Cupertino, Calif. - Electronic mail will become part of the Mac operating system next week, when Apple officially launches its long-awaited Apple Open Collaboration Environment technology.
However, only PowerTalk, the client half of the complex messaging technology, will initially be available; the PowerShare Collaboration Server won't ship until the first quarter of 1994, sources said.
PowerTalk will debut with System 7 Pro, a new system software release centered around a mail-enabled Finder (see MacWEEK, Sept. 6, Page 3). The new version adds several layers of client support for networked collaboration. PowerShare will add store-and-forward messaging, centralized management of mail and networkwide catalogs, and public-key-based security and authentication services.
Some observers said that, even without the server, PowerTalk will be a boon by making E-mail more universally available.
"PowerTalk doesn't give users a huge leap in functionality," said Adam Engst of Renton, Wash., a journalist and author on networking and E-mail. "But the problem with electronic mail has always been that it requires additional software and hardware to use. Once E-mail becomes a Finder object, it turns into something anyone can do."
Others were intrigued but not making plans. "We are not going to be jumping on the bandwagon," said Keith Bereskin, manager of microsystems development at Allergan Inc. in Irvine, Calif. "We are just now getting used to the System 7 environment around here."
Out of the box, System 7 Pro users will see new built-in communications capabilities. The new Finder will offer:
>Mail. PowerTalk will let developers add E-mail functions to applications through a mail header that appears in documents and features drag-and-drop fields for recipients and enclosures. PowerTalk will come with
> Signatures. PowerTalk makes it possible to attach digital signatures to documents and portions of documents, so users may be confident in the identity of a message sender.
> Client SAMs. PowerTalk will work with third-party service access modules (SAMs) that extend the system's reach to other services, such as existing LAN E-mail systems and the Internet.
> Key Chain. The Key Chain, one of three new icons PowerTalk places on the desktop, provides a single log-on procedure for secure access to all public or private on-line accounts. Once the Key Chain has been unlocked, for example, AppleShare servers can be accessed without typing passwords using previously saved keys.
> Catalogs. Another new icon, Catalogs, lets users view lists of individuals' analog and electronic contact information as well as AppleTalk network services, including printers and AppleShare servers. With third-party support, network catalogs could distribute any kind of data.
> Mailbox. The desktop mailbox, also a new icon, provides a central repository for all types of correspondence, including fax, voice messages and text sent from PowerTalk-savvy applications and via third-party gateways.
"The incredibly useful and attractive part of PowerTalk is the ability to combine several mailboxes into one on the desktop," Engst said. "I have seven mail services I have to check regularly; it's ludicrous. It should just be 'mail on the desktop,' and PowerTalk seems to promise that."
An array of third-party developers will step in to extend PowerTalk and PowerShare with new messaging and security products (see MacWEEK, July 12, Page 1).
"I think once people understand what PowerShare and PowerTalk will do, they will be very, very popular. But I think the education process will take about a year," said Steven Myers, vice president of product management at STF Technologies Inc. of Concordia, Mo.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
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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: Apple aims for mainstream with PowerPC
Hardware, ASICs offered to clone makers
By Henry Norr
Cupertino, Calif. - In an effort to make its upcoming PowerPC systems a multivendor standard, Apple is reportedly offering other manufacturers a chance to license its hardware as well as its operating system.
Apple executives, according to sources, have in recent weeks called on several companies that market Intel-standard personal computers to try to sell them on adding Apple-designed PowerPC-based systems to their lineups. Apple is also reportedly considering authorizing third-party vendors that now offer peripherals and cards for the Mac - such as DayStar Digital Inc., Radius Inc., MicroNet Technology Inc. and SuperMac Technology Inc. - to build high-end Mac-compatible systems for specialized markets.
Apple has been seeking licensees for the PowerPC version of its OS for several months (see MacWEEK, Aug. 16, Page 1) . But the company is now said to be offering potential partners several additional options, including licenses for application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) Apple has designed for the new Macs, and providing logic boards or even complete systems.
Sources said Apple is even considering naming either a new company or an existing supplier of PC components, such as Acer America Corp. of San Jose, Calif., to market Apple-designed parts to OEMs.
Among more than a dozen vendors of PC compatibles reportedly contacted by Apple, the best known is Dell Computer Corp. of Austin, Texas. Sources said Apple is eager to have Dell distribute at least the low-end, 50-MHz PowerPC model it plans to introduce next March; Dell, for its part, is reportedly more interested in higher-end PowerPC-based systems that could be marketed as servers, on the theory that customers committed to the Intel standard on the desktop are willing to deploy servers that use other processors if they deliver superior performance.
Dell is already discussing PowerPC server options with Motorola Inc., sources said. Motorola's Computer Group this month announced its intention to develop future PowerPC-based multi-user systems running a version of Unix System V Release 4.
Dell officials have reportedly made no commitments to Apple but agreed to plan further talks. Apple and Dell representatives declined to comment.
Computers based on the designs Apple is offering to license would be limited initially to System 7, sources said. Later, after IBM completes the PowerOpen version of Unix, that system would also run on the third-party models. Eventually Apple is expected to make its PowerPC designs compatible with a hardware reference platform - a specification for basic features that would enable any compliant hardware design to run any PowerPC operating system - under development by IBM Corp.
At that point, clone companies would have the option of offering customers Apple hardware with their choice of operating systems, including System 7, PowerOpen, Solaris, IBM's upcoming Workplace OS and a version of Windows NT that Motorola is developing under license from Microsoft.
Motorola is reportedly encouraging Apple to make its hardware and software widely available in order to kick-start the PowerPC market. Sources said Motorola might add Apple's ASICs to the line of PowerPC support chips it is already planning.
While Mac peripherals makers have expressed interest in building their own Mac-compatible CPUs, the response from PC vendors has so far been guarded, sources said.
"It's not in our business plans," said a spokeswoman for Gateway 2000 in North Sioux City, S.D. "We're not interested now, and I'm not aware of any future interest."
In other PowerPC news, IBM last week announced what will apparently be the first systems based on the new processor to reach users. Four workstations based on the 66-MHz PowerPC 601 are scheduled to ship Oct. 15; prices will start at $5,445. The systems will come with Version 3.2.5 of IBM's AIX/6000 Unix implementation. Eventually, users will have the option of moving to the PowerOpen-compliant version of AIX and running Mac software through Apple's Mac Application Services software.
Jon Swartz contributed to this story.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
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News: IBM's Workplace OS may run Mac apps
By Henry Norr
Boca Raton, Fla. - Apple and IBM Corp. are considering the possibility of adding a Mac "personality" to Big Blue's new Workplace OS - a development that would give users of PowerPC-based systems from IBM and other vendors a way to run Mac software without struggling with Unix, waiting for Taligent Inc. or putting up with System 7's limitations.
The Workplace OS, although not yet formally announced, is expected to ship next year and to be the primary operating system for the mainstream PowerPC-based machines due from IBM's Power Personal Systems Division. The OS will offer advanced capabilities such as memory protection, multitasking and multithreading.
Like the upcoming Taligent system, Workplace OS is based on a microkernel architecture and designed to support multiple personalities, or application environments. IBM already plans to provide DOS-Windows, OS/2 and Unix personalities for the system, and its lead architect, Paul Giangarra, said here last week that it would be "easy, technically" to add a Mac personality.
Giangarra and other officials at both companies declined to confirm reports that negotiations about that option are under way. But sources at Apple said that IBM briefed a team of high-ranking Apple executives on the Workplace OS this month. The Apple group reportedly included David Nagel, senior vice president of AppleSoft; Morris Taradalsky, vice president and general manager of Apple Business Systems; and Lani Spund, director of enterprise technologies for Apple Business Systems.
Giangarra said a decision about adding a Mac personality will be made this fall. "I'm certainly going to consider the business case for it," he said.
IBM plans a version of the Workplace OS for Intel-standard systems, but sources said discussions about a Mac personality are currently focused on the PowerPC version. The Workplace OS is a separate development effort from PowerOpen, a version of IBM's AIX that will run Mac software via Apple's Mac Application Services.
Like NeXT Computer Inc.'s NeXTstep, the Workplace OS is based on Mach, an advanced OS originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University. The architecture features a "personality-neutral" microkernel - a small nucleus that carries out key low-level tasks such as memory management, interprocess communications and I/O support - plus a set of device drivers and modules providing additional services.
