Mac Expert 1995 Winter/Mac Expert - Winter 95.iso/Les fichiers/Tidbits/TidBits 101 à 200/TidBITS#183⁄05-Jul-93

Text File | 1993-07-06 | 28.3 KB | 571 lines | [TEXT/ttxt]

TidBITS#183/05-Jul-93
=====================

 This week we welcome our latest sponsor, APS, and tell you how to
   find the most recent deals on APS offerings. We also examine
   volume II of Pacific HiTech's Info-Mac CD-ROM, which has grown
   significantly in size and features. Other articles include more
   details on the upcoming PowerPCs, a solution to a thoroughly
   confusing PowerBook problem, and a look at Abbate's
   VideoToolkit, which provides some interesting capabilities with
   a Mac and video hardware.

This issue of TidBITS sponsored in part by:

* APS Technologies -- 800/443-4199 -- [e-mail]
   Makers of hard drives, tape drives, memory, and accessories.

 For the latest APS price list, please send email to:
   [e-mail]


 Copyright 1990-1993 Adam & Tonya Engst. Non-profit, non-commercial
   publications may reprint articles if full credit is given. Other
   publications please contact us. We do not guarantee the accuracy
   of articles. Caveat lector. Publication, product, and company
   names may be registered trademarks of their companies. Disk
   subscriptions and back issues are available - email for details.

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Topics:
    MailBITS/05-Jul-93
    APS Sponsorship
    PowerPC Clarifications
    Info-Mac CD-ROM II: The Monster Archive
    Empowering Your Duo
    VideoToolkit Explained
    Reviews/05-Jul-93

[Archived as /info-mac/per/tb/tidbits-183.etx; 29K]


MailBITS/05-Jul-93
------------------
  This issue comes a day late, and for those of you who live in
  other countries, my apologies. July 4th is Independence Day in the
  U.S., and it is celebrated in a truly American way by blowing
  things up and taking a day off from work. We went to the six
  mile-long Dungeness Spit, which claims to be the world's longest
  sand spit. Upon seeing it, I of course had to run to the end and,
  back, ignoring the fact that I was running on sand, hadn't run 10
  miles in months, and wearing old running shoes, jeans, and a
  long sleeved shirt. I'm surprised I can walk today.


**Quadra 950 price drops** go into effect 06-Jul-93. The changes
  in the suggested retail prices range from $1,500 to $1,710 on the
  Quadra 950, and from $1,200 to $1,500 on the Apple Workgroup
  Server 95. If you've been tempted by a Quadra 950 recently give
  your friendly local dealer a call. The cheapest machine, a 950
  with 8 MB and a floppy, now lists for $3,999, down from $5,609,
  and thus comes into the price range of mere mortals.


**CopyDoubler details** were lousy in last week's review. We gave
  the wrong AOL address and upgrade price. Sigh, that's what happens
  when you believe a database. The real AOL address is
  [e-mail] and the upgrade price should be $19.95. If you
  snag the demo copy, which only works for three weeks, it includes
  an offer for $19.95 that's good until 31-Dec-93, which is the
  cheapest way to get CopyDoubler if you can't upgrade.


**CD-ROM Toolkit Redux** -- Russell Finn <[e-mail]>
  noted in response to our article on FWB's CD-ROM Toolkit that a
  recent MacWEEK report found no performance gain when using CD-ROM
  Toolkit with the AppleCD 300 drive, perhaps due to that drive's
  onboard caching. John Baxter used a AppleCD 150 in his tests, and
  the MacWEEK article did find speed increases with older single
  speed drives and slower double speed drives. So once again, make
  sure you can return CD-ROM Toolkit if it doesn't help you.


APS Sponsorship
---------------
  We are pleased to welcome our latest corporate sponsor, APS
  Technologies. APS has sold hard drives and other storage devices
  for years now, and has accumulated numerous commendations from
  industry publications for producing high-quality hardware and
  providing excellent technical support. In an industry where
  everyone uses the same mechanisms, things like cases, power
  supplies, cables, software, and technical support, not to mention
  prices, become the distinguishing factors. In recent years, APS
  has expanded their hardware and software offerings significantly
  and even has a catalog offering useful information about their
  products. Send them email or call to receive a copy of their
  catalog. In another unique move, APS's catalog carries only
  products that they use and recommend, not necessarily the best-
  selling lemming choices whose companies paid to appear, as in most
  mail order catalogs. Needless to say, Nisus is included. How could
  I not like these folks?

