to migrate could find their mission-critical messaging systems no longer being supported.
"The risks of not migrating are in several areas," Blum said. "As more and more products and trading partners start using 1988 techniques, things won't translate well." Blum said another risk is product obsolescence because older, proprietary directory synchronization utilities must be made to coexist with new X.500 products.
And for those thinking 1988 was a long time ago, you're right. In 1992 further improvements were made to the X.400 specification, but those functions will have to wait until 1988 X.400 components are in place.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
Gateways Page 20
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Gateways: MSA to split up Network SuperVisor
Smaller, specialized programs result
By Leonard Heymann
Pittsburgh - Shirking an all-in-one strategy, Management Science Associates Inc. is dividing up its Network SuperVisor administration program to give users the option of buying only the tools they need.
MSA this summer plans to launch a family of Network SuperVisor products from its CSG Technologies Division, beginning with the LANscape mapping program due at the end of June for $295. In August MSA expects to unveil separate offerings that will gather an inventory of network devices and analyze those assets.
The new series of products offers users more flexibility and reduces memory requirements, the company said. The current Network SuperVisor 2.0 requires at least 3 Mbytes of RAM because it is an integrated product built on top of ACI US Inc.'s 4th Dimension database.
> LANscape. The first of the new products includes a network schematic application that is known as the Topology Editor in the combined package. It learns the configuration and status of client Macs via a SuperVisor Responder extension or the Apple Responder and draws a map of the network. When devices go down, their icons turn gray and can trigger alarms.
> LANwatch. Formerly known as the Network Control Center, this application gathers data from the client Responders and produces reports on designated groups of Macs. Network addresses and monitors have been added to the list of features than can be scanned. Pricing has not been determined.
> ASSETbase. The database portion of Network SuperVisor runs faster after it was rewritten with Version 3.0 of 4th Dimension, according to MSA. Information from LANwatch can be imported into ASSETbase, where it can be analyzed and used to create custom reports and graphs. Pricing has not been set.
Management Science Associates Inc. is at 530 William Penn Place, Suite 329, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15219. Phone (412) 471-7170; fax (412) 471-7173.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
Gateways Page 20
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
GA: Microtek printer outputs in a snap
$1,499 color device prints to Polaroid film
By Matthew Rothenberg
Torrance, Calif. - Microtek Lab Inc. has brought down the price of photographic proofing with a new continuous-tone color printer that outputs Polaroid instant prints.
Microtek also announced that last week it started shipping two new slide scanners and a transparency adapter for its ScanMaker II line.
> The SnapPrint Instant Film Printer, priced at $1,499, outputs eight bits each of RGB (red, green, blue) data per pixel to Polaroid Type 990 High Speed Instant Film. The printer has a maximum image size of 3.625 by 2.875 inches and a resolution of 1,024 by 500 pixels. It can output an image in 40 seconds, Microtek said; colors of the instant film are fully saturated after 30 to 40 seconds.
SnapPrint, based on the Polaroid CI-700 instant film printer engine, accommodates standard 10-packs of instant film. It includes a SCSI interface and drivers for the Mac and Windows. According to Microtek, the printer requires System 6.0.5 or later and at least 5 Mbytes of RAM.
Microtek's new printer will compete against the Kodak 450GL from Eastman Kodak Co. of Rochester, N.Y. Kodak's $1,729 QuickDraw printer outputs eight bits each of CMY (cyan, magenta, yellow) or gray-scale data per pixel to special thermal paper and handles images measuring up to 3.94 by 5.51 inches. Photos take about 45 seconds to render and 45 seconds to print and cost about 90 cents each (see MacWEEK, April 5).
> The ScanMaker 45t, available for $7,999, captures transparencies ranging from 35mm to 5 by 5 inches at a hardware resolution of 1,000 dpi, which can be increased to 2,000 dpi via software interpolation.
The ScanMaker 45t includes CCD (charge-coupled device) sensors that can capture 12 bits each of RGB or gray-scale data per pixel in a single pass. Automatic gamma controls select the best eight bits each of RGB information for the final image, Microtek said.
The ScanMaker 45t can capture an image at maximum size and resolution in five minutes, 20 seconds, the company said (see MacWEEK, March 22).
> The ScanMaker 35t, priced at $1,999, handles 35mm color slides at an optical resolution of 1,832 by 1,832 pixels, which can be interpolated to 3,656 by 3,656 pixels. It ships with a device profile for Apple's Colorsync system extension for device-independent color matching.
> The Transparent Media Adapter, shipping now for $799, replaces the standard lid of Microtek's ScanMaker II flatbed models and draws power from the scanners' automatic document feeder option port. The adapter lets users scan transparencies as large as 8 by 10 inches in 24-bit color, Microtek said.
Microtek Lab Inc. is at 680 Knox St., Torrance, Calif. 90502. Phone (213) 321-2121; fax (213) 538-1193.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
GA Page 24
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
GA: Get The Picture lets Macs tap image server
By Kirsten L. Parkinson
San Luis Obispo, Calif. - Information Presentation Technologies Inc. is now shipping Get The Picture, a networked image-database system with Mac client support.
With Get The Picture, Mac clients can browse, copy and print TIFF and Encapsulated PostScript images stored on a Sun SPARCstation connected to an Ethernet or AppleTalk network.
The $8,995 system includes the company's Image Browser client application for 25 Mac users and several SPARC programs for database management as well as image spooling and printing.
When logging a new graphic into the Get The Picture database, users can specify a title, description and categories for the image. The program automatically creates a thumbnail and calculates and records the picture's resolution, physical dimensions, who logged it in and the most recent backup date. Users can then search for thumbnails by any combination of this data.
Get The Picture automatically substitutes the high-resolution original for a pasted thumbnail when printing, and the company's included Open Prepress Interface software prints the image at the best resolution for the selected output device.
Get The Picture also provides four levels of database password protection and the capability to browse only; add, modify and delete images; add new image categories; and set access privileges for other users. A log feature stores every action of the database in a single file for reference.
A future version of the product will add reporting capabilities for tracking activities such as how often each image has been used. DOS, Windows and NeXTstep 486 clients will ship this summer.
Information Presentation Technologies Inc. is at 555 Chorro St., San Luis Obispo, Calif. 93405. Phone (805) 541-3000; fax (805) 541-3037.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
GA Page 24
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
BusinessWatch: Apple loses suit, vows to appeal
Refuses to concede in 5-year copyright feud
By Jon Swartz
San Francisco - After investing five years in judicial maneuvering - not to mention millions of dollars in legal costs - Apple last week officially lost its copyright-infringement suit against Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co.
For now, at least.
U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, who in recent weeks has severely narrowed the scope of Apple's case, dismissed all remaining Apple claims last week.
A jury trial set for June 28 had been removed from the court calendar with the approval of the three companies, paving the way for Apple to avoid a costly trial and appeal the case instead.
Edward Stead, Apple's general counsel and vice president, said the company would immediately appeal the case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. "We think the District Court was wrong in treating Apple's distinctive copyrighted [interface] as a 'purely functional arrangement,' " Stead said in a statement. "We think it is important that innovative graphical computer works receive the protection to which they are entitled under the copyright law."
Microsoft and HP, meanwhile, lauded the decision. "We are gratified that we have prevailed," said William Neukom, vice president of law and corporate affairs at Microsoft.
Walker last month tapered the case to essentially one issue: whether Windows' appearance is identical to the interface of Apple's Lisa, a predecessor to the Macintosh. Walker ruled that a jury could not consider any of the 189 software features that Apple originally contended had been copied by Windows and could consider only four of the 147 HP New Wave features (see MacWEEK, May 24).
Legal observers said an appeal is likely to prolong the copyright suit another two years. "Apple is in this thing for the long haul," said Frederick Cooper III, a copyright lawyer based in Norcross, Ga.
Microsoft and HP plan to ask Walker to order Apple to pay their legal costs because they claim the suit was brought in bad faith and violated a 1985 licensing agreement between Apple and Microsoft. Observers said legal costs total millions of dollars.