One issue Apple must resolve is whether support for the Workplace OS will eliminate any competitive advantage its hardware would have, relative to IBM's. Some observers said the microkernel architecture of Workplace OS might impose an appreciable performance penalty, compared with System 7. Giangarra said that, with the Mac personality for Workplace OS still only a hypothetical possibility and System 7 for PowerPC not yet released, it's impossible to predict relative performance.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
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News: Developers reach for speedy QuickRing
By Robert Hess
Santa Clara, Calif. - QuickRing, the high-powered data transfer scheme Apple announced last year, has disappeared from the company's development plans, but several third-party card and hub vendors are now close to releasing products based on the technology.
QuickRing permits transfers of 200 Mbytes per second or more, making it more than 10 times faster than NuBus. QuickRing is particularly suitable for applications currently suffering bandwidth bottlenecks on the Mac, such as high-end video, 100-Mbps networking, multiprocessing and graphics acceleration.
The speedy card-to-card connection was developed by Apple's Advanced Technology Group along with National Semiconductor Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif. The bus was envisioned as a possible sequel or supplement to NuBus, and sources said some members of the PowerPC Mac development team lament the decision to abandon that future. Instead, Apple handed off QuickRing to National Semiconductor, which has continued its development and fostered its adoption by third parties. Many of these developers expect to release products in the first or second quarter of 1994.
> DayStar Digital Inc. of Atlanta is planning to use QuickRing in its line of PowerPC-based multiprocessor cards, nPower. Currently, nPower cards are based on the Quadra's processor direct slot, but DayStar said it hopes to introduce NuBus models to take advantage of more slots. Because NuBus transfer rates are well below that of a PDS, DayStar plans to introduce a PDS-based "master" nPower card that will use QuickRing for high-speed communications with NuBus "slave" cards.
> EnerAnalytics of San Ramon, Calif., next year plans to introduce two Mac video boards that use QuickRing. The company's Advanced Graphics Engine, a 24-bit-color display card with QuickDraw acceleration and an embedded 33-MHz RISC processor for applications acceleration, and its Quick! JPEG compression board will exchange video data with each other via QuickRing. Over time, the company expects to release more video-editing boards for digitizing, storage and networking, all of which will be based on QuickRing.
> Teleglobe Communications Inc. of North Andover, Mass., is working on a broadband multimedia hub, the CX-3000, that will use QuickRing internally. Teleglobe said its new hub will support much more traffic than a normal hub. The CX-3000 will be a new member of a family of products from Teleglobe that act as multimedia multiplexers, combining voice, data and video on the LAN and between LANs. Teleglobe said it sees the next generation of the product linking Asynchronous Transfer Mode and T3 lines for even faster communications.
> Xedia Corp. of Wilmington, Mass., is utilizing QuickRing in a high-performance networking hub it is developing. According to the company, QuickRing makes it possible to use switched Ethernet to deliver voice, video and data over a LAN.
> Fishcamp Engineering of Santa Maria, Calif., will introduce the NBS-AN50, a wave-form digitizer card capable of sampling one or two channels at 50 to 100 MHz. QuickRing will be used to interconnect the card with memory expansion cards, specialized signal-processing cards and additional NBS-AN50 cards.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
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News: LaserWriter Pro 810 to be unveiled
By Matthew Rothenberg
Cupertino, Calif. - Apple reportedly will shake up the high end of its laser printer line at the Oct. 21 CPU rollout, where it will introduce one new LaserWriter Pro model and discontinue another.
Sources said the company plans to unveil the LaserWriter Pro 810, an Adobe PostScript Level 2 device that can print 20 tabloid-size or 10 letter-size pages per minute. The new printer is based on a 400-dpi Fuji Xerox engine but reportedly uses software interpolation to achieve a maximum resolution of 800 by 400 dpi.
The LaserWriter Pro 810 switches automatically between Level 2 and a PCL 4 emulation; it will come with 35 Type 1 and 64 TrueType fonts. Besides standard LocalTalk, RS-232 serial, Centronics parallel and external SCSI interfaces, users will be able to purchase an Ethernet card that supports SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol).
The new printer reportedly includes a 16-MHz Weitek 8200 RISC chip and will come standard with 8 Mbytes of RAM, which must be increased to the maximum 16 Mbytes to print tabloid-size pages at maximum resolution.
Sources said the printer was developed by Dataproducts Corp. of Woodland Hills, Calif., which sells it as the LZR 2080 for $4,995. Apple also plans to eventually ship a version of Dataproducts' 15-ppm, $3,795 LZR 1580 as the LaserWriter Pro 800, according to sources.
Simultaneous with the Pro 800 launch, sources said, Apple will discontinue its $2,099 LaserWriter Pro 600, a 600-dpi, Level 2 laser printer based on an 8-ppm, letter-size Canon engine. The company will continue to offer the $2,529 Pro 630, a version of the printer that includes EtherTalk and SCSI interfaces as well as PhotoGrade image-enhancement capabilities.
In addition, Apple will reportedly pull the plug on its 12" Monochrome Display, a $245 monitor it introduced in 1990.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
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News: DateView, InTouch to schedule events
By Kirsten L. Parkinson
Sunnyvale, Calif. - Advanced Software Inc. in November will add to its line of information-management products when it releases a calendar desk accessory that interacts with its InTouch contact-management application.
DateView will offer standard daily, weekly and monthly views as well as a custom option allowing users to specify the number of days and weeks displayed. DateView also supports viewing of events by category or priority.
Users can schedule three types of events: activities that use blocks of time, events such as phone calls that have an assigned time but do not need a block of time, and to-dos with no specific time. To-dos appear at the top of each day's calendar.
DateView lets users create new events through a dialog box or by dragging across a desired block of time. Events can span more than one day, and users can schedule multiple reminders for an activity.
Via the Snap* control panel built into both DateView and InTouch, users can attach InTouch contacts to a DateView event. Users cannot create new contact records from within DateView, however.
Other DateView features include the ability to reschedule events by dragging and dropping, and built-in printing templates.
Advanced Software said it will ship Version 2.1 of InTouch at the same time as DateView. The upgrade adds support for the three event types in DateView. Because the two programs will share a common calendar file, users will be able to schedule events in InTouch and have them appear in DateView.
InTouch 2.1 will ship with a separate program called the InTouch Import Utility that provides templates for importing and formatting data from other contact managers, including Dynodex from Portfolio Software Inc. and Touchbase Pro from Aldus Corp.'s Consumer Division.
Both programs will list for $99.95. Registered InTouch users can purchase DateView for $24.95. InTouch upgrades are free. Owners of competing products can buy either DateView or InTouch for $35.
Advanced Software Inc. is at 1095 E. Duane Ave., Suite 103, Sunnyvale, Calif. 94086. Phone (408) 733-0745 or (800) 346-5392; fax (408) 733-2335.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
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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: SyQuest to sell 44-Mbyte drive for $300
By Kirsten L. Parkinson
Fremont, Calif. - Users who have always wanted a SyQuest drive but didn't think they could afford it might find that now is the right time to buy, provided they're willing to settle for a 44-Mbyte system that sources said will soon be discontinued.
SyQuest Technology Inc., based here, is repricing its 44-Mbyte drives and aiming them at the education and home-office markets. While street prices previously hovered near $500, the drives will now sell for about $300, the company said. PLI, a participating vendor, has dropped its list price to $369 from $786.
SyQuest denied it will discontinue the older removable-media model but said that it felt the drive was no longer viable in the high-end arena.
"The 88-Mbyte drive is the drive for the professional user," said Joel Levine, SyQuest vice president of corporate marketing. "For the 44-Mbyte systems, we have lost that audience. We're trying to push those drives down into the entry levels, places where [users] don't have the large megabyte files and need the bigger systems."
Earlier this year, the company introduced a version of its 88-Mbyte mechanism that writes as well as reads 44-Mbyte cartridges. That model has gradually become the choice for many high-end users. Furthermore, in January SyQuest will reportedly introduce a 200-Mbyte, 5.25-inch drive that is also backward compatible to 44-Mbyte and 88-Mbyte media.
Only two SyQuest resellers in the U.S. - PLI, also based here, and MacWarehouse of South Norwalk, Conn. - will be selling the bargain-priced drives. According to SyQuest, the company limited who can offer the lower price, providing an incentive for those companies to put more effort into marketing the low-cost systems.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
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News: Tools help PCs deal with Mac floppies
By Raines Cohen
San Francisco - Several vendors are aiming to make it easier than ever for users of IBM PCs and compatibles to read, write and format Macintosh disks, with products that include:
> MacAccess. Hypro Technologies Inc. last week shipped a new $69 background utility that lets DOS and Windows users read, write and format high-density (1.44-Mbyte) Mac disks with standard DOS and Windows commands.