  I'm especially pleased to have APS sponsoring TidBITS because I've
  always felt that they made solid drives and were in general a
  class act. I've put my money where my mouth is as well, purchasing
  two 105 MB hard drives, a 44 MB SyQuest, a DAT drive and soon, a
  1.2 GB drive. And although five drives is a small sample, I've
  seen many reports on the nets that back up my consistently good
  experiences. Should you not have a good experience with APS's
  support, please, send them email so they can figure out what they
  did wrong and work to correct it.

  As part of their long-term sponsorship of TidBITS, we will make
  APS's price list available on our fileserver for anyone to
  request. "Piffle," you say. "I could look in the latest
  MacSolarSystem." Well, you could, but if you did, you might miss
  out on good deals. Companies place ads in magazines well ahead of
  the time the magazine appears in your hands, so the prices are
  often out of date. In addition, if APS has only a few of a certain
  drive left, they won't include it in a magazine ad in favor of a
  drive that they have lots of, since there's nothing worse than
  telling customers that you're out of what they want.

  The price list on our fileserver won't suffer these problems. APS
  will update it frequently, so you can always get the latest and
  cheapest prices, since hard drive prices never go anywhere but
  down. In addition, if they have only a few units left of a
  mechanism that some manufacturer is discontinuing, they will
  appear clearly marked, often at a special price.

  If you wish to order from APS, please use the phone numbers (toll
  free for the U.S., U.K., and Australia) in the price list itself
  and tell them about TidBITS so that they know that making the
  price list available via email is useful. As usual, I recommend
  that you shop around before making any large purchase; that was
  how I first settled on APS, since they were the only price
  competitive vendor several years ago whose salespeople could
  answer my questions about SCSI partitioning.

  In the future we hope to provide other files from APS that will
  share some of the knowledge they've accumulated from years of
  helping users with hard drives. I'll note when those files become
  available, and I'll also indicate when the price list changes so
  you can send for the latest one if you need it. You can request
  APS's price list by sending email to:

    [e-mail]

  No special subject or body are necessary. Occasionally email
  responses bounce, and although I try to manually reroute them,
  sometimes there's nothing I can do, so if you don't get the price
  list within a day or so, try again from another address if
  possible.


PowerPC Clarifications
----------------------
  As with many of our articles, the article on the PowerPC itself
  prompted comments from people who know more than I, so here are
  some quick notes that should help clarify the situation a bit
  more. First, it appears that Apple reps at PC Expo predicted that
  the release date of the first PowerPC machines will be in the
  spring of 1994, not January of 1994 as previously thought.

  Wade Williams <[e-mail]> paraphrased some comments
  from Jordan Mattson, the Marketing Manager for PowerPC Development
  Tools, in a recent developers' conference on America Online.

* The emulation mode is "rock solid." Apple has not found an
  application that will break it with the exception of TMON, but
  since it's a low-level debugger and not an application, it doesn't
  really count. Since the emulation is complete at the Toolbox
  level, Control Panels and extensions should work as well.

* The emulation will not include an FPU or MMU, as both would be
  incredibly slow. Someone asked about 3D-rendering packages that
  need an FPU, and Jordan felt convinced that they would be some of
  the first to go native since they need the extra speed.

  So again, any application that _requires_ an FPU won't work in
  emulation, just as they don't work on the Centris 610 sans FPU.
  Presumably, the lack of an MMU means that applications that have
  their own virtual memory scheme, such as Photoshop, may not work.
  I can only assume that the system software's VM will be supported
  for applications in native mode, but possibly not for those in
  emulation. However, he did not speak on this subject, so it is
  just my conjecture. Luckily, most applications that have their own
  virtual memory scheme will likely be ported to native mode
  quickly.

