Cupertino, Calif. - Blackbird is expected to land on dealers' shelves next spring, and with once-soaring PowerBook sales now slowing, Apple's only waiting for that moment to arrive.
Under the Blackbird code name, sources said, Apple engineers are developing a new line of all-in-one notebooks featuring easy expandability, a bigger screen, longer battery life and a touchpad for cursor control, among other innovations.
Tentatively scheduled for release in March, the new PowerBook will come in several configurations, at least one of which will have a 68040 if Motorola can deliver the new low-power version of that processor in sufficient quantity in time for the rollout. The Blackbird's processor will be mounted on a daughterboard, making it easy for users to upgrade their systems as faster or lower-power processors, including the PowerPC 603, become available.
At least one version of the Blackbird will support 24-bit color and come with a 9.4-inch, 640-by-480-pixel screen - significantly larger than current color models. Sources said Apple will use a thin-film transistor active-matrix LCD display from NEC Corp.
The new PowerBook reportedly will use a longer-lasting and more-efficient version of the PowerBook Duos' nickel-hydride-metal battery. Sources said Blackbird can be outfitted with dual batteries, one of which can be removed for recharging while the other powers the laptop. The device reportedly also includes a new chip that manages power to prolong battery life.
The floppy drive, installed in a multipurpose bay, will be removable to make room for an extra battery or other add-ons. In addition, sources said, the device will allow additional expansion via PCMCIA cards.
The new PowerBook will weigh about 6 pounds in a basic configuration, according to sources. It will sport a slender chassis with rounded edges. Ethernet-support and audio-in-and-out capabilities will be built-in.
According to sources, Blackbird features a new type of input device, a small square pad that tracks the motion of the user's fingers. Apple reportedly plans to include the touch pad, code-named Midas, in Pomona, its projected "designer Mac".
Like the Duos, Blackbird reportedly uses auto-refresh dynamic RAM instead of pseudo-static RAM.
Apple executives are counting on the Blackbird to give the company new momentum in the notebook arena. The original PowerBooks lifted Apple into leadership in that market, but over the past year IBM Corp.'s ThinkPad line has stolen away the mantle of technological and sales leadership. In its modular design the Blackbird will resemble the ThinkPad 750C, a new model IBM introduced this month.
Raines Cohen contributed to this report.
MacWEEK 09.20.93
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(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
News: Futuristic Mac design packs in features
By Robert Hess
Cupertino, Calif. - Where do Armani and Sharper Image collide? In a new line of Macs for 1995.
Apple is looking to combine AV technologies with new display and input devices in a line of inexpensive Macintoshes intended to capitalize on the company's image as a design innovator.
One of the first designer Macs, code-named Pomona, will be a midperformance desktop machine with slick, modern ergonomics. The idea, one source said, was to build a computer that wouldn't look out of place on the set of "Star Trek: The Next Generation."
Pomona will be aimed at executives, doctors, lawyers and those with home offices. Sources said Apple wants to attract users for whom a computer is also a piece of furniture.
Pomona will come in three pieces: a 10.4-inch, color active-matrix LCD display; a CPU in the new ultra-slim case; and a cordless, infrared keyboard and mouse.
Taking advantage of AV video, voice and telephony, Apple hopes to have Pomona serve as a television, a radio, a telephone with answering machine and a CD player, in addition to being a computer. Pomona's monitor will reportedly sport high-quality speakers, much like those offered with Apple's current AV monitor, the AudioVision 14.
The new model will also have a built-in microphone and video camera for video teleconferencing. For users needing a larger display, Pomona will support video out to external monitors and even television sets.
Pomona might even include a new touch-pad input device.
Despite its array of features and its focus on executive-level users, Apple is said to be hoping to price its "Sharper Image Mac" as a sequel to the Classic II. Sources said the company can accomplish this by almost exclusively using existing, low-cost components along with new, inexpensive materials.
One question that remains to be answered is the processor Pomona will use. While sources said the PowerPC 603 is a logical choice - and one many team members are pulling for - the processor might not be available at a low enough price by the time Pomona is introduced. More importantly, the AV technologies Pomona is expected to use will have been thoroughly debugged running on a 68040 and digital signal processor, not on a PowerPC.
In addition to Pomona, several styles and colors of designer Macs are reportedly being considered.
Apple declined to comment.
MacWEEK 09.20.93
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News: New Macs reach highs and lows
Quadras are cheaper; Duos carry premium
By Carolyn Said
San Francisco - There's good news and bad news in the prices expected for Apple's October crop of CPUs. The good news is that pricing looks aggressive for the three new Quadra models. The bad news is that, barring a last-minute change of heart on Apple's part, the two new PowerBook Duos will sport big-number stickers.
> Quadras. Two of the new Quadras are renamed and speedier Centris machines (see MacWEEK, Sept. 6, Page 1). The Quadra 610 will list for about $1,549 in an 8/160 configuration with Ethernet, sources said. The new model is a revamped replacement for the Centris 610, incorporating a full 68040 processor running at 25 MHz; the Centris 610 has a 20-MHz 68LC040, which lacks an FPU (floating-point unit). The Centris version is currently $2,319 for an 8/230 configuration.
The Centris 610 has sold briskly, and both users and dealers said last week they thought the Quadra version should enjoy similar success.
"We were already beginning to look favorably at the Centris 610, even at 20 MHz, so the bump up to 25 MHz is gravy. Especially with the faster processor, built-in Ethernet and that pricing, it's a very attractive alternative," said Richard Williams, project leader for Systems Engineering Solutions Inc. of Huntsville, Ala.
The Centris 650 will be reborn as the Quadra 650 and will come with a 33-MHz '040, up from 25 MHz. Sources said the Quadra-monikered 650 will sell for about $2,299 in an 8/230 configuration with Ethernet. That's about an 8 percent reduction from its Centris predecessor, which is now $2,489 for the same configuration.
The one genuinely new Quadra, the 605, is expected to cost about $1,500 for a 4/80 model, including the monitor. The new low end of the Quadra line will be based on a 25-MHz 68LC040; it will be upgradable to a full '040.
> PowerBook Duos. Apple will charge users a premium for the active-matrix displays of its new Duo models. The Duo 250, which uses the same 33-MHz '030 processor as the existing Duo 230, will have a 9-inch active-matrix screen that can display 16 shades of gray. Sources said it is expected to cost about $2,750 in a 4/120 configuration, meaning users will pay about $670 extra for the crisper display.
The Duo 270c, which sports an active-matrix color display, is expected to cost about $3,290 for a 4/120 model. That brings it in well under the all-in-one equivalent, the active-matrix PowerBook 180c, which is currently $4,079 in a 4/160 configuration but still puts it on the high end of the price spectrum.
"[The new Quadras have] good pricing. But the new Duos are overpriced," said Richard Biba, president of Allied Crafts Engineering, a West Covina, Calif.-based reseller.
Dan DiPaola, manager of desktop graphics at Walt Disney Pictures and Television in Burbank, Calif., said: "I think the Duos are cool, but there's nothing particularly innovative about these machines, and the price is too high. If the street price is $300 to $400 below that, it might be more appealing. Or, they could charge $200 more and throw in a free Newton."
Robert Hess and Jon Swartz contributed to this report.
Prices for fall CPU crop
Model Processor Configuration Price
Quadra 605 25-MHz 68LC040 4/80 with monitor $1,500
Quadra 610 25-MHz '040 8/160 with Ethernet $1,549
Quadra 650 33-MHz '040 8/230 with Ethernet $2,299
Duo 250 33-MHz '030 4/120 (active-matrix $2,750
gray-scale screen)
Duo 270c 33-MHz '030 4/120 (active-matrix $3,290
with FPU color screen)
MacWEEK 09.20.93
News Page 1
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News: Intel chips in on Pentium, PowerPC war
By Mark Hall
Santa Clara, Calif. - Feeling the heat from the headline-grabbing PowerPC, Intel Corp. has begun a campaign to refute claims by Motorola Inc., IBM Corp. and Apple about their new RISC processor and to entice Macintosh managers to consider Pentium-based systems instead.
Several industry analysts, however, challenged Intel's technical interpretations.
Motorola raised the temperature inside Intel with an aggressive publicity campaign around the PowerPC in recent months. Motorola and its alliance partners contend that the first PowerPC, the 601, will outperform Intel's Pentium yet cost much less, draw less power and generate less heat.
Dave House, Intel senior vice president for corporate strategy, said last week that Intel will soon move the Pentium from 0.8 to 0.6-micron process technology, which will enable the company to deliver a version of the chip - known as the Pentium II - that roughly matches the 601 in die size, power and heat dissipation.