Because Mac disks can be mounted on the Windows desktop, users can open Mac files directly from within Windows applications that use compatible formats, such as Microsoft Excel and Word. No file-translation software is included.
The program offers functionality similar to that of MacDisk, the $99.95 utility shipped in July by Insignia Solutions Inc. of Mountain View, Calif. (see MacWEEK, June 28, Page 3). MacDisk consists of a terminate and stay resident program that reads and writes files on high-density Mac floppies, plus a utility that formats them and displays full file names.
MacAccess is not related to either of two products bearing the same name: Da Vinci Systems Corp.'s Mac electronic-mail client or ASD Software Inc.'s security-card reader.
> Deluxe Option Board. Utility maker Central Point Software Inc. is unloading inventories of its Deluxe Option Board, a PC card introduced in 1988 that lets PCs read, write and format double-sided (800-Kbyte) Mac disks. The $179.95 card is being discounted to $49.95 for a limited time. It will continue to be supported via fax, mail and on-line services.
Central Point is also offering Hypro's MacAccess for $49.95 to existing customers.
> Conversions Plus. DataViz Inc. has shipped a Microsoft Windows application that reads, writes and formats high-density Mac disks. Conversions Plus for Windows includes translators that can convert files between 350 pairs of formats. In addition, embedded PICT graphics in Mac documents that the program recognizes can be translated to Windows Metafile graphics. The $149 program can also convert files separately transferred to PC hard drives or network volumes.
Central Point Software Inc. is at 15220 N.W. Greenbrier Parkway, Suite 150, Beaverton, Ore. 97006. Phone (503) 690-8088 or (800) 964-6896; fax (503) 690-8083.
DataViz Inc. is at 55 Corporate Drive, Trumbull, Conn. 06611. Phone (203) 268-0030 or (800) 733-0030; fax (203) 268-4345.
Hypro Technologies Inc. is at 8557 Higuera St., Culver City, Calif. 90232. Phone (310) 473-0328; fax (310) 822-8123.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
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Gateways: Newton Messaging Card arrives
Apple to ship pager for the MessagePad
By Raines Cohen
Cupertino, Calif. - The Newton's first wireless links will become available next week when Apple ships the Messaging Card, a radio pager for its MessagePad.
The PCMCIA card, with an expected street price of about $200, is based on Motorola Corp.'s NewsCard and works over the wireless service provided by MobileComm of Jackson, Miss., the paging division of BellSouth Cellular Corp.
The receive-only card works like a high-end pager, storing about 48 pages of messages, each with as many as 250 characters. People can transmit messages to users of the Messaging Card in four ways: from a telephone keypad, through a dispatching service (when touch-tone phones are not available), by leaving voice mail with MobileComm, or by typing a message on a computer and transmitting it via the $29.95 MobileComm Messaging Software for Mac, DOS or Windows.
The card can receive pages and blink its message light when outside of the MessagePad. When the card is inserted, an incoming message triggers a single or double beep or chirp, whichever the user prefers, and appears in the Newton's In Box. Users can call a toll-free number to listen to messages they missed while out of range; text messages are spoken using MobileComm's text-to-speech technology.
Monthly rates for the paging service will be $20 to $69, depending on the coverage of service. MobileComm said companies interested in broadcast paging can custom order the cards and service so a single message can be sent to a group of users.
Users can find local Apple dealers who carry the MessagePad by calling (800) 365-3690, Ext. 100.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
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Gateways: Intel spurring wireless E-mail upgrades
By Nathalie Welch
Hillsboro, Ore. - Intel Corp.'s first wireless modem shipped just last week, but the device is already earmarked by several electronic- mail companies as the basis for their future mobile connections.
The $795 Intel Wireless Modem connects portable computers to other wireless modems via RAM Mobile Data's Mobitex packet-radio network. The device cannot call regular modems and can transmit data only in discrete chunks of up to 512 bytes in size. The effective throughput is 2,400 bps.
Intel's modem sports an RS-232 serial port, runs for 10 hours on a rechargeable battery, weighs 1 pound and measures 1.3 by 2.68 by 7.87 inches. Intel will also sell a batteryless version, for use with LAN-based E-mail servers, at the same price.
IBM PC and compatible vendors are lining up to bundle the modem with new versions of their remote E-mail packages. Combos currently available include Lotus Development Corp.'s cc:Mail Mobile (formerly cc:Mail Remote) for DOS, Microsoft Mail Remote for Windows and AT&T EasyLink Services' client software for Windows.
No Mac E-mail vendor has formally announced client-software support for the wireless modem, but several have plans in the works. West Des Moines, Iowa-based CE Software Inc. said it was working with RAM Mobile Data and Intel to send and retrieve QuickMail messages via remote Mac clients. Its packet-radio version should be available in November (see MacWEEK, Sept. 13, Page 1).
Parsippany, N.J.-based AT&T EasyLink Services has started preliminary work on a wireless version of AT&T Mail Access PLUS for Macintosh, which will use Intel's wireless modem and RAM's network. Product availability and pricing have not been determined, the company said.
Lotus said it intends to offer Mac wireless connectivity in the next release of cc:Mail Mobile for Macintosh, due later in the year. Lotus will provide an upgrade to current users, said Mark McHarry, cc:Mail spokesman.
"A little extra code goes on top of the existing client software, which brings up an extra menu so users can select what type of sending option they want, such as wireless," McHarry said.
Further back on the curve, Microsoft Corp. does not offer a remote Mac E-mail client.
"When we come out with our next generation of Microsoft Mail clients, we will be in a much better position to offer wireless mail," said John Goodman, Microsoft product manager for connectivity.
Intel Corp.'s PC Enhancements Division-Mobile is at 5200 N.E. Elam Young Parkway, Hillsboro, Ore. 97124. Phone (503) 629-7000 or (800) 538-3373.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
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Gateways: AOL expanding Internet services
WAIS, news in '93, inbound Telnet in '94
By Nathalie Welch
Vienna, Va. - America Online Inc. last week announced it will upgrade its service to provide simplified, graphical access to Internet services, including Usenet news groups, Gopher and Wide Area Information Server databases.
AOL's new Internet Center will go on-line in October with information about the ubiquitous international network and a list of Internet mailing lists to which users can subscribe. Later in the year, AOL will add connections to WAIS and Gopher, as well as to Usenet news groups.
To reflect these new services, AOL will remotely upgrade users' client software for free when they log on. AOL said it plans to release a new Mac client in early 1994 that will support networking protocols, such as Telnet, so users can access AOL services from the Internet.
AOL charges users $9.95 a month for five hours of connect time. The company, which has traditionally focused on ease of use, has signed several agreements in the past year designed to bring traditional media, such as newspapers, on line.
Cambridge, Mass.-based Delphi Internet Services Corp. (formerly General Videotex Corp.) currently is the only on-line service to have blended full Internet access with traditional content. Delphi uses a command-line interface accessed via a terminal emulator. Delphi charges either $10 a month for four hours of connect time or $20 for 20 hours.
America Online Inc. is at 8619 Westwood Center Drive, Suite 200, Vienna, Va. 22182-2285. Phone (703) 448-8700 or (800) 827-6364; fax (703) 883-1509.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
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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.
GA: After Effects to layer on features
Upgrade to let users edit motion paths
By Neil McManus
Providence, R.I. - The Company of Science & Art is crafting an upgrade to After Effects that will give QuickTime-movie makers greater control over layers, key-frame timing and motion effects.
CoSA After Effects offers a variety of high-end features, such as time-based filters, unlimited compositing and field rendering for video-out.
Version 2.0, due later this year, will carry an as-yet-undetermined price tag that will be higher than the current $1,295 price, according to CoSA.
The new version will include a revamped Time Layout view that shows a time bar for every layer. The scrolling view will display time layouts in user-specified increments, such as one frame, one second or one minute.
In the Time Layout view, users will be able to explode a layer's listing to view keyframe positions of masks and effects, as well as properties such as opacity and scale. Users will also be able to copy and paste keyframes alone or in groups and move them in time.
In the Composition window, users will be able to draw and edit motion-control paths using spline tools. In and out keyframes for motion paths can be interpolated using spline or linear methods.
