Expo exposed—More than a tea party at Boston’s MacWorld Expo
By Brian C. Keith
This year’s MacWorld Expo/Boston was a blast. Of course, the biggest firecracker at the show was Apple’s hand-held, intelligent organizer, personal assistant, communicator, and Etch-a-Sketch all-in-one—the “platform-agnostic” Newton MessagePad. It was so “hot” it was rolled out at a special unveiling on Monday before the show started. Other sparklers included Kai Krause’s demonstration of LivePicture and the release of a slew of new versions of Mac applications.
To those of you who’ve never attended MacWorld Expo at Boston’s World Trade Center, I can say only this: Getting to, around in, and from the place is like Scotty’s trying to maneuver the Enterprise on wheels down the eastbound Ventura Freeway on the Friday before Labor Day weekend. “Captain, I’ve got her up to warp 9, but she’s not going anywhere!”
At 9:25 a.m. my first day out, the 9:00 a.m. shuttle bus that was supposed to connect the South Station stop on the “T,” Boston’s mass transit system, with the World Trade Center still hadn’t shown. I gave up after waiting another five minutes—and walked. It was almost a mile—in a mind-melting, eye-squinting, swelteringly-humid 80 degrees. By the time I arrived a good 20 minutes later, I was drenched in sweat and very grumpy.
That was just the beginning of the logistical madness! MacWorld Expo events were held in three locations: the World Trade Center, the Bayside Exposition Center, and Boston Symphony Hall. The Bayside Expo Center is located well over two miles from the World Trade Center; and Boston Symphony Hall is well over three very circuitous miles away (especially during rush hour).
Little Cairo?
A big chunk of exhibitors was squeezed into the downscale, mock open-air, flea-market-like Bayside Exposition Center. It was here I felt most like haggling over prices with booth vendors. The real action and palpable excitement seemed to emanate from this side of the Expo. Bill Gates might show up at a place like this.
A second, relatively smaller cluster of exhibitors was housed in the more upscale, glitzy, snooty World Trade Center, which seemed insidiously fancier, grander, slicker. Here John Scully would be at home.
Apple hosted its own special Newton unveiling and exhibit at Boston Symphony Hall, which seemed probably as uniquely coy, self-aggrandizing, self-conscious, and self-aware as Apple “events” can get. Crowds were so thick and interest so keen here that Apple extended closing time a couple hours on Wednesday and Thursday nights. Wal-Mart shoppers would love this place!
The Mac exec with Kaleida-scope eyes…
At his keynote presentation on Wednesday morning in the Pavilion, literally the tent across the street from the World Trade Center, Nat Goldhaber, outgoing CEO of Kaleida Labs, Apple’s joint venture with IBM, introduced Mike Braun, who replaces him as Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer, and President.
Before coming to Kaleida, Nat remarked in his introduction, Mike worked at IBM for 21 years. That’s 21 years. What to do with a 21 year collection of blue suits, power ties, white socks, and loafers? I mean, if you worked for a company for 21 years, especially if that company were IBM, you’d undoubtedly be hauling quite a heavy load of corporate cultural baggage with you wherever you went. Is there a potential cultural conflict of interest here? Has Apple made a strategic blooper?
Although Mike’s reading of his audience was a bit off—when, for example, he failed to sense, or perhaps chose to ignore, the audience’s impatient desire to leave at the scheduled time—he certainly gets high points for the sheer effervescent energy he exuded during his part of the pair’s demonstration of ScriptX applications. And, he did wear a T-shirt, although I can’t recall whether it had an Apple, IBM, or Kaleida logo printed on it.
I’d like to tell you what Nat and Mike talked about, but for most of the rest of their presentation, I couldn’t hear anything! The Pavilion tent (and the World Trade Center for that matter), just happens to be smack in the middle of the flight path of virtually every airliner arriving and departing from Logan Airport, just a few miles across Boston Harbor. I mean, if I had waved at one of the passing planes overhead, the pilot probably would have signaled back.
Later that day, Katrin Eismann and Kai Krause were among a group of artists who talked about how they use Photoshop in a design conference called “Creative Imaging with the Mac.”