House also challenged the notion that the PowerPC will offer superior performance. The 601, he said, "is not very high-performance, not even in the upper half of distribution of performance" for CPUs.
House downplayed the advantages of RISC over the older CISC (complex instruction set computing) technology Intel still uses. The two design schools, he said, have converged on many of the same features, such as multiple pipelines. "We're as RISCy as they are CISCy," he said.
On the price issue, House said the cur-rent differential in price between the two chips doesn't reflect intrinsic cost, but the reality is that the demand for the Pentium outstrips supply. In fact, he claimed, the Pentium chip is already cheaper to manufacture than the 601 because Intel's anticipated huge volume will more than compensate for the larger number of transistors on the Pentium - 3.1 million as opposed to the PowerPC 601's 2.8 million. "We'll give them the 10 percent," he said.
But Linley Gwennap, editor in chief of The Microprocessor Report, said that PowerPC die sizes will continue to be smaller than Intel's, leading to higher yields. He added that Intel's BiCMOS technology is more costly than the CMOS technology used in the PowerPC.
"It's not true that the Pentium is technically better than the PowerPC. Not true at all," Gwennap said. Of the 2.8 million transistors on the 601, more than half, or 1.6 million, are used for cache memory.
The Pentium, by contrast, has only 800,000 transistors available for cache memory. It uses 2.3 million transistors, or nearly twice as many as the 601, for logic, the processing part of the chip. Technical staff at Intel said Gwennap's assessment was "basically accurate."
Motorola and IBM claim that the 601 performs floating-point operations 10 times faster than the Pentium. Intel's House conceded that the PowerPC has superior floating-point capabilities but argued that floating-point instructions are seldom used in today's applications.
But Phil Pompa, director of marketing for Motorola's RISC Microprocessor Division, said that floating-point capability has been neglected by application developers precisely because "Intel has no floating point. But there is a market for it."
Jerry Butler, chief technical officer at Aldus Corp. in Seattle, agreed: "The PowerPC changes the rules of the game. Historically, graphics applications have done as much as possible in integer arithmetic because previous processors have had better performance there. What we're seeing [with the PowerPC] is a move to floating point for our graphics applications and getting better performance."
While Intel currently holds a huge lead over Motorola in microprocessor market share, House expressed concern about the publicity the PowerPC has received. "I'm worried about the PowerPC because we're dealing with incredibly complex issues," he said. "Users and [information services] managers can't comprehend the technical information that companies are throwing at them."
Comparing PowerPC with Pentium
Power Power Available Available
Micro- Die Area Supply Dissipation Dies (8-in Revenue/
processor (Sq. In.) (Volts) (Watts) Wafer) Wafer
Pentium I 0.416 5.0 14.0 114 $34,200
(1993)
Pentium II 0.235 3.3 6.5 203 $60,900
(1994)
PPC 601 0.185 3.6 8.5 258 $77,400
(1993)
PPC 604 0.128 3.3 6.0 373 $111,900
(1994)
Source: Hambrecht & Quist.
MacWEEK 09.20.93
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News: RasterOps board: real-time 24-bit color
By Neil McManus
Santa Clara, Calif. - RasterOps Corp. will shake up the color graphics market next month by unveiling an accelerated 24-bit-color display board that reportedly will let users work with large images in near real time.
The company is expected to bill the NuBus board as a new kind of graphics subsystem that will unburden the Mac from processor-intensive graphics tasks. Code-named Mercury, the technology consists of a QuickDraw acceleration chip, up to 256 Mbytes of board-based RAM and an optional digital signal processor card - all linked by a 128-bit data path.
Sources said RasterOps will ship its first Mercury board this year, starting at about $3,000. The card will deliver accelerated, 24-bit color to monitors as large as 21 inches at resolutions up to 1,280 by 1,024 pixels.
The heart of the RasterOps board is a large application-specific integration circuit (ASIC) that accelerates QuickDraw commands. In addition to speeding "blit" moves, as other accelerators do, the new ASIC reportedly will accelerate logical operations performed by QuickDraw, such as inverting graphics. It will also speed bit-mapped font operations, and eventually the card might support TrueType and PostScript font rendering, sources said.
Instead of shuttling graphics data back and forth across NuBus and the Mac's 32-bit data bus, the ASIC will keep images in board-resident RAM and access it over the board's wider internal bus. Users will be able to pack RasterOps' board with as much as 256 Mbytes with standard SIMMs. Users will also be able to configure Mercury's memory as a RAM disk or as a GWorld (graphics world) buffer. GWorld RAM can be used by some programs for drawing images off screen and transferring them quickly to the display, instead of rendering images step by step on screen.
An optional daughtercard, reportedly to be priced at about $2,000, will use twin AT&T Co. 3210 DSPs running at 66 MHz. The DSP card will come with RasterOps-developed filters for Adobe Photoshop, as well as a utility that will let users apply filters to a group of files at once. Sources said the add-on card will be compatible with graphics applications written for Apple Real-Time Architecture (ARTA), the DSP software interface introduced with the AV Macs.
RasterOps will reportedly position Mercury as a competitor to pre-press workstations from Scitex America Corp. and Crosfield Lightspeed.
MacWEEK 09.20.93
News Page 1
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News: Vendors demo MessagePad apps at expo
By Raines Cohen
Cupertino, Calif. - Newton users saw several new applications last week at Newton Expo, but most programs for Apple's MessagePad and Sharp Electronics Corp.'s Expert Pad have yet to hit the streets.
Apple said more than 25,000 people visited Newton Expo, a two-day product demonstration fair here. The event featured hands-on training demos of the MessagePad's capabilities and previews of third-party applications.
Dendrite International Inc. of Warren, N.J., announced a line of sales-force automation products. The first offering, Principia, is aimed at health care salespeople tracking product samples, addresses and user schedules.
Pocket Science, a start-up company based in San Jose, Calif., announced KwikPrefs, a configuration-assistance utility due next month. The program lets users save and select sets of configuration settings with a single tap. Ease Technologies of Washington, D.C., last week shipped its $39.95 "VideoGuide for the Newton MessagePad" training videotape.
At the expo, Apple employees updated MessagePads to Version 1.04 of the Newton software. Users can order the upgrade at (800) 242-3374, not the number reported last week in MacWEEK. Newton fax modem owners can download it at (800) 639-8669, but last week Apple was still testing the download system and many callers encountered errors.
Despite negative press, "sales are running well ahead of our expectations," an Apple spokeswoman said. Apple Chairman John Sculley said last week that the company had sold more than 10,000 MessagePads. The spokeswoman said that figure predates nationwide distribution and has already been surpassed.
The international rollout of the MessagePad is also proceeding apace. In London, Apple shipped the MessagePad and announced many country-specific products and services, as well as alliances with Alcatel, British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and GEC Plessey Semiconductors.
MacWEEK 09.20.93
News Page 3
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News: PB batteries use same technology as Duo
Mac'si Pac powers for up to 12 hours
By Raines Cohen
Oskaloosa, Iowa - An electronics vendor here claims to have developed a pair of small, lightweight external batteries for all-in-one PowerBooks that can deliver up to seven times the battery life of internal batteries.
S&K Manufacturing Inc. said that next month it will ship two batteries under the name Mac'si Pac. Instead of the nickel-cadmium technology used in the all-in-one PowerBook internal batteries or the lead-acid chemistry some external batteries use, the company's offerings will be based on nickel-metal-hydride technology, the same used in Apple's PowerBook Duos.
The company said it plans two models of the Mac'si Pac. The Model 3500 will weigh 1.2 pounds, cost $169.95 and measure 6.4 by 2.1 by 1 inches. The Model 7000, which will be 2 inches wider and twice as heavy, will sell for $279.95. Both can be charged with Apple's power adapter or with a faster power adapter supplied with each battery.
The Model 7000 runs a PowerBook 160 with power-conservation functions disabled for nine to 12 hours; the 3500 can provide four to six hours of use in the same configuration, according to the company.
Nickel-metal-hydride batteries suffer much less from a memory effect than do nickel-cadmium batteries, so it is not necessary to discharge them fully before recharging. They also have a higher energy density, making them more powerful for a given weight and size.
The company said it is developing similar external batteries for the PowerBook Duo line and DOS notebooks.
S&K Manufacturing Inc. is at 215 S. Market St., Oskaloosa, Iowa 52577. Phone (515) 673-6930 or (800) 952-8972; fax (515) 673-8602.
MacWEEK 09.20.93
News Page 4
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News: Prograph gets more classes, speed boost
By Robert Hess
San Francisco - Prograph International Inc., formerly TGS Systems, next month will release Prograph CPX, a new object-oriented application development system based on its Prograph visual programming language.