Apple attorney Chris Ottenweller said Apple would strongly oppose paying legal fees.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
BusinessWatch Page 28
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
BusinessWatch: AT&T acquires majority stake in EO
By Lisa Picarille
Basking Ridge, N.J. - AT&T Co. is aiming to make handheld computing devices as popular as the telephone.
To that end, AT&T is placing its bets on nearly every major player in the fledgling handheld computer and wireless communications market.
Last week the telecommunications giant increased its investment in EO Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., to 51 percent, up from 20 percent.
Industry observers said AT&T's majority ownership and a joint marketing pact with EO gives the 2-year-old start-up strong marketing and distribution muscle for its personal communicators, which combine cellular phone, fax, electronic-mail and portable computer technology.
Under terms of the deal, EO is allowed to put AT&T's name on its personal communicators, due to ship this summer. EO also has access to AT&T's communications technology and services and its prodigious sales channel.
The deal is considered a boon for EO, which despite undisclosed equity investments from Japanese investors Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. and Marubeni Inc., faces competition from Apple and Tandy Corp.
For its part, AT&T now has equity investments in several handheld developers, including pen-based device maker General Magic, also of Mountain View.
AT&T's financial reach also extends to 3DO Co., a San Mateo, Calif.-based start-up that is developing a multimedia video game player; Sundisk Corp., a Santa Clara, Calif., developer of credit-card-size data storage devices; and McCaw Cellular Communications Inc. of Kirkland, Wash.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
BusinessWatch Page 28
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Special Report: High-capacity drives flood market
By Mitzi Waltz
Plenty of Mac users could use a 1-Gbyte hard drive these days, what with ever-expanding applications, bulging System folders and huge graphics files. As the number of users who need to have multiple megabytes of data close at hand has grown and the prices of hard drives have declined, vendors have seen an increase in sales of large-capacity drives over the past year that they describe as nothing less than phenomenal.
"One-gig drives have become a commodity-driven item faster than anything I've ever seen in my career in mass storage," said Kevin Perry, director of product development and marketing at Microtech International Inc.
Among the companies that manufacture large-capacity mechanisms are Quantum Corp., Maxtor Corp., Seagate Technology Inc., Fujitsu Computer Products of America Inc., Toshiba America Information Systems Inc., Micropolis Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co.
Available sizes range from basic 1-Gbyte models all the way up to Seagate's latest top-of-the-line Elite drive, which offers a whopping 2.9 Gbytes when formatted.
What are users doing with all that space? These drives are finding homes as file servers, as the keepers of huge databases, and as repositories of color graphics and layouts generated by pre-press applications.
They are also invaluable for video, audio and multimedia professionals, who have been early and enthusiastic purchasers. For these users, the amount of storage needed depends on the production system in use and the level of quality desired. In video production, for example, storing 30 seconds of low-end video on-line requires 8 to 16 Mbytes. For high-end work, such as video produced on an Avid system at AVR 5 video-quality level, 25 minutes of video requires at least 2 Gbytes of space, while storing CD-quality sound demands about 10 Mbytes per minute.
High-capacity drives at work. "I have three systems set up with 8 to 10 Gbytes apiece, and I'm currently working on a 100-Gbyte array," said Rick Eye of Digital Video Technology in Burbank, Calif. (Eye is a digital-video consultant for major studios in Los Angeles).
But buying a drive is not as straightforward as it seems.
"I look at the speed of the platter and transfer speed more than seek times," Eye said, adding that spindle speeds of 5,400 rpm and higher are mandatory.
Advertisements can be confusing. Sustained data transfer rates are a better basis for comparison than the "burst" transfer speeds sometimes used.
And drives should work not only with standard SCSI ports but also with accelerated SCSI cards, such as ATTO Technology Inc.'s Silicon Express NuBus card, Eye added.
Buyers of the largest high-capacity drives are sometimes surprised to learn that the Macintosh operating system can't recognize any storage device with a capacity that exceeds 2 Gbytes.
To use larger drives, users must partition them. "That's not a huge problem if you structure your files into nice, neat categories," Eye said. "Setting up a file structure right from the beginning is important anyway because things can get lost."
Users should also be aware that the Macintosh's file system divides drives into 65,536 "allocation blocks," each of which can hold only one file. As drives get bigger, the size of these blocks balloons to as much as 32 Mbytes, leading to wasted space when storing smaller files. Partitioning, which turns a single drive into two or more discrete volumes, lowers the size of the blocks.
Apple's operating system is likely to support large volumes in the future, said James Porter, president of Disk/Trend Inc., a Mountain View, Calif.-based market research company. But buyers shouldn't hold their breath. "From the first Macintosh on, Apple has seriously underestimated the storage needs of its users," he said. With the new Mac servers, he added, "they have to be thinking along these lines at last."
Thermal recalibration. For multimedia producers one recurrent problem with some drives is thermal recalibration, a procedure that attempts to compensate for swelling and shrinkage caused by the heating and cooling of drive media. Some older drives perform calibration checks every two minutes, effectively stopping data from being read.
These momentary halts are no big deal if you're scrolling through a spreadsheet, but if you're watching a movie or playing music, it could result in missed frames, jerky action or unwanted interruptions.
"When you're playing back video, there's a problem if it happens in the middle of a video stream, but most of the cards and software are structured to buffer the data enough," said Digital Video's Eye. "On some of the newer drives, that calibration is eliminated already because of the head structure, [and] most manufacturers are at least thinking about eliminating recalibration during the read process."
According to Eye, video users who experience missed frames may actually be seeing transfer problems. "It could be that the drive can't pass through the amount of data necessary to keep a continuous stream going." Other possible causes may include using a Mac with too little processing power and SCSI throughput or relying on hard drives with low platter-rotation speeds.
Although SCSI-2, a standard that theoretically offers much faster data transfer, is often touted in high-capacity hard drive ads, Eye said it offers few advantages to most Mac users because no current Mac models and only a few third-party SCSI cards support SCSI-2's Fast and Wide options.
The market for high-capacity storage has been driven by engineering workstation users and the proliferation of IBM PC-compatible file servers. This means that features of interest to video, audio and multimedia users have sometimes been overlooked in the attempt to meet the storage needs of this much larger market. But manufacturers are beginning to address the requests of these users, and if Apple can change its system software to meet them halfway, the prospects seem bright for more easily integrating 2-Gbyte and larger drives with Macintosh systems.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
Special Report Page 36
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Special Report: Magneto-optical storage
By Connie Guglielmo
Recent innovations in magnetic-optical technology have made it possible for you to hold more than a gigabyte of data - 1.3 Gbytes to be precise - in the palm of your hand.
In the past few months, market leaders Sony Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Maxoptix Corp. announced new 5.25-inch magnetic-optical drives for the Mac that can read and write to a new internationally endorsed 1.3-Gbyte (that's 1,300 Mbytes) storage format - a format that doubles the capacity of the current 650-Mbyte standard on a single cartridge. (IBM Corp. also announced a new drive, but it's not Mac-compatible).
The new capacity lowers the cost per megabyte of storage and with it will come other innovations that reduce seek and access times. It has also had a market impact, slightly reducing the cost of 5.25-inch MO drives. According to experts, these advances will address two of users' biggest complaints about MO technology.
And these price and performance improvements may not only make an already appealing storage option more desirable than other removable-media storage options (such as SyQuest or Bernoulli cartridges) but also help turn what has been considered a luxury item into a desktop commodity.
The MO on MO. Introduced five years ago, MO technology has a lot going for it. For starters, it is a removable media, allowing you to take your data with you or lock it up. MO disks are available in 5.25- and 3.5-inch sizes. (The current standards-approved capacity of 3.5-inch media is 128 Mbytes.)
MO is a rewriteable technology. Unlike CD-ROM and WORM (write-once-read-many) media, you can write over the disks millions of times with no loss of data or disk integrity; the system uses a combination of laser-generated light and electromagnets to read and write data. MO disks are extremely durable, with a minimum 10-year life expectancy.
The technology's appeal has also had to do with its large storage capacity; with an MO drive, you have access to an unlimited amount of storage. The fact that the 650-Mbyte format was based on an American National Standards Institute/International Standards Organization standard also ensured that disks were interchangeable among different MO drives.