Rendering will be noticeably faster in Version 2.0, CoSA said. The Basic 3-D effect, for example, will render 10 times faster, according to the company. The upgrade will also be compatible with Adobe Photoshop image-format plug-ins, allowing it to open and save images in a host of new formats.
Upgrade pricing has not been set, but it will be less than the price increase, CoSA said.
The Company of Science & Art is at 14 Imperial Place, Suite 203, Providence, R.I. 02903. Phone (401) 831-2672; fax (401) 831-2675.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
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GA: RIP makers to hitch Mac, color copiers
By Carolyn Said
Stamford, Conn. - Users will be able to print to Xerox Corp.'s newest color copiers with two competing technologies to be shown next month at Seybold San Francisco.
Xerox is expected by next year to market products developed by SuperMac Technology Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., and Electronics for Imaging Inc. of San Mateo, Calif., that turn Xerox's MajestiK Color Series copiers into PostScript Level 2 color printers.
The MajestiK copiers, which range in price from $29,750 to $31,750, were released late last month. Designed to reproduce 24-bit-color photographic images, they can output 6 color pages per minute at 400 dpi.
> SuperMac will provide a NuBus board and daughtercard that connect a Mac to a MajestiK copier via LocalTalk or EtherTalk. The board uses a 40-MHz IDT RISC chip; it comes with 72 Mbytes of RAM.
A Mac equipped with the card acts as a print server and RIP (raster image processor). The RIP, which can process in the background, accepts output from any Mac on a LAN. SuperMac said it will test whether the server will accept output from IBM PCs and compatibles on the network.
A future release will let users scan images from the copier to the Mac. The board will use proprietary Xerox technology for color matching.
SuperMac and Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd. of Tokyo last week announced a similar solution for the Japanese market, where the board will sell for about $25,000.
The product's name and U.S. pricing have not been determined; the board will be available in the first half of next year.
The daughtercard contains interface information specific to the Xerox copier. SuperMac said it is developing other daughtercards for color-printing technology, beginning with its own ProofPositive dye-sublimation printer.
> EFI will develop a version of its external Fiery RIP for the MajestiK Color Series.
Fiery connects to a network via TCP/IP and lets Mac, Intel and Unix users print to copiers from vendors such as Canon U.S.A. Inc., Eastman Kodak Co., Agfa and Minolta Corp., as well as to a current model from Xerox. Fiery also lets the copiers scan images into a computer on the network. It uses EfiColor, EFI's color-matching software.
Current Fiery RIPs cost $19,000 to $29,000; Xerox has not announced pricing for the MajestiK-compatible version, which EFI said should ship in the first quarter of next year.
Xerox is at 800 Long Ridge Road, Stamford, Conn. 06904. Phone (203) 968-3000.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
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BusinessWatch: Apple wants to expand into Texas
Company OKs plan to buy 130-acre site
By Jon Swartz
Austin, Texas - Apple apparently has big plans for expansion in Texas, which could mean an eventual exodus of sorts from Silicon Valley.
The company filed documents with city officials here last month that map out plans to significantly expand its 700-person operation beyond technical support and education sales.
Included in the document are plans for an unspecified number of "marketing and research and development" positions at a proposed 130-acre site.
Sources said Apple has been scouting the Austin area for months in search of a possible future home for Apple USA, which is based in Campbell, Calif., and for a site to supplant its Fountain, Colo., manufacturing plant. The company reportedly is unhappy with the cost of operations in California and with cultural clashes and a lack of technically trained workers in Colorado.
Apple spokesman Bill Keegan said the company currently has no plans to move either Apple USA or manufacturing space here.
Jim O'Neill, director of Apple's Austin site, said the company's continuing drive to slash costs has accelerated its expansion plans in Texas, which the company recently identified as a low-cost center of operations. "I wouldn't be surprised if we have other (Apple business) groups join us," he said.
Apple already has laid off 2,500 of its 16,000 workers worldwide this year in a cost-cutting move, and company officials said Apple will consider relocating some of its more than 5,000 workers in the pricey San Francisco Bay area to further trim costs.
The company is considering an additional 1,000 to 2,000 layoffs next month, sources said.
O'Neill said Apple's board of directors has approved the purchase of 130 acres, and the company expects to start construction of a 200,000- to 400,000-square-foot facility next year. Apple hopes to occupy the site by the middle of 1995. The company set up its U.S. Customer Service Support Center in leased buildings here a year ago.
Apple also is seeking an agreement with the city that would free it from city property taxes as a condition for buying the proposed 130-acre site.
Pieter Hartsook, editor of The Hartsook Letter in Alameda, Calif., said that Austin also makes an attractive site because of its proximity to the center of operations for Apple's joint development of PowerPC with IBM Corp. and Motorola Inc.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
BusinessWatch Page 24
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
BusinessWatch: Distributors happy with VAR drive
By Jon Swartz
Cupertino, Calif. - The reviews are coming in on Apple's value-added reseller recruitment program, and distributors and resellers are giving the 1-year-old program thumbs up.
In March 1992, Apple signed agreements with Ingram Micro Inc. of Santa Ana, Calif., Merisel Inc. of El Segundo, Calif., and Tech Data Corp. of Clearwater, Fla., to supply Macs to small- and medium-volume VARs specializing in engineering, integrated media, legal, networking, publishing, Unix and other market segments (see MacWEEK, March 2, 1992, Page 91).
Apple initially targeted 450 VARs, many of whom carry DOS products. But after the distributors quickly filled that quota, Apple raised the ceiling to 650 VARs each. Today, there are about 1,930 resellers enrolled in the program.
"It has been very successful," an Apple spokeswoman said. She said each of the 10 VAR segments is "equally important," and that Apple will focus on the mobility and business-productivity markets in 1994.
"I generally like it, especially now that Apple is constantly dropping its Mac prices," said Dhiren Shah, director of marketing for Solustan Inc., a Needham, Mass.-based CAD/CAM reseller. "As an Apple VAR, we can order CPUs as we need them. We're not in the position we were as an independent VAR three to four years ago, when we had to carry a lot of Apple inventory and didn't have any control."
Despite grumblings that Apple's frequent price cuts might put VARs at a disadvantage with dealers in the marketplace, Shah said that Apple's narrowing margins have instead put VARs on equal footing.
"I have no complaints," said Bill Wakefield, director of AAlied Support in San Francisco.
Even sales of Apple Workgroup Servers - which Apple officials concede have "not been stellar" - have picked up, according to VARs.
Distributors said they were pleased with the VAR recruitment drive - particularly with sales in-to such markets as publishing, graphics, sales automation and medical.
Dave Jaskulke, director of Ingram's Mac division, which has recruited nearly half of the 1,930 VARs, said he has seen a high degree of monthly Mac sales activity since the program began. "While many of the VARs previously leaned toward DOS as the primary (operating system), it's now about 50-50 with the Mac," he said.
Dean Jones, Merisel manager of systems product marketing, noted increases in multimedia, accounting and imaging sales.
Some VARs were effusive in their praise, crediting the program with propping up their business.
"We wouldn't be in existence if we hadn't joined the program," said Peter Joyce, vice president of Image Set Design, a Portland, Maine-based VAR that specializes in pre-press and graphics design. "The Mac is at the center of our business, and we needed access to it."
MacWEEK 09.27.93
BusinessWatch Page 24
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Special Report: The pre-press market
This year has seen significant advances and maturing of technology in virtually every area of digital pre-press, and the Macintosh has been center stage. However, major graphics software is being ported to Windows, and Unix workstations are in increased use. In this Special Report, MacWEEK examines recent developments in pre-press hardware and software and looks at the Mac's role in this changing industry.
By Steve Hannaford
Over the past year, the desktop-based graphic arts industry reached a new level of maturity and market domination. Desktop publishing, primarily Macintosh-based, is now rarely questioned as a technological approach, both for design and increasingly for pre-press.
Even holdout companies are finding ways to integrate desktop technology with either traditional page-assembly and pre-press techniques or those of high-end Color Electronic Pre-press Systems (CEPS). High-end system providers, such as Scitex America Corp., Crosfield Electronics Ltd. and Screen USA, are now integrating their more expensive proprietary systems closer to the desktop, especially to the Mac.