Kai ripped through a kaleidoscope of beta versions of some new Power Tool filters and a brief demonstration of LivePicture, from FITS Imaging Inc. of Paris, an application that enables you to open, rotate, skew, and resize huge, megabyte-sized graphic files in seconds rather than hours. Kai also presented a mind-blowing demonstration of LivePicture at a Friday afternoon conference session at the Bayside Expo Center.
Katrin, on the other hand, focused on the content and intent of her art, rather than strictly on the tools and techniques she used to create it—a welcome change of focus at MacWorld Expo.
Model not included, darn it!
Speaking of art, or, depending on which side of the fence you sit, lack thereof, Julie Strain, Penthouse’s 1993 Pet of the Year, demonstrated “The Virtual Photo Shoot,” an application from I.C.F.X., Inc. of San Rafael, California that enables you to create and print your own centerfolds.
Those standing in the exclusively male queue that snaked around the I.C.F.X. booth—conveniently arranged, by the way, behind a tall blue curtain—either smirked broadly, giggled nervously while making fleeting eye contact with passing attendees, or stared awkwardly at shoes. Ten companies presented X-rated material at MacWorld Expo this year. I guess you know a technology has arrived when they start creating X-rated titles and applications for it.
Also at the Bayside Expo Center, Gryphon Software Corporation demonstrated Morph 2.0, which enables you to transform still PICT, EPS, and TIFF images or dynamic QuickTime movies into “morphed” QuickTime movies, PICS animations, or unique still images.
The Gryphon saleswoman also demonstrated the application’s new caricature and warping tools, which enable you to create caricatures of subjects and distort and contort elements in images you import into the application.
In this new version Gryphon removed most, if not all of the limitations that marred the previous version. You can now export images in any size resolution, use start and end images of different dimensions, group key points, and rotate and scale groups of key points. Morph 2.0 is available now.
STF Technologies, Inc., whose booth was also located at the Bayside Expo Center, announced the release of FAXstf 3.0, that incorporates a long list of new features too numerous to list here. Notable new features, however, include support for Apple Events and AppleTalk Remote Access, as well as a new FaxSettings module that you can use to create settings files, specify communication options, and configure modems. FAXstf 3.0 will be available in October.
Teeth in the caps?
Back at the World Trade Center, MacWorld Magazine hosted a series of daily book signing sessions. Each day, MacWorld representatives handed out 100 free copies of books by Jim Heid, David Pogue and Joseph Schorr, and Deke McClelland, which the authors then signed. As the authors didn’t start signing the books until 11:00 a.m. each day, the queue for the 100 free copies formed promptly at opening time, 10:00 a.m., and usually didn’t end until sometime after the start of lunch.
After missing my chance at winning a free Microsoft cap in a big-draw demonstration of an Excel that incorporates Apple’s Casper voice recognition technology, I forced myself to endure a double-whammy of demonstrations (Mail and Word 5.1) to “earn” one. When I went to collect the cap, the Microsoft salesmen at the counter told me to put it on, as Microsoft reps would be wandering the World Trade Center floor awarding on-the-spot gifts to cap wearers. What the “gifts” were, he didn’t say—could have been another Microsoft cap for all I know, since I did not once experience, witness, or hear of anyone who won an on-the-spot gift. After wearing the thing for three days with no result, I traded it in for a WordPerfect T-shirt. It was a better deal, I think.
Across the aisle, Adobe, who always seemed to be competing with Microsoft for the attention of passersby, loudly proclaimed the release of Acrobat, Adobe’s new paperless electronic document product, Illustrator 5.0, Premiere 3.0, new Adobe PostScript printer drivers developed with Apple, and Wild Type, a new collection of playful typefaces.
New features in Adobe Premiere 3.0, which is available now, include: improved audio editing tools, previewing capabilities, and movie processing and output, new style sheets that enable you to pre-set and save options, a waveform monitor that enables you to accurately determine the quality of images, a new Title window, a batch digitizing capability, and a slew of enhancements to the product’s interface.
