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TidBITS#75/05-Aug-91
====================

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Topics:
    MailBITS/5-Aug-91
    CE Ships Kanji QuickMail
    Notebooks... the Next Generation
    One Minute Magazine
    A New Voice
    Integrated Software Wars
    Reviews/5-Aug-91


MailBITS/5-Aug-91
-----------------
  Last week's issue of TidBITS contained an article about the
  astronauts on board the space shuttle Atlantis planning to use
  AppleLink from space to communicate with ground personnel. I
  commented that, "Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for the
  astronauts and their sanity, the shuttle's AppleLink address is
  being kept confidential." A couple of readers have written to say
  that they've discovered that the address is "Atlantis." I'll say
  this... I feel sorry for the real owner of the AppleLink address
  "Atlantis," because it's not NASA! Yes, the address exists, but it
  has been there for a while. No doubt these poor people have been
  deluged with messages. Please don't contribute to the problem by
  writing to them yourself!

  TidBITS will have a few roving reporters in Boston this week to
  report on the Macworld Expo. I'd love to meet some other TidBITS
  readers (after all, most of the time I'm a reader myself), so if
  you're going to be at the Expo, please feel free to leave a
  message for "Mark H. Anbinder" in the convention center's message
  system (you can leave out the "H." if it'll confuse the people at
  the message desk).

  Don't forget to look for next week's Macworld Expo issue,
  containing lots of info about what was hot at the show.

  Below is some material that Adam sent me for inclusion in this
  week's MailBITS.

  Just before packing up my Mac for Seattle, I received email from
  Henry Norr of MacWEEK, who was upset with the way I related his
  comment on the new ROMs issue. Contrary to what I said (due to my
  misunderstanding his original note), Henry said that he didn't
  feel the issue warranted another story at that point, not that he
  felt the issue was dead. My apologies to Henry and to all of you
  for muddying the article behind incorrect information. That's one
  of the problems with email - short messages with little context
  are easy to misconstrue. Henry also said in his recent note that
  not only did he not feel that the issue was dead, but that MacWEEK
  has continued to pay attention to the matter (by printing a recent
  letter to the editor) and will continue to do as warranted.
  Thanks, Henry! I hope that continued attention from TidBITS and
  MacWEEK will help jolt Apple management into making a policy
  statement on the issue, as we politely requested in the letter
  sent to them. See below for another bit on the subject.

  In the near future TidBITS will have a new home on America Online.
  Thanks to Chris Ferino (AFL Ferino) for setting up a TidBITS file
  area in the Hardware file libraries (keyword: mhw). All new issues
  will show up there and eventually we'll have all the older issues
  there as well. As an added bonus, Chris has agreed to give anyone
  who writes an entire TidBITS issue a free hour of time on America
  Online, so send your submissions in to Mark and us (after we're
  set up again) if you wish to get that free hour on AOL. If you
  aren't sure about how to go about writing an issue, just ask Mark
  for our basic guidelines - they're easy to follow.

  One of our readers contributes the following about Apple's clean
  ROM saga. Apple published "Macintosh IIci Computer Training" in
  its Quick Reference Booklet series. The copyright is 1989. On page
  23 of this booklet is the beginning of a section titled "User
  Questions". The second user question listed on that page is: "Is
  the new ROM universal? That is, will it be incorporated into all
  Macintosh CPUs?"  The answer stated by Apple on that same page:
  "No. The ROM will be available only on the Macintosh IIci. The
  features incorporated into the Macintosh IIci ROM, especially
  including 32-bit addressing, will be made available to the
  installed base of Macintosh IIx, IIcx, II, SE and SE/30 owners at
  a later date."

  Now what I get from this is that Apple will make the ROM available
  to the installed base, not that Apple will produce new machines
  which the installed base can purchase. Also note the listing of
  the Mac SE - which has never been discussed in the AOL forums as
  one of the machines that would receive the new ROM. While MODE32
  could be construed as making the 512K ROM features available, it
  does not fulfill making it available to the Mac SE! The 1989 date
  also shows that Apple knew full well in 1989 that the ROMs were
  dirty in the pre-Mac IIci CPUs.

  You should be able to get the actual booklet at one of the Apple
  dealers in your area - they probably have it put away some where
  in a back room or threw it away. A lot of these booklets were
  produced for the IIci so one should be available. I have two of
  them - one without the two disks that comes with the booklet.

  My statements were made as a lawyer, which I remain, but because I
  like the Mac so much I no longer have the legal profession as my
  primary profession.