With the desktop publishing and pre-press market beginning to heat up on a variety of platforms, Apple is demonstrating a renewed commitment to this market. Lisa Wellman, director of pre-press marketing at Apple, said: "This is a critical time for Apple. Our business model is changing, but vital to our success is a continued focus on the publishing market. Our involvement is changing from simply providing the platform to providing some significant technology to allow users to see publishing not as a cost center but as a revenue channel."
Overall, the desktop pre-press industry has now gone beyond simply replicating traditional systems. L. Mills Davis, president of Davis Inc. of Washington, D.C., and president of the HiFi Color Project, a multiclient research program developing new color processes, said, "We are now just starting to see the desktop-based pre-press industry get beyond mimicking photomechanical processes of the past by using new ways of digital-imaging models that add to the flexibility and productivity of the whole process."
This impact has been seen in four areas in particular: screening, document assembly, image archiving and proofing.
Screening
It took a long time, but over the past few years imagesetter-produced halftone screens have begun to match in every way those produced either traditionally or through CEPS systems. A study last year sponsored by the Seybold organization, the so-called Color Screening Shootout, concluded that PostScript systems, while not perfect, had nonetheless nearly reached overall parity in screening with traditional systems.
New developments, especially the use of stochastic screening, are taking things even further, using techniques that only computers can generate and seem likely to lead to breakthroughs in high-quality printing. They may even redefine the whole notion of four-color process output.
Document assembly
A new set of methods is slowly emerging that is remaking the document assembly process. Though Open Prepress Interface, which keeps massive, high-resolution images separate from text until output time by using low-resolution place holders, has been used for assembling images and pages, that kind of assembly approach is only just starting to be widely used. The idea of separating work functions, partially assembling pages and allowing large color image files to be processed separately until production time is gaining more credibility with improved server software and hardware and an increased demand.
Quark Publishing System, now in beta testing, is a fuller publishing solution meant for tracking and organizing publishing functions, including tracking document revisions and keeping editorial and production departments in sync through an organizing database. Apple's new Workgroup Server series and other graphic arts server technologies from Compumation Inc., Helios USA and others are making it easier to assemble, spool and back up large color documents.
Image archiving
New technological advances in optical storage and archiving is beginning to make significant changes in the storage and processing of photographic images. These include Eastman Kodak Co.'s Photo CD technology, which provides an inexpensive and good-looking way of scanning and storing 35mm film on CDs, and image databases such as Aldus Fetch, which make it easy to catalog photographic images for later retrieval. The once-exclusive world of traditional stock photography is also changing rapidly, as the optical and on-line delivery of high-
quality digital images continues to proliferate and fall in price.
Proofing
A rethinking of the traditional methods of proofing is also slowly gaining momentum. Most publications still demand expensive, highly reliable film-based proofs such as 3M Corp.'s MatchPrint, and until recently many pages went through three to four cycles of proofing.
Along with more expensive digital proofing systems such as Kodak's Approval, users are also beginning to accept as good enough for certain tasks direct output from the Mac to, for example, an Iris high-
resolution inkjet printer or a 3M Rainbow dye-sublimation printer.
Color management is slowly having an impact on the proofing process by ensuring more accurate and replicable color output, thus allowing an ever wider range of color printers to be used for some proofing tasks.
More power, less money
A major erosion in the price of high-powered Macs and peripherals is having a big impact on the desktop pre-press industry. The availability of powerful desktop systems such as the Centris 650 at more affordable prices, and the huge technological advances in everything from disk I/O to networking to optical storage, have made big differences in buying decisions and pre-press file-handling methodologies. Even the most expensive hardware components (imagesetters, scanners and servers) are getting affordable enough to fit into a number of in-house situations where they never made sense before.
Mac builds up its lead
All of these advances have meant a growing number of Macs doing pre-
press work, from color correction to page assembly to film output.
The basic impetus has come from the design studio. Since its inception, the Mac has been popular with graphic designers and illustrators, and today it is virtually synonymous with desktop graphics. It is those users who have, by and large, pressured the pre-press community into the desktop age by doing more and more of their work in digital formats.
And the Mac's hold on the design market is still very solid. Nancy Aldrich-Ruenzel, editorial director of Step-by-Step-Publishing of Peoria, Ill., which regularly surveys its professional design subscriber base, said, "We can't say that we can see any significant migration from the Mac platform among serious graphic designers creating print media."
John Waters, principal of John Waters Design of New York and head of IDEA, an East Coast association of electronic graphic designers, agreed. "Most graphic designers are very conservative. They tend to adopt the platform they see other designers using, and at least for now, that platform is the Mac."
As the line between what the design studio and the pre-press house does continues to blur, many designers are beginning to take over more traditional pre-press tasks such as color correction and duotone creation, and pre-press houses are becoming obliged to use the same tools as their clients.
Alan Darling, general manager of Quad/Text of Pewaukee, Wis., one of the country's leading pre-press companies for magazines and catalogs, gets 80 percent of his work submitted electronically, and the vast majority of that is from Macs. The use of Macs in his pre-press house is a foregone conclusion.
In a recent survey of the Association of Imaging Service Bureaus, a several-hundred-member association of imagesetter-oriented pre-press faculties, many said that their sites are highly Mac-oriented, and the great majority said that more than 85 percent of the output they produce is generated on the Mac.
Even in the print shop, where an increasing amount of pre-press work is being done digitally, the use of the Mac is expanding. John Seibt, vice president of ABV Graphics of Dallas, whose company configures systems for pre-press houses, in-house corporate design companies and printing companies, sees more interest in the Macintosh than in previous years. "In the customer base I talk to, many of the midrange printers are responding to their client base, and those clients are scrambling toward the Mac," he said.
The PC (and Unix) challenge
In this market, to date, the Mac has dominated other desktop platforms. A half-dozen service bureaus we surveyed across the nation report that work produced on Intel-based IBM PCs and compatibles still accounts for only a small portion (5 percent to 20 percent) of their businesses, and most PC jobs are still straight black-and-white text work.
Quad/Text's Darling is starting to look seriously at the PC platform for the first time. "We have always pushed our customers toward the Macintosh. But lately we've been looking at the PC as a legitimate publishing platform for them. With the right programs and a real advantage in price, it has become a serious alternative. Who cares what the operating system is if the programs work?"
The PC has only started looking like a threat in this field within the past six months. The impressive CPU power of the 66-MHz 80486 machines and the next-generation Pentium (80586) chip are making PCs running Windows a very viable graphics competitor with the top Macs in terms of speed and price. Most important of all is the recent porting of high-end high-quality Mac design and publishing software - including QuarkXPress, Aldus PageMaker and FreeHand, and Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator - to the Windows platform. There is now a full complement of battle-hardened professional color publishing software running under Windows. And as Chuck Weger, an Alexandria, Va.-based publishing consultant with solid experience on both Mac and Windows platforms, said, "Every indication is that the PC versions are fully as competent as the Mac versions."
Less immediate is the Unix threat. Highly touted Unix platforms from Silicon Graphics Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. still have only minimal impact in the design and layout areas of mainstream publications (although documentation and other long-document work using programs such as FrameMaker are common on Unix systems). While they have a substantial presence as file servers and off-line workstations, they are niche players, often running one program or another, in pre-press houses. However, given the sheer raw power of these systems, they can't be counted out completely. Early reports of Photoshop performance on Silicon Graphics machines, due to come out by the end of the year, are enough to have power-hungry Photoshop users salivating.
So how real is this competition? How long can Apple dominate this area? Well, for a long time all the moves against Apple were only talk, but recent developments at Dell Computer Corp. have perhaps forced Apple to realize that it now for the first time must fight to save its home turf. Darling said, "Dell's campaign makes a first compelling case for color publishing on the PC." Can Apple hold on to this base area while waiting for the PowerPC and other new technologies down the road?
Apple: A new attitude?
Apple responded quickly to the Dell announcement by announcing its own integrated workstation, the Quadra 950 Publishing Configuration, which shows that Apple is not prepared to roll over and play dead. According to George Everhart, vice president and general manager of the new PC Business Division at Apple, "It was the publishing features of the Macintosh that propelled Apple into a leadership position in the computer industry. We intend to keep it that way."
At least some observers see a new attitude at Apple since the most recent downsizing. Seibt said, "Apple's attitude locally [in Dallas] has been very good, the reorganization has been positive. They are soft-
pedaling the emphasis on multimedia; they are putting more emphasis on graphics and publishing. The attitude is that publishing is what is making Apple money today."
