In the fast-paced world of computer sales, only the fleet-of-foot stay in the lead, so it should not be surprising that Apple this week intends to tinker with Power Mac configurations, beefing up their features while reducing their prices.
Sources said Apple this week will deliver a revamped price list to dealers. All 11 Power Mac models will be changed in configuration, price or both. In addition, a handful of 680x0-based Macs will be discontinued.
> 6100/60. The Power Mac 6100/60 8/160 will now have a 250-Mbyte hard disk, and the 16/250 model will now come with a 350-Mbyte disk; however, neither model's street price is expected to change. The 8/250/CD configuration will be reduced in price by 11 percent. The 6100/60 AV 8/250 model will be discontinued, although an AV upgrade card for the 6100/60 is expected to premiere this week for less than $500.
> 7100/66. All three members of the 7100/66 lineup that come with 250-Mbyte hard disks will now come with 500-Mbyte drives, but their prices remain largely the same. The 7100/66AV 8/500/CD model will receive an additional 8 Mbytes of memory and a 7 percent price cut.
> 8100/80. The 8100/80 configurations will see the biggest price changes, with cuts of up to 13 percent. The 8/250 will become an 8/500 with no change in price. The 8/250/CD will receive an additional 8 Mbytes of memory and a 500-Mbyte hard disk, as well as a 7 percent price increase. The 8100/80 16/500 model with Insignia Solutions Inc.'s SoftWindows will reportedly be discontinued.
> WS 6150. The PowerPC-based Workgroup Server line will also be modified. The price of the 6150 configuration with 8 Mbytes of memory, a 500-Mbyte hard disk, a CD-ROM drive and AppleShare 4.0 will be cut by 13 percent. A new 8/500/CD configuration will be introduced.
Several older Macs will be discontinued, sources said. The last two Quadra 650 models will exit the price list, as will the last remaining 660AV. The Workgroup Server 95 16/230 will also take its final bow.
Apple this week will reportedly add to the collection of PowerBook 500-series products you can order, but still can't get, when it puts the not-yet-shipping PCMCIA expansion module on the price list.
Bruce Lupatkin, director of research at Hambrecht & Quist of San Francisco, said Apple is repositioning the pricing of its high-end Power Macs so they are in line with upcoming "speed-bump" models.
"This has nothing to do with the price cuts that Compaq, IBM and Dell announced last month," Lupatkin said. "If that were the case, the Power Mac 6100 would have had more significant price reductions, and the Quadra 630's price would have come down."
Jon Swartz contributed to this report.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
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News: Newtons to get enterprise link
By Stephen Howard
Start-up Wayfarer Communications Inc. reportedly is taking steps to make the Newton into a real-time front end to enterprise data.
According to sources, Wayfarer's software, due to ship by the end of the year, is based on TCP/IP and custom services running on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT Advanced Server. The Newton MessagePad is the Mountain View, Calif.-based company's client of choice, and up to 100 PDAs can be connected concurrently.
The Wayfarer system is intended to be the core of vertical database-access applications, sources said. To this end, the company added a full TCP/IP protocol stack to the Newton along with messaging extensions to NewtonScript. On the server side, Wayfarer carries data between Newtons and SQL databases; gateways for e-mail, pagers and fax; and special monitoring processes.
Wayfarer's software is reportedly being used at several hospitals across the country in a Department of Defense pilot project called ProMED (see MacWEEK, Dec. 13, 1993, Page 132). Doctors with Newtons on a wireless LAN are connected to a Wayfarer server for live look-ups in patient databases and real-time data entry, such as test orders.
On the NT server, Microsoft's SQL Server database integrates data from other sources on the corporate LAN and makes them available to the wandering clients. Wayfarer's own server application performs event logging and conditional message handling and can send special alerts based on database contents.
In addition to database duties, sources said, Wayfarer-equipped Newtons can exchange digital ink messages or Newton data objects, such as business cards. Server gateways can forward e-mail to LAN-based clients that use Microsoft's Messaging API, and vice versa. Other gateways could forward MessagePad mail to pagers or fax software.
Though the system is built on SQL Server, sources said it will work with any database accessible through 32-bit Open Database Connectivity drivers. Likewise, the link between clients and server could be LocalTalk or modems instead of a wireless LAN. Sources also said the Newton software could work over radio networks, such as Ardis and Mobitex, or Cellular Digital Packet Data services.
Current Newton-compatible wireless LANs carry only AppleTalk, so the TCP/IP traffic between Newton and server must be tunneled, and the system requires a tunneling router on the server side.
The Wayfarer software reportedly will cost between $2,000 and $10,000, separate from Windows NT and gateways. Sources said a full client-server system, with hardware and links to legacy hosts, would cost about $10,000 per user.
Wayfarer declined to comment.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
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News: PowerBook 500s still in short supply
By James Staten and Jon Swartz
While vaporware may not be a term closely associated with the PowerBook 500 line, dealers and buyers are using four-letter words to describe the model's long-running shortage. Most dealers' shelves have been empty since May and, according to sources, may remain bare through the fall.
Apple is blaming the 540 and 540c supply problem on a Motorola chip on the PowerBook's CPU daughtercard. The company claims the chip is adversely affecting the 68LC040's timing, causing it to lock up.
Similar problems were reportedly solved earlier this year (see MacWEEK, June 6, Page 14). Sources said, however, that the fix never found its way into manufacturing and that Apple last week pulled all ready-to-ship inventory to replace the card and install System 7.5. The repaired machines are expected to start shipping next week.
A West Coast reseller said the shortage is also affecting the PowerBook 150. He said supplies of the low-cost laptop dried up a month ago.
An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on 150, 520 or 520c shortages, but she said, "We expect to see the backlog alleviated within the next month or two."
Meanwhile, resellers' and users' patience is wearing thin. Despite Apple's vow to dealers that PowerBooks would be available by late September, sources said the company has been evasive -- even "wishy-washy" -- on allocations.
Back orders for the 500 series number in the hundreds at most large dealers and educational sites, and one major Mac distributor reportedly has more than $20 million in orders. Buyers who placed orders as far back as June are still waiting.
"It's god-awful," said Mike Micucci, senior buyer at Visual Sound Co. of Broomall, Pa. "Customers are asking us, 'What's going on?' It's very frustrating."
Mark Foster, manager of the MicroCenter at Azusa (Calif.) Pacific University said: "We haven't seen one all summer. The only thing I have been told is that I'll be eating turkey before I see one."
While some dealers said the shortage was going to start pushing customers to Windows machines, others haven't noticed an increase in sales of Intel-standard laptops.
Indeed, sources said the laptop shortage is an industrywide syndrome, with IBM PC Co., Compaq Computer Corp. and Toshiba America Corp. all reporting manufacturing woes for new models. Of that group, only Compaq has indicated that it expects availability within 45 days.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
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News: Taking stock of Apple DTP
User reviews mixed on publishing push
By Cate C. Corcoran
One year after Apple's statement of recommitment to the publishing market, users and industry watchers are looking back for signs of Apple's new focus.
In his keynote speech last fall at Seybold San Francisco, Apple CEO Michael Spindler pointed to the publishing industry as an area in which Apple has excelled in the past and one in which the company would intensify investments in the future. As part of his plan, he announced the founding of the Worldwide Publishing Consortium.
"I would say I'm very pleased with Apple's commitment," said Steve Zenger, president of ImageCore Ltd., a service bureau in Buffalo, N.Y. "For a while there, they went into the multimedia focus, and I think that was an important thing to do. But while they were doing that, they kind of took for granted the publishing market."
Evidence of Apple's publishing focus hasn't reached all corners of the user base, however, and some industry members are not convinced.
"The answer is [Apple] has done nothing," said Robert Sugar, president and creative director of Auras Design Inc. in Washington, D.C. "They have not shown anything distinctly useful to graphic designers trying to get more product out of their systems. The best you can say is that the PowerPC is a faster platform."
The new platform has boosted user confidence in Apple's publishing business. "The introduction of the PowerPC and its software is great," said Chris Gulker, director of development at The San Francisco Examiner newspaper. "We're on the verge of taking the whole newsroom onto the PowerPC."
Apple may have to initiate major new programs before publishing users gain faith in their relationship with the company. Gulker said: "For a company that has professed commitment, there should be a [publishing-specific] help desk available 24 hours. They should have 1-800-PUBLISH or publish@apple.com and make that a free resource."
ImageCore's Zenger said Apple hasn't effectively communicated the relevance of its development efforts to the publishing community. "A few years ago, Apple was pushing CD-ROM, and now even in publishing we see CD-ROM as a mass-storage medium," he said. "In a lot of senses, Apple was demonstrating some vision in where they thought the industry would go. If I were Michael Spindler, I'd be saying, 'We are working on technology that shows commitment to the publishing market.' "
MacWEEK 09.12.94
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News: QuickDraw GX: Worth the weight?
Second of a two-part look at Apple's latest system software.
By Henry Norr
The biggest innovation in System 7.5, and the one with the most uncertain prospects, is QuickDraw GX. Like PowerTalk, it's not even an option in the main System 7.5 Installer: To load it you have to launch a separate installer script. At least for now, many users probably won't bother.
That's partly because of its resource requirements. The GX extension alone (not counting related extensions, drivers, fonts and utilities that clutter the System folder) weighs in at 1.7 Mbytes on 680x0 Macs and 3.2 Mbytes on Power Macs. After a standard installation, which includes a GX-savvy version of Adobe Type Manager, GX eats up 1.6 Mbytes and 2.5 Mbytes of RAM, respectively.
Even those with capacity to burn may hesitate before installing GX, however, because much of the code that fills those megabytes is of no use to current applications. In particular, there's not a single shipping application that supports GX's rich graphics and typographic capabilities, and only a handful of such programs are in the pipeline.
Apple hasn't done much better: Its SimpleText editor doesn't use GX typography. ("We didn't have time," a spokesman said, though GX has been under development for six years.) The only GX demonstration on the System 7.5 CD is a Macromedia Director 4.0 movie. (You can get a glimpse of what GX can do by selecting a desktop printer icon, holding down the Command, Option and Shift keys, and choosing Open from the Finder's File menu.)
For users, this leaves GX's new printing model as the only tangible benefit. It will soon be supported in a variety of applications and it is indeed a significant attraction where printing is important. Among other features, it lets you print by dragging files to desktop printer icons, select a printer in the Print dialog box without going to the Chooser, set times for deferred printing, see and reorder print queues or drag jobs to a different queue, and share printers directly connected to Macs.
For corporate managers, the principal allure of GX printing may be its extensibility. Two useful print extensions are included on the 7.5 CD, and others are available now in Peirce Software Inc.'s Peirce Print Tools. More important, commercial and in-house developers will be able to create their own extensions for functions such as job control and billing. Along with AppleScript and Apple Guide, this feature makes System 7.5 far easier to customize to organizational requirements than any earlier Mac OS.
Unfortunately, the transition to a new printing model inevitably involves some hassles. Third-party printers need new drivers (unless they use Apple's), and so far these drivers are hard to find, even though GX is supposed to make driver development easy. For example, a read-me file on the System 7 disks implies that a GX driver for Hewlett-Packard Co. DeskWriters is already available, but as of late last week it was not. Apple itself has yet to deliver a fax driver or a driver for the Color StyleWriter Pro.
The new architecture in its first incarnation has some rough edges and annoying limitations:
> Switching to GX isn't supposed to require reformatting of documents, but some of my Courier-font Word 5.1a documents vary in length by up to 10 percent, depending in part on whether GX is installed. (Apple's GX engineers and I are still trying to figure out what's going on.)
