When Apple introduces its first PCI-based Power Mac in May, the ROMs will include a new 680x0 emulator that could boost emulation performance by 50 percent to 100 percent, compared to the version built into current Power Macs.
The emulator enables the RISC Macs to run applications and portions of the Mac operating system that were written for the 680x0 processor and have not been ported to the PowerPC. Sources said Apple has been working on several alternatives to the current emulator for nearly a year; but for the PCI, or Peripheral Component Interconnect, Macs the company is likely to choose one that uses a technology called dynamic recompilation.
The version in the ROMs of current Power Macs operates by intercepting a 680x0 instruction and translating it to PowerPC code. For the most part, it works in a linear, static way. When an application enters a loop, the emulator must keep re-creating the code needed to execute that loop.
The dynamic recompilation emulator works more intelligently than the original, sources said. One way it improves performance is to watch the code it is translating to identify loops. When one is found, the emulator begins building a subroutine made up of the translated loop's PowerPC code. From that point forward, the native subroutine is called instead of re-translating the original code.
One disadvantage of the new emulator, sources said, is that it does not deliver the same high level of compatibility as the current version, which runs virtually all 680x0 applications except those that require an FPU (floating-point unit). Because of the way the new emulator uses Power Mac caches, the small number of applications that cannot run on 68040 Macs with the cache turned on will not run under the dynamic recompilation emulator either.
The performance benefits of the new technology vary depending on the code involved, but sources said the new emulator will offer performance at least equivalent to the current one at the same processor clock rate and as much as twice the performance under some circumstances. The high-performance PowerPC 604 CPU expected in some PCI-based Macs will boost performance even higher, sources said.
Upgrading current Power Macs to use the dynamic recompilation emulator would reportedly require replacement of the machines' ROMs. Sources said Apple has not yet made the decision to offer such an upgrade.
As previously reported (see MacWEEK, June 13, Page 1), the new emulator arose out of investigations that began when Apple first tested the current code on prototypes of the PowerPC 603, the low-cost, low-power member of the RISC family. The performance of the current emulator depends heavily on the PowerPC 601's 32-Kbyte on-chip cache. When tested on the 603, which was originally designed with only 8 Kbytes of cache for instructions and 8 Kbytes for data, its performance proved disappointing.
To remedy the problem, Apple asked its PowerPC partners, IBM Corp. and Motorola Inc., to produce a version of the chip, the 603+, with two 16-Kbyte caches. But Apple also began studying how the emulator could be re-engineered to improve performance.
Apple declined to comment.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
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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: Metrowerks builds PC apps
CodeWarrior 2.0 to boost scriptability
By Robert Hess
Almost a year ago, Metrowerks Inc. appeared, seemingly from out of nowhere, like a hungry shark taking large bites out of its competition in the programming tools market.
Never stopping to rest, the company will deliver an incremental upgrade to its programming environment in January and ship a major upgrade at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in May. Also at WWDC, Austin, Texas-based Metrowerks will introduce software aimed at making the Mac the preferred development environment for all major operating systems and hardware.
> CodeWarrior 2.0. At WWDC, Metrowerks will ship Version 2.0 of its C, C++ and Pascal development environment for PowerPC- and 680x0-based Macs. Code-named Rising Sun, the product has its sights aimed squarely at Rainbow, the upcoming but much-delayed development environment from Apple and Symantec Corp.
Foremost among the update's wealth of features is its integration of several compilers into one. The current version of CodeWarrior comprises several discrete elements that developers use to create applications. In contrast, CodeWarrior 2.0 will be a single product with drop-in tools that will enable programmers to develop code regardless of source, target platform or language.
The upgrade will be based on the company's PowerPlant application framework. By using its own framework, the company said it hopes to demonstrate the reliability of PowerPlant, while getting updates out the door faster. CodeWarrior will also be heavily scriptable, factored and attachable, although the company admitted the upgrade's scriptability will still fall short of the scripting capabilities found in Apple's Macintosh Programmer's Workshop.
To promote development of enhancements to CodeWarrior 2.0, Metrowerks will publish its project format and other environment-specific APIs. This will make it possible for third parties to create compatible compilers and tools.
Other features will include subprojects, improved support for external editors, an object browser and support for PowerPC assembly in source code.
> Intel compiler. Also at WWDC, Metrowerks will release a drop-in compiler code-named Icebreaker. This tool will make it possible to develop applications for Intel-standard PCs from a Mac.
According to Greg Galanos, Metrowerks president, the horsepower offered by the PowerPC makes it extremely attractive to developers for any platform. "When it comes right down to it, every developer's first two demands are quality compilers and fast compilers," he said. "We'll deliver both."
Unlike cross-platform frameworks -- which attempt to translate code between operating system elements such as the Mac Toolbox and Windows APIs -- Icebreaker will compile Intel code on a Mac, after which it is moved to an Intel computer for execution and debugging. Metrowerks said it envisions CodeWarrior acting as an overarching environment for the development of code for multiple operating systems and processors.
Metrowerks claims its compiler runs two to three times faster than Microsoft Corp.'s Visual C++ on a 90-MHz Pentium. Once the compiler is on the Power Mac, it will run four to five times faster than competing Intel-based products. Even though it will require debugging on an Intel-standard PC, the Power Mac compiler will still save considerable time, the company said. Icebreaker will compile Microsoft Foundation Classes and other frameworks.
> CodeWarrior 1.2. At Macworld Expo in San Francisco in January, Metrowerks will deliver Version 1.2 of CodeWarrior.
At the top of its feature list are the long-awaited support for templates and a new global optimizer for Power Macs. Its debugger will support conditional break points and expression evaluation.
A new Find dialog will include batch searches, and the upgrade will feature better error messaging. The update will be able to compile Symantec's TCL 2.0, APDA's MacApp and OpenDoc. An improved Profiler and better code-resource creation will also be included.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
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News: Plug-ins to power Adobe future
By Carolyn Said
Now that the dust has settled from its acquisition of Aldus Corp., Adobe Systems Inc. has sketched out plans for creating synergy among its array of graphics applications.
The $520 million Mountain View, Calif., company, the fourth largest software company in the world, now has 1.13 million customers in North America. It hopes to expand that base by integrating its products with a unified plug-in architecture, a common graphics engine and interchangeable file formats, among other changes.
An immediate area of commonality lies in plug-ins, which allow third-party developers to enhance such applications as Photoshop and PageMaker and tailor them to specific vertical markets. "Developing a common extensibility architecture across all of our applications so developers can write plug-ins that can be used with more than one product is our No. 1 cross-product technical focus," said Eric Zocher, vice president of engineering for the applications products division at Adobe.
"That is a win-win situation for end users and third-party developers," said Rob Auster, vice president of digital convergence at BIS Strategic Decisions in Norwell, Mass. "Adobe is a leader in presenting a core engine that can be modified and personalized. Leveraging that across multiple applications is a very smart move."
A common graphics engine is another priority. Illustrator, Acrobat, Photoshop and Premiere share a cross-platform, PostScript-derived engine that handles on-screen rendering and printing on non-PostScript printers. Adobe plans to integrate this engine into the Aldus applications.
"You could imagine, if that technology was in [all our products], that if I brought an Illustrator file into PageMaker, we'd see that in its native form on screen, not as an EPS, PICT or bit map," said John Kunze, vice president of the Adobe graphics business unit.
"I really want a unified imaging system," said Bob Schaffel, technical director at the Professional Prepress Alliance in Jersey City, N.J. "The problem now is that when you take graphics from one software program to another, it's not guaranteed that screen display will be consistent."
The core engine will enable hardware vendors to create boards that accelerate multiple Adobe applications. Moreover, with the advent of PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) Macs, which can use the same boards as Intel-standard machines, "you could literally make one card to accelerate [multiple Adobe applications] on both Power Macs and Windows," Zocher said.
Third parties said they like that plan. "We're working with Adobe on cross-application acceleration," said Andrew Eisner, director of product evaluation at Radius Inc. in San Jose, Calif. "Our customers are constantly asking for more acceleration for Adobe products, so that's what we're going to give them."
Multimedia publishing is another future direction. "We have a tremendous piece of technology called Acrobat for electronic delivery," said Mike Peronto, Adobe vice president of publishing products. "We're talking about adding multimedia elements to PageMaker, distilling them in some fashion and playing them through Acrobat," he said.
Acrobat may also serve as a file exchange cornerstone. "For every product our goal is to make it as tightly integrated with Acrobat as possible," Kunze said. All Adobe applications will eventually read and write Portable Document Format files, he said.
Adobe plans to ensure that all its applications support both OpenDoc and OLE (Object Linking and Embedding), competing component-software schemes from Apple and Microsoft Corp., respectively. "It's pretty clear that OpenDoc and OLE are going to play important parts in their respective systems software vendors' strategy," Zocher said. "It's a question of basic platform compatibility to support OpenDoc and OLE."
Other steps toward product integration include a more unified interface, such as consistent keyboard shortcuts, and improved printing to PostScript devices.
Adobe also reaffirmed its commitment to the consumer products group launched by Aldus and said it will look at "repurposing" existing software for the home market.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
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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: Dantz to dip into PC clients
Remote backups over Novell LANs
By David Morgenstern
Mac managers hoping to step across platforms will soon be able to turn to a new Retrospect Remote add-on for PC clients on Novell networks, sources said.
Dantz Development Corp. of Orinda, Calif., is expected to unveil Remote 10-Pack for NetWare at January's Macworld Expo in San Francisco; according to sources, the product will ship in April. The utility will permit backup to a 680x0-based Mac or Power Mac from as many as 10 Novell NetWare servers or clients in any combination. The new software reportedly will list for $349. Additional 10-packs can be used to increase the number of clients.
Dantz's forthcoming cross-platform product will use Storage Management System Version 2.0, NetWare's low-level technology for network backup and data restoration. The architecture is a standard feature of NetWare Version 4.x and is available as an upgrade to Version 3.x
Storage Management System provides a standard architecture and API for NetWare backup applications. The system relies on Target Service Agent technology, which resides on servers and clients and helps resolve differences among servers and operating systems.
The Target Service Agent modules pass commands and data between the backup application and clients. Because Storage Management System relies upon Target Service Agent modules provided by Novell Inc., no Retrospect-specific software is required for the NetWare clients.
Dantz will integrate both the Storage Management Engine and IPX support into Retrospect Remote, which will transparently handle the backup process for NetWare servers and clients.
Sources said the program will not alter Retrospect's Macintosh interface. It will map NetWare servers and clients to AppleTalk zones and represent Target Service Agent client directories as remote volumes. The program is reportedly being aimed at small to medium workgroups.
"It's welcome news -- Dantz should have jumped in [the NetWare market] sooner," said Paul Zagaeski, a network-industry analyst with Computer Intelligence InfoCorp of La Jolla, Calif. "It's an attractive option for companies with mixed-platform networks and may get second looks from sites buying newer and larger systems."
Remote for NetWare will not offer the full capabilities found in a Mac Remote client, including deferred shutdown, background priority setting, notification and private folders.
Sources said Dantz is re-evaluating the need for a NetWare for PowerPC version or an NLM (NetWare Loadable Module) for the Intel platform that was previously reported for release in 1995 (see MacWEEK, April 25, Page 1). Instead, the company will focus on a peer-to-peer backup utility for Windows and will ship a Retrospect Remote terminate and stay resident client for Windows in the second half of 1995.
In other news, sources said the company next year will release a Retrospect Remote add-on to support PowerBook users.
Code-named Peary, the software will let mobile users plug into a network and launch a backup operation. Mobile users have irregular schedules and are often out of the office during established backup times.
According to sources, the program can store the backup on the primary tape set and will use Retrospect's incremental backup scheme. Network managers can assign levels of priority to different users.
The company said it would not comment on specific development plans or time schedules.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
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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: Coalition calls for interoperable CTI
Apple key partner
By Stephen Howard
Add another entry to the long list of industry partnerships: Versit. Apple last week joined three other companies in announcing this coalition to promote interoperability between computer and telecommunications products.
AT&T Corp. and Siemens Rolm Communications Inc. joined IBM Corp. and Apple in founding Versit; Novell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. will contribute technology. The group's goal is to simplify connections between computers or PDAs and telephone networks for call control and, eventually, videoconferencing applications.