Like its predecessor, Prograph CPX has an iconic, point-and-click interface. It is aimed at a wide spectrum of users, from hobbyists to corporate developers, the company said.
Prograph CPX adds more than 100 new Application Building Classes, the building blocks used to create applications. In addition, the new version includes Application Building Class Editors, which let users edit a wide variety of objects, such as windows, dialogs and menus.
The company said the upgrade is much faster than the previous Prograph release, Version 2.5. Thanks to incremental compiling, Prograph CPX compilation times can be as little as one-eighth those of Prograph 2.5. Execution times are also faster, especially when calls to externals and primary math are made.
According to Prograph, CPX makes testing and debugging easier. Break points are more clearly shown, data is easier to view and modify during the execution cycle, and classes can even be modified on the fly.
Pricing ranges from about $200 to $5,000, depending on support, training and licensing fees. Current users can buy Prograph CPX for $199 until the end of this month.
Users of the previous version will be able to convert existing code to the new version, but the company said most will want to rewrite some code to take advantage of the new objects.
Programmers will be able to edit the source code of almost all classes, modifying their default behavior to the programmer's needs.
In the next few months, Prograph will release versions of the program for Microsoft Windows and Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Unix systems. Applications should be portable across platforms, the company said.
Prograph International Inc.'s U.S. office is at 447 Battery St., Suite 300, San Francisco, Calif. 94111. Phone (415) 773-8234 or (800) 927-4847; fax (415) 391-3942.
MacWEEK 09.20.93
News Page 10
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Gateways: XAPIA plans scheduling standards
Apple-events suite is almost finished
By Nathalie Welch
San Francisco - XAPIA, the X.400 Application Program Interface Association, last month voted to start developing cross-platform standards for scheduling software. Meanwhile, 18 months of work on an Apple-events suite for Mac scheduling is nearly complete.
Eager to avert a war over data formats and application programming interfaces (APIs) like the one still smoldering in the electronic-mail market, XAPIA has begun devising a protocol for exchanging calendar and schedule information. In its first meeting on the subject, the vendor association also decided to create a common API for programs accessing calendar services over a network. XAPIA said it anticipates completing work on the proposed standards within 12 months.
"Today the state of play is that nobody talks to each other and everybody is trying real hard to talk to IBM Profs," said Ed Owens, chairman of XAPIA and director of systems research and development at Lotus Development Corp.'s cc:Mail division. "The intent is to create a situation where there are not competing standards."
As XAPIA begins its interoperability work, an Apple-events suite for Mac scheduling applications is done and awaits final Apple approval. Apple began defining the suite in early 1992 and turned control over to third-party developers in June 1992. Although officially still in beta, most of the suite is defined, and a few shipping programs already implement it. According to its authors, it has not entered the canon of approved suites because of Apple's summer reorganization.
"The work that we have been doing with the Apple-events suite for scheduling and the work XAPIA plans to do are not mutually exclusive," said Jim Kaslik, president of Chena Software Inc. and co-author of the suite. Although he was unaware of XAPIA's plans, Kaslik said, "we will ante up by bringing what we have already accomplished to the table."
IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., the International Standards Organization and the MHS Alliance presented their specifications to XAPIA's calendaring meeting here in August. Other attendees included Novell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., RAM Mobile Data Inc., Attachmate Corp. and PowerCore Inc.
"Vendors who don't participate in the standards process will be left out," said Tom Evslin, general manager of Microsoft's Workgroup Division.
MacWEEK 09.20.93
Gateways Page 16
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Gateways: Brio adds scripting to data utilities
By Robert Hess
Mountain View, Calif. - Brio Technology Inc. this month updated DataPrism, its query utility, and DataPivot, its data analysis and reporting application. The new versions add scripting, data importing options and better integration with each other.
The cross-platform programs, upgraded simultaneously on Mac and Windows, can now be controlled through an internal scripting language and by other programs via Apple events or Dynamic Data Exchange. Mac software that can send Apple events can control the programs' features through a set of custom events, although Brio does not provide full support for AppleScript or the UserLand Frontier scripting system.
The new version offers other enhancements:
> DataPrism 1.5 can query databases via Information Builder Inc.'s EDA/SQL and Micro Decisionware Inc.'s Database Gateway. DataPrism's Limit function is customizable to recommend or enforce search ranges. Also, the program can be set up to access help systems stored within SQL databases.
> DataPivot 2.1, in addition to using data acquired by DataPrism, can read the native file formats of Borland International Inc.'s dBASE, Microsoft Excel 4.0 and Version 3.0 of Lotus 1-2-3 for Intel systems. The new version can change the data types of incoming data and add new data to existing reports. DataPivot 2.1 can also save reports with or without the underlying data.
The price of DataPivot remains $299; users can upgrade for $49. DataPrism is unchanged at $399. Upgrades from Version 2.0 are $19, or $99 from earlier versions.
Brio Technology Inc. is at 444 Castro St., Suite 700, Mountain View, Calif. 94041. Phone (415) 961-4110; fax (415) 961-4572.
MacWEEK 09.20.93
Gateways Page 16
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GA: Macs will snare Aldus TrapWise
PressWise update also on deck for Q4
By Kirsten L. Parkinson
Seattle - Aldus Corp. this month announced that it will bring its pre-press trapping software to the Mac desktop with TrapWise 2.0 for the Macintosh.
The company also unveiled an upgrade to PressWise, its page-imposition software. Both products will ship in the fourth quarter.
TrapWise 2.0 for the Mac leapfrogs the company's Windows version of the product, which remains at Version 1.0.
Like the Windows version, TrapWise for Mac will let users create manual or automatic traps, overlapping areas of color in images that compensate for registration imperfections during four-color printing. The program will support trapping of complex graphics, including gradient fills and objects that intersect with more than one color.
"About 90 percent of our systems are Mac-based, so having a PC trapping program was clunky," said Walter Schild, director of R&D for Los Angeles-based Alan Lithographic Inc. "We had to take a document from the Mac to the PC for trapping and then bring it back to the Mac for color separating. TrapWise for the Mac solves that problem."
New features in the Mac version of TrapWise will include trapping of continuous-tone images and support for multipage PostScript files. The Windows version supports only single-page files.
Users will be able to create and output color separations directly from TrapWise, and the program will allow trapping of up to 16 colors simultaneously. TrapWise will also support batch processing, so users can group multiple documents and process them unattended.
"Batch processing is cool because an operator doesn't have to sit there and do each job by hand," Schild said. "We often go home at night and let it do the traps and color separations. We can come back in the morning and have film printed out. The time savings is twofold."
To use TrapWise, Aldus recommends a Quadra machine with 16 Mbytes of RAM, a 200-Mbyte hard drive, an eight-bit-color monitor and System 7.
TrapWise 2.0 for the Mac will list for $4,995; owners of TrapWise for Windows can purchase the Mac version for $1,000.
TrapWise will compete with other Mac trapping programs, including Island Graphics Corp.'s IslandTrapper and Scitex Full-Auto Frames from Scitex America Corp.
PressWise 2.0 will add support for large-format output, including templates that support as many as 128 pages per signature.
The upgrade will also ship with combination layout templates that will allow users to include pages with different folding or binding methods in the same file. PressWise 2.0 will allow users to add customizable markings, such as color bars or company logos, to layouts and see them in the on-screen preview.
Other new features will include bottling controls and Apple-events links to Aldus PrePrint.
Version 2.0 will list for $2,595, $400 less than the previous version. Upgrades will be $495.
Aldus Corp. is at 411 First Ave. S., Seattle, Wash. 98104-2871. Phone (206) 622-5500; fax (206) 343-3360.
MacWEEK 09.20.93
GA Page 20
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GA: Pantone to extend color management
By Matthew Rothenberg
Carlstadt, N.J. - Pantone Inc. reportedly is toning up new ColorSync-compatible color-management technology.
Pantone will demo the software, which is code-named Clarity, at next month's Seybold Seminars in San Francisco, sources said.
Sources said Pantone will offer the technology free to all hardware vendors who license its color-swatch system. Pantone's current licensees include NEC Technologies Inc., Oce Graphics U.S.A. Inc., QMS Inc., Radius Inc., General Parametrics Corp. and Tektronix Inc.
The system reportedly will include hooks into ColorSync, Apple's device-independent color matching extension. The initial release will comprise a color-matching method, an application programming interface, sample source code, two system-level Mac color pickers and a color printing utility. Clarity will eventually offer color pickers for tint, two-color, color-on-color and HiFi Color.