> Like PowerTalk, GX requires you to keep its icons on the desktop, regardless of your preferences. If you copy them to a folder, drag-and-drop doesn't work and neither does the printer-selection pop-up menu in the GX print dialog box.
> GX's printer-sharing feature lets a user hijack a networked printer, denying use of it to anyone else.
> GX's portable digital document maker lets you share documents with users who don't have your software. But there's no way for Windows users or even Mac users who don't have GX to read the documents.
GX engineers say they are working hard to reduce memory requirements and improve performance, which currently seems about equal to non-GX printing for most jobs but slower for bit maps. When a more efficient version, more print extensions and compatible applications appear, GX printing could be a big hit. For now, though, it's unlikely to see wide adoption.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
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News: Acrobat 2.0 offers free views
Adobe to release API, add Verity searching
By Cate C. Corcoran
Adobe Acrobat will climb to Version 2.0 in October with new multi-user functions, an open architecture and a new bundling scheme.
One change likely to alter the way the document-exchange system gets used is free distribution of Acrobat Reader, which lets users view and print Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF) files. While Version 1.0 of the Reader cost $50, Mac, Windows, DOS and Unix versions will be included with all Acrobat packages and will be available free from Adobe or on-line.
Acrobat's new API will let developers customize the program. Adobe said it is initiating an add-on program for Acrobat similar to the one for Aldus PageMaker.
Building on this more open structure, Acrobat will include Verity Inc.'s search engine, which will let users do Boolean searches, including synonym recognition, across multiple documents. A new application, Acrobat Catalog, creates full-text images of PDF files. Only documents indexed with Catalog can be searched with the Verity engine.
Acrobat's notation capabilities have also been expanded, allowing multiple users to add labeled and color-coded sticky notes to any part of a document. Hypertext and bookmarks will be able to link text across documents and applications. Article threads, which let authors specify reading paths in multicolumn documents, also ease navigation. Acrobat will come in three packages:
> Adobe Acrobat 2.0, $195, will include Acrobat Exchange, Acrobat Search, PDF Writer and readers. It will let users create basic PDF files and view, print and search PDF files.
> Acrobat Pro 2.0, $595, will include all Acrobat 2.0 components as well as Acrobat Distiller, a conversion engine for making PostScript files into PDF files. Distiller is available in a native Power Mac version.
> Acrobat for Workgroups, $1,595, will come with 10 Acrobat 2.0 licenses, one Acrobat Distiller license and Acrobat Catalog.
Adobe Systems Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., is at (415) 961-4400 or (800) 833-6687; fax (415) 961-3769.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
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News: Bug in Norton Utilities for Mac may trash data
Symantec Corp. announced last week that it has found a bug in the Speed Disk module of Norton Utilities for Mac 3.0 that can result in data loss.
The company said less than 1 percent of NUM 3.0 users reported the problem, but all customers should immediately stop using the module. Shipments have been halted. An update will be mailed to registered users and will be available from on-line services; Symantec will also replace copies in stores. No date was announced for the new release.
Symantec Corp. of Cupertino, Calif., is at (503) 334-6054 or (800) 441-7234; fax (503) 334-7400.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
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News: NewGen outputs high-res printers
Models feature tabloid-size output
By David Morgenstern
NewGen Systems Corp. in August introduced a series of high-resolution laser printers that offer full-bleed, tabloid-size output.
Printers in NewGen's DesignXpress line are based on Canon U.S.A. Inc.'s new 16-page-per-minute, 600-dpi LBP-BXII engine. The engine is also used in models from QMS Inc. and Xante Corp. and reportedly will be included in Hewlett-Packard Co.'s forthcoming LaserJet 4MV (see MacWEEK, Sept. 5, Page 1). NewGen said its models offer print speeds of 9, 11 and 16 pages per minute, for tabloid, legal and letter sizes, respectively.
DesignXpress models are available in two configurations: a standard version with an 11.7-by-18-inch imaging area and an oversize, 12-by-20-inch version. NewGen said its oversize configurations provide the largest print area of any printer based on the LBP-BXII engine.
The 600-dpi DesignXpress 6 is priced at $4,395 and $4,895, respectively, for standard and oversize configurations. It ships with 12 Mbytes of RAM, which can be expanded to 192 Mbytes. With more memory, the printer can output 1,200-dpi pages.
The 1,200-dpi DesignXpress 12 costs $6,495 and $7,295, respectively, for standard and oversize versions. It ships with 40 Mbytes of RAM, which can be expanded to 192 Mbytes.
All DesignXpress printers feature a 33-MHz AMD RISC processor. They ship with the Level 2 version of PhoenixPage, Phoenix Technologies Inc.'s PostScript interpreter, and 35 Type 1 fonts. NewGen said it will offer HP PCL 5 and HP-GL/2 emulations late this fall. The printers also incorporate NewGen's text-sharpening and graphics-enhancement technology.
The devices switch automatically among LocalTalk, parallel and serial interfaces. A $399 EtherTalk interface includes TCP/IP and Novell NetWare support.
The models come standard with 100- and 250-sheet paper trays.
NewGen also announced that it has reduced its 1,200-dpi ImagerPlus 12 full-bleed, tabloid-size laser printer to $6,195 from $7,495 and cut its ImagerPlus 6L, a 600-dpi tabloid-size laser printer, to $3,995 from $4,495.
NewGen Systems Corp. of Fountain Valley, Calif., can be reached at (714) 641-8600; fax (714) 641-2800.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
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News: HP to release Mac inkjet with snap-on color
By Matthew Rothenberg
Hewlett-Packard Co. this week is scheduled to introduce the first Mac printer in its fall color line when it ships a new DeskWriter model.
The DeskWriter 540, which starts at $365, is a 600-by-300-dpi inkjet model that outputs monochrome letter-size pages. It can print 1 monochrome page per minute in Best mode and 3 ppm in a draft mode, HP said.
Users who want to print 24-bit CMY color can purchase a $49 color upgrade kit that snaps into the printer and replaces the DeskWriter 540's monochrome black cartridge. The printer supports 300-by-300-dpi color output; Best mode outputs 0.25 ppm and draft mode prints 0.67 ppm, the company said.
The new model includes LocalTalk and RS-422A interfaces and ships with 35 TrueType fonts. HP said the DeskWriter 540 is compatible with QuickDraw and QuickDraw GX. It comes with a 100-sheet feeder, a 20-sheet envelope feeder, a 30-sheet card feeder and a 50-sheet paper-out tray.
According to the company, the new inkjet has been redesigned for ease of use. It has a new Mac driver that alerts users when the printer is out of paper or ink or encounters mechanical problems.
The company said the DeskWriter 540 complies with Energy Star standards for power consumption. It ships with a three-year limited warranty.
According to HP, the new printer replaces its DeskWriter and DeskWriter C models.
According to sources, HP this month is also expected to introduce its first color laser printer, the 600-dpi Color LaserJet (see MacWEEK, Aug. 1, Page 1).
Hewlett-Packard Co. of Cupertino, Calif., can be reached at (800) 752-0900.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
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News: XVT enhances development environment
By Robert Hess
XVT Software Inc. in August revved up its cross-platform development environment. Version 3.0 of Development Solution for C++ now contains an enhanced application framework, a new data-structure architecture and a visual programming tool.
According to XVT, the environment gives developers a portable and scalable object-oriented system for creating applications primarily with visual tools. Once deployed on target platforms, the resulting code runs native, using local operating-system services.
Development Solution for C++ 3.0 includes XVT-Power++ 3.0 Application Framework, a MacApp-like foundation for code creation. The new version is available now for Mac, Windows, Windows NT, OS/2, OSF-Motif and Open Look. It adds support for 24-bit-color images; font access regardless of target platform; and a hypertext help system that compiles to use each OS's built-in help system, such as Apple Guide. XVT-Power++ 3.0 costs $1,950 for personal computers and $6,300 for workstations.
The Framework now incorporates Rogue Wave Tools.h++, a data-structures library with more than 100 object classes for new tasks.
Expected in the fourth quarter, XVT-Architect will give programmers a visual tool for creating applications using XVT framework objects. The free Architect add-on will make it easier to manipulate complex hierarchical object structures, the company said. Architect includes a Blueprint framework browser, Drafting Board layout tool and Object Strata class browser.
XVT Software Inc. of Boulder, Colo., can be reached at (303) 443-4223; fax (303) 443-0969.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
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News: Old screens, new Macs linked
By Cate C. Corcoran
Griffin Communications Corp. is breathing new life into old monitors with a video adapter that lets users connect them to Power Macs and other new models.
The $40 Composite Sync Adapter addresses incompatibility problems that arise from Apple's switch from using a synchronization signal on the green output pin of most pre-AV Macs to spreading sync signals across more pins on a number of newer models.
Griffin said the adapter is compatible with the Quadra 605 and 610, Mac LCs, PowerBooks, AV Macs, and Power Macs with external video. All monitors with one or three BNC connectors work with the adapter, the company said.
According to the company, the adapter combines the video signals from Macs, filters them and adds the synchronization signal to the green pin, taking the place of video cards that provide the "sync-on-green" signal. It also sets the sense codes to communicate the monitor resolution to the computer's video card.
Brian Kaihoi, technology coordinator at the visual information section of the Mayo Clinic of Rochester, Minn., said, "We bought 35 adapters, and each one saved us $1,000 in video cards."
Griffin Communications Corp. of Nashville, Tenn., can be reached at (615) 256-6913; fax (615) 259-2095; grifcom@aol.com.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
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News: Niles updates EndNote bibliography tool
By James Staten
Niles & Associates Inc. this week is slated to ship Version 2.0 of EndNote Plus, software designed to give researchers and scholars a better way to track their academic references.
EndNote Plus, a $299 bibliographic-database product, and its companion product, EndLink, a $99 import utility, let users track references from multiple resources, including on-line sources and CD-ROMs, and generate bibliographies.
EndNote Plus 2.0 features a customizable Term List that helps users track and maintain the consistency of important terms for data entry and retrieval. Users can now add keywords, simultaneously correct the spelling of multiple entries and change the display font used in the program.
The software includes more than 200 predefined styles from more than 15 academic disciplines to help users build appropriate listings.
EndNote Plus' searching capabilities now support comparative operators (<, >, =) when searching for a range of references. Search results can be combined and restricted.
EndNote Plus 2.0 is compatible with most word processors, including Microsoft Word, MacWrite Pro, WriteNow and WordPerfect. An incremental update that supports Word 6.0 will be free to 2.0 users, although no release date has been scheduled.
EndLink 2.0 includes more than 200 bibliographic filters for extracting references from sources such as Dialog, SilverPlatter and Knowledge Index. Users can modify the filters to change the specific information gathered and create new filters, the company said.
The upgrade can recognize and import 16 reference types, including patents. Version 2.0's import filters recognize database tags, such as keywords, as well as the numerical MARC format developed by the Library of Congress.
EndNote and EndNote Plus users can upgrade to EndNote Plus 2.0 for $79 or purchase new versions of both EndNote Plus and EndLink for $99. Niles & Associates said Power Mac versions of both products are under development.
Citing increasing support costs, the company said it is discontinuing support of EndNote, its entry-level product.