"You don't want to differentiate yourself on interoperability," said Rick LeFaivre, vice president of the Advanced Technology Group at Apple. The company's participation in Versit will let it leverage the Mac's existing computer-telephony integration (CTI) technology while reducing the number of systems and specifications with which it must be compatible, LeFaivre said.
Versit will embrace and extend some existing CTI integration and communications building blocks and then guarantee cross-platform interoperability among some products from the Versit partners. The definition of Versit compliance and how such guarantees will be presented to users have not been determined.
The key Versit building blocks announced last week are Novell and AT&T's Telephony Services API (TSAPI); Apple's GeoPort; IBM's CallPath Services Architecture; the Infrared Data Association communications standard spearheaded by HP; and a future data-sharing format and "virtual business card" specification based on Bento, Apple's compound-document format.
Versit said it is investigating a common implementation of videoconferencing over ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) using the current H.320 and the proposed T.120 standards.
Versit will raise the profile and increase the potential of the existing Macintosh Telephony Architecture. According to Michael Bayer, Apple manager of communication and collaboration technical strategy, the CTI functions in the Mac operating system are mature, "but the gasoline missing from the engine was interoperability."
That fuel is initially taking the form of a TSAPI Telephone Tool, due this month from Qsys International Inc., and a Mac TSAPI developer kit due from Novell in the first quarter of 1995. The former will open up TSAPI to any program that works with the current Telephone Manager. The latter will enable programmers to write TSAPI-aware programs from scratch.
Versit's endorsement of TSAPI over the Telephony API promoted by Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. has forced Apple to choose sides in the current CTI standards war. Likewise, Versit's choice of Apple's GeoPort architecture snubs Intel's high-speed serial interface announced in November. Apple has been trying without success to convince other vendors to support GeoPort, and last week Siemens and AT&T promised to use it in future CTI systems. Versit will release the GeoPort specification within 30 days, Bayer said.
To ensure clear identification of callers and call recipients, all Versit-compliant devices will exchange digital business cards. These cards will be based on the Bento structure, which was developed by Apple and is also the basis of OpenDoc's compound-document format. The specifications for Bentogram cards are due within a month.
Versit's most significant contribution to interoperability may be its CTI Encyclopedia, which will provide definitions for the topologies, features and interactions in computer telephony. Once they share an understanding of what is going on in their products, the partners plan to apply existing technology to make them talk to each other. "We haven't found any [problem] where one of the partners doesn't have something to solve it or that isn't in the public domain," Bayer said.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
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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: Macs selling in record numbers
By Jon Swartz
Users are snapping up Macs in record numbers from dealers and other personal computer stores nationwide.
About 73,000 Macs were sold in the United States in October -- the best sales month Apple has registered this year, according to Stella Kelly, an analyst at StoreBoard, a service of La Jolla, Calif.-based Computer Intelligence InfoCorp that monitors sales of Macs and Intel-standard PCs. "It's been bang-up business for Apple," she said.
The Power Mac 6100 was easily the top-selling Macintosh model in October, and the Performa 630CD was a hot commodity as well, according to StoreBoard.
Based on sales figures supplied by U.S. dealers, PC superstores, office superstores and consumer-electronic stores, StoreBoard estimated Apple's entry-level RISC-based machine racked up about 14,000 sales during October.
The 6100 easily outdistanced the Power Mac 7100, which recorded sales of 8,000 units. About 6,000 Performa 630CDs were sold, followed by the Performa 575, with 5,100, and the Power Mac 8100, with 4,400.
The monthly sales represented a 16 percent increase from September, when Apple sold about 63,000 Macs through computer storefronts.
The Power Mac 6100 was the top seller then, with 11,000 units; followed by the Power Mac 7100, with 6,000; and the Performa 630CD, with 5,500.
The popular but scarce PowerBook 540c, which was in short supply through most of the fall, did not make the top-seller list for either September or October.
StoreBoard's tally does not include direct sales, education purchases or mail-order catalog sales.
Kelly said domestic PC sales for October totaled 513,000. Macs accounted for 14 percent of that number. By comparison, Compaq Computer Corp. and IBM Corp.'s sales were 27 percent and 13 percent, respectively.
Several dealers said October Mac sales were in line with what they expect to sell through the end of the year. "We saw a 50 percent to 80 percent jump in Power Mac sales in September," said Ken Krich, president and CEO of ComputerWare, a chain of Mac-only resellers based in Palo Alto, Calif. "The real transition to Power Mac from Quadras took place then."
More than 1 million Macs, including some 250,000 Power Macs, shipped during Apple's recently completed fourth quarter. It marked only the second time Apple has moved 1 million CPUs in a quarter.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
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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: PaperPort scans, converts, faxes docs
By Cate C. Corcoran
Offering help to victims of desk clutter, Visioneer Inc. this week will ship a hardware and software solution for converting text on paper into electronic documents that can be edited, faxed and printed.
PaperPort, priced at $399, includes a compact scanning device as well as a document compression and management application with links to OCR, fax and word processing programs.
PaperPort's hardware component is a small, hand-fed scanner designed to sit between a keyboard and monitor. It scans documents from 2 by 3 inches to 8.5 by 30 inches at either 400 or 200 dpi.
Feeding a piece of paper into the device automatically launches the PaperPort application, which compresses images to as small as one-fourteenth the original size, then displays, groups and previews them in a special window. Besides a proprietary format that supports annotation, the software lets users save scanned pages as TIFF, BMP and PCX documents.
The application can use the OCR capabilities of Calera Recognition Systems Inc.'s Wordscan, which is bundled with PaperPort, to convert images into editable text. By dragging image thumbnails onto icons in the PaperPort application, users can automatically launch fax modem software, other OCR applications or word processors. Another icon lets users print images from within the PaperPort application.
A $149 option that will link the application to popular e-mail programs, including CE Software Inc.'s QuickMail, Lotus Development Corp.'s cc:Mail, Microsoft Mail and Apple PowerTalk, is expected to ship in early January. A native Power Mac version is also due early next year.
Visioneer Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., is at (415) 812-6400 or (800) 787-7007; fax (415) 855-9750.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
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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: Mirror unveils slew of RAID units
Line includes fixed, removable systems
By David Morgenstern
Reflecting Mac users' need for fast, reliable storage, Mirror Technologies recently released a new series of RAID systems.
The Precision arrays comprise a Fast and Wide SCSI-2 NuBus card; a fixed or removable drive enclosure; Fast or Fast and Wide SCSI-2 drive mechanisms; and a software RAID, or redundant array of inexpensive disks, controller based on technology from Trillium Research Inc.
Aimed at digital video as well as publishing applications, Precision arrays with two, three or four hard drive mechanisms use fixed-drive enclosures.
The two-drive systems are available in capacities of 2 to 17 Gbytes, the three-drive models support 3 to 12 Gbytes, and the four-drive units are available in 4- to 16-Gbyte configurations. Users can upgrade the three-drive array with an additional mechanism.
The fixed-drive systems, which command prices of $2,999 to $14,999, offer data striping and mirroring, also known as RAID levels 0 and 1, respectively, as well as mixed levels.
Two models using 2.4-Gbyte Fast and Wide mechanisms provide a sustained data transfer rate of 17.1 Mbytes per second, according to the company.
Mirror offers models aimed at network server and pre-press applications with five, seven and 10 removable-drive modules; the seven-drive system can be upgraded to 10 modules. The arrays have capacities of 10.2, 14.3 and 20.4 Gbytes and cost $12,399, $16,999 and $21,999, respectively.
In addition to providing data- striping and mirroring capabilities, the removable-module arrays support the more-efficient distributed-data recovery schemes found in RAID levels 4 and 5.
The units feature hot-swapping of failed drive modules, background data reconstruction and automatic replacement of bad blocks. A $1,000 paging software option lets users receive remote notification of up to 25 different array status alerts.
Mirror Technologies, a division of MacUSA Inc., of Edina, Minn., can be reached at (612) 832-1549 or (800) 654-5294; fax (612) 832-5709.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
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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: New scheduler gets hooks into databases
By Clifford Colby
EveryWare Development Corp. this week clocked in with multi-user Mac software that offers comprehensive tracking of schedules and billing throughout a business.
ETC, or Enterprise Time Capture, lets workers create to-do lists, book meetings and appointments, and coordinate schedules over a network. Businesses that bill clients for time can integrate their accounting systems with ETC.
The program stores information on a central relational database running on a Mac server. It comes with a specialized version of EveryWare's Butler SQL database, but for a fee the developer will set up the application to run on any SQL database. ETC can run on multiple servers, or it can be moved to a larger system, such as an Oracle or Sybase server. The package costs $25 to $200 per user, depending on the number of users. EveryWare said it expects to ship a Windows client based on Open Database Connectivity in mid-1995.
The program's day, week, month and year views can track meetings and activities. Calendars can be shared across multiple servers.
"We plan to use it for project management, as a building block for tracking cases through the court," said John Clement, senior manager of IS at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt, based in Toronto.
ETC will synchronize scheduled meetings and highlight meeting conflicts when remote users reconnect to the network.
"I can take ETC off-site [and] continue to work with it, and when I reconnect to the network, it will re-sync my schedule," Clement said.
Workers can record their time in a time sheet and assign billing categories, such as client, project and activity. They can also record expenses in ETC and assign them to categories. At the end of a billing period, workers can post their time sheets and expenses to their company's accounting system if it is integrated with the program.
"What we are gaining [by using the program] is a substantial reduction in time-sheet preparation and the flexibility of posting time directly into our mainframe database from the desktop or on the road," said Martin Fourie, manager of systems development for Ernst & Young in Toronto.
EveryWare Development Corp. of Mississauga, Ontario, can be reached at (905) 819-1173; fax (905) 819-1172; etc@everyware.com.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
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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.
Gateways: Apple RAIDs Workgroup Servers
Promised utility ships free to users
By David Morgenstern
Network managers could have given Apple thanks in November after it shipped the long-awaited RAID software for its PowerPC-based Workgroup Servers.
The software provides data striping and mirroring, also known as RAID, or redundant array of inexpensive disks, levels 0 and 1. The product was announced at the April introduction of the Workgroup Servers and is free to existing owners.
Apple RAID comprises a formatting and management application, a system extension that creates an on-screen alert after a drive failure, and a RAID driver extension. Apple's software is based on technology from Conley Corp.'s $299 SoftRAID (see MacWEEK, July 18, Page 10).
"Other RAID software has more options, but the Apple RAID interface is a lot easier to use," said beta tester Jack Rosenzweig, a project manager at Baseview Products Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich. "I can talk someone through a problem [over the phone] without having to dig through settings a couple of layers deep."
When used for mirroring, the software permits data access on a volume while its twin is being reconstructed in the background. "Contrary to expectations, we did not experience a big hit on performance with mirrored volumes," said Steve Erde, director of computing at Cornell University Medical College of New York.
The software complies with SCSI Manager 4.3 and supports asynchronous I/O, SCSI direct memory access, and the dual-SCSI architecture in the WS 8150 and 9150. Apple has certified the software for System 7.1.2 only.
"Apple RAID has not only legitimized redundant [data] solutions, but it's getting users and dealers interested in all RAID technology," said Dennys Bisogno, president of Trillium Research Inc. of Hudson, Wis.
Apple's RAID giveaway comes amid a boom in array products. Software RAID systems that offer levels 0 and 1 include FWB Inc.'s $799 RAID ToolKit, MicroNet Technology Inc.'s $495 Raven*8100 and Trillium's $295 Remus Limited. Further, many hardware vendors bundle proprietary or OEM RAID software with their hard drives.
Sites running the Apple Workgroup Server 95 must use FWB's $1,099 RAID ToolKit A/UX, while Trillium's $590 Remus is the only software that performs the distributed recovery of levels 4 and 5.
External hardware RAID controllers, typically priced at about $1,000, are shipping from several vendors. Modular systems using built-in controllers, which provide higher performance and reliability, are priced from $1,200 to $85,000, depending on size and features.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
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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.
Gateways: Smith Micro's MacComCenter Plus
Version 2.0 to add GX printing controls
By Jeff Ubois
A new entrant in the retailfax software market is bringing years of experience gained from modem bundles.
Smith Micro Software Inc. last month announced MacComCenter Plus 2.0, a $99.95 fax and data communications package that will let users send faxes from within applications, scan incoming faxes with OCR and fax files from the Finder using drag-and-drop.