* This is the most important point he made: the PowerPC computer,
  whatever it may be called, will run the Macintosh OS.
  Specifically, System 7.1 or whatever happens to be current. Some
  of it will run native, some in emulation. However, it will be the
  same system software (well, there will probably be a special
  "System 7.1 for PowerPC," but it will work the same).


Info-Mac CD-ROM II: The Monster Archive
---------------------------------------
  At first I thought of titling this "Info-Mac CD-ROM II: Economy
  Size," or even "Family Size" but I realized that those terms don't
  mean anything, and you only know that "Economy Size" is bigger if
  the bottle of ketchup so labeled is bigger than the one labeled
  merely "Super Big Bottle O' Ketchup." One way or another, the
  latest issue of the Info-Mac CD-ROM from Pacific HiTech is big,
  really big, and a lot bigger than the previous edition. This is
  good, of course, and it was helped by the fact that during the
  interim between the two issues, sumex-aim acquired (and
  immediately started to fill) a much larger disk drive to replace
  its old economy-sized 200 MB drive. This CD holds 576 MB of data,
  uncompressed and nicely named, whereas the first issue held a mere
  112 MB.

  So what's on volume two? All sorts of good stuff that lives on
  sumex normally, as of May of 1993, and for those of you who have
  access to sumex via FTP or mirror mailserver, the file

    info-mac/help/info-mac-cdrom-2.txt

  contains a list of the files on the disk with one-line
  descriptions. (See TidBITS #130_ for mailserver instructions for
  sumex, but the basic idea is to send email to
  [e-mail] with one or more lines like this in the
  body of the message: $MAC GET info-mac-cdrom-2.txt)

  Unfortunately, the starving graduate students who started Pacific
  HiTech as a way to reduce their dependence on taxpayer dollars
  were unable to put every item from sumex on the CD-ROM because not
  all authors wished to have their programs distributed in such a
  way. That's the authors' right, and I respect Pacific HiTech for
  abiding by those wishes. Pacific HiTech gives free copies to
  authors of new programs or major upgrades on the CD-ROM, but since
  it would be too much work for them to determine who gets a copy,
  if you feel you deserve one for your shareware contribution to the
  disk, drop them a line.

  What's not on volume II? Some of the early copies of the CD-ROM
  were accidentally mastered without a System 6 desktop file, so if
  you use System 6, make sure to ask so that they can definitely
  send you a disk from the second mastering run. Ah, how soon we
  forget. I certainly would have.

  Volume II adds a number of nice touches that didn't exist in
  volume I. Pacific HiTech created an On Location index for the
  entire disk, so those of you with On Location should like that.
  Everything is uncompressed, so accessing files is easy and hassle-
  free, and more importantly you can easily search the text of files
  on the CD-ROM even if you don't have On Location. Tonya and I came
  up with an interesting use that we haven't quite implemented yet.
  Everyone always complains about how Microsoft Word conflicts with
  many third-party utilities because Microsoft ignores Apple's
  programming guidelines. However, since Microsoft isn't aware of
  many conflicts, Tonya wondered if this might be a computer legend.
  I, of course, thought not and suggested we search the Info-Mac CD
  for instances of "Microsoft Word" to see how often shareware
  authors mentioned it in documentation as causing problems. I tried
  this first with Super Boomerang, which worked fine, except that
  Super Boomerang doesn't show much of the surrounding text and
  doesn't let you work with the group of found files in any way.
  Then a friend lent me On Location, but I couldn't figure out how
  to make it search for the phrase "Microsoft Word" instead of the
  words "Microsoft" and "Word" in the same document, which is a
  different and less useful search. An interesting experiment,
  nonetheless, and one which I'll also try with Mark Zimmerman's
  Free Text Browser, for which there is also an index.

  In addition to the On Location index, Pacific HiTech created views
  of many of the collections of text files in Akif Eyler's excellent
  Easy View, which lets you browse through old issues of TidBITS,
  Info-Mac Digest, and Murph Sewall's recently deceased Vaporware.
  Easy View may not be as fast as the WAIS, and it may not provide
  weighted searching, but for a quick scan through a bunch of
  TidBITS issues, it's unparalleled. And besides, the more people
  who scan back issues on their own, the fewer people who send me
  mail asking if we ever did an article on using Macs in weasel
  research.