At their booth, DeltaPoint demonstrated DeltaGraph Pro 3, which includes these new features: improved performance, twelve new chart types, more data manipulation options, smart presentation layouts, a user interface you can configure, the ability to load and save custom color palettes, support for Apple Events, new color palettes, formatting options, new symbols and backgrounds, the ability to rotate charts 360 degrees, the new Chart Advisor, which helps you choose the right chart for your data and audience, and a new eye dropper, shadow, and blend tool. DeltaGraph Pro 3 will ship in late September.
Sneaky non-preview
Apple’s booth at the World Trade Center was a bustle of activity. If you hastened there to see PowerPC, however, you were in for utter disappointment. Unless you were invited (or sneaked in) to Apple’s Cityview Ballroom for PowerPC developers upstairs in the World Trade Center, all you got to see of PowerPC were a couple Apple sentries standing in front of a monitor on which a looping redraw of a fractal image was running, a Compaq 486 on which another looping redraw of an identical fractal image was running (albeit more slowly), and a PowerPC chip under a microscope. I guess we’ll have to wait until January.
Throughout the entire show, the Newton presentation area in the Apple booth was tightly packed with a mass of craning necks, ogling eyes, and nudging elbows. The dense mass of bodies only seemed to dissipate slightly toward the end of each day. I guess these people eventually went somewhere to sleep.
Computer Town of Salem, New Hampshire, was the only vendor at the World Trade Center that sold Newton MessagePads. Lechmere Department Stores of Cambridge, Massachusetts, local CompUSA stores, and Computer Town also sold Newtons at the Bayside Expo Center.
Tom Jacobs, President of Computer Town, told me that he had a total of 850 Newton MessagePads to sell at the show, which he divided into lots to be sold each day. All the MessagePads in each lot, he said, generally disappeared before noon each day of the show.
Computer Town also sold a slew of MessagePads at their stores in Massachusetts and New Hampshire on the Monday before the show. A salesmen at the Salem, New Hampshire branch with whom I spoke told me that the queue for Newtons started forming an hour or two before they opened. By the time the store opened, the line wormed its way out the door and far into the parking lot, remaining that long for a good part of the morning.
Computer Town sold two types of MessagePad configurations at the show: the Newton MessagePad System, that consisted of a MessagePad and a 2400 bps send FAX modem, and the Newton MessagePad Professional, that included the MessagePad, the 2400 bps send FAX modem, and a serial cable and vaporware combination called Connection Pro Kit.
The Connection Pro Kit enables you to connect your MessagePad to a Macintosh or Windows-run PC, view, edit, backup, and synchronize your Newton data, and translate and transfer data back and forth between popular Macintosh or Windows and Newton applications. The Connection Pro Kit won’t be vaporware for long, as Apple has promised to release it within the next month or two.
Computer Town sold the MessagePad System for $897 at the show and $797 by reservation and mail order. They also sold the MessagePad Professional for $997 at the show and $897 by reservation and mail order. Don’t run to your telephone though, as Computer Town as an authorized Apple reseller cannot sell you a Newton by mail unless you first meet a Computer Town representative in person. So unless you’re going to be in the Boston or Salem, New Hampshire area in the near future, you’ll have to wait to purchase your MessagePad here on the Left (out) Coast.
At the show, Lechmere Department stores sold the basic Newton MessagePad (sans modem, cable, and Connection Pro Kit) for $700. But you had to purchase it at their booth and then schlep over to their Cambridge, Massachusetts store to pick it up.
Although not at the show, the Harvard Co-op in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts was selling a limited lot of Newton MessagePads (System configuration) for $850. Peter Allerhand of University Computers at the Boston University Bookstore Mall in Boston also told me that he expected to obtain Newton MessagePads for sale at “competitive prices” at the beginning of the school year in late August.
Apple’s price on Newton’s head…
Most interesting about Newton’s price, I think, is that the margin for the basic unit is probably the lowest Apple has ever seen for any of its products. After the show, I discovered that Apple—based on at least one confirmed case—is selling the basic MessagePad to dealers and resellers for $700. Considering some of the retail prices Newton fetched at the show, that makes for a very thin margin, so thin in some cases in fact that it’s practically non-existent!
Rather than making money from the unit itself however, Apple apparently hopes to cash in on the accessories and the peripherals, network interfaces, memory, applications, and services that are accessed and distributed through the PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card International Association) cards you’ll need to buy to really use the MessagePad.