The write way. What's changed with the new 1.3-Gbyte format is the way data is written to the disk. With the 650-Mbyte format, the disk was divided like a pie into wedges, with each wedge wider at the outside and smaller as you moved toward the center.
The same amount of data was recorded per sector, whether that sector was located at the wider outer diameter or at the smaller inner diameter; the result was that sectors at the outer diameter contained as much data as the inner diameter, despite the fact that there was physically more disk real estate at the outer diameter.
With the 1.3-Gbyte format, the disk is divided into bands or zones just like on vinyl audio records. Through a recording process called zoned constant angular velocity (ZCAV) recording, each zone contains progressively more data (more sectors) as you move toward the outer diameter. That is, more data is being recorded on the wider outer bands than on the smaller inner bands. That change in recording, coupled with a tightening of track pitch and placing data bits closer together, made it possible to double the disk capacity.
Not a first. The 1.3-Gbyte ZCAV format was submitted as a standards proposal by Sony, HP, IBM and 3M Corp. in March 1992 to ANSI, the U.S. representative to the ISO. But it was not the first ZCAV proposal to be endorsed by a standards organization.
That distinction belongs to Maxoptix, a San Jose, Calif.-based MO drive maker. In 1989, Maxoptix introduced MO drives based on a 1-Gbyte ZCAV technology it developed. With the support of companies such as HP, Philips Consumer Electronics Co. and Du Pont Optical, among others, the ZCAV media format was endorsed by the European Computer Manufacturers Association, the European counterpart of ANSI.
Maxoptix has offered the 1-Gbyte technology in its Tahiti line of drives, which are sold for the Mac as part of MO storage systems offered by Maxoptix OEMs and value-added resellers, including Iomega Corp., PLI and FWB Inc., said Bob Root, Maxoptix vice president of sales and marketing. "Anything that's 1 Gbyte out there is ours," Root said. According to Maxoptix, more than 30,000 1-Gbyte drives and 200,000 1-Gbyte disks have been sold since 1990.
In 1990-91, Sony submitted its counterproposal for a ZCAV storage format with a 1.3-Gbyte capacity. That capacity received endorsement from manufacturers such as IBM, MO media maker 3M and eventually HP, as well as ANSI and ECMA, according to Akyra Pagoulatos, Sony marketing manager for rewriteable MO, also in San Jose.
"What becomes a standard has to do with feasibility, whether the key components can be commercially available to others and whether it can be supported with products in a reasonable time frame," Pagoulatos said. "But if anything, it's politics."
With the groundswell of industry support and ANSI endorsement behind the 1.3-Gbyte capacity, Sony, HP and Maxoptix began designing new drives.
The drives. Sony's SMO-F521, HP's Model C1716T and Maxoptix's T3-1300 drives have several things in common.
They are backward-compatible, which means they will read and write both 1.3-Gbyte media and existing 650-Mbyte disks. In addition, Maxoptix will continue to support the company's 1-Gbyte capacity. Its T3-1300 will read and write 1-Gbyte-capacity media in addition to 1.3-Gbyte and 650-Mbyte disks, said Werner Glinka, Maxoptix director of marketing.
All three drives are jukebox-ready - that is, they can easily be incorporated into jukebox systems, which are gaining in popularity for archiving, or off-line storage.
There are, of course, differences. Like most 5.25-inch MO drives, the Maxoptix and HP units will be full-height drives. Sony is offering a half-height mechanism.
Seek and access times also differ. MO drives actually require at least two passes to write data: one to erase old data in the areas to be written, the other to write new information. A third pass is added for verification, although some drive makers let you turn off the verification pass to improve performance. It's these bottlenecks that make MO drives so much slower than magnetic drives, such as SyQuest, and that have kept MO an off-line and near-line storage technology.
To help cut access times, all three drives incorporate split-optics heads, a technology that Glinka said Maxoptix was the first to use in its MO drives in 1989. Split-optics was devised as a way to reduce the mass - weight and size - of the optical pickup or head that moves across the disk; the smaller head translates into faster seek and access times.
For 1.3-Gbyte media, the Sony drive offers an access time of 40 milliseconds and a maximum sustained transfer rate of 2 Mbytes per second. HP promises an average access time of 36 milliseconds and a data transfer rate as fast as 1.6 Mbytes per second for reads and half that on writes. Maxoptix claims an average access time of 25.25 milliseconds and data transfer rates of 2.2 Mbytes per second for reads and half that on writes.
"Our goal is to get as close to hard disk speeds as possible [which average 10 to 20 milliseconds]," said Glinka, who predicts MO drives will soon be used for on-line storage. "We want to put our drive on every desktop or in every home - wherever you have a computer now with a hard drive."
HP and Maxoptix plan to ship their drives in volume in early summer. And while the drives are still expensive (several thousand dollars compared with about $500 for CD-ROM and low-end magnetic tape drives), prices are falling. HP's Model C1716T will list for $3,950; the company also cut the price of its 650-Mbyte optical drive to $3,150. Maxoptix, which sells its drives only through OEMs and VARs, expects the drives to have a list price of $3,495.
Sony plans to ship its drive in volume in the third quarter; pricing has not been set, but the company said it will be competitive with its 5.25-inch MO drive, which retails for $3,995.
Media. Another factor that will help MO gain desktop acceptance is the economies of scale it provides, namely the cost per megabyte. Both Sony and HP will be marketing new 1.3-Gbyte MO media. Sony's disks will retail for $280; HP's media will retail for $189 per disk.
The improved capacity helps drop the cost per megabyte when compared with 650-Mbyte disks. The new 1.3-Gbyte disk represents a drop in price per megabyte from 31 cents to 22 cents for the Sony media and from 24 cents to 14 cents for the HP media.
Charlotte, N.C.-based Verbatim Corp., the second largest supplier of optical media in the United States after Sony, has also started shipping 1.3-Gbyte disks and has announced plans to produce 1-Gbyte disks to support the Maxoptix drives. Although OEMs are usually slow to adopt new technologies, John Stevens, manager of business development for Verbatim, said the shift from the 650-Mbyte to 1.3-Gbyte format has been fairly painless.
"The recording technology didn't change in a significant way in going from the pie shape to the zoned recording with 1.3 Gbytes," Stevens said. "We're working toward the next-generation products. In order to take the technology further, you're going to have to increase data density further, tighten the track pitch and create more zones. And that's going to mean a change in the method of recording."
The future. In only a relatively short time - about two years - new 5.25-inch MO capacities are expected to reach the market (the next standards leap for 3.5-inch media will be 230 to 256 Mbytes). Sony, HP, IBM, Maxoptix and others have already submitted proposals for 5.25-inch MO disks with 3X and 4X capacities - or 2 to 2.6 Gbytes. Expect another political as well as technical battle to see which format wins out.
"Should we go to 3X or 4X capacity? That's an interesting transition," said Art Rancis, vice president of OEM and systems reseller channels marketing for Sony in Park Ridge, N.J. "We're going to have to balance the needs of the marketplace against the available laser technology. It's hard to tell yet where the two will meet."
MacWEEK 06.07.93
Special Report Page 37
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Special Report: Maximum memory for PowerBooks
For many owners of the first PowerBooks, the largest available drive was 40 Mbytes. But don't worry. Larger-capacity drives will let you bring more files on the road.
By Larry Stevens
PowerBooks have never been known for roomy hard drives. The initial Mac PowerBook 100, 140 and 170 offered modest storage space by the standards of most users today. The highest capacity you could get was 40 Mbytes. Even now, the base configurations of the PowerBook 145 and 160 have 40-Mbyte drives. Chances are, if you bought anything less than an 80-Mbyte drive and have used your PowerBook for a year or so, you're hurting for space.
Luckily, you don't have to continue to work with the same drive you bought with your PowerBook. Drives with capacities of up to 200 Mbytes that can slip into your notebook are now available from a slew of storage vendors, including FWB Inc., Microtech International Inc., La Cie Ltd. and APS Technologies.