MacComCenter Plus 2.0, due to ship in January, is an improved version of the company's similarly named OEM fax software. The basic MacComCenter OEM software is included with fax modems from numerous manufacturers. Smith Micro has been selling a Plus 1.0 upgrade to MacComCenter owners since April. Users of the MacComCenter or the existing Plus upgrade will be able to upgrade to the new retail Plus 2.0.
MacComCenter Plus' fax functions offer many features through a QuickDraw GX printer driver. To send a fax, users will choose the Print command within an application or drag files to a fax-printer icon on the desktop; QuickDraw GX will create the desktop fax icon for System 7.5 users, and Smith Micro will include a desktop utility for other users.
The program will let a user view and annotate received faxes and selectively forward them to a fax machine. It will convert files into fax format from plain text, TIFF, PICT and MacPaint; export faxes into the same formats; and let users compress fax files to save disk space. Faxes can also be broadcast to multiple recipients and sent at prearranged times to take advantage of lower phone rates.
For data communications, the MacComCenter will support the Macintosh Communications Toolbox for connection tools and will display a ModemMonitor window that mimics modem status lights.
It will support color ANSI, VT100, VT102, VT52, and TTY terminal emulations, as well as CompuServe B and B+, Kermit, Zmodem, Ymodem, and several types of Xmodem file transfer protocols.
Smith Micro Software Inc. of Aliso Viejo, Calif., can be reached at (714) 362-2345 or (800) 964-7674; fax (714) 362-2300; 74431.427@compuserve.com.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
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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.
Mobile: Cracks in Duo screens blamed on production
Repair covered by PB warranty
By James Staten
PowerBook Duo 270c and 280c owners who have handled their subnotebooks gently can now stop blaming themselves if their LCD screens are cracked. According to Apple, the cracks are the result of a manufacturing problem that has been corrected.
Apple last week confirmed that a limited number of active-matrix color screens used in these models have developed cracks because of a flaw in the screens. Sources said the cracks can develop with as little provocation as closing the lid or taking the unit outdoors on a cold day. These tiny fractures ultimately grow into fatal cracks that render the screen unusable.
One cause of the cracks cited by sources is that the glass in some panels was improperly cut during manufacturing, leaving ragged edges that are susceptible to fracturing.
While not denying that ragged edges could be a cause, Apple said several factors are contributing to the cracks. The company said adjustments have been made to its manufacturing and assembly processes to keep the problem from occurring in the future.
Apple added that the standard warranty covers cracked screens and that all screens damaged by this problem have been replaced free. "If there is damage that is obviously the result of abuse, the repair probably will not be covered, but in this case it would be," said Kate Paisley, an Apple spokeswoman.
This problem aside, Paisley added that users should take extra care to protect Duo models, such as storing them in hard-sided cases, because the Duo design does not provide as much screen protection as Apple's other PowerBook models.
In related news, sources reported that a limited number of PowerBook 150s are failing to turn on from AC or battery power. The problem is occurring with units out of the box or after a few weeks of use. Apple said it is looking into the failures.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
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: VST upgrades EMMpathy
Offers rebate for Technoggin owners
By James Staten
VST Power Systems Inc. recently upgraded its PowerBook 500 intelligent battery diagnostic tool, shipped an automobile adapter for the 500-series portables and offered rebates to owners of PowerPlate external batteries from Technoggin Inc.
> EMMpathy 2.0. VST's repair and diagnostic program for the energy memory module (EMM) in the PowerBook 500 intelligent battery can now precharge a discharged power pack. These batteries often cannot be recognized by the PowerBook until they contain an electrical charge or the EMM is reset with factory default values (see MacWEEK, Oct. 10, Page 26). Previously, an external charger was required to precharge a cell.
EMMpathy 2.0 also reports battery parameters such as power consumption, current capacity, amp-hour capacity at last calibration and current battery temperature.
Version 2.0 costs $29.95 and comes with all of VST's Charger 500 products. Version 1.1 is now freeware and available over most on-line services. Upgrades to Version 2.0 are free to registered owners of 1.1.
> Auto Adapter 500. Priced at $99.95, the Auto Adapter 500 connects to an automobile cigarette lighter socket and provides surge protection and enough power to run a PowerBook 500 and charge the batteries. It weighs 7 ounces and measures 1 by 3.5 by 1.75 inches.
> Technoggin rebate. Responding to the warning issued by Technoggin about sulfuric acid leaks from its PowerPlate external PowerBook batteries (see MacWEEK, Nov. 14, Page 4), VST is offering PowerPlate owners the chance to trade in their units for its ThinPack external batteries.
Owners of the PowerPlate Mini3 or 3x will receive a $30 rebate toward the purchase of the $129.95 ThinPack Complete. The PowerPlate 5x and Ultra5 are good for a $60 rebate toward the $259.95 ThinPack Plus.
VST's ThinPack batteries use the same lead-acid cells as the Technoggin PowerPlates. However, VST said it uses quality control measures that ensure safety in its products. The company added that all battery cells, regardless of manufacturer or type, are subject to leakage but that leaks are not a significant problem in VST's product line.
VST Power Systems Inc. of Concord, Mass., can be reached at (508) 287-4600; fax (508) 287-4068; vstinc@aol.com.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
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: Media 100 video system upgraded
Version 2.0 improves images and editing
By Carolyn Said
Data Translation Inc. last week shipped Version 2.0 of its Media 100 digital video system, offering improved image quality, editing features and QuickTime interchange.
Media 100 Version 2.0, which comprises two NuBus cards, an external junction box and video production software, costs $8,995, 25 percent less than the previous version. The system now can run native on the Power Mac 8100.
Picture quality, previously 75 Kbytes per frame, is now up to 80 Kbytes per frame for NTSC and 90 Kbytes per frame for PAL (European) video. A $3,995 add-on called HDR (High Data Rate) Option provides image quality of up to 150 Kbytes per frame for NTSC and 180 Kbytes per frame for PAL.
Tobin Koch, principal of Thunder Sky Pictures Inc. of Boston, said using the HDR Option, he gets higher quality on S-video-out from Media 100 directly than from his previous method of transcoding to Betacam using a NuVista or RasterOps board.
A new Dual subsampler feature in the Trim Mode allows for more-precise editing. "I can see the end of one clip and the beginning of the next clip, both in real time as I move the edit point," Koch said. "That's a really nice power editing feature."
QuickTime interchange has been improved with a built-in compressor-decompressor (codec) that gives instant access to QuickTime applications. "Previously, I had to create new media to import a QuickTime movie," Koch said. "Now -- this is really exciting -- when I go to output from CoSA After Effects, Media 100 shows up as a codec. I can write a QuickTime movie that can be read by Media 100 without any alterations."
New motion effects include slow, fast, reverse, fit-to-fill and strobe. "It has really high-quality, subpixel interpolated motion effect. The slow-mo is just gorgeous," Koch said.
Other new features include improved project and media management, a real-time audio panel, support for Adobe Premiere 4.0 plug-ins, faster dissolve and faster title renderings.
A $3,995 add-on called Power Option includes All-On-One Mastering, which lets users digitize video in a high-compression draft mode. After editing, users can redigitize just the included video segments at broadcast-image quality. Power Option also offers on-the-fly logging, automatic batch digitizing and fast special effects.
Upgrades, which are software-only, are covered under the company's Platinum Plan for support, which is $1,500 a year.
Data Translation Inc. of Marlboro, Mass., can be reached at (508) 460-1600; fax (508) 481-8627.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
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: Graphics users say clip art meets needs
Low cost, high quality art
By Aileen Abernathy
Long a staple of employee newsletters and retail fliers, clip art now has become a vital resource for corporate communicators and small publishers who may lack the time, talent or funds to produce original artwork for their myriad publications.
In fact, clip art, which includes both line art and photos, is one of the fastest growing business-software categories, with Mac clip-art sales up 68 percent in the first six months of 1994 over the same period in 1993, according to the Software Publishers Association in Washington, D.C.
Clip art's broadening appeal can be attributed to several factors, including better-quality graphics, a wider range of subject matter and the popularity of CD-ROMs. But low price is probably the key selling point. Users can buy a good-quality package of 40 to 100 line-art images for about $40 to $100, while a lower-quality package of hundreds of images can sell for less than $100. Photographic images cost from $100 to $300 for 100 or more pictures.
"Due to budget and staff cutbacks, we could no longer afford illustrators," said Dominick Cancilla, typesetter for the employee magazine at ARCO, the Los Angeles-based petroleum giant. He needed maps to show the locations of pipelines and oil fields, so he turned to the MapArt series from Cartesia Software of Lambertville, N.J. "I bought a CD-ROM drive and a disc full of clip art for the price of three free-lance illustrations," he said.
Newspapers also rely heavily on clip art because of their high volume of advertising, fast turnaround times and need for product-specific graphics. Clip-art subscription services, such as those provided by Dynamic Graphics Inc. and Multi-Ad Services Inc., both of Peoria, Ill., supply a steady stream of brand-specific and thematic artwork to hundreds of newspapers and their advertisers.
"It's tough to come up with fresh ideas every week, so having a source of ready-made images, in themed packages such as Thanksgiving or back-to-school, saves a lot of time," said Joe Fortes, network administrator for the advertising department at Raley's, a chain of supermarkets and drug centers based in Sacramento, Calif.
Stand-out images
Many users seek out the growing number of companies that produce high-quality artwork in a specific niche, such as maps, or that offer a distinctive drawing style.
Ed Alfaro, art director at Taco Bell Corp. in Irvine, Calif., favors Art Parts of Orange, Calif., because "the images have an off-beat, humorous look that matches the trendy, flashy style of our commercials." He uses Art Parts' clip art in advertising, marketing, promotions, internal communications -- even merchandising.
Most users modify clip art to meet their needs, adding or deleting elements, changing colors, inserting text, and combining images to form new illustrations. In recognition of this, clip-art companies are crafting their images more carefully. Gone are the days of jaggy MacPaint images. Today's clip-art formats are EPS, high-resolution (300-dpi) TIFF, and, occasionally, PICT (for on-screen presentations). EPS files are typically supplied as editable Illustrator files, often with grouped elements and layers for easier editing.
Photos at your fingertips
Royalty-free graphics aren't limited to line art, however. Photography CD-ROMs, such as those from PhotoDisc Inc. of Seattle and Digital Stock Corp. of Solana Beach, Calif., are increasingly popular sources of digital imagery.
"What attracted me was the ability to have an entire library of royalty-free photos at my fingertips," said Paiwei Wei, art director at Eazell/Petersen Inc., an advertising agency in Anaheim, Calif., that uses PhotoDisc images in ads for political candidates and nonprofit organizations.
"Timing is critical in a political race," he said. "CD-ROM-based photography lets us create new ads within hours, rather than days, and we don't have to deal with model releases and usage fees." And stock art is a boon for nonprofit groups that can't afford to hire photographers, he said.
Cost was the crucial issue for corporate communicator Warren Mell of Kirkland, Wash.-based McCaw Cellular Communications Inc. "We needed lots of high-quality photos for a video to accompany a speech our president was giving," he said. "Buying from a stock agency was prohibitive because they can charge $175 per image for a second of use." Instead, Mell spent $1,200 on four PhotoDisc CD-ROMs. Impressed with the quality of the 300-dpi drum-scanned images, he used more than 100 to create the presentation.
Jerry De Avila, former director of OEM sales at DayStar Digital Inc. in Flowery Branch, Ga., was likewise pleased with the quality and content of images from Digital Stock. But the key selling point was their use of Photo CD format, which provides images in five different resolutions, allowing him to match the resolution to the job. "If I'm doing a direct-mail piece and printing to a dye-sublimation printer, I use a low-resolution file," he said. Full-page color ads, however, merit the highest-resolution, 18-Mbyte files.
Switching to stock photos improved business for Terrance Thornton, who, as advertising operations manager at the Washington Post, oversees the production of up to 800 ads each week. Many advertisers look to the newspaper to supply artwork, but the Post's designers used to be limited to clip art because hiring a photographer or using stock-agency photos cost too much.
Then they discovered the backgrounds and photography collections available from PhotoDisc and Myrtle Creek, Ore.-based Artbeats Software Inc. "Now we create better-quality ads that really pop out of the page," Thornton said. "And the better they look, the more ads we sell."