  Yesterday I had my annual hour-long argument with a friend about
  whether or not CD-ROMs are evil. He feels that the technology is
  too slow and limited, being read-only, and that Apple should put
  256 MB magneto-optical (MO) drives in every Mac this fall instead
  of a CD-ROM drive, as they supposedly plan to do. CD-ROM
  technology doesn't impress me, but I do feel that its pricing
  makes up for a lot (especially in comparison to $2,000 to $3,000
  MO drives and media ranging from $50 to $150), considering that
  the AppleCD 300 drive should now be available for under $400
  street price and that vendors can cheaply master CD-ROMs in
  quantity. The current price structure surrounding CD-ROM disks and
  drives makes them attractive, especially when they provide data
  like the Info-Mac CD-ROM, which reduces unnecessary network use
  and makes it easier for people to connect to sumex for the latest
  and greatest software.

  The Info-Mac CD-ROM II costs $49.95, and upgrades for owners of
  volume I are $29.95. U.S. users should add $5 for shipping and
  handling, whereas international users should add $9. Pacific
  HiTech can handle checks, money orders, or credit cards.

    Pacific HiTech -- 800/765-8369 -- 801/278-2042
      801/278-2666 (fax) -- [e-mail]


Empowering Your Duo
-------------------
  by Bill Dickson -- [e-mail]

  I was having some trouble with my Duo.

  Now, this was no ordinary trouble. This wasn't some problem with
  somebody's machine crashing now and then, or constant unjustified
  out of memory errors, or anything trivial like that. No, this was
  a problem with _my_ machine, and hence it was a matter of
  critical, nay, near national, importance.

  The problem manifested itself in two ways. The most common was
  when the machine was undocked, running on battery power. It would
  start to boot up happily, and then suddenly shut down in a manner
  best described, as Dave Barry would put it, as "suddenly and
  without warning." This usually happened during boot, but sometimes
  it happened a minute or two after the Finder appeared, and
  occasionally it happened any old time at all. If it hadn't been a
  complete shut down, I would have attributed it to computer
  narcolepsy.

  The second manifestation seemed to be modem-related, and led me to
  believe that it was a separate problem altogether. Whether on
  battery, power adaptor, or dock power, the whole machine would
  shut down the instant the Express Modem connected. This problem
  was not nearly so common, which was good, because otherwise I
  would have been prone to screaming fits long before now.

  I started by calling around for service and learned, to my dismay,
  that the minimum wait in this town (we're talking Seattle here,
  not some burg where they're still impressed by digital watches)
  for any kind of service is a week. I have no proof, but I strongly
  suspect that I would shrivel up and turn to dust if I was without
  my machine for a week. So I asked on the net rather than calling
  Apple and figuring out how to send my PowerBook into the wilds of
  Texas, or wherever Apple fixes things these days. Seattle
  PowerBooks don't like dry weather anyway.

  Alarmingly, quite a few people responded, but mostly with requests
  for a solution. It appears that I had a common problem. Most of
  the responses came from Duo owners, but a couple came from owners
  of other model PowerBooks. Luckily, two responses held a simple
  answer.

  If you slide the battery out of a Duo and look inside (the Duo,
  not the battery), you'll see the contacts way in the back. They
  are partially supported by a small piece of foam which presses
  them firmly against the battery terminals. In some cases, this
  foam doesn't do its job very well and you get poor, sporadic
  contact with the battery - the PowerBook disapproves of such
  treatment and responds by shutting off.

  So I reached in with a dry, clean, non-metallic object (a Pilot
  BP-S medium ballpoint, back end first) and carefully bent the
  contacts toward the battery terminals. It took about five minutes,
  and I haven't had either problem in nearly two weeks since - so
  apparently the Express Modem was also sensitive to the battery
  problem.

  This may void your warranty if the Apple Thought Police ever find
  out, but it beats shrivelling up and turning to dust.


