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From: leue@galen.crd.ge.com (Bill Leue)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Random notes from MacWorld Expo
Keywords: MacWorld
Message-ID: <1696@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Date: 16 Aug 89 12:26:04 GMT
Sender: news@crdgw1.crd.ge.com
Reply-To: leue@galen.crd.ge.com ()
Organization: General Electric Research & Development
Lines: 63

Gee, it's been almost a week since MacWorld folded its tents in Boston,
and there's hardly been any net chatter about it!  Come on, people, let's
talk it up a little! :-)  Or was it just too boring/overwhelming/expensive/
rainy for everyone? :-(

For what it's worth, here's some random notes about what impressed me.
(I was only there for one day -- Friday)

Biggest case of techno-lust brought on by a new product:  for MacroMind
Director.  It's just miles better than VideoWorks II, and Sagans more
expensive, too.  More realistic for us on finite incomes is Studio 1, which
does real neat animation, but it's only monochrome, sob.

Neatest new hardware product:  DeskWriter from HP.  Beautiful output,
quiet, affordable, and really not too slow for most applications.
Also impressive for those with big bankroles is the new Seiko color
printer.  It does both Quickdraw and PostScript output with the help of
Freedom of the Press' Mac-resident PostScript interpreter.  By the way,
Freedom of the Press is also selling their PS interpreter for the
LaserGraphics slide maker.  That should be a boon, considering how
poor it's Quickdraw performance is.

Most ludricrously inept salepeople in a booth:  CalComp, demoing their
color printer.  When asked what the hardware connection between the Mac 
and the printer was, the salescritter ventured, "ADB?"  (I looked -- it
was SCSI).  Really, folks -- one hour of pre-show instruction for your
staff would make a pretty good investment.  The days when a major company
can get away with Mac-ignorance at a trade show are long gone.  (Actually,
most of the people in the larger booths seemed to have been drafted from
the shipping department, as far as their technical knowlege went.)

Best overall booth:  friendliness, knowledge, presentations, etc.: 
Symantec, hands down.  What a great outfit!  I tried to meet Rich Siegel
face to face, after all these months of  net traffic, but he'd taken off
Friday for some well-deserved rest.  David Neal's (last name?) presentation
on Think Pascal was very impressive.  When are we going to get that kind
of power in the Think C debugger? 

Favorite tiny company:  Imagine That! software, with their (only) product,
"Extend".  This is basically a two-person outfit; husband and wife as
president and CEO, respectively.  "Extend" is a general-purpose simulator
which can do almost any kind of continuous or discrete simulation, complete
with simulated plotter output.  Their application-specific libraries now
include statistics, queuing, electronics, factory floor stuff, etc.  The
only real missing piece I saw was that they can't animate the graphical
model itself, only provide simulated plotter and numeric output from it.
I would like to see the ability to animate (in simple ways) the icons that
make up the model itself, so that, for instance, you could watch a state
machine goe through its changes.  They say that ability is coming in Rev 2.0.

Best giveaways:  shopping bags from MacUser and Addison-Wesley.

Biggest disappointment:  All the book sellers kept running out of
Guy Kawasaki's book; I couldn't get one anywhere.  (Of course, if I had
been able to read it, that might have been the second-biggest disappointment
:-).

Biggest change from last year:  it was cool inside the buildings.

-Bill Leue
leue@ge.crd.com

(Disclaimer:  these opinions are mine -- who else would want them?)