The main advantage of a larger drive, is, of course, that it allows you to keep more files on hand. "It makes my PowerBook more like a portable office," said Dennis Brothers, director of engineering at Cypress Research Corp. of Sunnyvale, Calif. Brothers recently upgraded the 20-Mbyte drive in his PowerBook 100 to a 213-Mbyte Toshiba drive from APS. The increased capacity has meant he leaves fewer files behind on his hard disks at home and in the office."It's more likely that the file I need is with me," he said.
The cost factor. The only disadvantage of installing a new PowerBook drive is cost. PowerBooks use 2.5-inch drives, which are more expensive per megabyte than 3.5-inch or 5.25-inch drives. For example, APS Technologies' internal 160-Mbyte PowerBook Go*Drive is $499, whereas the APS external 170-Mbyte ELS low-profile drive is $329.
There are no other downsides to upgrading your internal drive. Previous user concerns that they required more power than lower-capacity drives proved to be unfounded.
Install it yourself? If you buy the drive from your local Apple dealer, the technician will install it for a price ranging from free-with-the-purchase to about $30. If you buy the drive secondhand or from a mail-order dealer, you'll have to decide whether to install it yourself or pay an Apple-authorized service center to do the job.
If the PowerBook is still under warranty and you don't want to lose it, no one except an Apple service center can open the case. So users of the 145, 160, 165c, 180 and Duos, all of which are still under warranty, should think carefully before they install their drives themselves. Of course, it's often after that one-year warranty period that the accumulation of files becomes a problem.
If your PowerBook is out of warranty, the advice from experts is that changing the drive yourself is relatively easy but potentially dangerous.
"Unless you have 10 thumbs, you can exchange the drive yourself," said Brothers, who exchanged his in 15 minutes. But, he said, "If you're not grounded and you touch the wrong thing, you can blow out your PowerBook."
All drive makers' literature backs up Brothers' point. It provides specific instructions for do-it-yourselfers but warns that any time a PowerBook's case is open, there's a chance of damage. Said a spokeswoman from Quantum Corp. of Milpitas, Calif.: "Two-and-a-half-inch drives are very delicate and so is the PowerBook. We don't recommend user installation."
The hardest part of installing an internal drive in the PowerBook is opening the case. Doing so to the PowerBook 100 is easy; doing so to the Duos is difficult. All the other PowerBooks fall somewhere in between. And unless you have a well-stocked electronics workroom, you may have to buy some equipment to install the drive.
The PowerBook 100 can be opened with flat-head and Phillips screwdrivers. But other PowerBooks require a size 8 and size 10 Torx screwdriver, which you may have a hard time finding at the local hardware store. Most drive makers sell the needed set of tools for about $20, but if this is likely to be the only time you'll need the tools, you might be better off paying the same $20 to have the drive professionally installed.
You'll also need a grounded work area and wrist strap. Both are essential to eliminate the danger of a static charge destroying the PowerBook's circuitry.
Retired drives. If your PowerBook's internal drive is too small but is running strong, you're faced with the problem of early obsolescence.
The most promising solution is to install the old drive in a case that allows it to be used as an external drive. Microtech's Roadrunner DataXpress and APS' PowerBook Companion case are two examples. While this option preserves your original investment, the cost of the case ranges from less than $100 to nearly $200. This cost has discouraged some users.
Said Paul Marcowitz, who runs a computer consulting business in Amherst, Mass.: "It hardly seems worth it to pay $200 to put my old 20-Mbyte drive in an external case. I wouldn't pay that kind of money for a used 20-Mbyte drive."
However, since the case price is the same no matter what size drive you place in it, the larger the original drive, the more economic sense it makes to get a replacement case.
External drive. One alternative to upgrading your notebook's internal drive is to opt for an external pocket drive. These weigh less than 1 pound, are about the size of a cigarette case and can run on battery power. Besides eliminating the need to exchange drives, they provide the flexibility and security of a storage medium that can be sent to colleagues or locked in a hotel safe. Their small weight and size also mean they take up little space when you travel.
However, pocket drives require a SCSI port, which the Duos lack unless docked, and special SCSI cables.
Shelly Katz, a Dallas-based photographer who does work for Time magazine, uses his PowerBook 180 to work on images captured with his digital camera and stored on a HitchHiker external 80-Mbyte drive from Mass Microsystems Inc.
"I treat the drive like a can of film," Katz said. "I keep it in my hotel room; I send it to editors. It's very convenient."
Small answers. Whether internal or external, solutions to PowerBook owners' storage problems are easily at hand. The capacity of 2.5-inch drives has expanded rapidly during the past two years. And while 200 Mbytes is currently the upper limit, that capacity, along with some careful purging and archiving, should suffice for most users.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
Special Report Page 40
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Review: Editing Aces Suite fulfills its mission
Professional audio capabilities will be an important asset when Sound Manager 3.0 and QuickTime 1.6 arrive.
By Ric Ford
....................
Score Card: Editing Aces Suite
RasterOps Corp.
List price: $4,697*
Overall value 3
The Editing Aces Suite is a modular, cost-effective package for boosting QuickTime video capabilities to a full-motion, full-screen level. Its professional audio capabilities will be an important asset when QuickTime 1.6 and Sound Manager 3.0 arrive from Apple. RasterOps' MediaGrabber software offers good audio and video controls as well as high-quality captures of still images. The primary limitation of the Editing Aces Suite is its awkwardness in switching between Macintosh and video displays. People on a tight budget might want to combine the suite's MoviePak daughterboard with RasterOps' low-priced 24STV video card, using the lower-quality audio hardware built into newer Macs.
Performance 3
Features 4
Configuration 3
Compatibility 3
Documentation/support 3
* MoviePak: $1,999; MediaTime: $1,999; Video Expander II: $699.
....................
The Editing Aces Suite is a set of products from RasterOps Corp. that digitizes and plays full-screen, full-motion QuickTime movies with high-quality sound. It lists for $4,697 and competes with SuperMac Technology Inc.'s $5,999 DigitalFilm (see MacWEEK, Jan. 18).
Perhaps the most important distinction between the products is that the Editing Aces Suite consists of modular components, while DigitalFilm is positioned as an integrated "studio in a box."
At the heart of the Editing Aces Suite is RasterOps' MoviePak, a daughterboard that adds JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) compression hardware to four of RasterOps' video cards - the 24STV, 24MxTV, 24XLTV and MediaTime.
MoviePak uses an LSI Logic chip set to digitize one field per frame of moving video at a maximum resolution of 320 by 240 pixels. MediaTime's 2X hardware zoom produces a full-size image on playback from the quarter-screen movie. (DigitalFilm records one field at 640 by 240 pixels and synthesizes the missing field for playback.)
According to RasterOps, the LSI Logic chips provide an unusually wide range of compression ratios, compared with the C-Cube Microsystems processor used by others.
Making time. MediaTime is the second Editing Aces component. On a single NuBus card, it combines CD-quality audio processing (from market leader Digidesign Inc.), video processing and circuitry to drive a 13-inch Macintosh monitor at up to 24 bits of color.
A breakout box connects to MediaTime via a short cable, providing S-video and composite inputs for NTSC, PAL (European) and SECAM (French) sources and four RCA jacks for line-level audio input and output.
Rounding out the hardware is the Video Expander II, a box that encodes output from the video card into standard TV signals (composite, S-video or component), with genlock capability. The Video Expander II is available in either an NTSC or PAL version, and MediaTime outputs both.
Like SuperMac, RasterOps includes Adobe Premiere 2.0 in the package. Also included is RasterOps' MediaGrabber, an application for recording images and sounds and playing them back out again.
According to RasterOps, other RasterOps video cards can be substituted for MediaTime in a QuickTime editing system with no loss of performance or quality.
For instance, you could trade audio capabilities for lower cost by using a 24STV card in place of MediaTime with the MoviePak daughterboard. In another scenario, you could add a MoviePak to an existing 24XLTV card and install a Digidesign Audiomedia card to gain the capabilities of the Editing Aces Suite with a larger monitor. You could also use a different encoder in place of the Video Expander.
Software. MediaGrabber 2.2 combines strong features from RasterOps' previous software with new audio and QuickTime support.