  Information from:
    Mark H. Anbinder -- [e-mail]
    Adam C. Engst
    Pythaeus


CE Ships Kanji QuickMail
------------------------
  CE Software, Inc., the publisher of QuickMail, QuicKeys2, and a
  bunch of other neat products, has just announced a new version of
  QuickMail designed to work with KanjiTalk, Apple's Japanese
  version of the Mac operating system. CE worked on the project with
  a Japanese partner, Software Research Associates, or SRA.

  Lots of normal Macintosh programs work fine under KanjiTalk, but a
  program must be specially designed to take full advantage of
  KanjiTalk, to allow users to work in Japanese. Because of the
  large number of characters in the Kanji Japanese writing system,
  KanjiTalk uses two bytes of the computer's memory to represent
  each character, instead of the single byte used to represent a
  character in the Roman character set, used by most versions of the
  Mac OS. The screen shots enclosed with the press release
  distributed by CE recently show that the Kanji product, known as
  CEQUICKMAIL, cleanly integrates Roman and Kanji text within the
  same window.

  CE has already been distributing versions of QuickMail in
  languages such as Swedish, German, French, Danish, and Italian,
  but this is the first two-byte version. According to Paul Miller,
  the director of CE's International Department, "The goal of
  globalization of our products has leaped forward with the support
  of 2-byte character systems." He anticipates an exploding market
  for Macintosh networking in Japan. These Iowans are already the
  leading supplier of network mail software for the Macintosh, with
  over 350,000 QuickMail users worldwide.

  Software Research Associates can be reached at: 1-1-1 Hirakawa-
  cho, Chiyoda-ku, 102 Tokyo, Japan. Phone: [phone], Fax: 81
  3 3234 4338, AppleLink: DVJ.SRA.INC

    CE Software, Inc. -- 515/224-1995 -- AppleLink: CESOFTWARE

  Information from:
    CE propaganda
    Sue Nail, CE Software, Inc.


Notebooks... the Next Generation
--------------------------------
  Apple is expected to release a series of three computers this
  October that will be the first Macs that deserve the name
  "notebook computer." That doesn't mean, though, that the rest of
  the industry should hold its collective breath!

  Outbound Systems Inc. has had a popular alternative to the
  heavier, more expensive Macintosh Portable for over a year now,
  and a special agreement negotiated with Apple allows them to ship
  Apple ROM chips, taken from used Macs, in Outbound portable
  computers. Their new product, the Outbound Notebook System, will
  give impatient Mac users an alternative to this fall's Apple
  offerings.

  The new six-pound Outbound Notebook System shows quite a bit of
  promise. It can hold both an internal high density floppy disk
  drive and an internal hard drive, as opposed to the low-end Apple
  notebook, which will contain one or the other. A proper notebook,
  the new Outbound will fold down to 8.5 by 11 inches. I am
  skeptical of Outbound's assertion of a new-and-improved pointing
  device, which looks an awful lot like it's just an IsoPoint with a
  new-and-improved name. Given that there's no room on this machine
  for a trackball, I suppose the "TrackBar" (their new device) will
  be a reasonable substitute.

  The truly stunning notebook computer in the news this month is
  NCR's System 3125, a pen-based 386 portable that weighs less than
  four pounds. No, it's not a Mac or a Mac-compatible, but this
  machine will show us what might be down the road for Mac users.

  The 8.5 by 11 inch 3125 has no keyboard, which means there's lots
  of room for the 640x480 greyscale liquid crystal display. Instead
  of typing, the user enters data and controls the system using an
  included pen, with either GO's PenPoint operating system, or
  Microsoft's competing PenWindows. (The computer comes with one or
  the other operating system, but not both.) This means the NCR
  notebook isn't quite suited to every computing need, but it would
  certainly be good for data entry tasks such as inventory
  management, appointment scheduling, and address/phone databases.
  Of course, computer users who have never liked keyboards will be
  pleased by the option of using this handwriting-recognizing
  technology.

  What does this mean for the future? Aside from a vague resemblance
  to Apple's Knowledge Navigator dream computer (you may have seen
  the video tapes of the computer that talks to you... and
  understands spoken commands) the NCR 3125 is really just a
  rearrangement of existing technology. Sony has been selling their
  "palmtop" computer, a personal organizer with handwriting
  recognition technology, for about a year, and of course iconic,
  windowing operating systems aren't new. The key to NCR's product
  release is the combination... solid handwriting recognition in a
  real computer that's light enough and small enough to use
  anywhere.