Clarity is color space-independent and will do color-space translations for Pantone systems and continuous-tone images. Its engine takes about 15 Kbytes on disk; the size of device profiles reflect their accuracy, but large profiles are no slower than small ones.
According to Bill Flynn, analyst with BIS Strategic Decisions of Norwell, Mass., Pantone's entry into the color-management market would be a "double-edged sword" for vendors of color-management systems, such as Electronics for Imaging Inc. or Eastman Kodak Co. "If Pantone steps in, it gives [color-management developers] more competition, but it also gives more credence to the argument that color management is the coming thing."
Pantone color management "would give you portability that's synced into the Pantone system, not EFI's, Kodak's or Quark's. If [Pantone] can integrate that into a management system that's familiar to users, that's a big advantage," Flynn said. Pantone declined comment.
MacWEEK 09.20.93
GA Page 20
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BusinessWatch: Declining margins force QMS cuts
About 200 workers lose jobs in shake-up
By Jon Swartz
Mobile, Ala. - Squeezed by pricing pressures and declining margins, QMS Inc. last week announced a massive restructuring that will result in hundreds of layoffs and a multimillion-dollar charge against earnings.
The printer company, based here, said it is reducing its 1,650-person worldwide work force by 12 percent, or about 200 employees, and taking a one-time restructuring charge of $4.2 million in an attempt to "realign" the company's costs.
Company officials expect the layoffs and one-time charge to shave 10 percent off QMS' operating expenses.
"Our sales, while not as strong as we would like, are stable despite the negative national and global economic environment," QMS CEO James Busby said in a statement. "However, our expense structure needed to be better-aligned with our current and future business demands."
Terry Harbin, QMS marketing communications director, insisted the company's Mac and DOS sales have been good, but that the personal computer market isn't growing as fast as prices are dropping.
In fact, Harbin reported strong sales of several QMS Mac products, most notably the 860 Print System and the ColorScript 230 printer.
The layoffs - by far the largest in the company's 16-year history - are across the board but will not affect upper management, Harbin said. QMS has had two earlier staff cutbacks of fewer than 40 people.
The $4.2 million write-off, to be charged against earnings for QMS' fourth quarter ending Oct. 1, covers the consolidation of offices, extension of salaries and benefits to affected employees, and a job-placement service. QMS officials expect earnings of about 26 cents per share for the fourth quarter.
Through nine months of its 1993 fiscal year, QMS has posted sales of $230.2 million, up 21 percent from $190.2 million in the same period a year ago. During that same span, QMS reported net income of $2.1 million, compared with a loss of $1.6 million a year earlier.
For its third quarter ended June 26, QMS posted $70.5 million in sales, a 14 percent increase from last year. The company lost $1.2 million, vs. a $1 million loss a year ago.
Industry observers characterized the reorganization as aggressive, long-range planning rather than drastic actions to correct any management miscues.
"It's an industrywide problem; QMS is just taking the proper actions," said John Goetz, an analyst who covers printers for Dataquest Inc., a market research company based in San Jose, Calif.
Bill Gott, an analyst at InfoCorp of Santa Clara, Calif., said, "QMS is in a favorable position in that they have 600-dpi printers and they're also strong in network printers, which have had good, strong growth this year."
MacWEEK 09.20.93
BusinessWatch Page 26
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
BusinessWatch: Microsoft charges for some support
By Jon Swartz
San Francisco - For more than a year, consumers have reaped the benefits of shrinking software prices. Until now.
Microsoft Corp. this month became the latest software company to announce it will begin charging users for telephone technical support as dwindling software prices reduce profits. For now, however, the new policy will have limited impact on users of the company's Mac applications.
The Redmond, Wash.-based giant said that beginning Oct. 1 it will limit free support for DOS and Windows to 90 days; thereafter, support on the operating systems will cost users $2 per minute - or as much as $25 per call. Daytime support for Microsoft applications will remain free, but users will be charged $2 per minute for calls before 6 a.m. or after 6 p.m., Pacific Standard Time.
Individuals who don't want to pay on a per-call basis can opt instead to pay $195 a year for unlimited phone support; corporations can pay $20,000 a year for the same service.
Microsoft's new support program also lets users turn to the company's new Authorized Support Center partners, including Hewlett-Packard Co., Digital Equipment Corp. and NCR Corp., for additional services.
Last month Software Publishers Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif., announced that it would charge for some services that used to be free. Borland International Inc. of Scotts Valley, Calif., reportedly is preparing a new customer-support plan that includes fee-based services.
Apple, which charges System 7 customers for technical support, offers toll-free technical support for hardware products five days a week, 12 hours a day, via a toll-free telephone number (see MacWEEK, Sept. 6, Page 18).
"The way software prices are falling and margins are being squeezed, software companies cannot afford to dole out free unlimited service and support," said Jeff Silverstein, editor of The Software Industry Bulletin in Stamford, Conn.
According to Silverstein, the average retail price for software programs has fallen to about $100 from $300. Borland, for example, recently dropped the price of its Quattro Pro spreadsheet program to $49 from $99.
Users said they are willing to pay for technical support but won't tolerate being put on hold.
"I can sympathize with the software companies for trying to make back some money," said Joe Nagy, chief of the Facilities Engineering Group at the U.S. Mint in Denver. "But I don't like being put on hold and paying for air time. That pisses me off."
MacWEEK 09.20.93
BusinessWatch Page 26
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Special Report: Airlines keep flights on course
Macs take off for operation control, sales and training.
By Connie Guglielmo
The next time you find yourself cruising through the air at 35,000 feet with nothing in particular to think about, think about the Macintosh.
A few major airlines have invested in Mac technology to help them with selling their services to travel agents, training ground crews and flight attendants, devising flight plans and tracking flights en route.
In 1990, for instance, Northwest Airlines Inc. decided to build its state-of-the-art Systems Operation Control (SOC) center around the Macintosh. "SOC is a center that basically makes or is involved in all major decisions dealing with operations, including maintenance, planning and flight dispatch," said Bryan Bourn, an operations analyst with St. Paul, Minn.-based Northwest. "We have a variety of mainframe systems and different data sources. There was a definite need to organize those data sources into a centralized or distributed environment because we had spent so much time training people on all these different systems. We knew we needed one platform to communicate with all our systems."
After narrowing down the choices to computers from Digital Equipment Corp. or Apple, Northwest decided on the Mac. "The decision came down to two things," Bourn said. "First, connectivity with our Unisys mainframe. Apple had a demonstrated link at the time; Digital did not. The second was system cost per desk."
The SOC has about 300 Mac IIci systems; each Mac can communicate with the Unisys and IBM mainframe and Unix workstations spread throughout the Northwest campus.
Among the custom Mac applications designed by Bourn and his group are Aircraft Situation Display (ASD), which takes positioning information on all active flights off the mainframes and overlays the plane's position on maps showing the location of airports and geographical boundaries.
Dispatchers also have at their disposal a variety of tools they can use to measure distances between the flight and any relevant points on the map.
"[ADS is] a real-time tracking mechanism," said Doug Zifler, director of operations automation. "At any time, you can click on a flight number and see where the plane is en route."
The Mac is also used to display the weather graphics that are fed continuously into the network 24 hours a day by a service provider; the eight-bit gray-scale and color satellite images and charts are received by a Macintosh in a proprietary format but are converted to PICT format for display on the Mac using a HyperCard external command (XCMD) written by Northwest. "In the old days, the dispatcher had a dumb terminal that would talk to the mainframe," Bourn said. "If he wanted a map, he would have to pick up a phone, dial up by modem, and make the connections and then wait for the image to be painted on screen one line at a time. To get another image, then he would have to dial up again. Nowadays, you can open up as many windows on your screen as RAM allows."
Other applications Northwest developed for the Mac include the Flight Information Display Systems, which provides dispatchers and planners with a list of arriving and departing flights, updated in real time. In the next few months, Zifler said, Northwest plans to start creating its "rainbow charts" - laminated charts that use colors to indicate the fleet assignment for a day - on the Mac. "It's done manually today, with someone actually sitting down to color in which planes will be taking which routes and where the layovers will be."
By September, the company plans to have a Mac application that will run "what if" scenarios on the rainbow charts for its dispatchers and planners, Bourn said. "What if we canceled Flight 123 and replaced it with a different plane? What effect would that have on the fleet? It's basically an intelligent scheduling application that would be used by the people doing aircraft routing."
Training ground
At American Airlines Inc., the Mac also plays a critical role in the operation of the business: training. Employee training is the responsibility of a subsidiary, the Dallas-based ARM Training and Consulting Group, which houses a learning center stocked with about 210 Mac IIci machines, each equipped with a laser disc player.