Niles & Associates Inc. of Berkeley, Calif., can be reached at (510) 559-8592 or (800) 554-3049; fax (510) 559-8683; nilesinc@well.sf.ca.us.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
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News: Output to dominate Seybold expo
By MacWEEK staff
The usual suspects will line up to display high-end imaging wares at Seybold San Francisco this week with output devices expected to dominate this year's show.
> RIPs. Canon U.S.A. Inc. will introduce the ColorPass 1000 RIP server as well as its Color Copier 700 and 800 models. The 7-page-per-minute Color Copier 800 supports automatic duplexing.
ColorAge Inc. and ColorBus Inc. will demonstrate RIP servers that can drive multiple color copiers. ColorBus will introduce CopiPress, a device that can fuse color-copier images to cardboard, cloth, metal and wood.
Power Mac RIPs based on Adobe Systems Inc.'s CPSI (Configurable PostScript Software Interpreter) Level 2 will include PrePress Solutions Inc.'s Panther imagesetter systems and SuperMac Technology Inc.'s Splash models. ECRM Inc. will demonstrate its $7,500 Power Mac RIP, a new version of its Harlequin-based Level 2 RIP for ECRM's ScriptSetter imagesetters.
Agfa, a division of Miles Inc., will demonstrate three new RIP models and CristalRaster 2.5, the latest version of its stochastic screening technology. It will also show the entry-level Elan 500 imagesetter and the Agfaproof System 2 contract-proofing processor.
> Dye sublimation. Eastman Kodak Co. will show the XLS 8600 PS, a dye-sublimation printer that adds a protective coating to full-bleed, letter-size output. Sony Electronics Inc. will show two new dye-sublimation printers with PostScript and networking options.
> Environmental printing. Several vendors will offer strategies for reducing chemical waste. LaserMaster Corp. will introduce PressMate, a 2,400-dpi thermal printer that outputs dry-process film and four-color proofs. CalComp Inc. will demonstrate its large-format EcoGrafix Film Imaging System, aimed at the newspaper and screen-printing markets. Ultre, a division of Linotype-Hell Co., and Autologic Inc. will show imagesetters that can use 3M Corp.'s heat-activated Dry Image film and paper.
> Large-format output. EnCAD Inc. will introduce its NovaJet III color inkjet plotters, which support media widths of 24 and 36 inches. Summagraphics Corp. will show the SummaJet 2C, an inkjet plotter with refillable CMY cartridges.
Barco Inc. will debut the GigaSetter, a 4,000-dpi drum imagesetter that outputs 96-by-63-inch images and features an automatic film-loading system.
Other announcements include:
> Accelerators. Grande Vitesse Systems Inc. will introduce Workstation IIIP, a $7,995 PowerPC upgrade for Quadra 900 and 950 models that supports parallel processing and accommodates the company's Nomadic II removable array modules.
Adaptive Solutions will demonstrate PowerShop, which uses 64 digital signal processors in a parallel array to accelerate Adobe Photoshop functions. EA Research will introduce EAsyColor 24/1360, a $1,699 24-bit-color Photoshop and QuickDraw accelerator card designed to compete with Radius Inc.'s LeMansGT.
> Software. Power Mac upgrades on display will include HSC Software Corp.'s Live Picture and Bryce, as well as DS Design's Colorize software for colorizing bit-mapped images.
Monoco Systems Inc. will show Version 1.5 of Monoco Color, its automatic color-correction application. Pantone Inc. will announce ColorDrive, a new color-management package that lets users output Pantone color charts.
Adobe Systems Inc. will introduce Acrobat 2.0, which features a new open architecture, free distribution of Acrobat Reader and expanded search capabilities. Competitor No Hands Software will announce Version 2.0 of Common Ground. Laser Today International will show its ColorLink Universal color-faxing system. SoftPress Systems Ltd. will demonstrate UniQorn, its forthcoming QuickDraw GX layout application.
> Peripherals. Kodak will introduce the DCS 460, a $27,995, 3,060-by-2,036-pixel digital camera for outdoor use, while Nikon Inc. will demonstrate its new Digital Still Camera. KanImage Inc. will show Daguerre, new software that helps users of its KanImage Digital Camera compose shots and adjust controls.
Sony Corp. will debut its GDM-2000TC 20-inch Trinitron monitor.
Screen USA will unveil the DT-s1045AI, a 24-bit-color drum scanner. Wacom Technology Corp.'s new graphics tablets include a model with an electrostatic surface that holds down paper for tracing. Hitachi Digital Graphics (USA) Inc. will show its new MultiPad tablet.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
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(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
News: WWPC wrestles with DTP direction
By Cate C. Corcoran
As the Worldwide Publishing Consortium celebrates its first birthday this week, many of the organization's start-up tasks have been completed, and it is looking to the future.
The consortium, better known as the WWPC, is a nonprofit organization of vendors, user sites and individuals. It was founded to facilitate communication between developers of publishing products and users. It was announced last fall by Apple CEO Michael Spindler at Seybold San Francisco.
In the past year, the organization -- which includes among its vendor members Apple, Adobe Systems Inc., Eastman Kodak Co. and Linotype-Hell Co. -- has opened an office in Los Gatos, Calif., and elected a board of directors.
Its first major event, the Digital Town Hall to be held this week in San Francisco, will be a forum for publishing and technology issues that will include on-line participants and audience voting.
Members of the publishing community have expressed doubts about the organization's ability to bring about change. David Cole, editor of The Cole Papers, a publishing industry newsletter in San Francisco, said: "I don't know if the WWPC has been as effective as everyone thought it would be. Maybe [the community's] skepticism became a self-fulfilling prophecy. But they plan to make their presence felt at Seybold."
MacWEEK 09.12.94
News Page 89
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Gateways: Enterprise readies X.400 mail family
Mac EXM clients to ship in October
By Nathalie Welch
Enterprise Solutions Ltd. will unveil a family of 1988 X.400-based e-mail client and server components at the NetWorld+Interop 94 show in Atlanta this week.
Due in October, EXM (Enterprise Xtended Mail) provides clients, or user agents, for Macintosh, Windows, DOS, Unix and Unix-Motif platforms. User agents will start at $250 each. A remote client that lets Mac users dial in over TCP/IP WANs, X.25 links and dial-up modem connections will also be available, starting at $300 per user.
Enterprise Solutions' Unix-based servers will include the EXM/DMTA (Departmental Message Transfer Agent), starting at $895 and geared toward smaller locations. The EXM/SMTA (System Message Transfer Agent), for higher-volume sites, starts at $9,000. Both servers will be available next month.
The company previously offered Enterprise Mail, an e-mail system based on the 1984 X.400 specification, which did not include a Mac client. Customers with maintenance contracts can upgrade their 1984 clients to 1988 ones for free.
New client features stem from the 1988 X.400 Message Handling standard inclusion of Message Store and P7 Protocol. Combined, the two additions can reduce network traffic by letting users selectively access messages contained in the server-based Message Store. 1984 X.400 user agents must download all mail at once upon connection to the server, the company said.
Adding P7 and Message Store to the EXM/DMTA costs $1,295; adding that functionality to the EXM/SMTA is an extra $3,000, the company said.
EXM security features include password protection separate from regular system or network log-on security. Additional access restrictions, such as the ability to lock messages generated from certain addresses, can be controlled from an optional $1,295 administrator module.
Enterprise Xtended Mail also includes a Directory application that gives users access to both personal and enterprisewide X.500 databases. Directory clients start at $3,000 for a 100-user pack.
The entire system's user agents can be used with a variety of third-party X.400 servers, the company said, including Control Data Systems Inc.'s Mail*Hub and Retix Corp.'s OpenServer.
Enterprise Solutions Ltd. of Westlake Village, Calif., can be reached at (805) 449-4181; fax (805) 449-4186.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
Gateways Page 10
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Gateways: SimMac 5.0's hot-spot macros type text
By Nathalie Welch
The new Version 5.0 of SimWare Inc.'s Mac-to-mainframe connectivity software, SimMac, implements hot spots, IND$FILE, Macintosh Communications Toolbox and developer access to IBM Corp. APIs.
SimMac 5.0, available now for $395, includes a programmable hot-spot feature that lets users create macros from text in the terminal window. These hot spots are context-sensitive, based on the contents of the terminal window and, when clicked, automatically type text into the session.
The upgrade supports IBM's High Level Language Application Program Interface, which lets users develop productivity applications in C or Pascal that use the SimMac communications engine to access 3270 hosts. IBM's IND$FILE, a file transfer protocol resident on virtually all 3270-style mainframes, has been added to the upgrade, so no additional modules are needed. SimMac 5.0's support for the Comm Toolbox will result in more-robust serial port connections, the company said.
Upgrades from previous versions are $149.
SimWare Inc. of Ottawa can be reached at (613) 727-1779; fax (613) 727-8797.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
Gateways Page 10
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Mobile: CompuServe planning new Internet services
Full-access link would bypass CIS
By James Staten
CompuServe Inc. is entering the Internet this fall and hopes to take its corporate and consumer customers with it.
CompuServe's Network Services Division this November will offer commercial clients high-speed dedicated Internet and Internet Protocol access via its Frame-Net frame relay service; it will also offer dial-up access via Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP). The connections will give users full Internet access and will bypass the CompuServe Information Service (CIS) commercial on-line service.
Dial-up PPP sessions will enable Mosaic and other front ends to connect across CompuServe's global network at speeds of up to 14.4 Kbps. The company said 28.8-Kbps and ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) access are being tested. Dedicated T1 lines that offer up to 1.536-Mbps access will also be available. An optional Internet client, possibly based on the Internet tools used in CompuServe Information Manager, will also be offered.
CompuServe is also forming a new subsidiary to provide consulting and management services for corporate users interested in establishing a presence on the World-Wide Web.
CIS' Internet access will also expand later this year. Customers of the on-line service will be able to conduct both Telnet and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sessions. Web and Gopher servers will be available to CIS members in the first half of 1995 and PPP access will be offered later next year.
The company said it is looking into security issues surrounding Internet access and will implement password-protection schemes, and possibly encryption, when the services debut.
CompuServe Inc. of Columbus, Ohio, can be reached at (614) 457-8600 or (800) 848-8199; fax (614) 457-0348.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
Mobile Computing Page 14
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Mobile: Technoggin to loose batteries, 500 charger
By James Staten
Technoggin Inc. is unleashing a pack of power products this fall, including longer-lived internal and lighter external batteries, and a smart charger.
> The PowerPlate Duo, priced at $299.95, weighs 2.5 pounds and uses the Duo AC adapter for charging. Technoggin said it provides from six to eight hours of power on color units and eight to 12 hours on gray-scale Duos.
The PowerPlate is wedge-shaped (from 0.6 inches thick in back to 0.37 inches thick under the trackball) and tilts the Duo forward when attached. It monitors the Duo's power state and automatically supplies current when the portable is in use.
The PowerPlate Duo is expected to ship this week and comes with Connectix Corp.'s $99 Connectix PowerBook Utilities. All of Technoggin's new external batteries use smaller, lighter lead-acid cells and attach with Velcro.
> The PowerPlate Ultra5 costs $329.95, works with 100-series PowerBooks, and provides eight to 10 hours of use on gray-scale models and four to six hours on color machines.
Its performance is similar to its predecessor's, the PowerPlate 5x, but is 0.37 inches thick (as opposed to the 5x's 0.95 inches) and a pound lighter at 3 pounds. The Ultra5 has faster two-stage charging and an LED display that shows charging progress.