  Apple's three upcoming notebook computers are a step toward the
  same "next generation" category. They are much lighter and smaller
  than the existing Macintosh Portable models, and when closed at
  least, are notebook sized. The keyboard on the Macs, though, will
  mean that Apple will always seem to be behind the pack in notebook
  technology. I'm not saying that I want to see a Mac without a
  keyboard... at least not until they can replace it with a method
  of text entry that's just as fast and accurate! However, the
  industry is going to start wondering where Apple's REAL notebooks
  are.

    NCR Corp. -- 513/445-6160 -- 800/225-5627
    Outbound Systems Inc. -- 303/786-9200 -- 800/444-4607

  Information from:
    Outbound propaganda
    BYTE

  Related articles:
    BYTE -- Aug-91, Vol. 16, #8, pg. 37
    MacWEEK -- 30-Jul-91, Vol. 5, #26, pg. 1


One Minute Magazine
-------------------
  According to a recent Newsbytes article that a friend found
  floating around at Apple, KOFY-TV, channel 20 in the San Francisco
  area, will be broadcasting a one-minute-long "magazine" early in
  the morning of 1 October. The magazine won't be a typical TV
  magazine show, but will be a minute-long montage of still frames
  of text and pictures, generated on a Macintosh.

  The still images of the Future Media StillFrame Edition will go by
  on the screen far too quickly to be viewed at full speed, but
  viewers who videotape the broadcast (which will be some time
  between 1:56 and 2:00 am) can view the magazine frame by frame
  later on (or the next morning, for those who like to be asleep at
  2 am). You'll need a good TV and a four-head VCR to get a high
  enough image quality to read the text.

  The magazine is being generated by scanning images from H-8 video
  cameras into the Macintosh, and then laying them into screen-sized
  pages of text and pictures using page layout software. The text
  will be no smaller than 24 point, so it can be read from the
  television image.

  I doubt that this will become a popular publishing medium, because
  it requires some effort from the reader/viewer/user beyond sitting
  and absorbing. No doubt this initial broadcast will get lots of
  viewers... but once the novelty wears off, people aren't likely to
  bother.

    KOFY-TV -- 415/821-2020
    Future Media -- 415/548-0341

  Information from:
    Newsbytes article 19-Jul-91


A New Voice
-----------
  Recent discussions on USENET have mentioned a new version of
  MacInTalk that's supposedly in the works at Apple. Last year
  MacInTalk sparked some heated debates when Apple announced the
  aging speech-synthesis software would no longer be supported and
  could not be counted on to work with future system software or
  hardware releases. The new version sounds like it's a step ahead
  of the old software which, while it was certainly handy, was
  hardly impressive as speech synthesis went.

  At the Apple Australian University Consortium Conference last
  month, Caroline Henton of the ATG talked about the new software
  and gave a demonstration, which was said to be very impressive.
  The new MacInTalk will run on all Macs, and is purely software-
  based. It will support multiple voices, though the version that
  was demonstrated only included an American English female voice.

  Technically, the software uses concatenative synthesis, which
  presumably means that the component sounds of natural speech are
  assembled, or concatenated, in the right order to generate
  understandable, natural-sounding utterances. This differs from two
  other forms of speech synthesis: formant synthesis, which
  generates utterances based on the characteristic sound waves of
  spoken sounds and combinations of sounds; and articulatory
  synthesis. I can't really even guess about the latter, despite a
  linguistic background, except to offer the speculation of Matthew
  T. Russotto, who suggested that articulatory synthesis might
  attempt to imitate the sound properties of the human throat and
  mouth.

  The good news is that, whatever the technology behind it, the new
  MacInTalk is intended to sound as natural as possible. This
  contrasts with a common approach that trades naturalness for
  intelligibility. With well-planned utterances, pure
  intelligibility is a little less of a concern, because the human
  listener can "fill in" bits and pieces of missing sound when
  what's being said sounds natural enough. This is accomplished in
  face to face communications partially through unconscious lip-
  reading, though hints such as context and previous conversations
  help to fill in the rest, especially on the telephone or in other
  situations where lip-reading isn't feasible.

  MacInTalk has certainly made a difference for the Macintosh; it
  has allowed games to speak, but it has also allowed sightless Mac
  users to "hear" what's on the screen through software such as
  OutSpoken. A new version that sounds like natural speech and works
  on new Macs will be welcome.