In search of specifics
Some artists use stock photos as elements in composite illustrations. For example, Marc Yankus, a free-lance illustrator in New York, takes background images created by Artbeats and San Francisco-based Form and Function, tweaks them in Adobe Photoshop, then combines them with other images to create high-resolution artwork for magazines and corporate clients.
Yankus said he still shoots some of his own photos, however, because "commercial backgrounds are too clean, too perfect. I'm looking for the mold that grows on the metal."
Indeed, the major user complaint about stock photos and clip art concerns content, not quality. Users seem to agree that professional-quality images are available, if only from a limited number of companies. But because the companies try to create images that will please everyone, Wei noted, "they're often too generic to meet our needs."
McCaw's Mell agreed. "We had to compromise our vision for the video to work with the available images." But he said he was still pleased with the end result. "We got the same message across, just in a slightly different way."
Not surprisingly, there's an insatiable appetite for high-quality stock photography and clip art. Despite the increasing variety of clip art and stock photos available, it's not enough. Users long for definitive takes on specific subjects, such as food, pets or cars.
"We're always hungry for more images," said the Post's Thornton. "We never know what type of advertiser will walk in the door."
For vendors, clip art is definitely a gold mine. "We sell $1 million of clip art each month," said Heidi Roisen, president of T/Maker Co. of Mountain View, Calif., which claims 70 percent of the Mac market. "It's a pretty big small business to be in."
MacWEEK 12.05.94
GA Page 20
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
BusinessWatch: New RasterOps CEO takes charge
Doctor prescribes cure for company
By Lisa Picarille
Despite posting a $15.8 million loss, reducing its work force, losing its CEO and dropping out of the graphics accelerator market, RasterOps Corp. is bent on refocusing itself as a leader in the expanding video market.
Leading the charge is Louis Doctor, a former SuperMac Technology Inc. executive who took the reins as RasterOps CEO in October (see MacWEEK, Oct. 17, Page 24).
One of Doctor's first tasks was delivering the grim financial results for the video, graphics and multimedia company's first quarter, which ended Sept. 30. Sales dropped 22 percent, to $16.3 million, and the company lost $15.8 million (see MacWEEK, Nov. 14, Page 46). RasterOps' rival, Radius Inc., saw its fourth quarter sales fall 29 percent, to $66.9 million, and it lost $69 million.
"It's been a flood of red ink and nobody has been spared," Doctor said. Despite the quarterly loss, RasterOps has $5 million in cash with no bank debt.
Doctor is now attempting to change RasterOps' image from second banana in the graphics card and monitor businesses to a leader in the video market.
"As a peripherals vendor, you have to stay clear of what is being offered by the computer vendors and chip makers," Doctor said. "That is the mistake Radius, SuperMac and even RasterOps have made in the past." Doctor cited Apple's aggressive move into the 24-bit graphics-card business, along with shrinking monitor margins, as the major reasons RasterOps is seeking other market opportunities.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company plans to continue offering 24-bit graphics cards and monitors -- most of them Mac products -- which accounted for slightly less than half of its first-quarter sales. The rest of the company's sales were generated by its TrueVision line of primarily PC-based video products.
"RasterOps has a gleaming gem and it's TrueVision," said Jim Lindner, president of VidiPax, a New York-based consultancy specializing in video technology. "Radius and SuperMac do not have the level of video expertise RasterOps has."
Doctor said that RasterOps plans to increase the TrueVision portion of its business by leveraging TrueVision Inc.'s clout as a leader in providing OEMs and value-added resellers with video hardware. TrueVision boards are a key component of Avid Technology Inc.'s popular video-editing systems.
Early next year, RasterOps is expected to introduce retail video products aimed at medical, manufacturing, advertising, cable TV and corporate communications professionals. The products will run a variety of video applications, including Avid's VideoShop and Adobe Premiere, according to Doctor.
"Capitalizing on the TrueVision name is an excellent move," Lindner said. "If you look beyond the immediate horizon, there will be a huge market for retail video products."
RasterOps is also differentiating itself from Radius by providing only hardware. "We don't want to be in both the hardware and software business," Doctor said. "That is a mistake our competitors are making."
RasterOps Corp.
> Founded: 1987
> CEO: Louis Doctor
> Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
> Products: 24-bit graphics cards, monitors, video boards
> Employees: 200
> Fiscal 1994 sales: $79.2 million
MacWEEK 12.05.94
BusinessWatch Page 24
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
BusinessWatch: Feds scrutinize Microsoft, Intel
Charges of anticompetition
By Jon Swartz
Federal investigators are revisiting two of the personal computer industry's dominant players on charges of anticompetitive business practices.
The U.S. Justice Department is expanding its antitrust investigation of Microsoft Corp.'s $1.5 billion buyout of Intuit Inc., a move that could delay the deal and possibly force changes to its terms.
A Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed the company had received a "second request" from the Justice Department seeking comprehensive information about the deal, which could take months.
But the spokeswoman said the inquiry was "not unusual. This is standard operating procedure, and Microsoft is cooperating," she said.
Microsoft of Redmond, Wash., intends to use Intuit's personal-finance software as a platform for getting into electronic-commerce services such as home banking and stock trading, which might allow it to collect a transaction fee every time someone uses the service. "The problem with the investigation is that it is analyzing something that has yet to happen," said Richard Crone, a financial consultant for KPMG Peat Marwick in Los Angeles. "I think the [acquisition] would open up banking channels rather than be monopolistic."
Justice Department officials declined to comment.
Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission plans to look into charges that Intel Corp. has forced customers to buy some products as a condition for purchases of its chips.
If the investigation goes forward, it would be the second time the FTC has examined "tying" allegations against Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel. The agency took no action after a two-year probe of charges that Intel required computer makers to buy its 386 chips so they could receive shipments of its 486 chip.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
BusinessWatch Page 24
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Editorial: IBM needs a new script
In the classic film "Chinatown," the hard-boiled detective, played by Jack Nicholson, uncovers the truth by slapping it out of a world-weary and obscenely rich heiress played by Faye Dunaway. In one famous scene, a more pitiful than tragic Dunaway tells Nicholson who the missing girl is, an answer that changes with each slap of his hand: "My sister. My daughter. My sister. My daughter."
Pity the obscenely rich IBM Corp. as the streetwise press manhandles it. With each slap the answer on Macintosh licensing changes as well: "Yes we will. No we won't. Yes we will. No we won't."
Over the past few weeks, stories in this paper, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and elsewhere had representatives from IBM saying both yes and no to licensing the Mac operating system. And like the tragic mother-sibling in the film, IBM is telling the truth with both answers.
Yes, it will license the Mac OS. But, no, it will not push it especially hard. IBM's goal is to offer the Mac OS to corporate customers directly, not through dealers or value-added resellers. The Mac will not be a strategic platform for Big Blue, but a tactical one intended to help Mac managers coordinate purchases through a single IBM supply channel.
This is good for Apple. In corporations where IBM is the approved vendor, a Mac in a Big Blue box should forestall erosion of the Mac installed base and maybe even expand it. However, this primarily helps Apple; for IBM, the advantage will be delivering the second-biggest computing platform to its customers.
Getting mixed messages from IBM on its OS plans will only confuse those customers. The company has proclaimed that OS/2 is its strategic desktop OS. It has even signed up a few corporate clients based on its technical superiority. But as anyone in the Mac market could tell IBM, being better does not always prevail against Wintel clout.
Having a clear, concise message is the best answer to the Wintel juggernaut. Yet it seems to be the one answer IBM cannot give.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
Editorial Page 28
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Second Decade: Stuff stocking with toys for your Mac
By Henry Norr
'Tis the season when even the most serious of Mac managers has to take time out to buy presents -- if only by mail order -- so this week The Second Decade offers a grab bag of gift possibilities for your Mac-using friends and loved ones.
To avoid too drastic a break with this column's usual character, I'll stick mostly to serious stuff. If entertainment is what you're after, look instead to Page 34 for MacWEEK's annual games review. Though if someone on your list has a CD-ROM drive and doesn't already own Myst, Broderbund Software Inc.'s gorgeous mystery game, you can't go wrong by picking up a copy ($82.95 list). My teen-age daughters won't go near most computer games, but Myst has kept them mesmerized for months.
Handiwork
Technically inclined young people (ages 8 and up) will enjoy Maxis' Widget Workshop, a $44.95 floppy-based package chock full of gadgets -- tuning forks, stopwatches, plungers, switches and the like -- for assembling Rube Goldberg gizmos. InterActive Publishing Corp.'s $49.99 Leonardo the Inventor CD-ROM combines history, technology and aesthetic appeal (leaving aside some hokey games). Amnesty Interactive is both an interactive history of human rights and a model of CD-ROM design; developed by Ignition out of materials from Amnesty International, it's distributed at cost ($10) by The Voyager Co.
For those who like to bring the holiday spirit right to the desktop, Atticus Software Corp. offers Christmas Lights, a $19.95 software package with more than 50 styles of on-screen Christmas lights. Utility fanciers might prefer Atticus' Super7 Utilities, a $99.95 collection that's never gained the mindshare it deserves. Another underappreciated utility I wouldn't be without is Abbott Systems Inc.'s CanOpener. The Power Mac-native Version 3.0 is $59, including shipping, direct from the developer.
If your list includes any would-be Newton users who have given up in frustration over handwriting-recognition problems, Graffiti, the new add-on recognizer from Palm Computing Inc. ($79), might be the answer. For those paying a price in pain for years of keyboarding, the best gift of all might be a pair of Handeze gloves ($19.95) -- a palliative, no doubt, but one that's brought real relief to me and many others I know. The easiest way I know to get them is by calling APS Technologies at (800) 374-5688. (You do need to know the recipient's hand size.)
Holiday on line
Friends ready to dip their toes in cyberspace -- or currently limping along at 2,400 or even 9,600 bps -- will be forever grateful for a speedy new modem. You can now pick up a 14,400-Kbps model for $100 or less; I recently got myself U.S. Robotics Inc.'s Sportster V.34 (28,800 Kbps) for only $219 (plus several hours fiddling with scripts and initialization strings). A great guide to the Internet is Adam Engst's Internet Starter Kit (second edition, Hayden Books, $29.95).
And women and anyone else looking for a friendly, supportive home base on-line might welcome an account on a fledgling service called Women's Wire; for information, phone (800) 210-9999 or send a message to subscribe@wwire.net.
Henry Norr, editor emeritus of MacWEEK, welcomes feedback in the MacWEEK Forum on CompuServe or eWorld or at henry_norr@macweek.ziff.com.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
Second Decade Page 28
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
MacWEEK Insider: Macs are selling, let's sell more
By Rick Lepage
As we note above, Apple's doing a good job of selling Macs right now. Unlike the numbers Apple trots out in its quarterly earnings report, Computer Intelligence InfoCorp's StoreBoard numbers represent units sold, not shipped.
I like the fact that the Power Mac models represent a healthy chunk of overall sales. Apple has been working that beat hard over the past few months, and more than a third of the machines sold are RISC-based. If you include education and other channels, I'd bet the Power Mac numbers are even stronger.
But I'm still bugged. Power Mac sales are singing, but largely to the choir. If Apple really wants to increase market share, it needs to be even more aggressive because Intel Corp. has escalated its campaign against RISC.
For a while, Intel's approach was to publicly blitz us with ads touting the uplifting future of the Intel architecture. This has been given up for a much stronger tactic: price.
When I open the paper in the morning and see a 60-MHz Pentium system with 8 Mbytes of RAM, 1 Mbyte of video RAM, a 420-Mbyte hard drive, a double-speed CD-ROM drive, a 14.4-Kbps fax modem, a 15-inch monitor, a sound card and speakers selling for $1,699, I realize that Apple has quickly lost the best advantage it had when the Power Macs first came out -- price/performance.
When I scan the Power Mac prices, I don't like what I see. A Power Mac 6100/60 with 8 Mbytes of RAM and a 250-Mbyte hard disk goes for $1,599. That's it; there's no monitor, no extra VRAM, no modem, no CD-ROM drive, no keyboard, no speakers. I don't think you'll find that stuff sitting on a dealer's shelf for $100.