Like its predecessors, MediaGrabber captures still images from video at a full 640 by 480 pixels of resolution. Floating palettes offer fine control over image characteristics (such as gamma, contrast and brightness) and determine video setup parameters (hue, saturation, contrast, black level and white level).
The Editing Aces Suite captures QuickTime movies either to disk or to RAM at any size from tiny to full-screen. Standard controls set audio and compression parameters, and the application can display important information about movie files, such as frame rate, compression quality and the size of individual frames.
MediaTime's Export to Video function, for playing back a QuickTime movie on the Mac or printing it to tape, includes a welcome option that generates standard color bars for calibration.
Along with MediaTime, the Editing Aces Suite includes several system extensions: a VDIG file to register components with QuickTime, a MoviePak extension containing compressors-decompressors (codecs), and an extension containing sound and video drivers.
RasterOps supplies two different codecs: a fast, proprietary MoviePak Video codec and a slower MoviePak JPEG codec that is compatible with Apple's Photo JPEG codec and more suitable for still images.
Like Premiere and similar applications, MediaGrabber can open and save an existing movie with different compression settings or a different size.
The Editing Aces Suite digitizes audio at a 44.1-kHz sampling rate (mono or stereo) and can save tracks in either AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) or Digidesign's Sound Designer format, in addition to QuickTime format.
As this review was being written, Apple was preparing to release to developers Sound Manager 3.0 and QuickTime 1.6, which promise to enable high-quality output of QuickTime audio tracks through third-party hardware such as MediaTime. So far, QuickTime audio output has been limited to eight-bit samples.
Monitors. RasterOps' MediaTime board, like the company's other video boards, has a single monitor connector. This may be used to drive either a 13-inch Mac monitor or the encoder.
There is no way to connect both a Mac monitor and a video device at the same time, as you can with DigitalFilm. (DigitalFilm switches between Macintosh and TV out-put signals on the fly.) RasterOps' card can switch output signals, but its single port requires shutting down and reconfiguring cables to switch between a Mac monitor and a video device.
You could use a TV monitor as a Mac display, leaving the Video Expander connected all the time, but this is unpleasant at best. The limitation encourages digitizing all in one phase with a Mac monitor and printing to video in a separate phase using a TV monitor.
Digitizing must take place on the display connected to MediaTime, and you cannot control captures from a monitor connected to a Mac's built-in video port. Live video must be displayed on screen in 24-bit color during captures, which dramatically slows simple Mac operations, such as pulling down a menu.
A final limitation of the MediaTime card is its display speed. It cannot display Mac graphics nearly as fast as DigitalFilm's Thunder circuitry or the built-in video ports of Quadras and Centrises, and it does not support monitor sizes other than the 13-inch, 640-by-480-pixel standard.
Performance. The limitations of the Macintosh make it impossible to handle broadcast-quality video in real time, and products at the leading edge of QuickTime technology are struggling just to provide acceptable quality in noncritical video applications.
Results from the Editing Aces Suite and DigitalFilm are not very far apart, despite their architectural differences.
Both lose frames when capturing full-size images at maximum compression quality, even on a Quadra 950 loaded with RAM and a high-speed disk array. This happens despite the fact that only one field per frame is digitized. The problem becomes much worse on slower disk drives and with slower Macs.
Dropped frames produce very obvious motion problems, depending on the subject of the video. Moving subjects become unnaturally jittery and jerky at higher frame rates and strobelike at lower frame rates.
Reducing compression quality dramatically improves frame rates and smooths out motion, and the eye is less sensitive to degradation of the image from a little extra compression than it is to motion problems.
Because of its resolution limitations when capturing moving video, the Editing Aces Suite exhibits pixelation and loss of detail, plus jagginess along diagonal lines, even at high quality settings. Sharpness is good, within its limitations, but smearing and halo effects from JPEG compression become more obvious at lower quality settings.
DigitalFilm's output appears a little smoother and softer by comparison, but it has the same characteristic problems.
The Editing Aces Suite captures still images from video with much higher quality than it captures movies, and this gives it one advantage over DigitalFilm.
RasterOps' MediaTime board also has a large advantage in audio quality. We noticed a touch of low-level noise in our audio tests, but the overall audio quality was excellent and certainly suitable for professional video work. Using the audio's full bandwidth can affect QuickTime performance, however.
Compatibility and support. We did not encounter any serious bugs in testing with a variety of source material and a variety of digitizing configurations, from a Centris 650 with 8 Mbytes of RAM and a standard hard drive to a Quadra 950 with 64 Mbytes of RAM and a fast disk array.
Trying to digitize from the wrong port - choosing the composite input when video is supplied only to the S-video input, for example - caused the system to freeze, but this is not a major issue.
RasterOps warrants the hardware for three years. Unlike SuperMac, RasterOps offers no money-back guarantee with the Editing Aces Suite. Documentation is good, but not exemplary, and phone support is no longer toll-free.
Conclusions. The Editing Aces Suite offers a solid package of QuickTime hardware at a competitive price, and the MoviePak daughterboard should be especially appealing to QuickTime video producers on a tight budget and owners of compatible RasterOps video cards.
MediaTime's high-quality audio is an important asset, which should gain value with QuickTime 1.6 and Sound Manager 3.0, but superior audio and still-image capture are balanced by a display adapter that is slower and less flexible than its competition.
In QuickTime performance, the Editing Aces Suite and DigitalFilm are comparable, although the character of their images differs slightly.
Both products share the current limitations of QuickTime and compression hardware, and these issues are more important than the differences between the products.
For video production, Premiere's Make Movie operation is a serious bottleneck, and image quality is damaged in the digitizing process. Motion problems are difficult to avoid without using high-end Mac hardware and compromising image quality through further compression.
These limitations are less of an issue for multimedia production, however, and QuickTime excels at prototyping complex video transitions and effects on a budget. Overall, the Editing Aces Suite makes a good companion for QuickTime.
RasterOps Corp. is at 2500 Walsh Ave., Santa Clara, Calif. 95051. Phone (408) 562-4200 or (800) 729-2656; fax (408) 562-4065.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
Reviews Page 47
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Review: Datebook makes jump to Pro league
Update tightens link with Touchbase Pro
By Jeffrey Sullivan
....................
Score Card: Datebook Pro
After Hours Software*
Version tested: 2.0
List price: $79.95**
Overall value 4
Datebook Pro is the first major upgrade to the personal time management program. The addition of a Memo item to augment Events and To-Dos is welcome, but the more important enhancements to the schedule manager are its improved user interface and greater flexibility. Its integration with After Hours' Touchbase Pro is excellent. Datebook Pro cannot handle group scheduling; it is a personal time manager only - but a very good one.
Performance 4
Features 3
Ease of use 4
Documentation/support 4
*Aldus Corp.'s Consumer Division recently signed a letter of intent to acquire After Hours. **Bundled with Touchbase Pro: $149.95. Upgrades from previous versions of Datebook: $24.95; owners of Touchbase and Datebook can upgrade both for $39.95.
System 7 Compatibility: Datebook Pro 2.0
Balloon help No
TrueType Yes
Publish and subscribe No
Apple events Yes
32-bit addressing* Yes
*According to vendor.
....................
After Hours Software has delivered a one-two punch to the personal information software market, releasing major upgrades to its two flagship products, Datebook and Touchbase. Datebook, After Hours' personal time manager product, has received an overhaul and a new name, Datebook Pro.
Although the changes to the $79.95 Datebook Pro are not as sweeping as those to its sister product, the contact manager Touchbase Pro, they've followed the same spirit, resulting in a program with increased versatility and power that's just as easy to use.
Datebook Pro requires just over 1 Mbyte of disk space and at least 770 Kbytes of RAM. It will run under System 6.0.5 or later, but its linking features, particularly suited to letting it communicate with Touchbase Pro, require System 7.
The previous (non-Pro) version of Datebook will continue to be sold, through Performa channels only, at a retail price of $64.95.
New and improved. There is one significant change to the overall framework in which Datebook Pro operates: a new schedule item called a Memo. Memos are used to represent entries - such as shopping lists, daily journals and messages - that can be put on a schedule but aren't characterized as Events or To-Dos (the two other schedule items supported by Datebook Pro). Like Events and To-Dos, each Memo can contain as many as 32,000 text characters.