  Information from:
    Michael Newbery -- [e-mail]
    Matthew T. Russotto -- [e-mail]


Integrated Software Wars
------------------------
  Back in the early days of Macintosh, when a list of all the
  software available for the Mac could be printed in the back of
  every issue of MacUser, a small company called Lotus introduced a
  new product class for the Mac: integrated software. Jazz, which
  included word processing, database, communications, and charting
  functions, wasn't based on a completely new idea; Apple had
  AppleWorks for the Apple ][ series, and there were some similar
  products for DOS. But it was a new thing for Mac users, who until
  then had usually had to swap floppies, and often change startup
  disks, to switch tasks.

  Jazz fell by the wayside a long time ago, and its planned
  successor, Modern Jazz, never materialized. In the meantime,
  Microsoft, which has been accused of following a "me-too" software
  approach after making a name for itself with MS-DOS a decade ago,
  introduced Microsoft Works. Works was similar in approach to Jazz,
  but a lower price, better compatibility with other software, and
  Microsoft's market clout gave it a much bigger market share.

  Even Microsoft Works was not an outstanding package. It has
  existed at the front of its category for a long time mainly
  because there were no other players, and not that strong a demand.
  When Apple introduced its three new inexpensive Macs last fall,
  though, they created a relatively new market: low-end users with
  low-end pocketbooks to match. These users thought that being able
  to buy a single, inexpensive package that filled most of their
  software needs was a great idea.

  At this point, some other developers realized that there was a
  market to forge. Symantec, Beagle Bros, and Claris have all
  announced integrated software packages, and in fact Symantec has
  shipped their entry, called GreatWorks. BeagleWorks was presumably
  the subject of the "we could tell you, but then we'd have to kill
  you" ad a few weeks ago, and Claris Works offers the standard
  interface that most Claris products have in common.

  Symantec and Beagle Bros sound like unusual sources for this kind
  of productivity software, but in fact this move makes sense for
  them. Symantec has been looking to leap into the Mac productivity
  arena for a while; they have a strong presence in the utility
  software and programming environment areas, but their general
  productivity software has existed only on DOS platforms. Beagle
  Bros is a company well known among old-timers for its innovative
  utilities for the Apple ][, but what's probably less known is that
  they wrote AppleWorks 3.0 for Claris, according to a recent
  MacWEEK article. This makes them a great candidate for designing a
  new product in the integrated category for the Mac.

  It remains to be seen how all of these products will fare,
  especially since the new entries are up against the Microsoft
  monolith. Microsoft has already taken the first step towards
  securing its market share, or at least as large a chunk as
  possible, by lowering the retail price of Microsoft Works from
  $295 to $249. (The other integrated packages have, or are expected
  to have, suggested retail prices of $295 or $299.) That's not a
  huge price reduction, but in this low-end market, that almost $50
  cut could make a big difference to buyers. Without that price
  differential Microsoft Works would no longer stand out; in fact,
  GreatWorks seems overall to be a better package; but with it, the
  buyer has another reason to lean towards the Microsoft product.

  I wouldn't be surprised to see some changes to the retail pricing
  of BeagleWorks and Claris Works before they ship, but it would
  probably be a mistake for Symantec to reduce the GreatWorks price
  immediately. We'll provide additional coverage to the Integrated
  Software Wars as events warrant, but in the meantime it should be
  amusing to watch Microsoft fighting a battle it thought was long
  since won.

  Related articles:
    MacWEEK -- 7-16-91, Vol. 5, #25, pg. 1
    MacWEEK -- 30-Jul-91, Vol. 5, #26, pg. 7
    Playboy -- Sep-91, Vol. 38, #9, pg. 134


Reviews/5-Aug-91
----------------

* MacWEEK
    MacroMind Three-D, pg. 41
    GreatWorks, pg. 41
    MacDraw Pro, pg. 44
    GraceLAN 2.0, pg. 44
    At Your Service, pg. 46
    CD-ROM Drives, pg. 50
      CMS Enhancements PCD-600
      Hitachi CDR-1750S
      Liberty 115CD
      MacProducts Magic CD-ROM
      NEC CDR-73
      Procom HiPerformance CD-ROM
      Relax Vista CD-ROM
      Toshiba TXM-3301E1-MAC
    ContoursPro, pg. 50
    MacroMind Director 3.0, pg. 57
    Carbon Copy Mac 2.0, pg. 60
    ScanMaker 1850S, pg. 60

* InfoWorld
    Claris Resolve, pg. 64
    My Advanced Database, pg. 65

References:
    MacWEEK -- 30-Jul-91, Vol. 5, #26
    InfoWorld -- 29-Jul-91, Vol. 13, #30


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