The Ultra5 uses the 100-series AC adapter and can condition an internal nickel-cadmium battery. It is expected to ship this week and also includes Connectix's CPU.
> The PowerPlate 500 works with 500-series PowerBooks and gives up to four times the battery life of a single internal battery. The $299.95 battery pack weighs 3 pounds. It has two-stage charging and uses the PowerBook's AC adapter. It is expected to ship in late October.
> The PowerPlate Universal 5, priced at $299.95, is similar to the Ultra5, but rather than connecting directly to a 500-series PowerBook it has a cigarette-lighter socket. This lets the Universal 5 connect to any electronic device that has an automotive adapter. It has six LED indicators showing charge status and remaining power; it is expected to ship in October.
> The T-180 Premium Battery, available now for $59.95, is a high-capacity internal NiCad power pack that fits the PowerBook 100 series. It provides 20 percent greater battery life and features a sliding contact cover.
> The PB 500/4-Battery Charger is a $179.95, four-bay battery charger for 500-series intelligent batteries. It is scheduled to ship in the fourth quarter.
Technoggin Inc. of Cincinnati is at (513) 321-1777 or (800) 305-7936; fax (513) 321-2348; technoggin@applelink.apple.com.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
Mobile Computing Page 14
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Mobile: Newer Ethernet MicroDock adds sleep mode
By James Staten
Newer Technology has upgraded its Ethernet MicroDock for PowerBook Duos to support sleep mode and, in the process, unearthed a "feature" of System 7.
The company said its Ethernet MicroDock now lets users put a Duo to sleep while docked. However, when Newer enabled sleep, it found that if the version of System 7 installed on the PowerBook used Network Software Installer 1.4.5, the Duo automatically reverts the network connection to LocalTalk when put to sleep. The user must manually switch back to Ethernet after the Duo is reawakened.
According to Apple, this automatic reversion to LocalTalk is a feature of System 7.
Newer cautions users not to remove the dock while the Duo is in sleep mode, nor to connect any dock to a sleeping Duo. The company said users can disconnect the Duo from an Ethernet connection while asleep, but not from the dock itself.
The sleep-enabled Ethernet MicroDock is priced at $220 and works with all Duo models, including the 280 and 280c. Owners of the previous version of the dock can upgrade for $50.
Newer said it will be adding sleep-mode support to its other MicroDocks.
Newer Technology, a division of Spectrum Engineering Inc. of Wichita, Kan., is at (316) 685-4904 or (800) 678-3726; fax (316) 685-9368; newer.tech@applelink.apple.com.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
Mobile Computing Page 14
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
GA: UniQorn to leap into DTP market
GX-savvy program due early next year
By Cate C. Corcoran
QuickDraw GX enthusiasts at Seybold San Francisco this week can catch a glimpse of a forthcoming GX-savvy page-layout program from England.
UniQorn from SoftPress Systems Ltd. is a layout application aimed at the high end of the publishing market. According to the company, UniQorn has most of the features found in competitive products, such as QuarkXPress and Aldus PageMaker, but has been designed to use the full typographic capabilities and print architecture of Apple's QuickDraw GX.
SoftPress said it added a number of "intelligent" document features to UniQorn, including an overview palette that displays a document's layout and content structures, and a "Smart Outliner," which detects and tracks the structure of a document and allows the application of complex style sheets to it.
UniQorn's standard features include character-level style sheets, complex text-wrap capabilities and object-level trapping.
The company said that long-term development efforts for UniQorn focus on building in the flexibility to let users republish print documents as electronic publications on CD-ROM or in other multimedia form.
Kathleen Tinkel, editor of MacPrePress, an industry newsletter in Westport, Conn., said: "[SoftPress] seems to have picked the right functions in the short term. In the long term, it is looking at document interchange and multimedia publishing. Because it is designing its product with that goal in mind rather than reworking an existing program like [Aldus Corp. and Quark Inc.] are, [UniQorn] has a chance to be the next generation of software."
Version 1.0 of UniQorn will ship in native Power Mac and 680x0 versions and will be priced from $695 to $895. It is slated to ship in the first quarter of 1995, but SoftPress has not yet finalized distribution agreements for Europe or the United States.
SoftPress Systems Ltd., of Oxfordshire, England, can be reached at 44-993-882588; fax 44-993-883970.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
GA Page 20
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
GA: The Power Mac enters publishing, design market
By Connie Guglielmo
Although some have started integrating the Power Mac platform into their workplaces, many users said they are waiting for most major graphics applications to hit the streets in native format. Others are still testing the platform, and still others have decided that they will hold out for the next generation of Power Macs, due from Apple sometime in early 1995.
But despite the slow start, all users agreed that the upgrade to the RISC-based platform is inevitable and that the Power Macintoshes will become the standard publishing platform of the future.
Jim Angius, deputy systems editor for the Los Angeles Times, which is testing the platform, said: "I put [the Power Mac] in the art and production departments and everyone was amazed by the speed. When you're pumping things out for a very deadline-intensive publication with a short production cycle, speed is important."
Among the reasons cited for the slow acceptance of the Power Macs, users say, is that some core graphics and publishing applications were not readily available in native Power Mac format when the machines were released in mid-March. Native Power Mac applications that were rolled out early on include Aldus PageMaker 5.0a, Aldus FreeHand 4.0, Fractal Design Corp.'s Painter 2.0, Adobe Illustrator 5.5, WordPerfect 3.0, Specular International Ltd.'s Infini-D 2.6 and Strata Inc.'s StrataVision 3d 3.1.
But native versions of other major graphics applications -- notably QuarkXPress, HSC Software's Live Picture, Adobe Premiere 4.0E, Adobe Type Manager and a fully native Adobe Photoshop 3.0 -- have made it to market just within the last month or are about to be released. However, Photoshop 2.5.1 with the PowerPC Accelerator plug-in gives most of the performance benefit of a fully native application.
"The biggest holdup for the pre-press environment is that you don't have ATM," said Paul Beyer, senior vice president of Tana Graphics, a Mac-based commercial printing company in New York. "We can't work without ATM; we're totally dependent on it. Not to mention all the wonderful cdevs, utilities and INITs that we rely on. And there aren't yet [fully] native versions of Photoshop and XPress. We'd have to do 90 percent of everything in emulation mode.
"In the production department, everything has to be rock-solid. We've been building up the Quadra 950 for the last two years, with all those drivers and devices and system and monitor calibration, and we have everything down pat. Once you start to introduce a new system, there's a possibility that things will go down. We can't afford that."
Beyer also said he's not thrilled about the fact that the $25,000 worth of 30-pin memory he has purchased for the company's Quadras and other Macs won't work in the Power Macs because they use 72-pin memory.
But, Beyer said, the performance promises of Power Macs are too attractive to ignore. He expects Tana Graphics to begin testing the RISC-based systems within the month. "If I could get a 20 to 30 percent performance increase in Photoshop and XPress, then that's a significant throughput increase in a 24-hour work period," he said. "If we get the performance we want, then we'll buy a bunch of them."
One industry observer said: "With software, the fastest-speed Quadras are fast enough for most applications, like PageMaker and Illustrator. But Photoshop is the key application. The floodgates will open when that is released, and there will be full acceptance of the Power Mac."
He also said that the other big areas are servers, imposition software, RIPs and trapping software -- the things doing the industrial-strength work. "The Power Mac is going to make a gigantic difference there because of its speed," he said.
Lisa Wellman, worldwide industry manager of publishing for Apple, said users have benefited from the Power Macs. "It has been an app story," she said. "A substantial number of applications are there; and I think the users who have integrated Power Macs, even with non-native versions, have seen significant performance improvements."
Looking at the long term
Users who run the 680x0-based versions of applications in emulation mode on the Power Mac acknowledged that emulation mode has not slowed them down.
"Even in emulation, the applications run faster," said Steve Moonitz, technology manager for New York-based Entertainment Weekly magazine, a subsidiary of Time Inc. "The screen refresh is faster and it feels [almost] like a Quadra 650. Maybe initially, the people on the 650 are a tick faster, but in the long term, with the native versions, the Power [Macs] will be a lot faster."
Power Macs made their way into Entertainment Weekly as part of a recent upgrade designed to bring the all-Mac magazine's art department to the cutting edge within a limited budget, Moonitz said.
When the budget proposal was put together in late 1993, the plan was to trade in the current generation of accelerated Mac IIci machines for Quadra 650 systems. But a preview of the Power Macs, and the fact that the Quadras were dropping in price, convinced Moonitz to alter his plans. In June, the company installed six Power Macs (five 8100s and one 7100) and six Quadra 650s.
The Power Macs, each equipped with 24 Mbytes of RAM, a 250-Mbyte hard drive and a CD-ROM drive, went to the art department's power users, who run XPress and Photoshop among other products, to do the magazine's layout, video-capture and image editing, and color print production. "We're planning on buying another Power Mac in the near future that would be used as a high-end scanning station," he added.
As for the IIci machines, they were passed on to assistant editors and outfitted with 33-MHz 68040 accelerator boards from DayStar Digital Inc. of Flowery Branch, Ga.
Speed fix
The long-term benefit of switching to Power Macs also convinced Alan Lithograph Inc., a commercial print shop in Los Angeles, and Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott, a Boston architectural firm, to trade up to the RISC platform early. Both were Apple beta test sites for the Power Mac.
For Alan Lithograph, speed was among the most important issues when it decided to buy four Power Mac systems for use as retouching stations, said Walter Schild, director of R&D. "We had four Quadra 950s in our retouching lab, working on car brochures for Honda and a lot of entertainment and movie posters. We found that a lot of things we were doing with Photoshop -- cropping, rotating, scaling -- were time-intensive. We pay our operators by the hour and we bill our clients by the hour. The Power Mac, even with the beta of Photoshop 3.0, was significantly faster."
Testing, testing
Its early tests of the Power Mac also convinced Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott to forge ahead with the new platform. "Since we were a beta site, we had a chance to see how compatible they were with our existing software," said Duncan Keefe, computer manager for Macintosh systems at the firm, which has an installed base of about 60 Macs running the gamut from Mac IIs to Quadras. "Power Macs represent 6 percent of our installed base right now, but that should go up to 15 to 20 percent by the end of the year."
Architects create many of their designs with the specialized CAD software used on the firm's Sun workstations. CAD files are then saved in TIFF and exported to Photoshop and FreeHand to be stylized, Keefe said.
While the native Power Mac applications being run on the company's 7100s are, as expected, considerably faster than their counterparts on the 680x0 machines, even non-native applications, such as XPress and Photoshop 2.5.1 (using a PowerPC plug-in), "run beautifully," Keefe said.
Although the Power Macs are not cheap, the speed boost comes at a cost savings, Keefe added. The company had been buying Quadra 950s and outfitting them with $3,000 accelerator boards to improve performance. "No more 680x0-based machines for us," Keefe said.
The Los Angeles Times is still testing the Power Macs, but if all goes well, it plans to install nine Power Mac 7100s and 8100s in its Sunday TV Times Department within two to five months, Deputy Systems Editor Angius said. Another nine systems are tentatively slated for purchase next year.
The machines will be used to produce the 32 editions of the TV Times insert. Although the covers and wraparound editorial content are the same, each edition contains a specific listing of TV programs offered by the cable systems catering to 32 zones in the Los Angeles area. New zones -- and new TV Times editions -- are being added continually.