VideoToolkit Explained
----------------------
  I had a dilemma. Philip Palombo from Abbate kept sending me email
  telling me that I should write about Abbate's product,
  VideoToolkit. I'm always willing to consider suggestions from
  readers, even if they are trying to push their own products, as
  long as they can convince me that the product is neat.
  Unfortunately, I have no experience with video (well, I'm
  extremely good at setting VCR clocks), and I couldn't for the life
  of me figure out why anyone would give a hoot about VideoToolkit
  from Abbate's press releases. Finally Philip called me and gave me
  the entire history of the product and the rationale for each
  feature, and now I agree - VideoToolkit is a cool idea. I'm going
  to follow the same basic outline that Philip gave me, since I
  think it's the only way non-video people will understand this
  program, and at $279 list, it's not out of the reach or ken of
  normal people.


History lesson
  Back in the dark ages of video, people would go out in the field
  (left field, I imagine) and record events. They would then come
  home and immediately "log," or write copious notes about, each
  scene, so they could easily recall each distinct scene when they
  edited the tape in an editing studio that could cost hundreds of
  dollars per hour. This log, a series of scenes, becomes an "Edit
  Decision List" (EDL) since you could use it to make decisions like
  putting scene 25 before scene 19 in the final tape. Needless to
  say, this logging process was generally considered about as much
  fun as dropping an open-face peanut butter sandwich face down on
  the rug.

  That's where OnTrack/Mac, VideoToolkit's predecessor, appeared,
  because Mark Abbate (later joined by Philip Palombo), realized
  this was a job for a dedicated database that could control a VCR
  or camcorder (with a little extra hardware, of course). The
  database could store the beginning and ending locations of each
  scene and provide text fields for identifying each scene. This was
  a major step up, because when you went into the editing studio,
  you had a nicely printed list of each scene's description, along
  with the exact starting and ending points.

  This was handy for professionals, but the main semi-sophisticated
  feature at the time was the capability to control the VCR or
  camcorder. That feature would increase in importance in the
  future. In addition, if a Mac was available in the editing studio
  then you could transfer the edit list to the high-end edit
  controller.

  By this time inexpensive controllers had shown up on the market,
  so you could create drafts, essentially, by taking an edit list
  and recording from one VCR to another. Unfortunately these
  inexpensive controllers were RAM-based, so you could make only one
  edit at a time. If you showed your draft to your client, and she
  hated scene 19 before scene 25, you had to go away and fix it.

  VideoToolkit soon filled this niche too, by automating the control
  of two source VCRs and a recorder at the same time. Now you could
  create your edit list in VideoToolkit from two logs, and then
  actually make a second-generation tape of your rough draft to show
  your client. When your client hated scene 19, all you had to do
  was change the order of your edit list in VideoToolkit and re-
  record the destination tape from the original. Because this was a
  database, you could store multiple logs and manipulate the edit
  list easily. At this point, VideoToolkit was a HyperCard stack,
  which made it easy to find specific scenes, and teachers and
  salespeople could link presentations to video scenes on another
  monitor, so when the teacher reached a certain point in a stack,
  clicking a button would play a specific scene from VCR. In
  addition, if you used a RasterOps video card with VideoToolkit,
  you could capture a snapshot of the beginning and end of each
  scene. This made it easier to remember how each scene looked,
  because you could visually identify the beginning and end.

  Enter QuickTime, which initially provided device independence to
  VideoToolkit's snapshot capability. That was a big help for the
  ever-finicky professionals, and Abbate also made it easier for
  professionals to create a standard edit list-format with
  VideoToolkit, again simplifying the edit process in the high-end
  editing studio.

  But what about Jane Q. User? Many of these features were aimed at
  professionals, but Abbate turned it around in VideoToolkit 2.0
  (which became a stand-alone application), since it's easy for a
  normal person to buy a camcorder and a digitizing card, and many
  people have at least one VCR around. First, Abbate added support
  for all QuickTime digitizing cards so VideoToolkit can suck the
  original video in through the card and turn it into a QuickTime
  movie. However, VideoToolkit uses a different method than other
  video capture applications. Instead of trying to swallow the
  entire video stream in real-time (like trying to drink from a
  garden hose), VideoToolkit digitizes each frame individually, then
  merges them into the QuickTime movie. Think of this as turning the
  hose on briefly, taking a swallow, and then turning it off
  quickly, repeating as necessary.

