Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!crdgw1!daredevil!vita From: vita@daredevil.crd.ge.com (Mark F. Vita) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: So what happened at MacWorld? Message-ID: <1720@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> Date: 16 Aug 89 19:36:16 GMT References: <1989Aug15.112144.23099@aucs.uucp> <479@lloyd.camex.uucp> Sender: news@crdgw1.crd.ge.com Reply-To: desdemona!vita@steinmetz.UUCP (Mark F. Vita) Organization: General Electric Corp. R&D, Schenectady, NY Lines: 108 In article <479@lloyd.camex.uucp> kent@lloyd.UUCP (Kent Borg) writes: >OK, I can only think of 11 things worth a comment. Total. A >challenge to all who went to MacWorld: Can you come up with a top-ten >list? 1) THINK C 4.0. A nicely done, minimalist object-oriented implementation which doesn't compromise the feel of their existing product. The included class library is a nice touch. 2) The Macintosh Programming Primer. OK, so it wasn't introduced at the Expo, but Addison-Wesley was selling it at a 20% discount at their booth, and Symantec was giving it away with upgrades to THINK C 4.0. 3) Ehman Engineering's $895 19-inch monochrome two-page display for the SE and II. Yes, that's Eight Hundred and Ninety Five Dollars, including interface card. It's a Hyundai monitor ("monitors that make sense"?) The display quality isn't quite as good as many of the (much) more expensive competing displays, and they still haven't figured out what software to ship with it. But, the price is just amazing. 4) The Adobe Type Manager. Lets you have outline font capabilities many months before the same will be available from Apple. The fonts look great not only on the screen but also when printed on non-Postscript output devices. I got some sample output from an ImageWriter II that I wouldn't have believed the II was capable of. The best part is the price: $99 list, including Times, Helvetica, Symbol and Courier. The ATM will be carried by anyone who sells the Adobe Type Library, which means that MacConnection should have it for around fifty bucks. Shipping in October. 5) Shortcut and StuffIt Deluxe from Alladin. Shortcut is the spiffed up version of Ray Lau's SFVolInit. It includes all the functionality of that INIT, plus on-the-fly decompression and fast file-finding capabilities. A really swell feature is that you can have the search look into the contents of StuffIt archives. The only downside is the price: $80, which in my opinion is a little high for utility of this type (though they were selling it at the show for $50). Ray himself was demonstrating StuffIt Deluxe (which isn't shipping yet). New features include: new compression options (Fast, Faster, Better, etc.), new encryption options, virus detection, decompression of various PC formats (ARC, ZIP, etc.), ability to open multiple archives simultaneously, ability to navigate freely through folder hierarchies within an archive, ability to move files between archives simply by dragging them from one archive window to another. It also includes new scripting capabilities that allow automated archiving/de-archiving of files. There's a new "Quick Unstuff" command where you just pick an archive; StuffIt then creates a new folder and extracts all files in the selected archive into the new folder. [By the way, I tried unsuccessfully to convince Ray that THIS should be the behavior when selecting multiple archives from the Finder and opening StuffIt while holding down the Shift key (rather than what happens now, which is that all files from all of the archives get thrown together in a huge unintelligible mass in the same folder). However, the president of Alladin agreed with me and said he would try to get this feature in.] Some of these new features will also be present in the shareware release of StuffIt 1.6 (the most notable exception being the scripting). 6) Retrospect from Dantz Development. The ultimate tape backup and archiving software. Makes even FastBack II look like a toy by comparison. Incredible file selection capabilities. Almost worth buying a tape drive to use it with :-). 7) SUM II. They've spiffed up the interface quite a bit. And the Shield INIT (now just called the Guardian INIT, I believe) can be configured to update the Guardian files at various time intervals, rather than just at Shutdown, which makes it useful for things like file servers which aren't shut down very often. Also, they've added file encryption, and backup software which is a subset of my personal favorite floppy backup program, Redux. 8) Aapps MicroTV. No practical application I can think of. But it's Just Plain Nifty. 9) Apple's "Technology Extravaganza" presentation on System Software Version 7.0. The really amazing thing was that they didn't just present a lot of text slides listing the new features (much of which has been reprinted elsewhere), but they actually did live, working demonstrations of prerelease versions of many pieces of the new system, including the outline fonts (including ligatures and contextual forms), IAC (in particular, the Publish/Subscribe mechanism), and the new, rewritten Finder. There was so much good stuff presented here that I'll probably cover it in a separate article. 10) Gassee's presentation on Friday morning. He demonstrated several different third-party products, none of which were terribly exciting. But in about four out of the five demos, he ran into major technical glitches, and watching him cope with the situation using his rather sharp if irreverent French wit was very entertaining. The highlight was when just after an aborted demo involving Timbuktu Remote, some random person happened to call up on the phone attached to the Mac, apparently unaware that it was was located on a stage in front of hundreds of people. Gassee picks it up. "Well, I can't talk to you, I am doing a demonstration live on stage." (Wild laughter and clapping from the audience.) "You heard the applause?" Click. Gassee also made a rather oblique reference to next month's introduction of the portable; in response to some laughter when he somewhat jokingly lamented that there is no Mac "that you can take into the bedroom with you", he stated simply: "Start saving." ---- Mark Vita vita@crd.ge.com General Electric CRD ..!uunet!crd.ge.com!vita Schenectady, NY