"We started producing specialized editions of the TV Times four and a half to five years ago, first with IIcx [machines], and then we upgraded to the IIfx," Angius said. "Although other departments use Macs -- we're FreeHand, Photoshop and XPress users -- the TV Times department will be the first to [get] these systems because it's not dependent on other departments, so we can afford to experiment a little."
Crossing platforms
For Cornish and Carey Realty, a network of residential real estate sales offices with headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., the decision to standardize on Power Macs came after just a few months of testing.
Bob Duffy, director of MIS, said the company wanted to install a Mac in each of its 20 offices as marketing stations that would be used and shared by real estate agents.
In addition to the ClarisWorks templates of property fliers, mailing labels and real estate forms, the machine would be used to access information about property from local county assessor records stored in an Intel-standard PC database called Metro Scan. Running Insignia Solutions Inc.'s SoftWindows emulation software, agents can view and select data from the Metro Scan database and then cut and paste the data into ClarisWorks templates.
To the real estate agents who are using the marketing stations, the procedure is quick and painless, allowing them to get the lists of information they need, format it and print it without spending a lot of time on the computer. "That did it for us," Duffy said.
Bottom line
Although a few animators at Walt Disney Pictures and Television in Burbank, Calif., have gotten new Power Macs, Art Holland, executive director of information services, said the company plans to hold off mass upgrades until "the real Power Macs come out with PCI [Peripheral Component Interconnect] buses." These are due out in spring of 1995.
"We're not going to spend any great sum of money to upgrade the current generation of Macs," Holland said, adding that the company is also very interested in using the native versions of Painter, Photoshop and XPress. "I guess you could describe us as pragmatic."
In the meantime, most users at the company will have to make do with their current Mac systems -- Quadra 950s.
For a fast machine, the Power Mac has gotten off to a slow start with publishing and production users. But the race isn't over yet, and with important graphics applications ready to take on RISC, it looks like the Power Macs will finish first even without a good start time.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
GA Page 20
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
GA: Kodak printer gives images protective coat
Aimed at pre-press, presentation markets
By David Morgenstern
This week's Seybold San Francisco will be the stage for Eastman Kodak Co.'s debut of the Kodak XLS 8600 PS, a $9,995 dye-sublimation printer that is three to five times faster than its predecessor and can print full-bleed letter-size images with a protective coating.
Based on a proprietary engine, the printer uses a 33-MHz MIPS Technologies Inc. RISC processor and a PostScript Level 2 controller. It comes standard with 32 Mbytes of RAM and can be expanded to 64 Mbytes of RAM.
Kodak is aiming the 8600 PS at the business presentation, pre-press proofing and scientific imaging markets. The 300-dpi printer has a maximum imaging area of 8.5 by 12 inches when printed on 9.5-by-14-inch coated paper. It can print a nonlaminated CMY page in 1 minute, 20 seconds and a transparency in 3 minutes. The company said these times are more than three times the speed of the XLS 8300, the model the 8600 PS replaces.
In addition to using traditional color dye-sub ribbons, the printer accepts Kodak's new XtraLife ribbons, which coat the colors on the paper or transparency medium with a protective polymer. According to Kodak, this ribbon technology is twice as resistant to fading from exposure to sunlight as other dye-sub prints and resists fingerprint damage. Unlike other dye-sub output, these laminated prints reportedly do not suffer damage when stored in plastic holders.
The overcoating ribbon adds to color print times and cost. Kodak said that 8-by-12-inch XtraLife and traditional prints cost $2.95 and $2.10, respectively. The new ribbons are also available in monochrome black for medical imaging applications; the print cost is $1.80.
The 8600 PS can also be configured as a high-speed raster printer for scientific and digital photographic applications. It has a pair of SCSI interfaces for connection to a host computer and an external hard drive.
With PostScript Level 2, it uses Kodak's UltraColor color-correction scheme and in raster mode uses Kodak TableMaker color models. Kodak also provides an Adobe Photoshop plug-in for direct printing.
The printer has 35 resident Type 1 fonts; an additional 30 fonts are included on disk. Users can select an anti-aliasing feature at print time that improves text rendering, Kodak said.
The printer switches among simultaneously active LocalTalk, Centronics parallel and SCSI interfaces. A $995 Ethernet interface includes support for AppleTalk, IPX and TCP/IP.
A model without PostScript, the XLS 8600, is $8,995. Both models have a 100-sheet multisized tray.
Eastman Kodak Co. of Rochester, N.Y., can be reached at (800) 235-6325.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
GA Page 20
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
GA: PowerPC vs. Pentium publishing software
For most graphics work, we found that Power Macs increase speed significantly.
By Bruce Fraser
How does the Power Macintosh stack up to the Pentium as a publishing platform? With the help of ZD Labs in Foster City, Calif., we set about finding answers to that question by running several cross-platform applications through the same battery of tests on a Power Mac 8100 and a 90-MHz Micron Pentium.
On most of our tests, the Power Mac was a clear winner, but the Pentium's speedy internal IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) drives, which provide transfer rates of close to 10 Mbytes per second, gave it a clear advantage over the Power Mac in disk-intensive Aldus PageMaker operations.
Our test applications were PageMaker 5.0; Aldus FreeHand 4.0; Adobe Photoshop 2.5.1 with the PowerPC Accelerator plug-in; Fractal Design Corp.'s Painter 2.0; and Pixar's Typestry, running Version 2.0 for the Mac and Version 1.1 for Windows. We had hoped to test QuarkXPress but were unable to obtain the native Power Mac version in time for testing. The other major graphics application notably absent from our test suite, Adobe Illustrator, is still at Version 4.0 for Windows; the Mac and Windows versions are different enough in capabilities to make meaningful comparisons difficult, if not impossible.
For each application, we tested six functions, timing each result. When the test suite was complete, we restarted the machine and performed the tests two more times. We then took an average for each test. The best time in each test was normalized to a value of 1.0 and the slower time mathematically adjusted to a percentage of the faster time. The benchmark numbers shown above are an average of the normalized results for each test in each application. The figures provide a handy general guide to the relative performance we'd expect each application to deliver on the configurations we tested.
Our Power Mac 8100/80 was equipped with 40 Mbytes of RAM, a 1-Gbyte Seagate internal hard disk and 4 Mbytes of video RAM driving a Sony Multiscan monitor with a 1,024-by-768-pixel display and 24-bit color. We ran System 7.1.2, LaserWriter 8.1.1 and Adobe Type Manager 3.8G7.
Our Micron 90-MHz Pentium had 40 Mbytes of RAM, two Conner 500-Mbyte IDE internal hard disks, and a Matrox Ultima 2 Plus video card driving a Sony Multiscan monitor with a 1,024-by-768-pixel display and 24-bit color. We ran Windows 3.1 and ATM 3.0 for Windows.
PageMaker
In PageMaker, we noticed that disk speed is critical to the performance of all our tests. The Pentium was about twice as fast as the Power Mac on text import, text autoflow and a global font change to a 78-page document. The Pentium was also faster than the Power Mac by 20 percent to 30 percent on search-and-replace and on printing separations.
However, the Power Mac, despite a much slower hard disk, proved slightly faster than the Pentium at importing and displaying a 13-Mbyte CMYK TIFF image. PageMaker has to create an RGB preview from the CMYK TIFF to display the image on screen. The Power Mac does this part of the job much faster than the Pentium, fast enough to wipe out the advantage conferred by the fast IDE hard disks.
Photoshop
When we tested Photoshop, the story was quite different. The Power Mac was a little more than 10 percent faster than the Pentium at generating a histogram of our 10-Mbyte RGB test file, almost 30 percent faster at unsharp masking and channel calculations, almost 40 percent faster at a 10-pixel Gaussian Blur, almost twice as fast at performing a 13-degree arbitrary rotation and close to three times as fast at converting the RGB file to CMYK.
Looking ahead, Photoshop 3.0 for Windows running under a 32-bit operating system may narrow this gap, but Photoshop 3.0 for the Mac will be the first completely native Power Mac version, so some modest speed gains should be realized there.
Painter
With Painter, the difference between the two platforms was smaller, although the Power Mac still came out ahead. On the Glass Distortion and Apply Marbling effects, the Power Mac was marginally faster than the Pentium. On an arbitrary 13-degree rotation, it was almost 10 percent faster than the Pentium, although both machines took much longer to rotate the image using Painter than they did using Photoshop. On the Apply Lighting effect, the Power Mac was more than 40 percent faster than the Windows machine. The Pentium was slightly faster than the Power Mac on motion blur, and almost 20 percent faster on the disk-intensive session playback.
FreeHand
FreeHand 4.0 showed the biggest difference between the two platforms, with the difference in favor of the Power Mac. Importing a 13-Mbyte CMYK TIFF image was almost twice as fast on the Power Mac as on the Pentium. Creating a 500-step blend between two shapes was more than twice as fast on the Power Mac, grouping all the elements in a complex 1-Mbyte illustration was almost three times faster on the Power Mac, and rotating the illustration 13 degrees was almost four times faster on the Power Mac.
On the final two tests -- switching from Wireframe to Preview mode and using the Simplify Path command -- the Power Mac was five times faster than the Pentium.
Typestry
Typestry's results were a little less conclusive. We compared two versions, 2.0 on the Power Mac and 1.1 on the Windows machine, and we performed only two tests. On the simpler task, rendering a type block using only a singe light source with no shadows, the Pentium outperformed the Power Mac by 25 percent. When we used two light sources with shadows, however, the Power Mac was slightly faster.
Conclusions
For most graphics applications, the 80-MHz Power Mac offers clear speed advantages over the 90-MHz Pentium. The one weakness uncovered by our testing is the relatively poor disk performance of a single fixed SCSI drive, even using Apple's internal SCSI bus on the Power Mac 8100. While IDE can support more devices than SCSI and is easier to configure, it provides sustained throughput of close to 10 Mbytes per second, while even a fast SCSI drive on the Apple SCSI bus rarely exceeds 4 Mbytes per second. A RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) system that stripes two mechanisms using both SCSI buses in the 8100 can approach IDE performance, but until Apple implements Fast and Wide SCSI-2, Mac disk performance will lag behind that of its competition.
For most graphics work, the speed gains offered on time-consuming, processor-intensive tasks make up for the Power Mac's shortcomings in this area.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
GA Page 26
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
BusinessWatch: Merger will change layout of DTP
Adobe to move into electronic publishing
By Kirsten L. Parkinson
Altsys FreeHand. Adobe PageMaker. It will take some getting used to, but it's just the beginning.
While the initial result of Adobe Systems Inc.'s acquisition of Aldus Corp. may be product name changes, industry observers said the long-term outcome will be shifts both in Adobe's and Altsys Corp.'s strategies and in the focus of some of the graphics industry's most popular products.
Take PageMaker, for example. While the page-layout program will still play a role in the traditional desktop publishing market, it will also be a primary component of Adobe's plan to break into the electronic publishing arena, Adobe President Charles Geschke said.
"To get the real potential of added value in this electronic world, you need to take all of the components for authoring and make them integrate so that you can seamlessly build a piece of content for the superhighway," Geschke said. "But we didn't have a page-layout program."
Geschke said the strategy for Adobe's electronic publishing pursuits is to make products such as PageMaker interact seamlessly with Acrobat, the company's platform-independent technology for viewing and sharing documents.
Analysts said combining Acrobat with PageMaker should help broaden the technology's appeal and put Adobe in a strong position in the electronic publishing market.
"With PageMaker in the fold, [Adobe] can bring Acrobat to the attention of publishers because it has a page-layout program working with it," said Neil McManus, executive editor of Digital Media, an industry newsletter based in San Francisco.