Using the Authorware Professional authoring system from San Francisco-based Macromedia Inc., ARM developed more than 200 hours of computer-based training material, including videos (starring American Airlines employees), lessons, quizzes and tests in the form of Authorware "templates," according to Connie Springer, a courseware developer who helped write some of the Authorware templates that have been used at the learning center since July 1990.
"We have developed courseware that describes everything from how to use our computer reservation system to one on 'dangerous goods' that describes how to package hazardous materials for shipment on airplanes," Springer said.
The target audience for the training program is new employees, who spend five to seven weeks going through the lessons and being tested on the material they learn. Testing is an automatic feature built into the Authorware courseware. "We have developed a test template that presents students with up to 50 questions," Springer said. "They can browse the questions, skip questions, return to them and bookmark questions that they've answered but want to recheck. Once they're satisfied, they hit a button called Score This Test. The program grades the test and tells them which questions are wrong and right and then allows them to go back and review."
The templates, developed now for both the Mac and Windows, have been so successful that the company has sold them to other companies, including Delta Air Lines Inc., US Sprint Communications Co. and the Federal Aviation Administration, Springer said. "Once you have the template for a test or a lesson, it's just a matter of entering the content you want. You can develop a very complex model without being a programmer. The functionality is incredible."
On the road
To help it sell its services to travel agents and other clients, Air France last year began equipping its U.S.-passenger sales force with PowerBook 170s. Instead of brochures and slide shows, sales representatives take the laptops (equipped with 4 Mbytes of RAM and 40-Mbyte hard disks) on sales calls.
With a mouse click, the company's more than 70 U.S. sales reps have access to statistical profiles of travel agencies, commercial accounts or individual passengers. Graphs and charts showing aircraft seating charts, for example, are also displayed from the PowerBook. The company, which services Paris and the rest of Europe from nine U.S. locations, has also developed custom software that lets its users access Air France's reservations computer via modem from the field. According to a company representative, the technology has been "very popular."
MacWEEK 09.20.93
Special Report Page 32
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Special Report: Mac moves to front counter
Point-of-sale programs incorporate accounting, inventory and other features with cash register operations.
By Mitzi Waltz
Customers are often surprised to see a Mac in place of a cash register on a store counter, but it's a sight that's becoming more familiar as Mac-based point-of-sale packages proliferate. Macs can be linked to cash drawers, receipt printers, credit card authentication systems, bar-code scanners and other devices to take the place of more traditional systems - and that's just the hardware functions. Most point-of-sale (POS) packages go far beyond simulating cash register operations by adding accounting, inventory, report generation and other features in demand by retail, wholesale and mail-order users.
At Natural Sound of Framingham, Mass., POS/OE 4 Mac Version 3 from EES Cos. Inc. lets owner Jim Lackey concentrate on specifics of the latest stereo components rather than on details of management. "We use it right at our front counter to sell merchandise; keep track of our inventory, customer lists, accounts receivable and accounts payable; and to do our credit card processing," he said. POS/OE's credit card authentication software allows the Mac to take the place of the dedicated terminals used by most merchants.
"It helps a lot to have it all integrated," Lackey said. Before moving to the Mac, Natural Sound relied on a MicroVAX system from Digital Equipment Corp. "There's a big ease-of-use difference," he said. "The point-of-sale procedures and the order-entry format are both easier and more comprehensive."
POS/OE is based on 4th Dimension from Cupertino, Calif.-based ACI US Inc. EES also sells a less comprehensive sister program, Merchant's Edge, which can be upgraded.
POS trends
As point-of-sale software evolves, four trends are evident: automation, integration (often achieved through modular systems), multistore functionality and specialization. Automating tasks saves time and energy, especially with integrated packages that obviate the need to enter the same data in several record-keeping systems.
One product that illustrates the first three trends is DB:S Retailer's Advantage from DB:Solutions Inc. This "store management system," as the vendor dubs it, combines cash-drawer management; a database for inventory; a purchase-order system; and various lesser features of interest to store owners, including price-change management, special pricing and quantity discount plan implementation, and the capability to export data to a full general-ledger package. DB:S Retailer's Advantage is available in several versions, ranging in complexity (and corresponding price level) from single-store/single-user to multistore/multi-user.
The Carnegie-Mellon University Computer Store in Pittsburgh, which handles $6.5 million in yearly sales with a 10-person, mostly student staff, needed an easy-to-use POS package, said Manager Kip Kelso. With all store operations now integrated - including ordering merchandise from vendors as well as selling it and getting it to the customer - the software has influenced much more than simply how clerks ring up sales, he said. "Just about everybody who works for me has their day touched by information from this system, from the guy who drives the delivery truck to the computer repair staff and the person on the cash register," he said.
Before switching to DB:S Retailer's Advantage, Kelso said, the store had used 4th Dimension for inventory and a separate package for cash-drawer management. "It was incredibly cumbersome to translate data back and forth between the two systems," he said, especially when the same records had to be transferred again to the accounting office's system. "The back-office part of sales is always the hardest," he said. "The important thing for me [when choosing a new system] was getting the ability to track serial numbers, enter a back order and convert that into a sale at a later date, and to use a single system that had purchasing and sales modules."
Running on a Quadra server, DB:S Retailer's Advantage has made the computer store's operations smoother, faster and much easier, Kelso said, adding that the quality of vendor support should be an important factor to consider when purchasing a POS system. DB:Solutions has been exemplary in that regard, he said, noting that when a serious problem cropped up while he was in Europe recently, the vendor's support staffers were able to walk student employees through repairs, without catastrophic results.
Specialized solutions
Retail stores are not the only users of POS systems. Wholesalers, small manufacturers and distributors, and mail-order businesses also need similar capabilities, with or without cash drawers. Nitro-pak Preparedness Center of Santa Fe Springs, Calif., sells disaster-preparedness and self-defense supplies through a retail store and a mail-order operation. ShopKeeper Plus 5.93, an easy-to-use POS system from ShopKeeper Publishing International Inc., provided features to handle both sides of the company's business, said Vickie Weyandt, Nitro-pak vice president of finance.
"For our walk-in sales, we have a cash drawer hooked up to one of our Mac SEs," Weyandt said. The program tracks item prices and customers, handles the transaction, and prints out a full itemized receipt. "The 'balance-out' at the end of the night gives us a lot of needed information that we couldn't get from a cash register," she said. "[ShopKeeper] is constantly adding new capabilities and new types of reports."
The program supports a hookup to a dedicated, non-Mac terminal for approval of credit card sales but, like several other POS vendors, ShopKeeper recently added support for credit approval directly from within the program. With this low-cost upgrade, users will no longer need to rent or purchase expensive, cumbersome terminals - and getting purchases approved and the funds transferred to the storekeeper's account may be speeded up exponentially.
ShopKeeper's mail-order features have been especially helpful to Nitro-pak, Weyandt said, since many of the company's customers regularly order shipments of supplies that must be rotated, such as emergency foods. "Now we can create a packing slip for the warehouse, and what can't or shouldn't be shipped yet goes into a back-order system so the customer is charged only for what actually ships [at that time]," she said.
Would-be POS software purchasers have a number of choices besides the three profiled above. Similar products include Software for Less' MacRegister; Microfinancial Corp.'s modular Flexware II Point of Sale; Marketech Inc.'s Marketech Easy Retailing 3.0, which is aimed at high-volume retail users; and Pacific Software Engineering's POS Register. Each company offers differing degrees of integration and customization, with prices for systems ranging up to $5,000 or higher, depending on the number of users and stores.
Some products take specialization a few steps further: Ensign Systems Inc. sells Posim Express, a high-volume POS program customized for the inventory-heavy convenience store, liquor store and cafeteria markets. A user-customizable cousin, Posim Premier, adds more marketing and reporting features and has gained much acceptance among retailers that rotate stock frequently, such as bookstores or clothing shops, while another version, Posim Lite, gives small, single-store retailers a reduced feature set for a lower price.
Retail Engine Point of Sale from Houlberg Development is customized for clothing retailers only, with specialized reports and invoices. This small developer, like many larger vendors, is also willing to create unique POS implementations for customers who want special features or whose business needs are not met by off-the-shelf packages. In fact, many retailers - especially large, multistore chains - contract with programmers to build POS systems from scratch. But for most retail operations, modifying readily available packages like these may offer a less expensive and faster solution.