A 7100/66AV with 16 Mbytes of RAM, 2 Mbytes of VRAM, a 500-Mbyte hard disk and a CD-ROM drive goes for about $3,400. Again, you'll need to get a monitor and a keyboard. That system sounds a little better, until you find out that a fully configured 90-MHz Pentium tower with a 1-Gbyte disk, CD-ROM drive, modem, sound card, speakers, monitor and keyboard can be had for $2,700. If you want only a 9,600-baud modem and a 540-Mbyte drive, you can cut that system down to about $2,200.
I know that Macs have so much more than Pentium systems, and they do seem to be able to add two plus two and come up with something other than 3.9. (However, since most of America can't add, the Pentium math problem probably will be perceived as an endearing trait, not a fatal flaw.)
Intel knows that price is the great eliminator in today's world. Apple knows that, too. The company pushed the price/performance button hard in March, April and May. Power Macs were fast and inexpensive. Unfortunately, Pentium systems are fast and even less expensive right now. What Apple has to do is respond, and I don't mean by bumping up the clock rates a bit.
Rick LePage is MacWEEK editor. He welcomes feedback at rlepage@eworld.com or rick_lepage@macweek.ziff.com.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
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: Collage 2.0.1 makes layered images easier
Specular's upgrade still relies heavily on Photoshop's abilities
By Ben Long
Collage 2.0.1 is Specular International Ltd.'s first major upgrade to its digital composition application released last year. Completely native and sporting a few new features, the $399 program is mostly the same, but offers better performance than its predecessor.
Collage 1.0 was an exciting product when it was released last year, offering a layered, object-oriented approach to image manipulation that Adobe Photoshop lacked. While Collage 2 is a capable performer, the obvious question is: With Photoshop 3.0 providing layer controls, is Collage still necessary?
Layering it on
Collage makes no claims to be anything but a complement to a true image editor such as Photoshop. The program contains no painting or editing tools and only limited manipulation tools. Instead, its strength lies in creating multilayered, collage-type images.
You create an image in Collage by importing source material from your favorite image-editing or paint program. Although each object can be any resolution, Collage will, in an effort to improve performance, create a 72-dpi proxy at import time and use this proxy for on-screen editing.
To create an image, you simply drag each imported item onto the Collage canvas. There, its proxy will appear at screen resolution. As you drag additional items onto the canvas they appear in the same front-to-back order in which they are listed in the Elements palette.
Collage documents can now work in true CMYK mode. You can import CMYK elements and create your final rendering as a CMYK image. The program, however, is somewhat slower when working with CMYK, so you may want to create your project as an RGB image and convert the final image later using another application.
Editing
Once all of your elements are on screen, you can use Collage's tools to position and rearrange them. Basic tools are provided for rotating, skewing and cropping. Scaling is accomplished simply by dragging on an object's corner handle, while other options, such as flipping, are accessed from an Element menu.
Unlike the Layering features in Photoshop 3, Collage's treatment of image elements is truly object-oriented. No operation in Collage is final: You can adjust an item at any time by using the program's editing features; any modifications or effects can be easily removed or altered. You can also change elements with the Information palette, which gives you numeric control over an item's position, rotation, scale, shear and opacity.
Collage offers several page-layout features that help make designing easier. You can display horizontal and vertical rulers, and you can drag guides onto your canvas to ease placement and alignment. An Align function, similar to that found in a drawing program, lets you select objects and align them along their edges. Collage also contains a simple, Photoshop-like Text tool for creating text items with the application.
You can apply Photoshop-compatible filters by selecting an item and choosing the appropriate filter from a menu. Because of its proxy system, however, many Photoshop filters -- including most of HSC Software's Kai's Power Tools, Aldus Corp.'s Gallery Effects and Xaos Tools Inc.'s Paint Alchemy -- will not work with Collage. However, Collage now exports Photoshop 3-compatible files complete with layering information, so you can easily export your final image to Photoshop and apply your filters there. Also new to Collage 2 is a Filter List dialog that lets you remove a filter at any time.
Masking
If your image was created with an alpha channel, Collage can use that channel as a mask when compositing images. Simply clicking the Mask button on the Information palette will render unmasked areas of the element invisible.
The Information palette also lets you select a transfer mode that governs how an element interacts with the elements below. In addition to the standard Copy method, you can select Add, Subtract, Difference, Multiply, Lighter, Darker, Screen and Contrast methods to create interesting compositing effects.
Unfortunately, Collage 2 still offers no way of creating or altering a mask. Even a simple mask creator, like the Layer Mask feature in Photoshop 3, would make Collage much easier to use. We found ourselves constantly returning to Photoshop to create a new mask or edit an old one.
When your image is finished, the Render command creates a final, high-quality image at the resolution of your choice. If your source images are all 300 dpi, you can create your final rendering at any resolution up to 300 dpi with no loss of quality -- just time and disk space. For example, rendering a 15-Mbyte, 150-dpi image with six layers and a few effects took 10 minutes and 60 Mbytes of disk space on a Power Mac 8100.
Performance
For large images, Collage 2's proxy system operates faster than Photoshop for basic editing and effects. Ideally, you'll want a large memory partition (we performed our tests with 36 Mbytes of RAM allocated to Collage).
Moving objects on screen showed little difference between Collage and Photoshop. As more layers were added, Photoshop began to show a little sluggishness, whereas Collage's performance remained fairly stable.
Calculation-intensive operations such as rotating and shearing were much faster in Collage. A rotation that took Photoshop 58 seconds was done by Collage in nine seconds.
There is a price to pay for this speed. When you import an image, Collage takes a long time to create the proxy; it also takes a while to render a final image. These processes can easily add 20 minutes or more to a large project.
Documentation and support
Collage's documentation is simple and straightforward and mostly unnecessary. The program's interface and feel is easy enough that few users will need to turn to the manual.
Conclusions
Although Collage 2.0.1's true object-oriented approach to its layers is a nice improvement over Photoshop 3's layering controls, the extra time and hassle of importing and rendering makes us question the need for a separate compositing program.
Creating collage-type images should be an interactive process, wherein you constantly move images and try new compositions. However, Collage's dependence on Photoshop for creating masks and preparing images greatly hampers this interaction.
Whether you should buy Collage partly depends on your hardware. If you have a Power Mac and at least 72 Mbytes of RAM, Photoshop might be running fast enough so that Collage will not offer much of a speed improvement. If you have a lesser setup, Collage will be faster to work with than Photoshop, but you'll still have to prepare your elements and touch up final images with the latter.
Still, if creating layered compositions is a large part of your work, these performance issues may be secondary to the relative ease-of-use Collage provides.
Specular International Ltd. of Amherst, Mass., is at (413) 253-3100; fax (413) 253-0540.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
Reviews Page 31
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Review: FullWrite Professional 2.0
Word processor's features expand beyond the basics
By Dale Coleman
Akimbo Systems' FullWrite Professional 2.0 is the first significant upgrade of this word processor in several years. The $395 program, now in the hands of its fourth owner, retains its many editing, layout and long-document tools and overall personality despite the addition of new features.
FullWrite 2 sports a number of enhancements and interface tweaks, a new extensible architecture, and respectable performance running in emulation mode on Power Macintoshes. (A release date for the native version has not been announced.)
It runs on any Mac with at least System 6.0.4 and 1.5 Mbytes of RAM (2 Mbytes is recommended). A complete installation requires less than 4 Mbytes of hard disk space.
Checkered past
FullWrite's original designers had some innovative ideas of how to extend the application's interface, but by doing so they broke a lot of the Apple guidelines. While the program languished at the ill-fated Ashton-Tate Corp. and then at Borland International Inc., each new system release revealed more incompatibilities.
These events are remembered because FullWrite promised features that weren't available in other Mac word processors back when the Mac Plus was hot, including layout tools and extensive annotation options -- advanced features that made it ideal for creating complex or long documents. But it also needed more memory and a faster processor than most users dreamed of.
During the nearly eight years since its original release, Macs have gotten much faster and programs with chunky RAM requirements are more common. By comparison, FullWrite's resource requirements, interface and feature set are now in the mainstream. You'll find no evidence of the current vogue of multiple button bars and tool palettes; instead, FullWrite relies mainly on traditional menus and dialog boxes. The instances in which the interface standard is pushed, such as abandoning nonmodal dialog boxes, are useful and, Akimbo said, in accordance with Apple guidelines.
FullWrite retains its personality, however, still using the term "chapters" to refer to document sections, for instance. And its tradition of innovation is also evident: The new modular design implements more than 100 features as FullWrite extensions, which can be added or deleted by dragging them into or out of the FullWrite Extensions folder.
Having frames within a word processing document was a radical concept six years ago. Frames -- or, as FullWrite confusingly calls them, sidebars -- behave as documents within a document. They are central to FullWrite's design, and especially to its page-layout features, such as the capability to wrap text around irregularly shaped objects.
Feature list
One reason FullWrite has such modest resource requirements is that it doesn't suffer from the kind of feature bloat that's partially responsible for Microsoft Word 6.0 evolving to its present condition. The list of new features includes smart drag-and-drop, a System 7-style outliner interface, glossary entries that expand automatically when typed, integrated tables and Design Science Inc.'s Equation Editor 1.2.
Some features have more depth than you might expect. For example, FullWrite lets you have endnotes and footnotes within the same document. Tools are also available for creating a table of contents, an index sorted to two levels and a bibliography. The range of annotation features, which now includes the capability to display changes in a user-defined color, remains impressive. However, our favorite feature is still FullWrite's electronic sticky notes, which are the best we've seen.
Live and learn
FullWrite 2's consistent, intuitive design makes it easy to use, but it's not the best choice for casual users. For instance, some basic actions, such as setting a first-line indent, require creating or modifying a style. However, even if you're repeatedly perplexed by the implementation of style sheets in Word or WordPerfect, you'll find using FullWrite styles a snap.
FullWrite has none of the new task-oriented features, such as Word 6's wizards (see MacWEEK, Sept. 26, Page 1) or ClarisWorks 3.0's assistants (see MacWEEK, Nov. 28, Page 35). For example, FullWrite's new Table feature presents a stern dialog box that requires you to understand its options and specify what you want. The payback for what may be some extra effort up front is the capability to fully control an agile, flexible writing tool.
Performance
While the original FullWrite needed a faster Mac than Apple made at the time, the opposite is true with Version 2. For most tasks it runs quite well in the suggested 2-Mbyte partition (3 Mbytes on Power Macs) and yields acceptable performance even on older 68030 Macs.
FullWrite will never be a corporate standard. There is no Windows version, and file translation support is limited. FullWrite now uses XTND for file translation rather than MasterSoft Inc.'s Word for Word as before, but only text, MacWrite 5 and MacWrite II translators are included.
We discovered a bug that, on some configurations, crashed the system when the spelling checker was invoked. Akimbo offers a free updater, Version 2.01, that fixes this problem.
Documentation and support
The manual is an updated version of the Ashton-Tate offering, clearly written and well-organized, but the index glosses over some topics. On-line help is comprehensive.
Again breaking with tradition, FullWrite's technical support is provided only over the Internet, not by phone. Akimbo said almost all questions are answered within 24 hours.
Conclusions
FullWrite 2 is an appealing product that is generally well-suited to its intended users -- individuals who create long or complex documents. Students, especially, can take maximum advantage of its annotation features. The paucity of XTND translators is a problem, but many users already own translators bundled with another product. Akimbo said it hopes to provide a better solution.
If your word processing needs exceed the capabilities of basic products such as ClarisWorks or SoftKey International's WriteNow, don't overlook FullWrite. It may match your requirements better than the alternatives.
Upgrades from previous version, $99; competitive upgrade, $120.
Akimbo Systems of Somerville, Mass., is at (617) 776-5500 or (800) 375-6515; fax (617) 776-5512; sales@akimbo.com.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
Reviews Page 31
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Review: The MacWEEK play list
Of course the Macintosh is a serious business machine; that's why you read MacWEEK. But with the holidays comes a lighter workload, absent co-workers and time to appreciate what a great game machine the Mac is. Here are our reviews of some of the year's hottest titles.
Marathon
By Robert Hess
It's been hard to avoid the Doom craze for the past year. Companies nationwide have banned the game, as roving bands of networked players on Intel-standard PCs brought enterprises to their knees. Well, get ready, Mac managers: We're about to join the fray.