As former Aldus products are folded into Adobe's lineup, analysts said they expect to see more sharing of components, such as text engines and menu commands, among applications such as Illustrator, PageMaker, Persuasion and Premiere.
"The advantages to that are really significant," said Jonathan Seybold, publisher of Seybold Reports, based in Foster City, Calif. "From the developer standpoint, it means you're developing it once instead of over and over again. From the user standpoint, it means different products have a common operation and a common feel to them."
As for FreeHand, the PostScript illustration package will revert to Altsys in January, and the Richardson, Texas-based company is restructuring and refocusing itself in preparation for the change.
The company has licensed Virtuoso, the NeXTstep version of FreeHand, to GS Corp. of Larkspur, Calif., so it can concentrate its resources on developing and supporting FreeHand, Altsys CEO Jim Von Ehr said.
Altsys is also looking at forging new technological and business alliances with other graphics companies and products, such as PageMaker rival QuarkXPress. "In the past, we were prohibited from working with Quark," Von Ehr said. "Because we're not really aligned with Adobe or Aldus, we can now work with other products in the industry."
Observers said they wouldn't be surprised if Altsys creates new technologies or products that wouldn't have been possible during its licensing agreement with Aldus.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
BusinessWatch Page 28
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
BusinessWatch: Apple rolls out incentive plan
By Jon Swartz
Hoping to jump-start sales of Power Macs installed with System 7.5, Apple last week debuted an incentive program that rewards resellers with soft-dollar credits of up to two percentage points.
Turn up the Heat Reseller Solutions Fund gives dealers credits of one-half, one and two points for sales of Power Mac 6100, 7100 and 8100 models, respectively. The machines must be equipped with System 7.5 and invoiced between Sept. 6 and Sept. 30.
Resellers can invest the credits in Power Mac promotions, including ads, demonstrations and special events, from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, according to Apple.
Most Apple resellers were unaware of the program before its announcement. But most said it would boost Power Mac sales in the short term and put the Cupertino, Calif., company's marketing efforts on equal footing with incentives offered by IBM Corp. of Armonk, N.Y., and Compaq Computer Corp. of Houston.
"[The program] sounds good," said Donya Mullins, co-owner of MicroAge Computer Center of the Triad in Greensboro, N.C. "It gives dealers another compelling reason to sell Power Macs. Every little bit helps."
But Gary Droutman, president of the Byte Shop in Merrick, N.Y., said the program should have started a month earlier, when Power Mac sales were flat. "Sales for the last month really started to pick up," he said. "This plan won't have much of an impact."
MacWEEK 09.12.94
BusinessWatch Page 28
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Editorial: Apple keeps DTP commitment
At last year's Seybold San Francisco, Apple snatched away some Windows momentum by making a bold commitment to the publishing market. Microsoft Corp. had been targeting Apple's dominance in desktop publishing. Major products were arriving on Windows before the Macintosh. Gates had committed his company's resources to penetrating the market. Apple looked vulnerable.
Michael Spindler, the first top executive at Apple to use the Seybold forum since Steve Jobs, said in 1993 that his company's future was inextricably linked to computer publishing, with more than half its revenue coming from DTP. What some described as a niche market, he characterized as a $15 billion segment he was happy to dominate.
To underscore the company's focus on DTP, Spindler announced the formation of the Worldwide Publishing Consortium, which was embraced by some vendors and users as a step in the right direction. He promised this group would be the foundation for improved vendor-user relationships as well as a think tank for DTP ideas and strategies. Windows backers had no comparable association.
After initial fanfare, the WWPC appeared to vanish. Skeptics sniggered that Apple's marketing machine had once again made much sound and fury signifying nothing.
For once, the cynics were wrong. Now 1 year old, this Apple-backed organization is poised to take a prominent role in the DTP arena. First, it established a board of directors. It then set a reasonable goal: create dialog between the interests of users and vendors.
Technology briefings have already been held in eight U.S. cities, giving vendors a chance to present products to buyers. International events will follow. In addition to product showcases, these seminars let users critique vendor strategies. This give-and-take will lead to better products.
At Seybold San Francisco 1994, the WWPC will get another moment in the sun at Apple's Digital Town Hall and other events. But it will be in the coming year that the group matures into a market force.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
Editorial Page 32
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Second Decade: You can't write off Newton
By Henry Norr
A funny thing happened to the Newton on its way to being relegated to vertical markets: It turned into a useful personal information management device.
At least that's what happened to my MessagePad. Like many other would-be PIE-oneers, I bought it last summer, struggled to make it work for me, then gave up in frustration. But now I keep it with me all day long. And I'm finding that its value increases with each name I enter.
From toy to tool
What prompted me to take the MessagePad off the shelf was Apple's upgrade program, which give the original model the same ROM as the newer MessagePad 110. The upgrade is supposed to arrive in a week, but in my case it took three, and my credit card was charged the day I ordered, not the day the product shipped -- a practice to which I wouldn't have expected Apple to stoop.
Still, I'm glad I went to the trouble. I'm not sure the handwriting recognition is really any better, but, perhaps because I now print most of the time, my results have improved. And at least the new ROM makes it easier to get into and out of letter-by-letter mode, a feature I use extensively because little of what I enter is in the dictionary.
What's really made the difference for me, though, is the new software that has appeared in recent months. I bought the MessagePad in the first place to use it as just that -- a place to log incoming voice-mail messages -- but the built-in applications turned out not to match my needs and work style. But at last month's Macworld Expo I stumbled across a little product that does much of what I wanted: Mundo Software's Message Central. Since then I've found another nifty package designed for the same purpose, Ohgi-One Software's Message Manager.
I also purchased SilverWARE's MoreInfo, an awesome enhancement to the Names application. (It provides additional fields, contact logging and direct links to the Date Book, Eidetic Inc.'s Notion and the shareware NotePak.) And last week I bought PenMagic Inc.'s Letter Express, not because I really plan to start writing letters on the Newton but because the program includes an enhanced keyboard and a text macro feature I can use in other applications.
Altogether, these programs have turned my MessagePad from toy to tool. Yes, logging incoming calls in it takes a bit longer than my old scribbling-into-a-notebook routine did, but the new software has reduced the penalty and magnified the rewards. (Now if I could just get CE Software Inc.'s EnRoute QuickMail client to connect reliably to the MacWEEK server ...)
Back to the future
Using the MessagePad more has made me increasingly conscious of its structural shortcomings. It's too slow, its screen stinks, it needs a built-in modem or a second slot, and its recognition capabilities are still far from adequate.
But I'm again convinced that it could yet be the Next Big Thing, if Apple has the patience and foresight to stick with it and keep supporting the software developers who have already done so much for it.
Henry Norr, editor emeritus of MacWEEK, welcomes feedback in the MacWEEK forums on CompuServe or eWorld or at henry_norr@macweek.ziff.com.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
Second Decade Page 32
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
MacWEEK Insider: Adobe basks in the sun of success
By Rick LePage
It might not be like the triumphant return of Julius Caesar from the Gallic Wars, but this week's Seybold San Francisco show should be a welcome homecoming for Adobe Systems Inc.
At Seybold, we'll see Apple's Return to DTP II, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s and Silicon Graphics Inc.'s latest stand, and Microsoft Corp.'s rendition of "Do you know the way to Chicago?" But Adobe should be the commanding presence of the show -- good news for the legions of Mac users forlorn over Intel Corp.'s efforts to dominate the industry.
Adobe is on a roll. It has completed the acquisition of Aldus Corp. and worked out an amicable settlement over the disposition of Aldus FreeHand. More important, nearly all of its applications are shipping native for the Power Mac. By my calculation, the combined AdobeAldus has the largest number of native apps of any vendor in the industry. With all the hoo-ha over when so-and-so is going to ship its Power Mac application, it's been refreshing to see Adobe reps come through MacWEEK's offices like clockwork with one native application after another. (It's almost as much fun as devising Microsoft conspiracy theories for Oliver Stone.)
At the risk of appearing downright giddy, I think Adobe's success augurs well not only for its own future but the future of the Mac.
Since Adobe moved away from the font business toward the application side, the company has done a good job of maintaining its lead in Mac graphics technology. It made a smart move by ensuring its applications are multiplatform; but its strategy also acknowledges the fact that most publishing professionals use the Mac as their primary production platform.
With the incorporation of Aldus into the Adobe sphere, Adobe has become a graphics software giant that rivals Microsoft in strategic importance. Over the next few months we'll see how the culture clash goes, but I'd be surprised if the Aldus contingent withers away.
In addition to managing the transition phase, Adobe faces other serious challenges. I hope that Adobe's plans for PageMaker go beyond making it a linchpin in its Acrobat strategy because, in Adobe's hands, PageMaker has a serious chance to knock off QuarkXPress as the layout tool of choice.
The new version of Acrobat looks good, and the company seems intent on betting its future on Acrobat's success. Acrobat is a sound technology, but it will take time to grow.
It will also be a challenge to work with the Aldus Consumer Division, which has a number of solid products. Aldus seemed lost when dealing with this group, and it would be easy for Adobe to overlook it as well.
This week, though, Adobe deserves to bask in the spotlight before it returns to the trenches.
Rick LePage is MacWEEK executive editor/news. He welcomes feedback at rlepage@eworld.com or rick_lepage@macweek.ziff.com.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
MacWEEK Insider Page 3
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Review: InfoDepot 2.0 helps organize project pieces
When Chena Software Inc.'s Fair Witness debuted three years ago, it was a useful, albeit eccentric, tool for organizing thoughts and planning projects.
Chena's new version of the product, which it rechristened InfoDepot 2.0, is almost a complete rewrite.
Now featuring a number of new views and multi-user support, the program lets users create time-based project outlines that can contain a number of data types for quick reference. Users can share and collaborate on a project outline simultaneously.
The $295 program can run on any Mac with 2 Mbytes of RAM and System 6.05; System 7 is required for AppleScript and QuickTime support. Chena said a free native Power Mac upgrade will be released this fall.
Variety of views
To organize and display your data, InfoDepot offers five views: Outline, Table, Timeline, Chalkboard and Form. The views are dynamically linked, so changes you make in one are reflected across-the-board.
You open a new document in Outline view, but most users will want to switch quickly to Table view, an outline and spreadsheet combination that resembles Attain Corp.'s In Control. InfoDepot's Table view, though, is much more powerful.
Table cells can hold a multitude of data types, including formatted text, dates and times, graphics, QuickTime movies, compiled AppleScript scripts, and sounds. Cells can also contain formulas for basic math tasks, a feature we've longed for in In Control. Cells also support multiple values through series. You can quickly switch through elements in a series, although switching values does not update calculations.
Form view displays information from Table view one row at a time. You can arrange elements on the screen to create a more visually appealing screen for entering and viewing your data. In Form Design mode, fields travel with their labels, making it easy to experiment with your layout. The Effects command lets you add an embossed or chiseled look to your fields. While InfoDepot doesn't have a tool for creating on-screen buttons for forms, you can get nearly the same capability by attaching AppleScript scripts to fields.
InfoDepot's Timeline view presents a graphical display of time-based data; tasks are shown on a time grid with bars and markers. You can easily vary the period a time line covers or the markers that represent critical milestones. Legends let you identify different date ranges and markers. You can also change the interval that the time line displays -- from 30 minutes to a century -- or interactively change deadlines by dragging the borders of date ranges.