To-Dos have been expanded in Datebook Pro. In addition to a three-level priority setting, To-Dos can now be automatically carried forward to the next day if they haven't been completed. Datebook Pro also tracks the number of days a To-Do is overdue, something that Now Software Inc.'s Now Up-to-Date doesn't do.
Datebook Pro features dramatically improved printing support. Options include a Quick Print feature for every schedule item; customizable templates for printing days, weeks, months or quarters at a time; the capability to print single events; and the capability to print wall calendars of arbitrary size. Datebook Pro also includes a print-preview feature.
There are five ways to view your schedule in Datebook Pro: in a textual list or graphically in daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly views. (The quarterly view displays 13 consecutive weeks.) Unlike its competitors, Datebook Pro shows all three kinds of information items in every view. It does, however, let you place activities into groups and categories, so you can view only your "Personal/Project X" appointments, for example. But unlike Now Up-to-Date, you can isolate groups and categories only in the list view, not in the weekly or monthly calendar views.
Searching in Datebook Pro has been improved with the addition of the Searchlight feature. Although most scheduling programs (including Datebook Pro) let you search for items according to some set of criteria, Datebook's competitors list the results of the search in a textual list. Datebook's Searchlight lets you view the results of a search in any text or calendar view. Clicking on the Searchlight icon will highlight every matching day in the current view.
Interface lift. Most of the other changes to Datebook Pro are improvements to the user interface, making it more flexible, attractive and consistent.
Color icons, banners and program controls give Datebook Pro a slick 3-D look. Optional word wrapping in quarterly and monthly views makes item descriptions easier to read. For those with smaller screens, the palette at the bottom of the schedule is detachable, and the Busyness indicators at the bottom of each day's box in quarterly and monthly view are optional.
Holidays in Datebook Pro are flexible, providing a customizable list with independent options to display the holiday. Recurring events can be scheduled with a high degree of flexibility, but After Hours has thoughtfully created an easily accessible interface to this feature.
Navigation has also been improved, moving Datebook considerably ahead of Now Up-to-Date in this area. In addition to Datebook's excellent Date Selector, Datebook Pro now supports a Go To command that lets you graphically select any day in the year with a double-click. Now Up-to-Date's more-limited navigation tools make it more arduous to move to a specific date outside of the current view.
Datebook Pro comes with a Mini-Datebook Pro version for those running with low memory or for spur-of-the-moment scheduling needs. This "lite" program, which can be accessed in any application by hitting a hot key or double-clicking in the menu bar, lets you create and view items, set alarms, and launch the full Datebook Pro application.
Datebook Pro includes an extension that manages alarms and notifies you of upcoming appointments.
Snags and snafus. A major difference between Now Up-to-Date and Datebook Pro is that the latter does not support group scheduling or multiple-schedule reconciliation. These items are on After Hours' development slate for a future version.
We experienced some crashes and lost Events after converting to Datebook Pro from the previous version of Datebook. A technical-support person at After Hours suggested that our schedule file had been corrupted, even though it worked in the older Datebook application, and Datebook Pro had appeared to have converted it without a problem. After we rebuilt the file, as After Hours suggested, the problems disappeared.
Datebook Pro, like Now Up-to-Date, does not allow you to stretch regular Events across date boundaries (except for banners, which do not carry the normal attributes of an Event). To represent Events spanning multiple days, you'll have to use a work-around (possibly two Events to mark the start and end of the item or a recurring Event that spans multiple days).
Documentation and support. The Datebook Pro manual has been extensively rewritten. It is clear and comprehensive and slanted more toward the new user than someone upgrading from a previous version.
Conclusions. Datebook Pro has come through its first major upgrade more flexible, powerful and attractive and has maintained its ease of use. The new Memo item is a welcome addition, and the enhancements to the interface add up to a significant improvement in the feel of the program. There is still room to grow, especially in support for group scheduling, which After Hours said is in the works. If you need this feature, then Now Up-to-Date is the best choice. Datebook Pro, meanwhile, is a very good personal time manager.
After Hours Software is at Tri Center Plaza, 5990 Sepulveda Blvd., Van Nuys, Calif. 91411. Phone (818) 780-2220 or (800) 367-8911; fax (818) 780-2666.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
Reviews Page 47
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Review: Touchbase Pro makes solid contact
Major improvements, including new fields, shortcuts and greater flexibility, make this worthwhile product even better.
By Jeffrey Sullivan
....................
Score Card: Touchbase Pro
After Hours Software
Version tested: 3.0
List price: $79.95*
Overall value 4
This impressive upgrade to one of the leading Macintosh contact managers provides more than just a new name. Touchbase Pro has been substantially revamped, making it easier to use and more flexible and customizable. New features include additional custom fields, file synchronization, field shortcuts, complex searches, multiple open contact files, a built-in word processor and AppleScript support. Some minor cosmetic glitches and bugs blemish the otherwise impressive quality of this upgrade.
Performance 3
Features 4
Ease of use 4
Documentation/support 4
* Bundled with Datebook Pro, $149.95. Upgrades from previous versions of Touchbase, $24.95; owners of Touchbase and Datebook can upgrade both for $39.95.
System 7 Compatibility: Touchbase Pro 3.0
Balloon help No
TrueType Yes
Publish and subscribe No
Apple events Yes
32-bit addressing* Yes
*According to vendor.
....................
Ignoring the truism "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," After Hours Software has released a major upgrade to Touchbase, its popular personal contact manager.
Lest one suspect more bluster than muster, rest assured that the $79.95 Touchbase Pro improves virtually every aspect of the already well-rounded product. It is more flexible and even easier to use, while packing in substantial new functionality. Upgrades from the previous version are $24.95.
With this upgrade, Touchbase Pro is no longer available as a desk accessory (unlike its main competitor, Portfolio Software Inc.'s Dynodex 3.0, which still provides a stripped-down DA version). Touchbase Pro has graduated to a full-fledged application - a sizable one at that, requiring more than 800 Kbytes of disk space and at least 650 Kbytes of RAM. Although Touchbase Pro will run on any Mac with System 6.0.5 or later, System 7 is required for some of its advanced linking features, in particular its substantial integration with Datebook Pro.
Like Datebook, the previous (non-Pro) version of Touchbase will continue to be sold, through Performa channels only, at a retail price of $64.95.
What's new. Touchbase Pro adds five new customizable fields to the 11 offered in Touchbase. The new fields provide two more check boxes, another date and two new number fields. In addition to excellent automatic field formatting, Touchbase Pro fields can now have shortcuts associated with them. Shortcuts can be used like the glossary feature of word processors, as a pull-down menu of frequent field fillers or as a pop-up menu that restricts field contents to one of its items.
Unlike previous versions, Touchbase Pro allows you to have multiple contact files open simultaneously, letting you easily cut and paste contacts between files.
The new version features greater flexibility in entering and retrieving information. More actions within the program - such as dialing a number or printing a letter - are logged to a contact's Notes field with a time stamp. Touchbase Pro now supports compound searches of field contents (on unlimited fields rather than Dynodex's limitation of two fields per selection search). A new Views editor lets you create a menu of custom selections of contact files. For example, you can create a view called Salespeople that shows all contacts with the word "sales" in their title field.
Like Dynodex 3.0, Touchbase Pro offers a bare-bones text editor that lets you create memos, called FastLetters. Convenient integration with Touchbase Pro allows for easy mail merge and form-letter creation, but for a program with such tight integration, it's surprising that FastLetters cannot be linked to a contact.
New tools, but no Tools. Touchbase Pro has eliminated the Touchbase Tools application, rolling its functionality into the Tools menu, along with a slew of new features. In addition to the capability to convert Dynodex and Power Up! Software Corp.'s Address Book Plus files, permanently sort and reconstruct contact files, and transfer data to and from Sharp Electronics Corp.'s Wizard palmtops, Touchbase Pro now supports user-customizable duplicate-record checking, global search and replace of field contents, and the capability to compare two contacts and swap data between their fields.