  This step-and-grab technique relies on VideoToolkit's ability to
  control the VCR carefully and requires a quality VCR (since the
  end quality will only be as good as the still frame quality), but
  it provides two interesting benefits. First, you can create an
  edit list in VideoToolkit and then have VideoToolkit create a
  QuickTime movie from that list, which is more efficient than
  bringing everything into the Mac and doing the rough editing
  there. Secondly, because VideoToolkit uses this step-and-grab
  technique, it can effectively create true 30 frame-per-second
  (fps) QuickTime movies up to full-screen size. Of course, this
  isn't currently realistic because of the amount of disk space and
  RAM, not to mention processing power, needed to compress such a
  large movie, since VideoToolkit can't compress on-the-fly because
  of the step-and-grab technique.

  So again, we're talking pretty neat stuff here. You can make a
  tape of something, create an edit list in VideoToolkit, suck that
  edit list into a QuickTime movie at up to 30 fps, and... well what
  about the sound? That's right, QuickTime does talkies. That's the
  latest feature, because this step-and-grab technique can't take a
  snapshot of audio, so VideoToolkit makes a second pass through the
  tape after stepping through digitizing the images. On this second
  pass, which goes in real-time, VideoToolkit grabs the sound track
  and lays it on top of the video track in the QuickTime movie,
  synchronizing it to match properly.

  Great, so we've got a QuickTime movie now. But it's a lot easier
  to find a VCR for a presentation than a QuickTime-capable Mac with
  a projector. VideoToolkit can also embed the timecode in first
  frame of the QuickTime movies text track. That gives you unique
  frame references. Now, if you take your QuickTime movie into Adobe
  Premiere, you have the advantages of digital editing, seeing where
  everything will go and moving more quickly than on an analog
  system. Because each movie has that unique frame reference number
  now, you can then export the edit list (technically, a CMX 3600
  EDL) out of Premiere, import it back into VideoToolkit, and have
  VideoToolkit control two VCRs to create a tape with your edited
  movie. You would, of course, lose any fancy effects you used in
  Premiere, since VideoToolkit is taking just that edit list and
  recording original footage from one tape to another, bypassing the
  digital step aside from the edit list.

  So, if you're doing a presentation and don't know if you'll have
  access to a QuickTime-capable Mac, you can create both your
  QuickTime movie (adding effects if you like) and a videotape of
  the same scenes (minus effects) and take both. If you only have a
  VCR and television, you've got that videotape backup, and that
  tape is also easier to give to grandparent-types without access to
  QuickTime if you do personal videos. Of course, it is possible to
  record a QuickTime movie to tape, which would give you your
  special effects, but when using the high ratio of software-based
  compression necessary to get the movie small enough to play back
  smoothly on the Mac, the quality may not be good enough. You can
  solve this by using pricey hardware compression (such as Radius
  VideoVision, RasterOps MoviePak or SuperMac's Digital Film) while
  creating the movie and recording it to videotape.

  Keep in mind that I'm merely reporting how things are supposed to
  work here. I don't have the hardware to play with VideoToolkit,
  and I don't have the background to judge it in comparison to other
  products. However, I think I've explained how VideoToolkit is
  supposed to work above well enough that you will get a sense of
  whether or not it's worth checking out for your purposes. That you
  can do by talking to Abbate more, either in email or in their
  America Online forum (keyword: Abbate).

  Information from:
    Philip Palombo, Abbate Video Inc. -- [e-mail]
      508/376-3712 -- 508/376-3714 (fax)


Reviews/05-Jul-93
-----------------

* MacWEEK -- 28-Jun-93, Vol. 7, #26
    CPU 2.0 -- pg. 69
    Common Ground -- pg. 69
    Contact Ease 2.0 -- pg. 74
    MAP II 1.5 -- pg. 76
    FutureBASIC -- pg. 76
    On The Air 1.1 -- pg. 77
    MovieWorks 1.1 -- pg. 79

* BYTE -- Jun-93
    Centris 650 & PowerBook 180c -- pg. 129
    FutureBASIC -- pg. 143
    Kodak PhotoEdge & Kodak Renaissance -- pg. 146


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