Chalkboard view -- a window in which to free-associate -- is the weakest of InfoDepot's views, lacking the capability to convert randomly linked ideas into flowcharts the way that Inspiration Software Inc.'s Inspiration can.
Chena has added a slew of productivity functions to InfoDepot views. Pop-up menus and word-completion capability help you with data entry, while style sheets and layouts facilitate customization. You can corral long lists into an outline by dragging and dropping them into categories at the bottom of the window.
Interface enhancements
The completely customizable Commands and Tools palettes house useful buttons for navigation and design, respectively. The Tools palette is especially useful when creating forms. Chena has eschewed the traditional palette of ovals and rectangles in favor of a Chalk tool that straightens rough lines and creates perfect arcs from rough attempts. You can edit the created shapes, as in any standard drawing program.
Other floating windows include a Glossary palette for holding common outline items, a rudimentary Calendar palette that can consolidate dates across documents, and a disappointing Tablet that merely opens a new InfoDepot document in Chalkboard view but provides no additional capabilities.
Scripting and sharing
Through support for AppleScript and UserLand Frontier, InfoDepot's expandability is virtually limitless. Included scripts can extract addresses and address types out of contact managers such as Aldus Corp.'s TouchBase Pro, create a calendar in Now Software Inc.'s Now Up-To-Date and graph data in Microsoft Excel.
Though it's not as easy for most users as In Control's Lookup feature, Chena's bidirectional, integrated approach quickly proves itself more flexible, thanks to its better data-type support.
InfoDepot facilitates script creation by being recordable, and it is one of the handful of Mac applications that are attachable, which means you can make AppleScript scripts part of InfoDepot's interface. You can attach a script to a cell or to a number of actions, including opening or saving a document and adding, deleting or dragging a row.
InfoDepot's document-sharing and collaboration features are beautifully implemented. Multiple users can share InfoDepot documents over a network and make simultaneous changes. In contrast to other products that rely on elaborate category-based security, InfoDepot documents can be shared with two mouse clicks. Security-conscious users can set two separate passwords to control data viewing and editing on a per-column basis.
Unfortunately, though, you must save, close and reopen a document to start sharing, a tedious task that Chena could have easily automated through AppleScript. The program also adds e-mail integration through PowerTalk support.
InfoDepot doesn't implement Apple's Macintosh Drag and Drop. A proprietary drag-and-drop feature lets you exchange data easily among InfoDepot documents but not with other applications.
Weaknesses
For all of InfoDepot's strengths, its interface suffers from too many options and artificial barriers between views. We think that switching among the Outline, Table and Timeline views should be more transparent, dynamically switching menus and tools as ClarisWorks does. While custom layouts let you quickly switch among different sets of columns, you cannot have multiple views in different windows of the same data set.
Other annoyances include a host of static dialog boxes with inconsistent button placement, balloon help that doesn't explain palette buttons and a general-purpose Color menu item oddly placed in the Text menu. The interfaces for sorting, searching and hiding aren't as efficient as those in other table-based products, but they are useful nonetheless.
Compared to its Fair Witness days, some of InfoDepot's obscure jargon has been simplified, but too many menu items are vague enough to require a trip to the on-line help system. More keyboard equivalents are needed, as is better Undo support. Menu commands often fail to dim when they are inappropriate, provoking a "There is no selection" message.
Documentation and support
Chena's chatty documentation includes many examples and sample scripts. The tutorial is critical for getting up to speed. On-line help, itself an InfoDepot document, offers many good tips but lacks hypertext links, graphics and context sensitivity. Explanations for some of the program's more nonintuitive features could be clearer.
Fortunately, Chena's outstanding technical support cheerfully fielded a bevy of questions, struggled for work-arounds, acknowledged faults and offered updates when the problems were corrected.
While InfoDepot is more accessible than other project-management packages, its multiple views and unique interface elements can hinder the process of jumping in and exploring. A HyperCard-based introduction would go a long way toward replacing the introductory videotape Chena used to bundle with Fair Witness.
Conclusions
Those looking for a place to brainstorm and nurture ideas and plans will find InfoDepot, with its excellent display capabilities, a powerful alternative to In Control. Its versatile tables are unmatched by any Mac information manager. Superb AppleScript support, modular architecture and network ties provide a nerve center for organizing and linking information in data-rich applications.
Hard to describe but easy to extend and customize, InfoDepot may become the HyperCard of information managers. So much lies below the program's surface that we were still discovering new tools and techniques after weeks of use. Mastering InfoDepot will require time to figure out its dizzying array of facilities, facilitators and interface foibles -- but many users will find that it is time well spent.
Chena Software Inc. of Allentown, Pa., can be reached at (610) 770-1210 or (800) 245-4577; fax (610) 770-1043.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
Reviews Page 37
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Review: ClarisDraw has good looks and intelligence
Clean interface, tools in MacDraw update
By Todd Coopee
ClarisDraw 1.0 is more than an enhanced version of Claris Corp.'s MacDraw family of generalist drawing programs. The 24-bit-color, object-oriented drawing application offers an array of innovative tools and timesaving features, as well as Power Macintosh support. ClarisDraw also boasts cross-platform compatibility with its yet-to-be-released Windows counterpart.
The $399 ClarisDraw requires a Mac with at least 2 Mbytes of RAM and System 6.07.
Get smart
While ClarisDraw offers all of the standard tools found in most drawing programs -- such as Line, Rectangle, Oval, Arc and Polygon -- it is the nifty set of smart tools and features that deserve most of the attention. One of these, SmartSize, automatically maintains the height-to-width ratio of selected objects when one object in the group is resized. To create a size relationship, you select two or more objects and choose a resize option from the Alignment palette.
The Alignment palette also gives you access to another ClarisDraw feature, SmartAlign. This lets you automatically restore the alignment between two or more graphics and text objects when they are moved within a document. To see how individual groups of objects may be aligned, you have the option of placing relationship indicators on object groups. These can come in handy when multiple alignments are applied to several groups of objects.
SmartConnectors are another timesaving feature. These straight or angled lines expand and contract to stay connected to a text or graphics object when it is moved. For example, lines connecting sections of a corporation's organizational chart would adjust themselves as employees are transferred between divisions.
To further aid in precision drawing, ClarisDraw is equipped with a number of drawing guides and visual aids. It has a standard ruler, and snap-to-grid and multiple-layering capabilities. In addition, the Guideliner and PointGuide let you determine specific geometric locations and points on an object, such as centers, corners and midpoints. Selecting an object and choosing the info palette function also brings up a dialog box that contains the object's coordinates, size and angle of rotation; this box can be edited. Users working with blueprints and technical schematics will benefit from these tools.
Arts and letters
For color mavens, ClarisDraw provides several tear-off tool palettes that give you access to more than 60 fill patterns and gradient fills, as well as a 256-color palette. The available color, fill and gradient editors let you modify existing choices. However, you cannot create additional palettes or increase the size of existing ones.
ClarisDraw also offers a rudimentary suite of painting tools that let you manipulate an image on a pixel-by-pixel level. MacPaint users will find many of the drawing tools familiar, including Pencil, Brush, Spray Can, Paint Bucket and Eraser. A few effects are also available when working with paint images, including the capability to distort, slant, rotate and invert an image. It's clear, however, that Claris intends for these limited painting features to be used to enhance previously drawn objects rather than for wholesale creative painting.
In addition to drawing tools, ClarisDraw sports a snazzy set of text-handling features. You can format text by changing fonts, sizes, styles and color. ClarisDraw also lets you create custom styles that can be saved and applied to other areas of text in a document. In addition, attributes such as line spacing, tab settings and indentation can be set on a paragraph level. Paragraph styles can be copied to other paragraphs but, unlike text styles, they cannot be saved for future reference.
ClarisDraw also supports linked text frames, which let you flow text from one frame to another, wrap text around objects and bind text to any object or path that is drawn. However, users hoping for high-end desktop publishing features -- such as attribute-based finding, kerning and drag-and-drop editing -- will have to look elsewhere.
Other goodies
ClarisDraw ships with a 2,400-item library of high-quality clip art. You can create new libraries to store objects you've produced, and you can use libraries in MacDraw Pro and ClarisImpact format as well. We found one quirky feature: Objects can be dragged and dropped out of, but not into, the libraries.
Another nice feature of ClarisDraw is the capability to create slide presentations. The built-in slide show provides a number of options, including fading, looping, fitting to window and support for playing back QuickTime movies. You use the Slide Manager to rename, reorder, add and remove slides as well as change the viewing options for each one. You can also print reduced versions of your slides -- two, three, four or six slides to a page -- to produce a very readable handout.
Overall, the slide presentation feature is fine, but bare-bones; it lacks such creative niceties as transitions and sound support. We think it's good for quick jobs but too basic in many areas and a bit too cumbersome for large presentations.
Documentation and support
Like most Claris software, ClarisDraw's documentation is thorough and well-written, although the index has a few too many circular references. The manual is augmented by balloon help and an on-line, context-sensitive help system that is patterned after the one in Microsoft Windows.
Claris offers 90 days of free technical support for ClarisDraw as well as a pay-as-you-go 900 number. Additional support services are available via on-line services, fax and a BBS.
Conclusions
ClarisDraw is distinguished by its clean, uncomplicated interface and the melange of features it has integrated from separate drawing, layout and painting programs. All told, they provide more than enough capabilities for nonprofessional and entry-level illustrators and designers.
However, we doubt these features will lure many users away from competing drawing programs, such as Deneba Software's Canvas, which offers more advanced features and functionality for the same price ($399). We hope the next release of ClarisDraw contains some of Canvas' more high-end capabilities, such as object blending, extrusions and color separation, as well as more fleshed-out presentation and painting features.
Still, ClarisDraw is an able application for the graphics generalist. Its intelligent tools are a welcome addition, as is its Power Macintosh support. And the promise of cross-platform support with a future Windows release is an added bonus. MacDraw users will do well to upgrade to this product.
Claris Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif., is at (408) 727-8227; fax (408) 987-3932.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
Reviews Page 37
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Review: AfterImage 1.0 is scaled-down After Effects
By Ben Long
With AfterImage 1.0, CoSA has introduced a new marketing tactic: releasing older versions of successful programs at one-third of the price.
There is nothing new in this $395 product from the CoSA division of Aldus Corp. Rather, it is a somewhat crippled version of an older release (Version 1.1) of After Effects, the company's high-end video post-production and compositing application.
Like After Effects 2.0, AfterImage lets you easily create multilayered composites of movies, graphics and animation complete with motion, filters and special effects. However, AfterImage is built on the older After Effects 1.1 imaging engine and less-powerful interface.
As in After Effects 1.1, you import elements to be composited -- QuickTime movies, PICT and PICS files, AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) sounds and PACo documents -- into a Project window. From there, you drag documents into a Composition window for manipulating and compositing. AfterImage provides powerful keying support and keyframe-based animation of motion and filters. Once you complete a composition, you can place it inside other compositions; this lets you manipulate an infinite number of layers.
Unlike After Effects 1.1, AfterImage supports only 640-by-480-pixel movies (as opposed to After Effects' 4,000 by 4,000 pixels), and it cannot render individual video fields. This leaves the program unsuitable for broadcast-quality video. However, CoSA has also shed $1,500 from the price of After Effects, making AfterImage ideal for multimedia developers and presentation-program users.
To market, to market
With AfterImage, CoSA has arrived in a market with few competitors. Although VideoFusion Ltd.'s $649 VideoFusion offers better performance because of its native PowerPC code, it does not offer nearly the amount of control and power of AfterImage. (AfterImage is not native nor has a release date been set for a native version.)