MacWEEK 09.20.93
Special Report Page 33
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Review: Apple's Quadra 840AV talks a good game
Latest Mac offering carries "AV" message to new heights
By Ben Long
Apple's latest Macintosh, the Quadra 840AV, came into the world last month amid a cyclone of fanfare. The wealth of new technology in this box made us wonder whether Apple was more intent on showcasing the bells and whistles of its R&D than quietly putting together the nuts and bolts of high-end personal computing. Frankly, we still suspect the latter, but within the storm of visual and aural distraction lies a significantly enhanced Mac that costs only pocket change more than the popular Quadra 800.
We reviewed the top-of-the-line 840AV. The Centris 660AV includes most of the same core features but is based on slower processors.
On the outside, the 840AV looks like a Quadra 800 with lots of extra ports on the back and a new power switch on the front. The changes inside are many, however, and they begin with enhancements to the logic board.
All the hardware that fits
The 840AV is based on a 40-MHz 68040 processor, which should make it about 20 percent faster than the 33-MHz Quadra 800. Our tests with Ziff-Davis Labs' MacBench utility and with real-world applications bore this out. From a raw CPU perspective, this is the fastest Mac Apple has made. The built-in digital signal processor (DSP) adds a whole new dimension to Mac performance, which we'll cover in detail below.
The 840AV has three NuBus slots, like the 800, but it lacks a processor direct slot, which limits upgrade and enhancement options. The 840AV does use a new NuBus 90 controller that reportedly provides a significant increase in data throughput, particularly with accelerated graphics cards. Our results on card-to-logic-board speed tests were ambiguous, but if this improved NuBus 90 support works, it could alleviate the lack of a PDS.
The 840AV adds a new, 40-pin Digital Audio Video (DAV) slot for new kinds of cards that plug directly into the AV subsystem. No such cards are available yet, but the first are expected to be video compression-decompression (codec) hardware to improve video capture. Apple said video-capture cards for the 840AV should be cheaper than ones for other models because the digital-to-analog conversion hardware is already built in.
An on-board direct memory access chip manages I/O for SCSI, modem, printer and Ethernet ports. This long-awaited improvement to the Mac should provide substantial speed increases by easing the workload of the CPU. In addition, the 840AV ROMs include a new SCSI Manager that allows for asynchronous SCSI I/O, including the SCSI disconnect-reconnect feature vital to high-end disk arrays. Unfortunately, the rest of the Mac OS does not take advantage of the new SCSI Manager's potential, nor do most applications.
We fear we've been down this road before with the vestigial DMA hardware in the Mac IIfx. SCSI throughput has long been an issue with high-end Mac users, and the 840AV's capabilities cry out for higher disk performance.
We tested raw throughput on a number of fast drives using existing drivers and prerelease versions of drivers for the 840AV. In our tests, performance on those drives improved when applications took advantage of the special features in SCSI Manager 4.3. In some operations, however, fast drives with older drivers were slower in some operations on the 840AV than they were on our Quadra 800 and 950. Hopefully, developers will rush to support the new SCSI Manager with new disk drivers and applications, but we're not holding our breath.
The 840AV comes with 8 Mbytes of RAM soldered onto the motherboard and uses the same 72-pin SIMM slots as the Quadra 800. The 840AV, however, requires 60-nanosecond RAM rather than the 70-nanosecond chips in the 800. With four SIMM slots, the 840AV can hold up to 128 Mbytes of RAM, and, like other recent 68040 Macs, the slots can be filled one at a time with any 4-Mbyte or greater SIMM.
The 840AV also includes 1 Mbyte of video RAM for 16-bit color on monitors up to 16 inches, and this can be expanded to 2 Mbytes for 24-bit color on a 16-inch monitor or 16-bit color on a 21-inch monitor. Like other recent Macs, the built-in video support on the 840AV extends to industry-standard Super VGA monitors, although there are some incompatibilities that third-party vendors have to work out before Mac users have a wide range of VGA choices.
Although it looks like a standard Mac serial port (and can function as one), the 840AV's modem port is the first implementation of Apple's high-speed GeoPort architecture. The GeoPort makes possible DSP-driven telephony applications, such as the software fax modem and on-screen telephone included with the 840AV, but these also require an add-on telephony "pod".
The 840AV's second heart
The biggest hardware change - and the one that's key to the 840AV's most striking capabilities - is the inclusion of an analog-to-digital converter and a 66-MHz, 32-bit DSP. The latter is one fast chunk of silicon, rated at 17 mips and 33 Mflops (millions of floating-point operations per second).
Apple chose AT&T Co.'s 3210 DSP because, in addition to its speed, the operating system for the chip already existed and provided 32-bit parity with the Mac OS. Other common DSPs would have required a conversion from 32 bits to 16 bits, which would have hurt performance. Spectral Innovations Inc. helped Apple integrate this limited-purpose DSP OS with the Mac, resulting in the Apple Real-Time Architecture (ARTA), which includes an application programming interface that software developers can use to run selected tasks on the very fast DSP. Code and data needed by the DSP get buffered in the chip's 8-Kbyte cache, which helps performance. Thanks to ARTA, the DSP and the Mac logic board can share the main system memory.
Although this design requires more RAM for DSP-powered applications, it does not require RAM dedicated to the DSP.ARTA and AT&T's DSP OS also allow multitasking within the DSP. Real-time events, such as sound capture, use only part of the bandwidth of the DSP. ARTA makes it possible to use the remaining bandwidth for simultaneous asynchronous functions, such as accelerating Adobe Photoshop filters. Because these tasks run on the DSP, the Mac's main '040 CPU is free to do other work. The result should be a much more capable Mac for certain kinds of multitasking.
The DSP doesn't stand alone, however. The DAV slot allows video and audio signals to travel to and from the DSP without taking cycles from the 68040, and the DSP has direct access to video RAM without '040 intervention. This whole hardware subsystem, together with ARTA, provides the backbone for new system software to handle voice recognition, telephony, and video and audio I/O. Spectral Innovations recently shipped a NuBus card containing the same DSP and ARTA software as the 840AV, but these higher-level software functions are available only on the latest Quadra.
Hear no evil
The back of the computer contains the standard stereo audio-out and audio-in ports. The similarities to existing Apple sound hardware end there, however. Rather than Apple's typical eight-bit, 22-kHz sound sampling, the 840AV can grab 16-bit, 48-kHz audio - and even has an option for 44-kHz sampling, which is the same rate as your CD player. (The 840AV has a signal-to-noise ratio of 85 decibels, while CDs expect signal-to-noise ratios of about 90 decibels.)
These sound ports connect to the DSP, allowing you not only to grab high-fidelity sound in real-time but also to modify and filter it with effects such as echo, reverb, flange, delay and so forth. The new Sound control panel holds a hint of this technology. Functioning as a simple mixer, the control panel lets you adjust the relative volume of beep sounds, incoming audio and CD-based audio, and it's a lot more fun than changing your desktop pattern.
If your 840AV has an internal CD-ROM drive, sound can be sampled directly from an audio CD via the Sound control panel. Another nice feature is the capability to select a track from a CD and convert it into a sound-only QuickTime movie. We can't imagine a simpler process for digitizing audio for QuickTime editing.
Software vendors that choose to support these sound capabilities will be able to create powerful audio applications that can input, mix and output CD-quality audio while applying effects in real-time. Such features normally require dedicated analog or digital effects boxes, so if this is your kind of work the 840AV may save money and desk space.
See no evil
The "V" portion of the 840AV manifests itself in several video input and output ports. Accepting signals from either a standard composite RCA cable or an S-video S cable, the 840AV can digitize 24-bit-color video at 8 to 15 frames per second in a 320-by-240-pixel window. For video output, the 840AV has standard S-video and composite encoding, letting you send your screen graphics and video to a tape deck or NTSC monitor. This output benefits from Apple's "convolution" techniques, which reduce jitter and flashing lines on standard televisions.
Apple bundles a copy of VideoFusion Ltd.'s FusionRecorder application for capturing QuickTime movies. One annoying quirk of FusionRecorder is that it can grab frames only when the monitor is in eight-bit mode. We found ourselves continually opening the Monitors control panel to switch into eight-bit color for frame-grabbing and then back to 16-bit mode for editing and viewing.
The 840AV can also display full-screen, although very grainy, video at 30 frames per second via Apple's Video Monitor utility. The program's window can be dragged around, resized and covered up with no frame-dropping or loss of quality. With some creative programming, multimedia developers should be able to incorporate this live-video display feature into their presentations. Video Monitor also lets you grab a single frame of video and save it as a 24-bit-color PICT or stash it on the Clipboard. The frame-grabbing works well at small sizes, but at full screen the picture is so grainy it would be useless to anyone but an impressionist. In our experience, grabbing single frames from third-party boards works much better.
Apple also includes a teleconferencing program that lets two networked users with 840AVs and video cameras see each other in irregular freeze frames. The program is really just a novelty, though, since it doesn't transfer sound along with the pictures.