Bungie Software Products Corp.'s $69.99 Marathon is the first serious Mac-based entrant into the world of realistic multiplayer shoot'em-ups (although you can also play as a single user). While its documentation provides a highly involved story to get you in the right mood, the game's real purpose is simple: run as fast as possible around a space station, shoot everything that moves, and evade intelligent aliens and (depending on the kind of co-workers you have) even smarter networked human opponents.
Marathon takes the genre several steps forward with complex, nonorthogonal spaces requiring true 3-D play. (If you're shot by unseen foes, they're probably hiding above you.) The graphics are stunning and may be a great excuse to buy a Power Mac 8100/110.
Nice touches appear throughout. If you're killed, it's a simple matter to be reborn, but sometimes it's more fun to lie on the floor and watch your fellow players duke it out.
The beta version we played was lacking in minor ways, such as levels that don't actually lead to each other. We hope that's fixed in the release, so that the exploratory aspects of the game improve. Also disappointing was the absence of support for TCP/IP-based games, which is probably just as well, considering the rate at which the traffic is building up on the information superhighway.
Marathon is the best multiplayer game on the Mac and probably offers the most realistic graphics of any game on a personal computer.
Bungie Software Products Corp. of Chicago can be reached at (312) 563-6200.
Cosmology of Kyoto
By Mark Hall
It's not often you find yourself wishing you'd just go to hell. But if you want to progress to the Imperial Palace through the dusty, demon-infested streets of Kyoto at the turn of the last millennium, that's where you must go. Many times.
As you might suspect, hell is a nasty place.
To play the game portion of Yano Electric Co. Ltd.'s $98 Cosmology of Kyoto (the CD-ROM also has a dull reference section on the period), you begin by choosing your sex, marital status, body and face. As you move through the game acquiring items, such as clothes, you can use a mirror to see how you've changed.
By surviving encounters in the terrifying streets and alleys, you accumulate karma and money, which is accounted for in corner boxes. When you die -- as you must -- and pass through one of the eight hells, you are reincarnated naked, broke and without karma. You don't start over at the beginning, but pick up further along on your path. There's supposed to be a message here, but it will be lost on most players anxious to proceed to the next nether world.
The game's stunning artwork attracts as often as it repels. The characters and devils that populate the game are primitive caricatures of the human form, which masks the horrors players endure.
Kyoto in 972 A.D. is an unnerving place at best. The levels of hell are reminiscent of Dante's Inferno and the tortured souls evoke images from Hieronymus Bosch. Everything is dark and wretched, except for the rare encounter with a holy man on the way to the glories of the Imperial Palace.
The designers of Cosmology of Kyoto have created a fascinating animated realm that weaves mythology and history about a terrifying period of upheaval in Japanese history.
Yano Electric Co. Ltd. is represented in the United States by Azuma Lander International of San Francisco and can be reached at phone and fax (415) 928-7914; 74077.364@compuserve.com.
Wolfenstein 3D
By Ross Scott Rubin
Before achieving fame as the purveyors of Doom for Intel-standard PCs, Id Software released its first-generation, first-person, texture-mapped shoot'em-up, Wolfenstein 3D, itself a reincarnation of the classic maze game for the Apple II. Rewritten and re-released by MacPlay, Wolfenstein 3D is now finally available for the Macintosh.
As Captain William J. "B.J." Blazkowicz, you must escape from the Nazi prison in which you are held captive. You start with only a knife, a pistol and a handful of ammo, but you move on to a machine gun, Gatling gun, flamethrower and rocket launcher. And you'll need all you can get as you encounter fascist brownshirts, SS guards, Nazi mutants and the fuhrer himself.
Compared with similar games, such as Reality Bytes Inc.'s Sensory Overload (see review below) and Bungie Software Products Corp.'s Marathon (see review, previous page), Wolfenstein 3D shows its age. There is no network play, and the floors and ceilings lack rich textures. But MacPlay has re-created this PC classic with loving care.
Instead of the original low-resolution art, new graphics from the Atari Jaguar version are used; optional music in the background drives you on, and the sampled shouts of German soldiers are realistic and effective. Because its computing requirements are more modest than other first-person shooters, Wolfenstein 3D gets good performance on a reasonably fast 68030 Mac, and Quadra and Power Mac users can run it smoothly in full-screen mode.
Best of all is the price. The first three levels are available free from on-line services and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites. Registering it for $15 gets you the Second Encounter, which includes 27 more levels of gory, fast-paced Nazi blasting. At press time, MacPlay was on the verge of releasing the Third Encounter, which includes five different missions totaling 60 levels -- enough to satisfy the blood lust of any rabid Nazi killer.
MacPlay of Irvine, Calif., can be reached at (800) 969-4263; fax (714) 252-2820.
Quantum Gate
By Ben Long
So, as it turns out, Earth will be uninhabitable toward the end of the 21st century. Don't panic; brilliant scientists have found a way to solve the problem. But it's real dangerous, and that's where you come in.
That's the basic premise behind Quantum Gate, a $59.95 interactive movie created by Hyperbole Studios. Quantum Gate makes extensive use of 3-D animations and small QuickTime movies to tell its story from the user's perspective. You take part in the telling by moving around an animated 3-D mining station, slowly uncovering an intriguing conspiracy while you try to save the world.
Quantum Gate has a stylized approach to its graphics. Other characters, for example, are represented by 3-D mannequins. When it comes time to interact with them, little QuickTime windows appear over the mannequins and small scenes are played out. Although this sounds cheesy, it's effective and fun to watch.
Unfortunately, Quantum Gate isn't sure if it's a game or a movie. Alfred Hitchcock once said that drama is "life with all the boring parts removed." Quantum Gate has successfully put all those boring parts back in. Too much time is spent wandering around hoping that you'll stumble onto a telling QuickTime movie.
Also unfortunate is another movie tradition that Hyperbole chose to adopt: the cliffhanger. Quantum Gate's story feels like the first third of a movie. You never really know what the conspiracy is, and just when all the interesting elements are set up, the game ends. But not to worry, the sequel, The Vortex, will be out next spring. (Aaaaargh!)
Although it's trite, predictable, sometimes hokey and chock-full of bad acting, its use of animation and QuickTime movies is intriguing enough to make Quantum Gate an enjoyable (though expensive) five- or six-hour experience in front of your computer.
Hyperbole Studios of Seattle can be reached at (206) 441-8334 or (800) 989-3767; fax (206) 441-9134; hbstudios@aol.com.
Sensory Overload
By John Farnsworth
Sensory Overload from Reality Bytes Inc. is another entry in the growing line of scrolling 3-D maze adventures for the Mac. Hunting, gathering and plenty of killing action are all provided in abundance in this $69.95 game.
You play the role of a CIA agent working undercover as a test subject for the AlphaChannel project in a genetic engineering laboratory. You have just awakened from a long sleep to find everyone around you dead. You now have to search your way through the lab's maze of hallways, stairs and security doors to find out what's happened while fending off the bad guys.
Weapons are found scattered throughout this maze, as are ammunition clips, body armor, medical kits and grenades. Also, typical of this style of game, you can view a map that reveals only the rooms and passageways that you have already successfully explored.
The artwork is good, and the scrolling action is smooth and seamless. Unfortunately, there seems to be no randomness built in, so you can memorize a level's danger and treasure spots. Sensory Overload's interface is easy to understand, so little preparation is needed to start playing. Keyboard assignments can be customized, which I find essential.
While Sensory Overload's sound and 3-D views (including the complexity of the rendering, texture mapping and shadows) can all be modified for faster play on slower machines (you need at least a 68030 Macintosh), the best way to play it is on a Power Macintosh. And if you don't have a Power Macintosh yet, this is another good reason to get one.
Reality Bytes Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., can be reached at (617) 621-1555; fax (617) 577-1209; rbytes@netcom.com.
The Gingerbread Man
By Robert M. Repass
Flushed from the shadows of their dank circus tents, The Residents return with another serving of their homespun CD-ROM psychosis. In ION's $49.95 The Gingerbread Man, you become the fairy-tale prankster peering into the deepest recesses of the minds of others. As expected, The Residents, reunited with award-winning animator Jim Ludtke, have created nine of the strangest computer characters since their critically acclaimed Freak Show CD-ROM.
The Gingerbread Man can be played on an ordinary audio CD player as well as on a Macintosh -- a strong plus, since the famed ocular musicians have composed 11 new songs for this project. While this program can consume 20 Mbytes of RAM with its impeccable graphics and rich sound, it tested well on a Centris 650 with 8 Mbytes.
The opening sequence creates a moody world of lost souls. Suddenly, you face a wheel of misfortune; the Gingerbread Man spins in its center. Using the cursor, which wears a top hat, you choose a character for your cerebral perusal. Will it be the aging musician, the butcher or another?
Once inside, a spinning, muttering head awaits you. The interface is deliberately ambiguous and sometimes bewildering. This is not a game but an abstract mind romp. Experimentation with the mouse and keyboard is the key to gaining insight into each character's psyche. Ultimately, the fun lies in visually and aurally playing along with each character's song, producing vivid cognitive kaleidoscopes of images and sounds.
When a song ends, you return to the wheel for another spin, a process that does become slightly tedious after a while. However, the attraction remains in each unique creation you produce. Finally, when you're finished, just slip the disc into your audio player. The Residents will weave their magic again. Eye know it!
ION can be reached at (310) 312-8060.
Lode Runner: The Legend Continues
By Rick LePage
It's not deja vu, but it's close. You still have to work your bounty hunter Jake through level after level of subterranean labyrinths, fending off the mad monks of the evil empire in your mercenary quest for bags of gold.
Yes, Lode Runner is back. No II, no Pro, no Deluxe. Now called Lode Runner: The Legend Continues, it's available from Sierra On-Line Inc. for an estimated street price of $45.95.
The original version of Lode Runner was one of the first commercial games available for the Macintosh when Broderbund Software Inc. shipped it in 1984. The graphics back then weren't bad, the music drove everyone crazy, and it was damn addictive. Although it was popular, other Mac games eventually overtook it in look and game play, and Broderbund never updated it. Now Sierra has picked it up and given it new life.
At its core, the new version isn't much different from the original. You climb ladders, swing across ropes and dodge those monks as you pick up bags of gold and other items. If you pick up all of the gold on a level, a portal appears that leads you to another maze, where you get to go through the process all over again.
Sierra has excelled in the presentation, bringing Lode Runner up to today's game standards. As a result, the new Lode Runner is a lot like Psygnosis Ltd.'s Lemmings, in which arcade skills are as important as a sharp mind to solve the riddle of each level. The graphics have been updated to the 1990s, there are plenty of new tools to help you go up against the monks, the music will still drive you crazy, and there is now a two-player option. Sierra also added a game editor that lets you create your own world in case you tire of (or beat) the labyrinth that ships with the game. All in all, it's a great reworking of an old classic.
Sierra On-Line Inc. of Bellevue, Wash., can be reached at (206) 649-9800 or (800) 757-7707; fax (408) 644-2018.
PowerPoker
By Jeff Green
Are you the chump of your Friday night poker games? The one who always leaves the table broke after a night of misplayed bluffs and failed flushes? Well, stop moping and get yourself a copy of Electronic Arts' $39.95 PowerPoker. This is not only the best poker game for the Macintosh we've ever seen; it just might teach you a thing or two.
PowerPoker offers 77 varieties of the card game, brilliantly implemented in a clean and clever Mac interface. You play against five other people, either computer-generated or real (via LocalTalk, Ethernet or Apple Remote Access). You can choose the game yourself or you can turn on Dealer's Choice to switch the game automatically with each new hand. Betting limits, wild cards and other rules are all customizable.
Each player is represented by an animated face that changes expression with victory and defeat. If you install the full program, you can replace the faces with QuickTime video clips of each player that are amusing but tend to slow down the game. PowerPoker also features the voice of a dealer who moderates the game and a host of great sound effects, including the sound of shuffling and of chips and cards hitting the table.
For the more serious-minded poker student, analytical tools can show hand strengths, display a line graph of each player's status over the past 50 games and even give you a midhand what-if analysis based on cards you might draw. Also featuring a 70-page manual with a glossary of poker terms, PowerPoker is nothing less than a complete poker tutorial -- as well as a fun game to play.