Touchbase Pro supports the Personal Information Suite of Apple events, which an After Hours programmer helped define. The program is scriptable under AppleScript.
Synchronization. Touchbase Pro adds support for file synchronization. The program provides two means of reconciling the contacts in a file used both abroad and on a central server. Using the Matching Contact IDs method (similar to Dynodex's file-synchronization feature), each file is scanned for duplicate records on a field-by-field basis, with you selecting the fields to consider. Touchbase Pro's Reconciliation Log method performs the synchronization much faster; it keeps a log of modifications made to the file and reconciles only records that have changed.
You are given the standard array of choices for what to do if a record has been changed in both files, along with a less-standard merge option. If you choose the latter, Touchbase Pro's Compare Contacts dialog comes up, highlighting the differences between the two records and allowing you to update them.
Glitches and gripes. One annoying "feature" of Touchbase Pro is that it scrolls you back to the top of your current list after you've deleted a contact record. This makes for tedious, repetitive scrolling when you're trying to delete unwanted records in your list.
We would also like to be able to type the first letters of a contact name (in List view) and be able to go to that record.
Touchbase Pro suffers from some minor cosmetic bugs, occasionally not refreshing its display appropriately in list view and after sorting. Simply scrolling the list up or down is enough to redisplay the window in these cases, however.
We also found Touchbase Pro to be a bit sluggish when working with large files (more than 300 contacts). Operations such as searching and sorting were generally much slower in Touchbase than in Dynodex.
Documentation and support. The Touchbase Pro documentation has been significantly rewritten, expanding its coverage of old features and addressing new ones. Users familiar with the old Touchbase might have a difficult time picking out the new feature documentation because it's not distinguished from previously existing features, but new users will find the manual very helpful and clearly written.
After Hours offers 180 days of free technical support for Touchbase Pro. Technical support can be received on CompuServe, America Online, AppleLink and via a toll call. Once we got through to it - not an easy task on its support line - After Hours was extremely responsive to our technical-support requests.
Conclusions. After Hours has done an outstanding job of upgrading one of the best personal contact managers available for the Mac. Touchbase Pro is a feature-laden, flexible and easy-to-use tool that fits its job like a key in a lock. Of course, we will be even happier once the minor glitches in the initial release of Touchbase Pro are cleaned up.
After Hours Software is at Tri Center Plaza, 5990 Sepulveda Blvd., Van Nuys, Calif. 91411. Phone (818) 780-2220 or (800) 367-8911; fax (818) 780-2666.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
Reviews Page 51
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
ProductWatch: Pieces in the groupware puzzle
Managers must look at many options when designing ways to improve work flow.
By Mitch Ratcliffe
The personal computer is a heads-down, shoulders-to-the-wheel machine that focuses users' attention on their own work rather than the goals of their company. Its office dominance has done little to streamline the flow of information in organizations.
Now a maturing generation of software, known as groupware, is lifting the blinders from Macs, IBM PCs and compatibles, and Unix computers, enabling the sharing of information, the tailoring of business processes, and the scheduling of people and resources.
Assess work-flow needs. Before adopting groupware, managers need to take stock of their networks and the jobs computer users are trying to accomplish. According to users, the character of the applications chosen for an organization should come as close as possible to the working habits already in place.
Although a large growth area for workgroup applications is in specialized markets such as publishing, there are a number of products that can satisfy more general needs. These groupware applications fall into four categories: conferencing systems; real-time virtual work spaces and collaborative databases, which let workers collaborate on documents in a coordinated manner; resource-management programs; and work-flow software, which lets managers design the flow of data, forms and documents through their offices.
Conferencing systems. Most Mac groupware installs in two pieces, including a client and a server component. In the case of conferencing systems such as Pacer Software Inc.'s PacerForum and MacVONK Inc.'s Inforum, a server collects and archives all data, which client Macs access over an AppleTalk network.
These programs take the rudiments of an on-line bulletin board system - the capability to upload and download information - and use it to put networked users in the middle of brainstorming sessions. Entire projects are stored under a clickable icon as ASCII text threads and attached to documents, graphics and QuickTime movies, which can be reviewed by forum participants.
The PacerForum and Inforum settings avoid the verbosity of their on-line ancestry. Because an entire discussion thread is stored under a clickable icon in the main screen, users need not include lengthy quotes of previous messages to provide context for their ideas.
Collaborative databases. ON Technology Inc.'s Instant Update, provides two productivity environments, a word processor and a drawing program, where users can work on ideas and documents. Users send updates to the Instant Update server, which distributes the latest version to other users.
Digital debates. Syracuse (N.Y.) University uses PacerForum to conduct writing classes. "If a student misses class, they just come in after hours and pick up where the class left off," said Bret Ingerman, manager of the advanced applications group in Syracuse's computing services department. "The boundaries of time and space that we think of as a class period are breaking down."
A class discussion conducted via PacerForum allows students to participate in debates and group writing exercises using pseudonyms, which increases participation by otherwise soft-spoken students, Ingerman said.
Groupware has enabled a rash of other innovations at Syracuse University, including the encouragement of targeted discussion groups that provide feedback to teachers and students on grading and papers; the creation of instant archives of classroom debates; and plans for a campuswide system that will serve as a distribution point for homework, information and software upgrades.
Telemorphix Inc., an interactive production company in San Francisco, uses PacerForum to link employees in Europe, Asia and the United States. There is no central Telemorphix office; instead the company maintains multiple PacerForum servers, each dedicated to an individual project, which users access by dialing into the company's network through AppleTalk Remote Access.
According to Andy Harris, Telemorphix president and co-founder, the capability to share information among Telemorphix team members makes the worldwide organization possible. "We use PacerForum to coordinate activities, then we can play it by ear," he said.
Real-time virtual work space. But Telemorphix cannot provide customer training and technical support through the Pacer interface. For this it turned to Farallon Computing Inc.'s Timbuktu, a cross-platform screen-sharing application that enables real-time collaboration. "Something that's incredibly difficult to explain over the telephone is easy to show when someone is able to look at the same screen," Harris said.
Timbuktu is available for Mac and Windows machines. Datawatch Corp.'s ScreenLink, available only for the Mac, also allows real-time screen sharing.
Putting two or more machines in touch with a networked document takes a company the next step up the interactivity scale; real-time collaborative applications break the bounds of geography to bring people together in a virtual work space.
Group Technologies Inc.'s Aspects has found a following in companies with widely distributed teams that want to work in the dynamic atmosphere of a live brainstorming session. The application loads on individual Macs, which communicate over an AppleTalk network or via modem. Two or more Aspects users can work simultaneously in a word processor or drawing document. Individual user input is signified by a unique cursor shape or color.
"It puts you in a face-to-face mode," said Neil Drake, process specialist at Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Mich. Drake said he uses ResEdit to create cursors that include the initials of each Dow office in an Aspects session.
Making the choice between the real-time capabilities of Aspects and the store-and-forward data features of PacerForum, Inforum or Instant Update is a matter of trusting one's intuition about how a team works best together. Users said they tended to favor the server-based products for extended projects, especially when they want to create an audit trail or project archive.
Resource management. Groupware can reach outside the realm of bits and bytes to help manage the physical and human resources of an organization. Resource-management applications let groups refer to a central database of meetings, reference materials such as books and periodicals, and employee in/out boards without having to leave their desks.
Meeting Maker from ON Technology is finding a niche as a supplement to other collaborative software by many companies moving to groupware. Meeting Maker 1.5 is a Mac server-based scheduler that lets users propose meetings, select conference rooms and equipment, and send agendas to invitees.
The latest version, Meeting Maker XP, runs on Mac or Windows-based servers and clients, and it allows laptop users to modify their schedules while they roam and send updates to the server when they reconnect to a network. XP runs on AppleTalk or Novell Inc.'s Internetwork Protocol Exchange network protocols.
Another scheduling alternative is Now Software Inc.'s Now Up-to-Date. Unlike Meeting Maker, which lets users share information between individual calendars, Up-to-Date calendars are a central schedule that many users can modify. Individual users can create a calendar for their own schedule or a conference room, and their co-workers can avoid conflicts by checking it before proposing a meeting.