Third-party Newton applications and PCMCIA cards released or already in the works include: Day-Timer Expense Assistant, from Slate Corporation, and Polaris, from State Of The Art, a pair of business expense tracking programs; Meeting Maker software link, from ON Technology, that enables you to link your Newton to Meeting Maker, their group scheduling Mac application; Drawpad, from Windows-based CAD company Saltire Software; Gofigure, a calculator program from Dubl-Click Software; ContactPad, a contact management package from Pastel Development; Dyno Notepad, an outlining tool from Portfolio Systems; CSL Profiles, a program from Chancery Software Limited that enables teachers to prepare anecdotal student report cards; Personal Time & Billing and Financial Analyst, from Great Plains Software; Portable MLS, a real estate multiple listings service application from Integration Systems; Fingertip for Golf, Personal Training, Youth Sports, and Fan Analysis, a set of sports statistical and personal training tracking applications from Fingertip Technologies, Inc.; MobileCalc, a spreadsheet application from MobileSoft, Inc.; Isaac’s Notepad, a mathematical problem solving application from Prescience Corporation.
Accessories you can purchase from Apple include the Connection Kit and Connection Pro Kit, pager PCMCIA card, FAX modem, print pack, power adapter, battery booster pack, rechargeable battery pack and recharger, carrying cases, and one and two MB memory storage cards.
Apple and many third-party companies demonstrated some of these accessories and products at the Newton exhibit at Symphony Hall. Notable demonstrations I witnessed include NewtonMail, BellSouth’s MobileComm regional and nationwide paging service (that you access through Apple’s nifty pager PCMCIA card), Connection Pro Kit, and Apple’s Newton application development kit.
Apple’s demonstration of “beaming,” their term for transmitting data via infrared light, was also as delightful as it was notable. After witnessing the beaming demonstration, it occurred to me that an ideal Newton shareware application waiting to be written would turn your Newton into a $700 TV remote control. The trouble is, however, Newton can only send a beam a maximum distance of one meter, so you’d unfortunately have to move extremely close to your television set to make it work.
In any event, the lucky few who were able to purchase a Newton during the show were frequently observed scurrying gleefully from the Computer Town and CompUSA booths to the exits—tell-tale red, yellow, and purple box snugly held under arm or firmly clutched in hand. Still other lucky, newly-blessed Newton owners were observed posing near OHVAs (optimal high-visibility viewing areas)—front rows in conference sessions, show floor entrances and exits, front seats on shuttle buses—MessagePad and passive stylus in hand, flaunting their luck to the chagrin and angst of unlucky passersby. If you’ve got it, flaunt it I guess.
Apple-drops keep falling on my head…
To buy or not to buy a Newton? One of the primary questions in my mind as I pondered over such a purchase concerned durability. Most pre-release photographs of the Newton prototype showed a hinged flip cover that protected the tap screen. Sometime during the testing of the prototype, however, Apple decided to ditch the hinged cover. When asked why, an Apple representative explained that they received too many negative comments about it.
But what if you drop it? What if you bang the crystal against something, or worse, if the crystal whacks up against something in your briefcase or luggage? Is it easy to break? Do you want to be the first to find out? Sharp Electronics, who co-manufactures the MessagePad with Apple, retains the hinged cover design in their soon-to-be-released version of the Newton called ExpertPad. It’ll be interesting to hear what owners have to say about MessagePad now that it lacks a protective cover.
When you are considering buying a Newton, also keep in mind what every Apple presenter at every Newton conference session I attended emphasized repeatedly: The Newton is not a shrunken Mac. The Newton is intended for capturing, organizing, and communicating itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny information bites. It is not intended for capturing, organizing, and communicating document-length chunks of information. Apple’s motto here: Ideas are to Newton as documents are to Macintosh. Remember that if and when you choose between a PowerBook and a MessagePad.
All these considerations aside, however, if you’ve got an extra 800 dollar bills laying around and you’re a trucker, lawyer, doctor, avid golf player, salesperson, teacher, real estate agent, or someone who travels regularly, the Newton MessagePad is for you.
(Brian C. Keith is a second generation professional technical writer who works for a large software development company with local offices in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley.)
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