Electronic Arts bills PowerPoker as "the ultimate poker simulation," and we agree. Even better than real life, you can belch and smoke cigars in front of your Mac all you want, and no one's going to make you leave the table.
Electronic Arts of San Mateo, Calif., can be reached at (415) 571-7171 or (800) 245-4525.
Prince of Persia 2
By Jeffrey Sullivan
If your tastes run toward arcade games, you won't want to miss Broderbund Software Inc.'s Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame.
Picking up a few days after the original story ended, the $40 sequel places the newly married Prince in another scuffle with the nasty vizier Jaffar. You enter the throne room to discover you've been replaced by a simulacrum. Worse yet, no one recognizes you. Your doppelganger orders you put to death, and with a running leap through a nearby window, you begin the game.
Throughout your journey to restore your good name and defeat Jaffar, you must run, crawl, jump and fight your way through 15 trap- and puzzle-filled arcade levels set in five exotic locations. Prince of Persia 2's story line is more involved than the original's, with new magic capabilities: For instance, you can separate your soul from your body and wander the world as a shadow.
As with any game of this type, the way you figure out how to solve a level is by dying a lot; every time you die, you learn what not to do. We found Prince of Persia 2 formidable -- much more difficult, in fact, than the original. This is a welcome challenge to die-hard fans, but much more likely to frustrate casual gamers. Fortunately, clues are available on various on-line services, and Broderbund sells a strategy guide (which covers both Prince of Persia games).
Prince of Persia 2's gorgeous graphics, fluid animation, challenging puzzles and exciting story make it a clear winner. Arcade aficionados will want to return to the game time and again to try to better their score.
Broderbund Software Inc. of Novato, Calif., can be reached at (415) 382-4400 or (800) 521-6263; fax (415) 382-4582.
Eric's Ultimate Solitaire
By Rick LePage
It came out too late for us to include in last year's games issue, but Eric's Ultimate Solitaire from Delta Tao Software Inc. is a keeper that deserves mention.
Seventeen solitaire games are packed into this $49 program, ranging from the staid Klondike to the arcane Black Hole. You can create separate players and track the number of hours (or days) that each has wasted playing Baker's Dozen.
Eric's uses the Macintosh interface better than any solitaire game that came before it; and, of course, it lets you cheat. It is the best, by far, of any solitaire game we've seen on the Mac. Buy it and throw those cards away.
A demonstration version of Eric's Ultimate Solitaire is included with the CD-ROM version of System 7.5.
Delta Tao Software Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., can be reached at (408) 730-9336 or (800) 827-9316.
BreakThru
By Lee Fowler
Spectrum HoloByte Inc.'s $44.95 BreakThru might be the company's first knockoff of Tetris that has the addictive appeal of the original game.
The goal of BreakThru is to remove all the bricks and foreign objects from a wall in a set time. Bricks are removed by clicking on a group of bricks that have the same color; as they disappear, the other bricks in the wall slide down to fill the gaps. While you're working on that seemingly simple task, bricks, missiles and bombs are marching across the top of the screen, and you need to maneuver them to drop into places where you can build groups of bricks. What usually happens, however, is that they drop automatically into the wrong gaps.
Adding to your troubles, the walls are littered with spiders, rocks, tin cans and other obstacles that impede your attempts to remove the bricks. You can use randomly dropped elements, such as bombs and missiles, to help get rid of some of this stuff, but managing it all in five minutes isn't easy.
You can change the time limit to two, five or 10 minutes (you can set no limit, but that's not much fun), and there are four skill levels: Child, Easy, Medium and Hard. There are also cooperative and competitive two-player modes.
I've tried some of the company's other Tetris-style games, such as Welltris and Wordtris, but none of them were really worth playing for long. BreakThru is different; it's much more fun and very playable. It will run on all Macs except the Mac Plus, SE, Classic, PowerBook 100 and Mac II.
Spectrum HoloByte Inc. of Alameda, Calif., is at (510) 522-3584; fax (510) 522-9357.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
Reviews Page 34
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Review: The MacWEEK play list part 2
Of course the Macintosh is a serious business machine; that's why you read MacWEEK. But with the holidays comes a lighter workload, absent co-workers and time to appreciate what a great game machine the Mac is. Here are our reviews of some of the year's hottest titles.
SimTower
By Steven Roback
SimTower from Maxis is the zenith of intelligent urban-planning games. Your task: to design a vertical city up to 100 stories high and place the Unidenominational Cathedral on top as a shimmering crown.
To win the $44.95 game, you must manage the construction of offices, restaurants, condos and elevators while maintaining an acute awareness of human behavior; building costs; and the occasional fire, terrorist attack or cockroach infestation.
This game is both maddening and trance-inducing. An endless flow of human silhouettes trudge antlike up stairs, through corridors and down elevators. An accelerated spinning clock tracks the days and years, while hypnotic dawn-to-dusk graphics create an eerie and effective sense of humanity's relationship to the world it builds. Window options and pop-ups allow control over game variables such as human stress levels and elevator timing. All of these influence the financial and social health of the tower and keep the builder involved in countless adjustments that determine the tower's ultimate fate.
Relentless antlike human motion may at times become tedious in the 2-D display. Also, some sound effects may be irritating and are better left on low volume. SimTower nevertheless succeeds in creating an imaginative and captivating look into how people live, as well as the brutal financial and social consequences of the decision-making process.
Maxis of Orinda, Calif., is at (510) 254-9700 or (800) 336-2947; fax (510) 253-3736.
Monopoly
By Steven Roback
True lovers of this classic American board game will be in for hours of joyous real-estate acquisition and capitalist adventure with MacPlay's easy-to-navigate and graphically accurate version of Monopoly. Race car, thimble, wheelbarrow and all of your other favorite playing pieces are available by clicking on icons as you enter new players to compete against humans or the computer.
Each player clicks on a pair of dice in a Status box, which also tracks each player's cash, properties, assets and monopolies. A text window keeps players from cheating by keeping track of every move and transaction. Great sound effects include rolling dice, clopping pieces, train whistles and bank alarms. As the computer moves each piece to its square, true-size graphics of properties and Community Chest and Chance cards pop up in the center of the board. Dialog boxes keep the game moving and allow for quick and easy trades, mortgages and building purchases. Each player has a window with detailed information on holdings. These windows cannot be resized, which can crowd smaller screens. The small game board can't be resized either. The game board doesn't show property names, but it can show property owners via icon. However, it's easy to end up with icon overload.
The social interaction -- the banter, cajoling and accusations of stealing -- is part of fun of Monopoly, and this is hard to accomplish when players are crowded around a computer. Nevertheless, this $29.95 game is an excellent simulation and may be perfect for the serious tournament player or hard-core addict.
MacPlay of Irvine, Calif., is at (800) 969-4263; fax (714) 252-2820.
PGA Tour Golf II
By Maria Sample
It's not the Olympic Club, but PGA Tour Golf II is better than your average municipal course. The $59.95 game from Electronic Arts features seven courses, six tournaments and several great viewing options.
PGA Tour Golf II requires at least System 6.0.7, 2 Mbytes of RAM for color and 5 Mbytes of disk space for the aesthetically pleasing graphics.
In addition to several courses, a driving range and putting green are available to acquaint you with the nuances of the program. If you're not the manual-reading type, it may take you a while to figure out that each swing requires three mouse clicks.
The views are the best part of the game. In order of coolness, they are Hole Fly-By, Ball-Cam, Hole Browser and the putting grid.
Hole Fly-By provides an overview of the hole from green to tee, so you see the hole in a different light. Ball-Cam shows the path of the ball from the ball's point of view after each swing, except for putts.
Hole Browser lets you change the angle and see your shot from any view. The putting grid brings up an image of the green, helping you read the break of the putt.
Selecting pros to play with, or simply watching them play, is a good way to learn how the game works. Although I got tired of the three-click stroke, I enjoyed the caddie option (standard on most golf games), which picks your clubs for you, and the draw-fade meter for hooking or slicing to avoid hazards.
I also liked the Mulligan option (available only during practice rounds), instant replay, wind gauge, skins game option and familiar announcers updating you on the leader board. A word of warning, though -- turn the sound off or the broad, sweeping music will drive you insane in less than three minutes.
Electronic Arts of San Mateo, Calif., can be reached at (415) 571-7171 or (800) 245-4525.
Flying Colors
By Honey Bee Evans (age 10), B.B. Said (age 10) and Walker Shapiro (age 9)
With lots of shimmering stamps and 256 colors, you can create wonderful pictures in Flying Colors, a $59.95 paint program for all ages from Davidson & Associates Inc.
For example, you can make pictures of dragons guarding gems and gold with a cave as a background. Some of the stamps flicker and move; for instance, the fire looks like it's really burning and the jewels are glowing. Not only can you make fabulous pictures, but you can make birthday cards, invitations and more.
We thought this program was great. Although most of it is just stamping things down, the pictures turn out wonderful because the stamps and the backgrounds are so beautiful. There are many dazzling stamps to choose from, including shells, dragons, flowers, fish, asteroids, people and much, much more. You can rotate the stamps, change their size, and make them lighter or darker.
You also get to paint things in magnificent colors. Some of the color gradients are animated, so what you draw will have a moving rainbow of colors. There are also paint tools like Brush, Paint Bucket, Line, Spray Paint, and shapes and patterns. You can also add writing to your pictures.
One thing that we like to do is to make a design with the Symmetry tool turned on so the same design will appear evenly all around the screen. It turns out to be really neat! Flying Colors is one of the best programs we have ever used.
Davidson & Associates Inc. of Torrance, Calif., can be reached at (310) 793-0600 or (800) 545-7677; fax (310) 793-0601.
Museum Madness
By Honey Bee Evans (age 10), B.B. Said (age 10) and Walker Shapiro (age 9)
MECC's Museum Madness is a game where you have to think a lot. It's for ages 10 to 13. The idea of the $49.95 game is there is a big science and history museum that got messed up by a computer virus; you go to different exhibits like the Revolutionary War or the solar system, figure out what is wrong, and fix it.
You learn by doing because the game gives you information that helps you solve the problem and teaches you what the exhibit is about.
You have some tools in a backpack to help. For instance, if a room is too dark, you can take your flashlight so you can see whatever you click on. You also have some help from a robot, Mick. He will say what is wrong and what you must do.
Different places have different problems. For instance, a machine might be out of order and you must put the parts together where they should go, or you might have to figure out how to board a ship and find your compartment. Sometimes you talk to the people from olden times and they tell you what things were like in their time.
Museum Madness is a very educational game with true history and science facts. It is a fun and challenging way to learn things that happened in the past. It's not a game to just pass the time.
MECC of Minneapolis can be reached at (612) 569-1500 or (800) 685-6322; fax (612) 569-1551.
Glider Pro
By Devon LePage (age 9)
Glider Pro is the $49.95 sequel to Casady and Greene Inc.'s Glider. In this game, you fly a paper airplane through a house and the world outside it. Each world has a number of stars that you need to pick up to win the game.
Along the way you get points by landing on clocks, and there are hidden bonus points that you get when you fly over them. Plenty of obstacles and enemies along the way, such as balloons, darts, helicopters, goldfish, bouncing basketballs and dripping water, will cause your glider to crash.
You can pick up rubber bands to help shoot some of the enemies down, but you will need to fly pretty good to get through all of the rooms without crashing. You will find that things like boom boxes and electrical outlets will also kill your glider when you fly over them at certain times.
To protect your glider, you can pick up aluminum foil, which covers your plane and protects you against enemies for a while.
Glider Pro comes with a pretty big world that you can fly through, but one of the fun things about the game is that you can create your own world. In it you can add rooms, enemies, furniture, prizes and other things. You have to put blowers in the rooms to keep your glider moving, and you have to remember to put a way to get out of each room or else you'll crash pretty quickly.
Some of the other things you can put in your world are fireplaces that will take you up the chimney and out of your house, and invisible doorways that transport you to other places in your world. You shouldn't make it too easy, or the house won't be much fun.
I really liked Glider Pro, but the program crashed too much when I was making up rooms in the Room Editor. If you make your own world, you should save every time you finish putting a room together or you'll lose what you were working on.
Glider Pro requires a color or gray-scale Mac and System 7.0 or greater.