Some applications take group scheduling a step further by integrating scheduling features with electronic mail. Microsoft Schedule Plus uses the Microsoft Mail 3.0 server to facilitate group scheduling. Schedule Plus also allows the use of tentative scheduling so that meetings are not posted to all members' calendars until confirmed. Its graphical conflict-checking feature makes scheduling group meetings easier by providing graphical charts showing workgroup schedules.
WordPerfect Office integrates E-mail; scheduling; and the delegation, assignment and tracking of tasks. WordPerfect is expected to release versions of Office for VAX/VMS, Unix and OS/2 in addition to those for Mac, DOS and Windows. The simplest solution to tracking the availability of people and resources is Milum Corp.'s Office Tracker, according to Stan Stanart, staff engineer at McDonnell Douglas Space Systems' Space Station Division in Houston. An electronic, networked in/out board, Office Tracker lets groups track the comings and goings of people and resources.
"We use it only for people right now, but we intend to try it for [tracking] books and a tape library," Stanart said.
Work flow. Helix Technologies' Tracker is a work-flow and document-management product based on Helix Express relational database client-server technology. Tracker allows users to send tasks, comprising due dates, instructions and documents, to other users in a workgroup. A task initiator can check the status of the task at any time, reroute it or notify users when changes are needed. Tracker keeps an audit trail for each task and provides a document storage area on the server. Lotus Development Corp.'s Notes is an application for sharing information between networked users. Macs, Windows workstations and, soon, Unix machines can exchange information created in other applications and platforms or in a Notes discussion database, which functions like PacerForum.
Notes is catching on in many corporations, and a variety of third-party developers are building on its basic capabilities. The development of forms routing, fax gateways and database-access tools is substantially broadening the scope of shared information and services.
"The power of Notes is the availability of the same user interface across a wide range of applications," said Judy Ruffing, an analyst at a Washington, D.C.-based knowledge company.
It is particularly notable, Ruffing said, that the Notes format is drawing information publications, such as SandPoint Corp.'s electronic version of The Wall Street Journal.
"The information at the desktop is the 'carrot' that entices people to use Notes," Ruffing said. "However, the collaborative power of Notes is really why we use it - to connect task forces of leading experts. The capability to collaborate and build a consensus across organizational and geographic boundaries is tremendous."
Installing Notes takes a big commitment. Every user in an organization and the network itself, through the installation of an IBM OS/2-based server, must be converted to Notes, if it is to become useful.
"It's hard to measure Notes in terms of its costs and benefits," Ruffing said. "If you measure it in terms of the value to a person who's getting information and the capability to retrieve information faster than through older systems, then it's invaluable."
Data-flow design. Optix Workflow, an imaging and document-routing system from Blueridge Technologies Inc., is a groupware application that purports to tie together the organizational information flow. Its components include work flow, optical character recognition, document imaging, full text search, archive and retrieval, and fax. Work-flow features include parallel routing, the capability for several users to work on a document simultaneously. Notes is another possible choice for companies wanting to integrate the creation and routing of information - and it will support scheduling features.
South San Francisco, Calif.-based Genentech was the first user of Optix WorkFlow, which it uses to import 10,000 to 15,000 pages of written medical documentation into its electronic information-processing system each month. According to Stu Nixon, manager of biomedical information at Genentech, the company has cut copying and archival storage costs tremendously and has simplified personal filing for employees.
WorkFlow lets users scan in doctors' notes, medical charts and other information, then create a routing form that directs the data from person to person in the company. At Genentech, for instance, information is collected for drug studies, analyzed by a series of people, then packaged automatically by WorkFlow for delivery to the Food and Drug Administration.
Nixon said the WorkFlow system demands that users think more creatively about how information is collected and used. The result is a data flow optimized to the particular requirements of each study and, he said, that leads to far greater productivity.
"The system paid for itself in only a few months," he said. But measuring its exact effect on the organization has been difficult. "The problem is the variability in the metric. We never do the same case study twice, and if you look at it from a before-and-after perspective, well, we're different after every case."
Room to grow. "The problem with all these groupware applications is that none of them integrates everything I need," Nixon said. He said even the most comprehensive applications lack resource scheduling.
"I've got WorkFlow running on the same screen with Meeting Maker and (Digital Equipment Corp.'s) All-In-One Mail," Nixon said. "None of them talks to one another; I talk to them all."
Even if no single work-flow solution can currently satisfy an organization's every need, users said comprehensive work-flow applications, such as Optix Workflow and Notes, work wonders and have wrought profound changes in their organizations.
In fact, the sharing of information and tracking resources is becoming mandatory as companies deal with ever larger amounts of data. Systems that reduce the time needed to process data will give companies an advantage in these data-soaked days, users said.
Experts said analysis and insight are the most valuable currencies in the information economy, and groupware intelligently applied to an organization's needs is an invaluable solution for quickly getting to the kernel of value in data.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
ProductWatch Page 55
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Mac the Knife: The seen and not-seen scene
As long as we have Ross Perot we will always have ample opportunity for sarcasm. But enough about serious affairs of statecraft. Of late, most thinking Americans have been more concerned with the troubling matter of Barney, the animated, dichromatic Jurassic Park refugee whom many fear is methodically turning the brains of an entire generation of toddlers into happy-talk mush.
And the fears of these concerned adult citizens could be quite well-founded. Imagine these youngsters reaching the age at which they can truly enjoy the fruits of multimedia, only to be incapable of appreciating the ultimate digital experience. Fortunately, there's still hope that our well-supported public-school system will rescue the children from a life of post-intellectualism.
Those among us who still possess functioning neurons will perhaps be interested in the Knife's report that the consortium behind the PowerPC has decided to support the MPEG video-compression standard. That means we'll soon have the real-time compression/decompression capabilities needed to bring full, professional video to the desktop - all the Barney kids can stand and more at the click of a mouse button.
Not seen. Last week's Consumer Electronics Show blew in and out of Chicago without a peep from Apple about Newton prices and specifications. In fact, Apple, contrary to some widely and wildly circulated predictions, had absolutely nothing really new to announce about Newton. This, of course, left observers wondering about other PIE (Personal Interactive Electronics) products.
For example, there's the PowerCD, which Apple announced last March for shipment sometime this summer. The Knife's sources claim that the Philips N.V.-manufactured product has presented unanticipated compatibility problems, requiring some serious engineering tweaking to rectify. Although the prospect of tweaking engineers working on a serious project doesn't inspire all that much confidence, sources are optimistic that everything should be in order in time for shipping before the end of the year.
As it turns out, the fourth quarter might as well be named the season of optimism at Apple. The Knife says that Apple is projecting Newton sales at as many as 200,000 units for that all-too-brief three-month period. That would, indeed, be a stunning accomplishment, especially if you remember that Apple sold only 400,000 PowerBooks in its first 12 months and PowerBooks arrived on the scene with a full complement of ready-to-run software titles.
To be seen. To the delight of those who think that an interface can never be GUI enough or run on too many platforms, there's good news straight ahead. The Knife has learned that Apple is planning to end rampant speculation and formally announce Companion, the DR DOS-based version of the Mac Finder and Toolbox for Intel platforms. And that's all good because all those meetings between Novell and Apple were causing a lot of innocents to jump to some pretty outrageous conclusions. The time is June 29 and the place is the Jacob Javits Convention Center on Manhattan's bustling West Side.
Goodbye to all that. The Knife joins the entire Newton group in offering a tip of his hat and a farewell and good luck to Larry Tesler as he leaves that group to join the Macintosh Software Architecture Division. Somehow it's a little difficult to contemplate the Newton project without its widely acknowledged stepfather. But just as the Hearst Corp. will find a new head, so will the Newton group.
You'd write leads like the one on this page, too, if you were too cool to read Spy. As for mugs, when you've got your tip ready, flag down the Knife at (415) 243-3544, fax (415) 243-3650, MCI (MactheKnife), Internet (mac_the_knife@macweek.ziff.com), AppleLink (MacWEEK) or CompuServe/ZiffNet/Mac.
MacWEEK 06.07.93
Mac the Knife Page 118
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