Video I/O is controlled by a new video subsystem. The DSP is not used in the process, but it's connected. In theory, QuickTime codecs could be written to use the DSP for video compression and decompression.
The DSP question
DSP technology has been used in add-on cards for some time to accelerate graphic filters in Photoshop and to handle real-time processes. Its inclusion in a high-end Mac should be an unqualified benefit.
For example, beta versions of Spectral Innovations' Lightning Effects plug-in filters for Photoshop ran two to three times faster than corresponding non-DSP-aware filters on the 840AV. Since many QuickTime applications and other graphics programs work with Photoshop filters, the speed-up could be widespread for some users. Spectral said the filters will be even faster when they ship.
Fractal Design Corp.'s PainterX2 is supposed to take advantage of the 840AV's DSP, but we didn't find any noticeable differences in our tests. Another likely candidate for a DSP boost is JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) image compression, but there have been no product announcements to date.
And that's the rub
Third-party support for the DSP would add a lot to the value of the 840AV. But vendors - and users - are uncertain whether to commit because of Apple's official silence on whether future Macs will be equipped with the chips. Apple said ARTA is not tied specifically to AT&T's 3210 or any DSP; the system software functions that require a DSP on the 840AV could possibly run on a future Mac's sole PowerPC CPU. But that cost-saving possibility leaves third-party developers hanging in the wind, wondering whether to risk development on the 840AV's most important technology.
Conclusions
With the exception of speech recognition, there is little the Mac Quadra 840AV can do that isn't done better with third-party add-ons. Its audio-video features will be valuable for some users, but if you're serious about video you'll need to go beyond what the 840AV alone provides. Sound mavens should wait until third-party software supports the built-in hardware.
On the other hand, the 840AV is like getting a Quadra 800 with a 40-MHz accelerator; a QuickTime capture board and video encoder; a near CD-quality sound board; fax modem capabilities; an unremarkable speakerphone; and some funky speech software for only $400 extra. Even better: Apple added all this hardware and software technology without sacrificing compatibility. We found no problems with the 840AV running a wide variety of applications. The only fly in this ointment lies with the new SCSI Manager: Performance with old and new drives remains an issue, and many high-end users may balk at the slowdown until new drivers are available.
This machine is the best proof to date that Apple is trying to move the Mac ahead of standard-issue IBM PCs and compatibles while driving prices down. The 840AV may not meet everybody's expectations, but compared with the other Quadras, it's a very good value.
MacWEEK 09.20.93
Reviews Page 45
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Review: Query power for end users
GQL lets database managers grant controlled access to users
By Jonathan A. Oski
Andyne Computing Ltd.'s Graphical Query Language 3.1 is an end-user data access tool that can be controlled by database administrators, yet deployed to their entire end-user community. It can be distributed across Macintosh, Windows and OSF/Motif platforms.
The GQL family has four modules: GQL/Admin, GQL/User, GQL/Update and GQL/Design. They can be purchased as one unit, the $4,995 GQL Developers Kit, or separately. The minimum components you need to use GQL are one copy each of the $1,995 Admin module and the $495 User module. We focused on these two products.
The User module is the primary client component of GQL; it lets users query databases and create printed reports. The Admin module lets system administrators create the working environment for users.
Database administrators can give select users additional power with the $495 GQL/Update, which not only lets clients create queries and reports, but also lets them update databases - a powerful and perhaps risky facility to distribute on a wide scale in any organization. GQL/Design is similar to the Admin module, but it also lets administrators create and modify their database structure. It provides a crude but usable method of creating entity relationship diagrams and then building the databases on your servers.
GQL uses a SQL-based approach to access data in many popular databases, including Sybase Inc.'s SQL Server; Oracle Corp.'s Oracle; IBM Corp.'s DB2, SQL/DS and AS/400; The ASK Group Inc.'s Ingres; and Informix Software Inc.'s Informix.
GQL also supports a fairly comprehensive list of database connections, including Apple's Data Access Language, MacTCP and Macintosh Communications Toolbox; TechGnosis Inc.'s SequeLink; Sybase's DB-Library; Oracle's SQL*Net; and Digital's Pathworks. GQL also supports direct or dialed RS-232 asynchronous connections.
GQL/Admin
The Admin module is installed only on administrators' workstations. You install it by dragging the GQL/Admin disk onto your hard disk. Installing GQL/User is somewhat easier because it's distributed as a self-extracting archive. This approach is inconsistent, tedious and clumsy. We would prefer a more standard approach that relies upon the Apple Installer utility, which would let you customize the installation.
The primary function of GQL/Admin is to tailor the presentation of your database for end-user access. You can give more-savvy users ad hoc access to the database and less literate users a point-and-click interface for running "canned" queries created by someone else.
The first step is to create a data model, a graphical representation of your database structure that includes tables, views and relationships. Each data object in the model represents one or more tables in your database. You can use icons, clip art or graphics to represent data objects. Objects are connected by lines that contain relationship icons. Double-clicking on a data object reveals its attributes, a term used by Andyne to represent columns or fields of information in a data object.
Data model creation is important since it will govern access to the database, and GQL does well here, letting you describe your database in terms your users can understand. You can hide tables and columns that are of no consequence to them.
GQL should have the capability to create a data dictionary, however, which would let you use longer explanations for tables and column names, helping users better understand the relationships that exist within the database.
After you have created the data model, you can distribute it to users. For savvy users with varied reporting requirements, you can distribute a simple data model to them so they can use GQL/User to construct their own queries and reports. For other users, you can further simplify data access by creating buttons, additional windows and "ornaments" (text or graphics) that users can click on to perform queries and create reports.
GQL/Admin has an advanced feature that lets you create prompts for information within a query. This lets you build canned queries for your users that will produce results fitting their individual selection criteria. For example, you could create a query that reported sales of one or all products for one or more regions. With the prompt facility, you could create the query object once and let users select subsets of the data depending on their information needs. This easy-to-implement feature does a good job of filling the middle ground between ad hoc queries and canned reports.
GQL/User
GQL/User can be distributed throughout your entire end-user community. With GQL/User, you can issue canned queries or create your own using the data model objects created by a GQL administrator. The ad hoc query capability is flexible and easy to use. You can also add qualifiers and create queries on related objects, such as customers and purchases. Frequently used queries can be saved.
Query results, which are displayed in a spreadsheet format, can be easily incorporated into other programs. You can export data to a variety of applications by saving the results of your queries in delimited text files. GQL also supports System 7's publish and subscribe.
GQL/User gives users complete control over the appearance of printed reports. This includes common areas of embellishment, such as typeface and style, as well as the arrangement of columns and subtotals and the placement of graphics. We found some portions of this interface to be confusing. For instance, column reordering is menu-driven, as opposed to the familiar click-and-drag operation used in many other programs.
Documentation and support
Separate manuals are provided for each of the four GQL modules. They are well-organized and cover their respective product in thorough detail. A tutorial section in each book walks you through typical uses of the product. Overall, we found the manuals to be accurate and useful. GQL's less-than-intuitive interface and occasional use of nonstandard terminology makes reading the manuals necessary if you want to make full use of the product family.
Conclusions
Andyne's GQL fills its niche well. It lets you control access to your data while distributing the burden of query and reporting functions from the top of your organization down and across three platforms.
Although you can create query and reporting facilities using systems such as ACI US Inc.'s 4th Dimension, it would be hard to match the breadth of functionality provided by GQL. Any organization that suffers from an overload of end users' query and reporting requests should look carefully at GQL.
Andyne Computing Ltd. is at 552 Princess St., Second Floor, Kingston, Ontario K7L 1C7, Canada. Phone (613) 548-4355 or (800) 267-0665; fax (613) 548-7801.
MacWEEK 09.20.93
Reviews Page 52
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
ProductWatch: Breathing life into aging Macs
By Eric J. Adams
Not that long ago, the only way to improve Mac performance was to buy a faster Mac model. Advancements in CPU accelerators, however, have given users another upgrade path. Managers of corporate Macs are increasingly utilizing CPU accelerators to extend the lives of existing Macs and save money in the process.
A CPU upgrade can reduce the time between initiating a command and regaining control of a machine. Depending on the Mac and accelerator used, users routinely see speed increases of up to 1,000 percent.
For Mac managers, the benefit of acceleration shows up someplace else as well: in a spreadsheet cell in the form of reduced hardware expenditures.
"At a time when budgets are constrained, we have decided to go with [Radius Inc.] Rockets in our IIcx and IIci machines to bring them up to snuff without actually replacing them," said Paul Keithley, network administrator for Bendix, a division of Allied-Signal in Baltimore.