With a great deal of work, you could try to approximate some of AfterImage's functionality within the $795 Adobe Premiere 4.0, but you would be hard-pressed to achieve the same results. AfterImage, and After Effects for that matter, is a complementary product to Premiere rather than a competitor.
Although Premiere 4 includes powerful compositing and motion controls, they are somewhat bogged down in modal dialogs and Premiere's track-based interface. AfterImage, on the other hand, was designed and optimized specifically for these types of effects. AfterImage does not, however, have any facility for editing; for that you'll still need a QuickTime editing program.
Conclusions
If you edit QuickTime movies for use in multimedia or business presentations, or if you need to add some post-production power to your existing QuickTime editing suite, AfterImage is a bargain. While its performance lags far behind native-mode QuickTime applications, AfterImage lets you do things that you cannot do in other applications.
AfterImage is available only directly from CoSA. It is $349 until Sept. 15; $595 afterward.
The CoSA division of Aldus Corp. of Seattle can be reached at (206) 628-4526; fax (206) 343-4240.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
Reviews Page 42
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
ProductWatch: Power Mac paves way for 3-D tools
The advent of the Power Mac has given industrial designers the 3-D graphics muscle they need.
By Sean Wagstaff
This time last year there were only three full-featured industrial-design products on the Mac (depending on your standards). There are now at least five, all of which offer -- or are on the verge of offering -- native Power Mac support. Most of these programs are starkly different from their 680x0 counterparts of a year ago, not only in terms of performance but in interface and features as well.
The requirements of industrial design are more demanding than those of graphic arts and multimedia. Industrial designers typically create prototypes that become manufactured goods. An industrial designer might build a model of a computer keyboard, complete in every detail, down to the curve of the keyboard's face and its beveled edges, the shape of the cable sockets, the letters on the keys, and the subtle texture of the matte surface. Often these designs are presented as realistic renderings. But sometimes designs are taken to stereolithography devices that "print" a prototype out of plastic, or the objects are animated in 3-D to show a representation on video. The designs may eventually even make it to computer-aided manufacturing for production.
Because of these demands, as well as the complexity of the shapes used in manufacturing, industrial-design software needs to be able to model realistic details such as rounded edges and neatly carved holes. Currently, the programs that meet these criteria on the Mac include Presenter Professional 3.0 from Visual Information Development Inc.; Sculpt 3D 4.0 from Byte by Byte Corp.; Zoom 4.5 created by Abvent SA of Paris and marketed in the United States by Graphisoft U.S. Inc.; form*Z 2.6 from autodessys Inc.; and Shade III, recently reintroduced to the United States by Yarc Systems Corp. Of these products, Zoom and form*Z are solid modelers that lack realistic rendering. Zoom, however, does have an interface for Pixar's MacRenderMan. The other products offer highly realistic ray-traced renderings in addition to modeling.
All of these programs feature precise numeric control, NURBS (nonuniform rational B-splines), and solid constructive modeling or Boolean-style surface trimming. Perhaps most importantly, they are all shipping (or are very close to shipping) in native Power Mac versions.
Snappier tools
Blair Burtan is an engineer at a Fortune 500 manufacturing company in Southern California. He creates prototypes of new product designs in form*Z. His reaction to the impact of the Power Mac and its future implications for his work echo the sentiments of many 3-D users. "With form*Z on the Power Mac, things are much snappier now," he said. "And we're at the bottom of the power curve; there's nowhere to go but up."
Burtan's company used to rely exclusively on hand-built models but has since found the Mac to be a better alternative in many cases. Using form*Z, and ElectricImage Animation System from Electric Image Inc. for rendering, Burtan said he recently completed a project for a client in three days that would have taken two weeks using traditional model building techniques. "We would have charged them $8,000 to build it using traditional modeling," he said. "But doing it this way, I think we charged only $2,000."
While Burtan is happy with the Power Mac version of form*Z, he said he expects further improvements in Version 3.0, which has been announced but is not yet shipping. He's particularly enthusiastic about the impending arrival of a native Power Mac Camera (a separate rendering module) for ElectricImage Animation System, which he says will make rendering much faster.
Joe McCarthy, a designer at Western Publishing Inc.'s creative services department in Racine, Wis. is also awaiting the arrival of native Power Mac software. The company is best known for its children's books, including the Little Golden Books series. Many of these books include toys or activity items, and McCarthy uses Presenter Professional on the Mac for what he calls "synthetic photography" to make realistic pictures of the products that have yet to be created.
"I use [Presenter Pro] Version 3.0 [in beta] for some things about 50 percent of the time, where I can use [Mac]RenderMan," he said. "But I'm still using the 1.5 version when I need to render with ElectricImage." Like many high-end Mac programs, Presenter Professional has been plagued by the late arrival of development tools, and the native Version 3.0 of the product has been close to shipping for some time. Nick Pavlovic, president of Visual Information Development, said that Presenter Pro has been rewritten almost from scratch since the previous version, which has made the upgrade a long process.
Still, some users, including McCarthy find the beta release of the new Power Mac version fast enough to be useful.
McCarthy cites the fast and functional Boolean trim surfaces (which let you cut holes out of objects using other objects); new, more powerful snapping tools; an improved interface; and a completely redesigned animation module as reasons he's looking forward to Presenter Pro 3.0's ultimate ship date.
Faster rendering
Like Presenter Pro 3.0, a native Power Mac version of Byte by Byte's Sculpt 3D 4.0 has been on the verge of shipping for some time. Many longtime users have beta versions, and all praise the effort put into Sculpt's interface, which has been transformed from arcane to friendly.
Joe Ashear, whose firm, Art of Fact, does industrial design and rendering in Brooklyn, N.Y., said, "The tools are a lot easier to use, particularly for the new user." Ashear differs from many of his contemporaries in 3-D design in that he hasn't upgraded his hardware recently. "I actually don't use a Power Mac," he said. "My machine [a Quadra 800] is still plenty fast for me. I do mostly still images, and the longest I've had to render is about 15 hours; the average is about an hour."
Nevertheless, Ashear has seen the Power Mac version, which he said renders at least twice as fast. He is also attracted to its real-time shaded previews.
John Ulliman, animation and image specialist at On the Wave Visual Communications in Oakland, Calif., said he has benchmarked Sculpt's ray-trace rendering against other programs and found it to be as much as four times faster. "We tested a Power Mac 7100 against a Quadra 950 with two Yarc NuSprint boards," he said, "and the Power Mac was just as fast."
Yarc has long held a place in high-end 3-D users' hearts. The company's new Zuma board, based on the Power Mac chip, is much faster than its older NuSprints. However, Yarc boards accelerate only rendering, not screen redraw and preview shading, an area in which the Power Mac has greatly improved things.
"[Sculpt's] user feedback is much better," Ulliman said. "Aside from the interface, [Byte by Byte] spent most of the time on redraw speed, which is fast. It's probably the easiest way to see how much the Power Mac has improved things."
Made in the shade
Shade III is a new program on U.S. shores. It was introduced to the United States nearly two years ago, then withdrawn by its Japanese manufacturer. It was recently reintroduced, in a new Power Mac-native version, by Yarc.
Users have praised Shade for its smooth spline modeling, powerful procedural textures and fast rendering with and without the help of Yarc boards. Unlike the other 3-D programs, Shade does not model using Booleans, but it can render with Booleans to simulate solid operations, such as subtracting one object from another. This is something that has been possible in the past only with MacRenderMan rendering. While the final picture looks the same, this makes Shade III more limited in its ability to export files to other programs and for uses such as stereolithography. On the other hand, it is much quicker to render simulated Boolean objects from start to finish, especially when ray tracing.
Zoom is a true solid modeler with many of the capabilities of form*Z, but a native Power Mac version has yet to make it from France to the United States, and new features haven't been announced. Graphisoft, however, has promised a free upgrade for owners of the current version when it goes native.
Although it's unusual to find professional users clamoring for beta software, in the case of high-end Mac 3-D products, it seems to be the rule rather than the exception.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
ProductWatch Page 45
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Mac the Knife: Finessing fall family's features
You don't have to spend your free time immersed in PC columnists' minutiae to come to the conclusion that, as far as the Mac is concerned, it's all over but for the official release of Windows 4.0. The shaky acceptance of the Power Mac after its initial splash only reinforces the gloom, especially if you factor in Apple's somewhat checkered record for fleet-of-foot midcourse corrections.
But while others have been idly checking their wardrobes for ashes and sackcloth, the Knife has not been deterred. As a result, he has unearthed the latest on Apple's product announcement plans for the next few months. And the newfound spring in his step indicates that Apple isn't prepared to fold in the face of Chicago. Not even close.
As evidence, the Knife offers the latest, more accurate plans for the speed-bump Power Macs. Rather than rolling them out at the November Comdex as originally thought, these beefed-up replacements for the current configurations should debut in January at the San Francisco Macworld Expo. But that doesn't mean the Las Vegas crowd will be left holding an empty bag. Instead, they will witness the debut of the hottest Mac yet to roll off the assembly line.
According to the Knife's sources, this Mac will be powered by a 100-MHz (or faster, production yields permitting) 601 PowerPC. Aimed at what one source insists on calling the elitist render-geek market, it will come out of the box equipped with an enormous capacity hard drive and all the RAM that market conditions will allow. And as you have no doubt already surmised, this Mac will command a significant premium and therefore represent a meaningful profit opportunity for Apple.
Go, speed-bump racer, go
As good as the November 8100s will be for Apple's revenue stream, the more reasonably priced replacements for the current Power Mac configurations are where most of us will do our fishing. Among other improvements, Apple will endow each and every model, not just the 8100, with the 256-Kbyte L2 cache option. The cache and the faster clock-rate 601s ensure a respectable performance improvement.
But while these speedy new Macs may not achieve Mach 5, something that does seem to be moving quite a bit faster than the speed of sound is Apple's effort to, at last, license the Mac OS. Those folks who made the Mac OS the toast of clone makers abroad are well on their way to serving up said foreign licensees with the new 8100 at Comdex. And, because first things sometimes do come first, Apple next week will reveal a new logo and branding scheme that will be used to show that your German clone does, indeed, have the genuine Power Mac OS inside.
Acrobat Macs
Speaking of contracts where the ink is a little runny, word is that Adobe, Apple and CI Labs are about to announce a major one, if they can just turn the blow-dryer up.
Chief among the deal's tenets is that Adobe will adopt OpenDoc across its application suite; the Knife's sources report that PageMaker and Photoshop are first in line to become container applications. To further cement friendly feelings, Adobe will become a sponsor of CI Labs, the group helping to bring Apple's object technology to the world.
And if you're wondering what Apple's contribution to the as-yet-unsigned agreement will be, it's nothing less than bundling the Acrobat 2.0 Reader with Macs that have at least 5 Mbytes of RAM. If you want to make as well as read Acrobat documents, the partners will include a reasonably priced upgrade offer for the full Acrobat, of course.
If Apple can keep the momentum on this strategy rolling, the competition to earn a MacWEEK mug could take some unexpected turns. If you're up to the ride, contact the Knife at (415) 243-3544, fax (415) 243-3651, Internet (mac_the_knife@macweek.ziff.com), AppleLink (MacWEEK) or CompuServe/ZiffNet/Mac.
MacWEEK 09.12.94
Mac the Knife Page 90
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