Of course, Apple and others expect that the PowerPC will reshuffle the cards. The prospect of Unix power with a Mac interface and a competitive price is a natural. As Toronto publishing consultant Michael Kieran put it, "Serious color publishers who have been crying out for Unix power at a reasonable price will find satisfaction with PowerPC."
But in the six to 10 months until PowerPC arrives, expect determined competition, especially from PC vendors, to push hard against the Mac.
Tim Manousos contributed to this Special Report.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
Special Report Page 30
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Review: Lotus offers Notes as Mac link to nets
Workgroup application still needs work
By Jonathan A. Oski
After being available for OS/2 and Windows clients for years, Lotus Notes finally offers Macintosh client support. Version 3.0 of the $495 workgroup computing product also includes a significantly overhauled user interface. IBM Corp.'s OS/2 is no longer required on the Notes server; Microsoft Windows 3.1 can now support IBM PC and compatible clients. Macintosh clients, however, can communicate with Notes servers running only on OS/2 1.3.
Notes is a client-server application that provides an environment from which you can access personal or shared databases. The information in Notes databases is typically organized in forms (or documents) and can be stored in a variety of data types, including text, pictures, images, sound or binary objects. Notes also provides an electronic-mail system.
Our examination of Notes focused on the issues that Mac-centric organizations would face as they install and start to use Notes.
Notes 3.0 continues to require an PC for the server. For our evaluation we used a series of 80386- and 80486-based PCs with 16 to 32 Mbytes of RAM for our servers. Notes servers can consume a fair amount of disk space depending on the amount of data you store. We recommend a minimum disk size of 300 to 500 Mbytes for the average Notes server.
The workspace
The Notes environment, or workspace, displays six file folders. From these folders you can access various databases, which are stored either locally or on a remote server. You can arrange the databases and name the "tabs" on the folders as you wish. You can connect to a database by double-clicking on its icon. If the database is on a server that you have not yet logged onto, you will be prompted to enter your user password.
Notes databases are flat-file collections of information that loosely resemble applications created with a product such as Claris Corp.'s FileMaker Pro. Lotus builds on this with a powerful feature called Views, which lets you arrange or sort documents in a database by almost any field in the file. Views are multilevel and can be collapsed or expanded in a manner similar to the hierarchical list of files in a Finder window. Using a variety of Views, you can quickly sift through many documents in a database.
Dance of the seven levels
There are seven levels of database access that can be granted to any Notes user: manager, designer, editor, author, reader, depositor and no access. This lets you accommodate a wide array of document- and database-sharing scenarios.
To help you quickly get started using Notes, Lotus includes 15 predesigned database templates, such as Call Tracking, Purchase Requisition Tracking, Travel Reimbursement Authorization and Electronic Library. Beyond this lies the realm of Notes application development. In many cases, you can tailor one of the templates to fit the needs of your application.
Lotus offers a range of its familiar "@" functions as a macro programming supplement to the form-based nature of Notes databases. As with other aspects of Notes, we found that the documentation alone was not the most efficient method of learning the development system. Also, if you want to modify templates there is little system documentation to help you understand the design perspective.
Mac limitations
This is the first version of Notes available for Mac clients, and it shows. While the Notes interface has been retooled with Smart-Icons, new dialogs and a remapped keyboard, its heavy Windows-based influence will catch some Macintosh users off-guard. There are some annoying compromises. For instance, you need a folder called "System*" at the root of your start-up drive, and the folder in which you store the Notes application cannot have any non-ASCII characters in its title. Finally, many dialog boxes and menus do not follow Apple's Human Interface Guidelines.
The Mac client does not have a degree of functionality equal to the more mature Windows and OS/2 clients. For instance, while PC users can use the Notes client for full-text searches, Mac users must use the server. This can have some performance implications for servers that host a large number of Mac clients that routinely use the full-text search feature on one or more databases. It also means that Mac users cannot perform full-text searches of local databases.
We found client performance on the Mac to be somewhat sluggish on midrange Macs such as the IIsi, IIci and SE/30.
Notes Mail
Notes includes an electronic-mail application, Notes Mail, which offers some advantages over competing systems. You have full control over the formatting of your mail, including font and text style. You can also place a variety of attachments in a mail message, including QuickTime videos and sound; these can be opened directly from mail without filing the attachment and launching the application that created it. Notes Mail does not, however, notify you of incoming mail. You have to periodically scan your mailbox for new messages.
Replication
One of the most powerful and unique features of Notes is database replication. With this feature, databases can be synchronized across an enterprise, thereby letting users access data locally even if they share a database with someone across the country.
Using the replication feature can get complicated when many copies of a database are spread throughout servers and workstations in your organization. You need to carefully plan replication schedules and decide whether a server will fully replicate with another server, or just send or receive information from other servers.
With replication, however, bad data can be automatically distributed throughout your Notes servers if you are not careful. The real danger comes if someone with direct access to a key server changes critical information in one or more databases. Before you're aware of the security breach, the bogus information could be replicated throughout your organization. While this should not dissuade you from using Notes' replication feature, it should underscore the importance of physical security of your Notes servers and a well-planned security and replication strategy.
Show me your ID
Notes' security scheme is very awkward and complex. Unlike most others, it's distributed to the workstation level.
ID files are the foundation of Notes security. When a new user account is created, a user ID file is created. This ID can be distributed manually to each user via floppy disk or across a network, or it can be automatically copied to the user's workstation the first time the user connects to the server. The user ID file must be certified, or stamped, by each server that the user will log onto. If user ID files are lost or damaged, they cannot be reproduced.
Lotus strongly encourages you to make backups of these files, but maintaining them for a large installation is a monstrous task. We fail to see the need for additional, and obscure, security systems when authentication can be capably handled by enterprise network operating systems such as Banyan Systems Inc.'s Vines, Novell Inc.'s NetWare, and Unix.
Notes' strange security system also lacks flexibility. Unless multiple ID files are stored on a workstation, only one user is limited to each workstation. This means you cannot use another workstation to check your Notes mail unless you carry a copy of your ID file with you wherever you go. This is certainly counter to the notion of virtual, location-independent networking.
Documentation and support
Overall, the documentation for Lotus Notes is inadequate. Notes relies heavily on on-line documentation, which some users may decide not to install to save space. The printed documentation that is provided is incomplete.
The only end-user documentation included with the client package is a 70-page Quick Tour booklet. There is no explanation of the philosophy of Lotus Notes, and important issues, including security, are mentioned only briefly. The manual also uses Windows screen dumps. Lotus does include two manuals for application development; we think it's an odd assumption that all users will need these.
The server package includes a Network Driver manual and a hefty Administrator's Guide. The latter should be read closely before installing Notes. However, it too is missing some important information.
Lotus does offer toll-free phone support for 90 days after your first call. The phone support was adequate in most cases but at times it took more than one call to resolve a simple problem. Lotus offers two levels of continuing support. Each can be purchased for an annual fee. The $295 basic support package should be sufficient for most small installations; the $2,500 premium support is intended for large organizations with many sites and Notes servers.
Lotus also offers a 24-hour "fast fax" line, (617) 253-9150, which lets you order specific product information.
Conclusions
We see Notes as a viable tool but one that requires a great deal of patience, troubleshooting and training to be successful. Lotus has paved the way for organizations with a heterogeneous mix of Macintosh, Windows and OS/2 clients to start building distributed, document-sharing databases at the enterprise level.
However, the road that Lotus has created is a bumpy one, especially from the Mac perspective. The Mac client features an uneven interface, sketchy documentation and a questionable security system. Installing and learning Notes is no small task: If you plan to use Notes in your organization, you should also plan on investing in a comprehensive training curriculum for your Notes administrators, developers and users.
If you are in a cross-platform shop, it is good news that you can finally integrate your Macs into the Notes universe. If you are in a Mac-centric environment with few (if any) PCs, a Notes 3.0 installation can be a significant drain on your administrators' resources, especially if they are not familiar with the intricacies of the world of OS/2. In any environment, you will probably hear complaints about Notes' performance on all but the fastest Macs.
Lotus Development Corp. is at 55 Cambridge Parkway, Cambridge, Mass. 02142. Phone (800) 828-7086; fax (617) 693-3899.
Contributors
We wish to thank Gerard Palmeri, Kristen McCowan, Chul Sung Kim and Camille Riddle of Ziff-Davis Labs for assisting in our evaluation of Lotus Notes and contributing to this review.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
Reviews Page 39
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Review: Painter X2 keeps selections afloat
Extension gives painting app some object-oriented features
By Ben Long
Fractal Design Corp. has introduced an extension to Painter 2.0, its excellent "natural media" painting program. The most touted feature of the $79 extension, called PainterX2, is its capability to create multiple permanently "floating" selections. The extension also includes new color features.