The argument is hard to beat. A fast CPU accelerator can boost the performance of the IIci nearly 800 percent, making it 50 percent faster than a Quadra 950, according to the vendors. That's more speed at one-third to one-half the price of a new Quadra 950, albeit without the added bonuses a Quadra 950 offers.
Keithley estimates that the accelerators have extended the life of his 30 IIcx and IIci machines "by two-and-half to three years."
David Van Houten, systems analyst and technical editor at the Los Angeles Times, said, "We just installed two TokaMacs, and I'm recommending more, even though there's a solid majority on the staff here who believe that anything that's not an Apple-sanctioned upgrade is a waste of money."
Van Houten said the accelerators also offer him the opportunity to speed up Macs without justifying new capital equipment. "We can bring in the accelerators through the back door as an upgrade, plus it saves our large investment in RAM in the machines we accelerate."
Bill Klech, programmer analyst with American President Line in Oakland, Calif., looked to accelerators for another reason - to buy time until after the rollout of PowerPC Macs. "The PowerPC looks very promising, but I'm a little reluctant to buy Version 1.0 hardware or software, and I'd rather let someone else work out the initial bugs of the new platform," Klech said. "It's not so much the cost of the hardware, it's that we don't want to make hardware decisions right now."
Klech upgraded 22 Mac II and IIx workstations in Asia and at shipping ports along the West Coast with 68030-based accelerators from DayStar Digital Inc. "With the accelerators, we've bought ourselves another two years with these machines, enough time, hopefully, for the kinks to be worked out of PowerPC," said Klech.
Klech chose to use '030 accelerators over speedier 68040-based accelerators because of their destination Macs. "If we were upgrading IIfx machines, we would have gone with the higher-speed stuff. Why put a fast CPU in an older machine that suffers from other speed bottlenecks [such as SCSI throughput]?"
Accelerators also give managers the opportunity to move equipment around more freely and even to buy used equipment for upgrade purposes, said David Hester, vice president of VIP Systems Inc. in Alexandria, Va., a design firm that caters to a host of large clients, including Knight-Ridder Inc. and Time Life Books.
"You can get a Mac II for about $700, which is a heck of a deal because it has all those card slots," Hester said. "Slap a Rocket and a good video card in there and you have a machine that's faster than a IIci and almost as fast as a Quadra."
The speed boost offered by accelerators has, at times, made life a little easier for Geeter Kyrazis, president of All Systems Color Inc., an electronic pre-press trade shop and system integrator in Centerville, Ohio.
"We have a Silicon Graphics' Indigo running Eclipse software from Alias, which would seem to be a better solution for some of the things we do," said Kyrazis. "But because of some network integration problems, it's easier sometimes to do the work on an accelerated Mac than to send it over the Novell network for the SGI. It has made life simpler."
Multiprocessing
Speed is only one advantage of a CPU accelerator. The Rocket from Radius is designed to work with the company's RocketShare multiprocessing software to let a Mac do the work of two or more Macs.
"Multiprocessing is what first attracted us to accelerators," said Bendix's Keithley. "We wanted them for users who typically print big jobs - 20 minutes to a half-hour - and then wait around for the printing to finish."
Ross Burke, a graphics animation specialist, is so bullish on the multiprocessing capabilities of his Macs that he plans to turn them into a profit center for his company, Micron Semiconductor of Boise, Idaho.
In addition to Dash 40Q-accelerated Quadra 950s from Sixty Eight Thousand Inc. and Radius Rockets, Burke has three Quadra 950 machines in his department equipped with Yarc boards from Yarc Systems Corp. of Newbury Park, Calif., and 512 Mbytes of RAM. The RISC-based Yarc accelerators are designed to accelerate 3-D rendering programs. By using the Yarc board with Infini-D, the 3-D rendering program from Specular International of Amherst, Mass., along with Back Burner, the company's background rendering utility, Burke is able to keep working on his production machines while they speedily, and transparently, render 3-D images in the background.
"Because we're not slowed down by the rendering, we're seriously thinking about offering our services as a rendering house," said Burke.
Compatibility Issues
Accelerators can make life easier, but they can also make life more difficult, according to several managers who have encountered scattered compatibility problems with accelerator boards.
"Anytime an accelerator hits the market, for the first few months there are problems. I would say that's true of all manufacturers," said All Systems Color's Kyrazis, who regularly tests accelerators for the custom workstations he builds for his customers. "[However], enough accelerators have been out long enough so as not to pose any problems."
The more complex the workstation, the more potential for problems, according to Bendix's Keithley. "I've had problems [with the Rocket] that I thought shouldn't have happened; things like incompatibilities with scanners and software for mounting external removable devices," he said. "Once they're up and running, they are great, but getting them up and running has been frustrating. I would warn anyone contemplating buying accelerators that they may be in for a job if they're putting them into a complex workstation that has a lot of equipment attached to it."
Gary R. Malo, an architect for Universal Card/AT&T, also encountered minor problems with hard disk drivers and accelerators, but was able to easily overcome them. "Nine times out of 10 it's the hard disk driver," said Malo, who replaces the driver or alters them with Diskmaker from Golden Triangle Software of San Diego, Calif.
Once you make the right match, few products offer such a singular and tangible benefit as a CPU accelerator. The benefit, simply, is cheap speed and lots of it.
MacWEEK 09.20.93
ProductWatch Page 55
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Mac the Knife: Focusing on the 'vision thing'
If there was any remaining doubt that we are living in interesting times, the ceremony last week on the White House lawn removed it all. What good citizen wasn't stirred at the realization that only in America could one witness such a large and peaceful gathering of ousted one-term presidents, past and, some speculate, future.
But it is easy to jump on the naysayers' bandwagon when the chips are down. And this also applies to Apple, whose fortunes have been questioned ever more frequently with each passing week since things began to turn sour. While things are often, indeed, exactly as bad as they seem - or even worse - the Knife reports this week that Apple itself is convinced that it isn't down for the count just yet.
Observing the rocky road the company has been traveling this summer could lead you to believe that Apple has lost what our most recent wordsmith president called "the vision thing." But contrary to appearances, Apple does have a vision, and judging from the evidence, that vision is in focus.
Power strategy
Forget products per se. The big accounts are more concerned about strategic direction. Apple's apparently sound strategy rests on four legs. The first is called "natural interface," leveraging off the 10-year-old Finder GUI with such technology as speech recognition, speech synthesis, handwriting recognition and some unseen new technologies.
Apple is calling the second leg "knowledge navigation," which is simply shorthand for making the Mac the tool of choice for information retrieval. Leg three is "personal communications." This includes AOCE, telephony, VideoPhone, wireless networking and the like. The fourth is "anytime anywhere." This is the beyond-the-desktop part of the strategy, and it's where the new PowerBooks, the Newton family and Sweet Pea come in.
If this sounds good to you, you're right in the corporate mainstream. The Knife has seen documents that imply that at least one high-profile account in the Detroit area that had previously defected to the Microsoft camp was willing to listen and, as a result, is now reviewing its decision. Two other big accounts that have been wavering in their loyalty to the Mac - a major telecommunications equipment company and a big-cheese accounting firm skeptically agreed to listen to Apple's pitch and found the reasoning persuasive. As they say on the street, that's all good. Maybe Apple should let the rest of us in on it.
Power focus
In its quest for sustainable margins, Apple may yet have to inflict upon itself even more cuts, but it's a safe bet that the money budgeted to pay for independent focus groups will be the last to go. While many of us were involved with our varied and several summer activities, Apple was keeping more than a few focus-group types gainfully employed. When asked about what they demand from the first round of PowerPC Macs, participants were nearly unanimous: They need to run Microsoft applications - Word and Excel in particular- in native mode, and they all place surprising weight on the need for a way to run Windows. Apple's promise to provide Windows emulation at 486 speeds by way of Insignia Solutions' SoftWindows should fill the bill, and that's all good, too.
Power boards
Don't think for a minute that Apple would introduce the first PowerPC Macs without a board or two to round out the sale. The HPV PDS board, a frame buffer with a whopping 4 Mbytes of video RAM, will provide 24-bit color on 21-inch displays. The Planaria is a video card designed to bring AV-style video technology to PowerPC Macs. More as boards are developed.
If you need a MacWEEK mug, you'll have to negotiate your own free trade agreement with the Knife at (415) 243-3544, fax (415) 243-3650, Internet (mac_the_knife@macweek.ziff.com), AppleLink (MacWEEK) or CompuServe/ZiffNet/Mac.
MacWEEK 09.20.93
Mac the Knife Page 118
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