Casady & Greene Inc. of Salinas, Calif., can be reached at (408) 484-9228; fax (408) 484-9218.
The Cat Came Back/Digby's Adventures
By Anita Malnig
Interactive stories are staples of children's software -- and the genre keeps getting better.
Two good ones are available on CD-ROM from Sanctuary Woods Multimedia Corp.: The Cat Came Back and Shelley Duvall's Digby's Adventures. In both stories, the artwork is bright and well-drawn, the animation lively, and the music cheerful. Both are also slow when moving from one scene to another.
The Cat Came Back is a story about a lost cat's adventures as it finds its way home. Four different modes offer a variety of activities for kids. In Listen-Along mode, you can have the story read to you as the scenes move along. In Write-Along, you can keep a diary of the cat's adventures, write your own version of the story or solve mystery clues that lead you to where the cat may be. Read-Along is perhaps the most fun: You click on an object in the illustration and something happens -- for example, water boils over -- or click on the word balloon icon and answer questions such as "Can you find six kitchen utensils?" Sing-Along requires speakers (if you have an external CD-ROM drive), and it will get you singing! The activities are simple yet diverse, and there are enough of them that you won't exhaust all possibilities too quickly.
In Digby's Adventures, Shelly Duvall tells the story of her 1-pound dog Digby and the scrapes a little pup can get into. The dog also has his own voice, and a cute one at that. You can let him tell you the story straight through or choose numerous other routes. One is to help Digby out of his troubles by clicking which action he should choose; for instance, should he jump into the basement window or crawl under a fence to escape some danger? You can also play games such as guiding him through a maze or racing him through squares in the garden to escape from the gardeners working there.
Digby is billed for children ages 3 to 7 and that seems about right; Cat is recommended for kids 7 to 11, but I'd bring that down a few years. Both are fun and offer real layers of activity.
Sanctuary Woods Multimedia Corp. of San Mateo, Calif., can be reached at (415) 578-6340; fax (415) 578-6344.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
Reviews Page 35
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
ProductWatch: Get set to output on the road
Smaller size, ever-lower prices and more functionality make portable printers more appealing.
By Mitzi Waltz
It is inevitable. If you're going to compute, e-mail and fax on the road, you're going to print there as well. And with the latest PowerBook-compatible portable printers, you can produce the same crisp black-and-white or even color documents that you would get at the office.
Apple's Portable StyleWriter has garnered great reviews for its high-quality output, but it has plenty of competition. The Kodak Diconix 180si Printer/Serial from Eastman Kodak Co., the MobileWriterPS from Mannesmann Tally Corp., the WriteMove II from GCC Technologies Inc., the Citizen Notebook Printer II and the PN60 for the Macintosh from Citizen America Corp., the SlimWriter from Atlantic Technologies Inc., and the DeskWriter 320 from Hewlett-Packard Co. offer portable output options as well.
When Mark Simon, president of Gardena, Calif.-based P and S Appliance Parts Corp., a wholesale distributor, goes on the road with his PowerBook 170, he needs to produce hard copy on the spot to finalize the sale. Simon said he has often clinched a deal by printing full-color mock-ups of labels for large clients, such as Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Circuit City Stores Inc.
His Citizen Notebook Printer II has been reliable. "I've had no paper jams or problems with poor quality, and I'm afraid it's gotten pretty rough treatment," he said. "It's not designed to do volume printing, but for what I do, it's just right." He added that its color cartridge does an adequate job of reproducing Pantone colors he specifies in QuarkXPress.
The 360-dpi QuickDraw device prints on plain paper using thermal-fusion technology, and at 2.6 pounds, it's one of the lightest printers around, even with its built-in five-page sheet feeder. It can use Apple's StyleWriter driver for black-and-white copy and a proprietary driver for color.
Citizen's newest printer, the PN60 for the Mac, is the size of a flashlight and half the weight (1.1 pounds) of the notebook printer. It has a resolution of 360 dpi and can output at 2 pages per minute in color or monochrome. It does not, however, support Citizen's optional sheet feeder.
HP's DeskWriter 320 can also print color with a $49 color kit. This 300-dpi inkjet printer can be outfitted with a 60-sheet autofeeder, making it a better match for quantity jobs. It weighs 7.5 pounds with the feeder; the base unit weighs 4 pounds.
A rechargeable battery is available for $49, although one user said the battery is interchangeable with the less expensive Panasonic camcorder battery.
Crisp monochrome
The Apple Portable StyleWriter outputs 360-dpi black-and-white copy. It's the same printer as Canon USA Inc.'s BJ10SX Bubblejet. It comes with a manual feeder, but a 50-sheet autofeeder is available. It's equipped with 39 scalable TrueType fonts, a battery and a recharger unit; and at 4.5 pounds, it fits the definition of portable.
Although it doesn't print gray-scale pages, the StyleWriter benefits from Apple's advanced printing technology, which improves the appearance of text and graphics. Kodak's Diconix 180si Printer/Serial also supports TrueType, although you'll need the Kodak Mpower 180si Interface Kit to link the inkjet device to your PowerBook. Unfortunately, it offers a best-case resolution of only 192 by 192 dpi.
Kodak points to the portable printer's ease of use as its best feature. It has an LED control panel on top that lets users select print modes and fonts. The device can run on five C-size nickel-cadmium rechargeable batteries or an AC power supply. And because it has a parallel interface, PC portable users in the office can carry it along as well.
GCC Technologies Inc.'s WriteMove II is a 360-dpi QuickDraw printer that uses thermal technology to print sharp in black and white.
Like Citizen's portable, the WriteMove II is extremely light and compact, adding just 2 pounds to your briefcase. Thermal printers tend to make better transparencies than inkjet models do, since the ink is "baked on" rather than sprayed, and they can print on a wider variety of papers without bleeding. High-end laser paper is still the best medium for this model, but it and its thermal competitors do offer some extra versatility for business users.
Atlantic Technologies' 360-dpi SlimWriter uses a thermal printing method. It is QuickDraw-compatible with the Mac Pack -- Mac cable and drivers -- sold separately for $79. Manufactured by Toshiba, it is similar in size and weight to the GCC and Citizen models. Inkjet printers have a lower per-page cost than thermals, and their cartridges can be re-inked for even more savings.
A PostScript possibility
If you're torn between buying a portable printer or a new desktop printer, Mannesmann Tally's MobileWriterPS combines the best qualities of both. This 300-dpi powerhouse can go on the road, sit on your desk or be installed as a networked printer, automatically switching between PostScript Level 1 and HP PCL 4 languages for Mac and Intel-standard PC users. It's the only PostScript portable for the Mac.
The MobileWriterPS is a thermal printer, but it works with any kind of laser paper. (Users and reviewers have noted, however, that print quality drops precipitously when low-grade paper is used.) It is intended especially for mobile users who need high-volume printing. With a $999 list price, it's considerably more expensive than its counterparts, and its consumables are pricier as well: A five-pack of ribbons that will produce about 750 pages costs $75. The MobileWriterPS runs off a rechargeable NiCad battery with a battery-saving sleep mode; DC and AC power adapters are also available.
A recent study by BIS Strategic Decisions Inc., a Norwell, Mass.-based market research firm, has revealed that portable printers of all makes are apparently spending a great deal of time sitting on desktops. About 30 percent of these low-cost printers are sold to desktop-based users, who have purchased them instead of a more typical office machine. They offer the convenience of portability when needed, such as the ability to take the printer home with weekend work, and can easily be locked away in a desk drawer when not needed.
Making PC printers work
If management requires that costly mobile computing equipment be shared and has only PC printers on the shelf, you can try The Grappler IIsp from Orange Micro Inc. of Anaheim, Calif., which includes an adapter that hooks Macs into a PC parallel port plus a Mac printer driver. Or, you can hook up a non-Mac-specific printer to your PowerBook or Duo with PowerPrint 2.5 from GDT Softworks Inc. of Burnaby, British Columbia. PowerPrint has drivers that let Mac portables (and desktop machines) print to any PC-compatible portable printer, such as Canon's BJ10SX Bubblejet or Lexmark International Inc.'s IBM Portable Printer 5183, and to stand-alone PC printers. Users will also need an appropriate cable.
Marty Silbernik, marketing director for a rapidly expanding chain of restaurants that he asked not be identified, spends nearly half his time on the road. Thanks to PowerPrint, all he needs to carry is his PowerBook, a cable and a couple of disks. "PowerPrint enabled me to print to virtually every printer I found, [and] high-quality laser printers abound in nearly every hotel and business center," he said.
Depending on your printing needs, you may want to bring along a copy of Apple Remote Access Personal Server or Timbuktu Pro from Alameda, Calif.-based Farallon Computing Inc. in addition to your printer. These products will let you remotely print files from your PowerBook on printers at the office, which is very handy for transmitting sales orders to support staff for prompt processing while you're on the road.
And if you're caught by portable-printer breakdown or simply can't pack another thing into your already crammed briefcase, be sure to bring a cable and look for a quick-printing shop that will let you plug your PowerBook into a laser printer. Another emergency printing solution: Fax the document to your hotel's fax machine and pick up the hard copy at the front desk. Not exactly elegant, but it'll do in a pinch.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
ProductWatch Page 43
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Mac the Knife: Markets without borders work
The ecumenical spirit that's swept through the culture these past few weeks was about as expected as a foot of new powder at Lake Tahoe in July. Evidence is everywhere.
Elected representatives and former presidents of both parties came together for a moment last week to worship at the altar of free trade, while Bob Dole lectured European heads of state on foreign policy. And in Mexico, the opposition even got a cabinet post in the new administration.
But as the Knife points out, this liberal spirit has been a central feature of the Mac scene for as long as we've had Foreign File Access and Insignia's various solutions. Not that there aren't holdouts. Most developers long ago accepted the gospel of cross-platform viability, although a few, including Corel Corp., have yet to deliver.
Alert sources tell the Knife that the Canadian developer's Mac project is proceeding more or less on schedule. The first Mac application to ship early next year will be based on Photo-Paint, a $199 image-editing program that the company recently unbundled from CorelDraw. Thus Corel will join Apple as a member of that select club of spunky companies brash enough to offer an alternative to Adobe Photoshop. (In case you're wondering, the CorelDraw project is so distant that it hasn't shown up on radar.)
One image
Apple may market PhotoFlash as the Photoshop alternative, but it certainly has no quarrel with the many customers it shares with Adobe. Photoshop users have been among the first to put their names on the Power Mac 8100/110 waiting list. Seems you just can't make a Mac that's fast enough to completely satisfy the image-manipulation crowd, although sources who have had 8100/110 hands-on experience verify that it has never been faster than this.
That's why late-arriving reports that the NuBus on the new 8100 is slower than the original were met with skepticism. Could Apple have taken two steps forward only to take one bus step backward? If so, that RAID-sucking video project you've been working on might run faster on an 8100/80 (which is not such a bad situation, given the general unavailability of the 110).
One world
Free trade and free elections weren't the only items on last week's menu. This explosion of holiday spirit can mean only one thing: Macworld Expo is almost here. Communications will be a main theme, of course. Global Village, for example, will be showing its new OneWorld Combo -- a marriage of the OneWorld Fax and OneWorld ARA. Owners of the original products aren't left holding the bag, either, as the company has worked out an upgrade plan to address the hurt feelings buyers are likely to experience at the Global booth.
Don't be surprised if the company has more than a new piece of hardware to tout at the show. The Knife has heard that Macworld may be the time Global Village chooses to announce that it's branching out into the Internet business.
One future
If you're really well-connected, you don't have to wait for trade shows to see cool stuff. Those lucky stiffs in the right loop have been exposed to Escher, Apple's graphics technology of tomorrow. Reports are circulating of three-dimensional graphics extravaganzas that rival anything you can create with a Silicon Graphics workstation. Imagine combining this seriously cool technology with the Apple-applied marketing expertise currently driving the QuickDraw GX phenomenon.
Or imagine needing a 60-vote majority in the Senate to get what you want. In reality it only takes a bit of interesting information to get a MacWEEK mug. Tips are judged at (415) 243-3544, fax (415) 243-3651, Internet (mac_the_knife@macweek.ziff.com), AppleLink (MacWEEK) or CompuServe/ZiffNet/Mac.
MacWEEK 12.05.94
Mac the Knife Page 86
(c) Copyright 1994 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