To use PainterX2, you must have a copy of the $399 Painter 2.0. PainterX2 adds some resources and code to Painter 2.0 and then creates a new file called PainterX2. The old Painter 2.0 application can be thrown out. (Fractal said that you can continue to use the old copy of Painter 2.0, but it consistently crashed our demo machine, a Macintosh IIfx with a 33-MHz Radius Rocket).
If you've ever pasted something into a painting program, you've experienced a floating selection. In a traditional program, the pasted image stays separate from the underlying, existing document. While floating, the selection can be dragged about the screen until you click outside the selection, at which point it becomes part of the background.
Float on
With PainterX2, you can select an area of a painting with Painter's existing frisket tools, then "float" it by clicking on the area with the new Floating Selections tool. In PainterX2, nothing stops floating until you tell it to via the Edit menu's new Drop command. An unlimited number of floating selections can exist in a document. These selections stay floating even after you save and reopen the document.
Because the computer has to keep copies of each selection, files saved with floating selections are, expectedly, larger than a document without floating selections. How much larger depends on how big the individual floating chunks are. If size is a problem, though, you can always "drop" all of your selections to reduce the size of the file. You will, however, lose the capability to edit the floating parts.
Floating selections can be dragged off the document and into the new Portfolio palette. A scrolling list of thumbnail images, the Portfolio provides a place to store frequently used pictures and a mechanism for moving selections from document to document.
Layers and groups
Once a selection is floating, you can manipulate it in many ways. A new Floating Selections palette provides layering and grouping controls similar to an object-oriented drawing program such as Claris Corp.'s MacDraw or Adobe Illustrator. You can reorder floating selections so they are in front of or behind other selections. You can send an object forward or backward one layer at a time or move the object all the way to the front or back. You can also group floating selections together so that when one object is moved the others are moved with it.
The Floating Selections palette also contains sliders that let you control the opacity of a floating selection and the amount of feathering along the border. Painter 2.0's existing Distort, Scale and Rotate commands, as well as any other command that works on a non-floating selection, can be applied in the same way to a floating selection.
You can set floating objects to interact with other objects and the underlying background in one of several ways. By changing a selection's compositing method, a floating selection can be mixed with what's underneath it. PainterX2 provides a nice selection of compositing effects; methods range from swapping luminance values of the floating and underlying images to blending the hues of the two images.
Masks
To further manipulate floating or nonfloating selections, you can use the new masking tools in conjunction with some of Painter's other tools. The Generate Mask command will automatically create a mask using several algorithms, from differences in luminance to paper grain. Painter's existing mask controls are still used for mask viewing and control.
Tools used through a mask will have different effects, depending on the color of the mask. Black areas allow no painting, white allow complete painting, and gray areas allow something in between. New Masking brushes let you alter a mask by just painting over it. You can use black, white or gray brushes to change the transparency of an existing mask. Masking methods let you apply these same sorts of masking effects to existing brushes.
When a mask is applied to a floating selection, portions of the selection can be made more transparent or opaque, thus allowing underlying selections and background to show through.
Although PainterX2's masking effects are powerful, they are less intuitive than Adobe Photoshop's. Distinguishing between masks and friskets (which are sometimes referred to as "selections") can take some getting used to. Using the masks to apply certain effects is rather obtuse. For example, to screen a picture so that it fades from top to bottom, you must move the image to the floating selection palette, create a new document, set the foreground and background colors to black and white, create a ramp fill in the Fill Palette, clone the document, select all, choose Generate Mask/Luminance Map, bring in the picture you want to fade from the Floating Selections palette, and set the picture's Compositing method to Masked Inside. Not the most obvious set of steps for the new user.
Color and cartoons
The other half of PainterX2 is its new capabilities for dealing with color. Color sets, which are designed to provide color consistency from document to document, can be created and accessed from the new Color Set palette. Similar to a normal color palette, each color in a set can be given a name.
A color set is created with the new Digitize Color Set command, which lets you click on a color in your image and assign a name to it. A very nice customization feature lets you specify the size and shape of each color swatch in the Color Set palette, a feature particularly useful in a program already crowded with dialogs and palettes.
After creating an image with colors from a color set, the annotation feature can be used to label the colors in your picture. After choosing Annotate, clicking on a color marks that area with the color's name (as defined by your color set). Fractal touts this feature as being useful for anyone who needs to ensure color consistency among documents.
X2 also includes a new Fill Palette method called Cartoon Cel. Designed for filling cartoonlike images using the Paint Bucket, Cartoon Cel is smart enough to understand how to fill anti-aliased lines without leaving a white space between the color and the line. For further filling control, you can drag a selection around an area before filling it. If the fill leaks out of a line, it will be contained within the enclosing selection.
X2 throws in a couple of other small upgrades, including the capability to paint with repeating color patterns and a new Position button within the Paper Palette that lets you offset repeated paper texture applications. The new Lock-Out Color feature makes it easier to fill small, hard-to-click areas with the Paint Bucket by letting you lock out adjacent colors.
In addition, Painter's tablet tracking has been improved with a spooler that lets the computer spool samples from a tablet as fast as the tablet can generate them.
Documentation and support
The X2 manual, which is organized similarly to Fractal Design's Sketcher and Painter manuals, provides a good overview of the program's features. It's necessary to thoroughly read the manual to understand the theory behind some of Painter's tools. As with Fractal's other products, X2 is obscenely overpackaged; most of the box is filled with cardboard.
Conclusions
While the X2 approach gives you the option of adding the new features or staying with Painter 2.0, one could argue that the "extension" approach is just a way for Fractal to charge an inflated price for an upgrade.
Nevertheless, PainterX2 adds features that complement the already excellent Painter 2.0. Although it takes a trial-and-error approach to figure out some of the features, the question is: Do you need them?
The capability to treat a bit-mapped painting as an object-oriented drawing is very enticing, but you may find that things are more complicated than they seem. As you begin to select objects and move them around, you may find that each new location requires different alterations to blend the selection into the background. Although this problem can be worked around with editing, it does make the promise of object-oriented painting a little dimmer.
Fractal Design Corp. is at 335 Spreckels Drive, Suite F, Aptos, Calif. 95003. Phone (408) 688-5300; fax (408) 688-8836.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
Reviews Page 39
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
ProductWatch: Mac dev tools get with the program
New class libraries and languages help to keep the software coming for Apple's platforms.
By Bruce Schneier
A computer platform is only as good as the software developed to run on it. To create good software, programmers need flexible development tools that take advantage of evolving hardware and operating systems.
Apple's interests lie in keeping development tools current so programmers will continue to develop for its Mac, Newton and PowerPC platforms. It has often received criticism from developers for delays and outdated tools.
Mac tools are keeping pace with those on other platforms with help from companies, such as Symantec Corp., that are releasing new languages, environments and class libraries for in-house developers.
Language lessons
Apple committed to Pascal when the Mac was introduced and declared it the language of choice on the machine. Use of Pascal has declined considerably because of the popularity of powerful cross-platform object-oriented languages such as C++ and Smalltalk.
"Pascal, Object Pascal, LISP, C and C++ are all fine languages, but it comes down to support," said Neil Ticktin, editor in chief of MacTech Magazine, a programming journal based in Los Angeles. "If you walk into a bookstore, all the titles are about C and C++. The tools are going to reflect the same thing."
The leading-edge development language today is Symantec's C++ 6.0 for the Macintosh, the first environment for the Macintosh with an integrated, native C++ compiler. There are two versions of C++, one for use within Apple's Macintosh Programmer's Workshop environment and the other for use within Symantec's Think environment. According to Randy Hill, software engineer at Claris Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif., "the three most important things about C++ is that it's fast, open and native C++."
But not everyone is equally impressed. "C++ is, by any account, a horrible language," said Howard Oakley, software developer for EHN & DIJ Oakley on the Isle of Wight, United Kingdom. "Most of the C++ coders I know admit that they hate the language and would prefer another but appear stuck because of commercial demand."
Most programmers still prefer writing in C. "[Symantec's Think] C is much easier to learn than C++," said David Shayer, lead programmer at Sentient Software of San Carlos, Calif., developer of Fifth Generation Systems Inc.'s Public Utilities. "It won't do everything for you, but it does certain things very well."
There are other versions of C, such as Mainstay's new VIP-C, an integrated C compiler and visual, interactive application development system. VIP-C ships with a royalty-free runtime module.
Apple's Macintosh Common LISP, distributed through APDA, also has its proponents. "It's currently the best object-oriented development system on the Mac," said Michael Hauser, programmer for Woodwind Software of San Francisco.
Others prefer Smalltalk, an object-oriented cross-platform language developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in California. Both ParcPlace Systems Inc. and Quasar Knowledge Systems Inc. market implementations of this language.
Prograph by Prograph International Inc. is an object-oriented visual programming language for the Mac that will soon be available for Windows, Unix and eventually PowerPC.
Novell Inc., which recently acquired Serius Corp., will be releasing new versions of Serius Developer and Serius Programmer as a new product called Appware later this year. The product will be a cross-platform object-oriented application builder available in Mac and Windows versions. Pricing has not been set.
Programming environments
C and Pascal programmers have two choices of environments: Apple's MPW or Symantec's Think. The choice usually centers on the size of the programming project.
"Commercial software is done on MPW because you cannot manage a large project with Symantec," said Adrian Ruigrok, consultant developer for Ruigrok Innovations in Vancouver, British Columbia. "Most programmers use Symantec because most programmers are not big commercial shops, and for small projects [the Symantec environment] is much faster."
MacTech's Ticktin said, "MPW has lots of problems. It's real slow, and there's no good tech support. People use it because of group programming, customizability, scripting and raw power."
The future of MPW is in doubt. In May Apple announced that it would continue to support MPW tools by issuing bug fixes and maintenance releases, but it will not add new features or functionality beyond those in Essential Tools and Objects Release 12. Instead it said it would focus efforts working with Symantec to develop Bedrock, a new environment for cross-platform development.
This was disappointing but not surprising to many developers. "I'm used to Apple saying they'll support something and then dumping it, but it is still annoying," said Sentient Software's Shayer.
G. Gordon Apple, vice president of engineering at Advanced Communications Engineering Inc. of Redondo Beach, Calif. said: "Replacing MPW is great - if they replace it with something better. If they abandon MPW and don't follow through with a replacement, then developers will be left high and dry."
According to Symantec's Levine, "Rainbow (the code name for Symantec's own PowerPC development environment) will take the best features of Symantec's C++ environment for the Macintosh and combine it with the power of MPW."
Some programmers said they feel Rainbow is too far into the future to merit serious consideration. "This new environment is two to three years away. If I'm not going to have the tool within nine months, I can't care about it," said Shayer.
Class libraries
MacApp is Apple's class library and application framework. Think Class Library is a class library distributed with Think C and Symantec C++ 6.0 for Macintosh. "MacApp can knock 50 percent to 75 percent off the development time of the project, if you know it," said Ruigrok. "Otherwise your time in learning MacApp will offset your savings." Experienced MacApp programmers estimate that it takes at least a year to understand the class library well enough to use it efficiently.
MacApp reflects Apple's migration from Pascal to C++. Apple wrote MacApp versions 1.x and 2.x in Pascal but converted it to C++ for Version 3.0. When Apple switched to C++, it was criticized for not providing tools to help from MacApp 2.x to the new version.
Programs such as Sierra Software Innovation Inc.'s P2C help programmers convert Pascal projects to C and C++.
Prograph CPX, a professional development environment aimed at corporate application building, is scheduled to ship next week, according to Prograph. It supports multifile projects and includes a class library and extensible object editors. Prograph said CPX will be comparable in functionality to TCL and MacApp.
Another, less well-known applications framework and development environment is Component Software Corp.'s Component Workshop 1.1, which is designed primarily for client-server applications. "I use it because it's a very nice development environment and will eventually be on Windows," said Spec Bowers, president of Bowers Development Corp. of Concord, Mass. Component said it will release a Windows version in early 1994.
Bedrock: Future framework
Apple and Symantec are betting on Bedrock as the new cross-platform tool for the Mac, Windows and, eventually, Unix.
Symantec made a Bedrock Architecture CD available in May, and a confidential prerelease version of Bedrock has already been distributed to some developers. According to one developer, who asked not to be named, Bedrock is a "rich framework that includes over 400 classes of objects."
Symantec is already using Bedrock as an internal development tool. It expects first seeding at the end of this year and to ship a final version by next summer.
"Bedrock won't be perfect, but the fact that it is carrying the experience of MacApp and other frameworks makes it a hopeful future product," said Jesse Feiler, software director at the Philmont Software Mill of Philmont, N.Y.
Howard Shere, president of Green Dragon Creations Inc. of Lake in the Hills, Ill., said he worries whether the new class libraries will support special Mac features. "The class libraries have to keep up with operating system developments. Currently there is no MacApp support for QuickTime or AOCE (Apple Open Collaboration Environment)."
Others are in no hurry to port code to the first version of Bedrock. "I've learned that if I try to use Bedrock 1.0, I'll likely spend more time debugging it than my own code," said Michael Peirce, president of Peirce Software of San Jose, Calif. "I'll wait until at least six months after Bedrock ships before I'll go anywhere near it."
MacWEEK 09.27.93
ProductWatch Page 45
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Mac the Knife: Goals met, but blood to be let
You'd have to be a mighty big Apple stockholder not to have been distracted last week by the twin spectacles of Yeltsin and Clinton doing their respective things. No doubt our president has had occasion to wish that he, too, could disband the entire legislative body and start afresh. And the Russian leader probably has a wide body of knowledge of both the benefits and the pitfalls of universal health-care coverage.
In case your portfolio does include a smattering of Apple stock, you may be pleased to learn that the company has met its unit-shipment goals for the fiscal quarter just ending. This was undoubtedly achieved by a variety of aggressive means, including a channel blitz.
Skeptics are pleasantly surprised at the level of acceptance the AV Macs are receiving. Sources say that Tele-Communications Inc., the giant cable-TV outfit, is ready to order 500 or so, and Nike is considering an order of several hundred AVs for its own corporate use. A few more accounts such as these two would breathe some life into Apple's big-accounts strategy.
Taking stock
No news is good news, and good news is even better, but Apple stock is still low enough that those with iron constitutions may be tempted. Apple has recently restructured its stock-options policy to reflect this reality. Under the new plan, holders of high-priced (and therefore unusable) options will be able to trade them in, at a 3-for-2 ratio, for new options priced at $24.25. For those affected, this new policy is very good news indeed, even though they'll have to wait an extra year for vesting.
With the layoff of additional employees - maybe as many as 1,500 - now scheduled for October, reasonable people could assume that Apple's financial picture will look better again before it looks worse. At least that's the presumed assumption behind Apple's decision last week to go ahead with the bloodletting.
On the move
It's no secret that John Sculley needs a real job, unless you count being the public Newton defender gainful employment. Talk that he was more than casually interested in assuming CEO duties at Kodak seemed to be just that until the reports from the Apple Expo in Paris. Perhaps it was the beauty of the City of Light or maybe the genuine friendliness of the natives, but privately he admitted that the position is more attractive than he has acknowledged in public.
With the recent changes at GO Corp., Bill Campbell is also pounding the pavement. He and Spindler have been good buddies for a long, long time, but the Knife's sources doubt that Campbell is seriously considering a return to Apple, where sagging employee morale might be impervious to even Campbell's power to inspire team spirit.
Rough trade
Third-party Newton software may be delayed because of a roadblock of Apple's own devising. It made a special arrangement with a PCMCIA fabricator for a developer discount. To get the price, the developer must have a letter of introduction from Apple. Oddly enough, some developers are reticent to share their plans for fear that Apple secretly wants to control the Newton software market. Shades of Microsoft.
While on the subject of aggressive business practices, Intel is said to be telling its customers that if they develop PowerPC platforms, they can expect to be at the bottom of the Pentium allocation queue. Because Motorola does not yet have the same leverage, its response so far has been to instruct IS and data processing managers in the PowerPC-platform cheer.
Barring a congressional compromise, the Knife won't be accepting the proposed health security card. If you want a MacWEEK mug you'll still need a hard, cold tip. Look him up at (415) 243-3544, fax (415) 243-3650, Internet (mac_the_knife@macweek.ziff.com), AppleLink (MacWEEK) or CompuServe/ZiffNet/Mac.
MacWEEK 09.27.93
Mac the Knife Page 94
(c) Copyright 1993 Coastal Associates, L.P. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
