🚀 go-pugleaf

MacWorld this year: nothing absolutely *dazzling* but a lot of solid products
out there.

1) Apple had (surprisingly) nothing new to say or show.  I guess they expected
	to have the laptop and/or the IIci ready to show there, but it didn't
	happen (a couple of the people in the Apple booth were trying *really*
	hard to look clueless while saying "laptop? which laptop?" :-)

2) LaserMAX had a cheap (performance wise) laser printer: $7995 for 1000x400
	dpi resolution and *astounding* printing speeds (15-20 seconds for
	*complicated* Freehand files [multiple TIFFs+fonts with effects and
	the like]).  They also had Nubus cards that directly control the engine
	on any LW, givin you 600x300 dpi resolution and much faster speeds.
	Very nice products, very friendly people.  I liked it.

2) Color printers were more common than at last year's show.  Most of them
	were the same-old thermal xfer technology.  Like kent@lloyd.uucp
	said, DOW was showing a nice expensive color printer.  I saw a couple
	of the new Kodak continuous tone printers around as well; they print
	on photographic paper and had very nice output.  Finally, Howtek had
	*very* nice printers (for the money) that used a "Thermo-Jet" process
	(ink jet with plastic ink that is melted on the spot).  Some of the
	nicest color output I've seen without any of the glossiness inherent
	in the other printers.  Postscript compatible, too.

3) A new company called Serius had a nice powerful development system.  Very
	visual and object oriented, (you write "objects" for your "project"
	in C or Pascal, then add it).  Spits out standalone applications.
	*Very* nice.  An apple person called it "what HyperCard should have
	been."  I'm not kidding, check it out.

4) Most elegant and cleanest hack of the show:  A company (forget the name)
	which allows you to get color scans out of a grey scale printers by
	placing green, red, and blue high-quality transparent acetate sheets
	over the source material and doing multiple scans, then putting all
	three together in software.  Very neat idea - hope they make much $.

5) SCSI software: LaCie's SilverLining.  Although it has been mentioned in
	the net, I hadn't seen it running yet.  Impressive piece of work.
	True SCSI partitioning and password protection, as well as a number
	of other features (choose among six different drivers to optimize
	performance, depending on your drive and machine, for example).  One
	of the neatest things I saw it do was to "truly" treat three 20M
	drives as a 60M drive.  The price takes it, though: $69.

6) Printers: HP's DeskWriter: outstanding.  Enough has been said in the net
	about this one already, so I'll mention the other two I saw that I
	liked.  GCC's WriteImpact: 360x180 dpi resolution with scalable and
	fully rotatable (1 deg increments) outline fonts and a forecoming
	utility to convert nonencrypted Bitstream and other fonts to the
	GCC format for $699 list (including Times, Helvetica, Courier, Symbol,
	Palatino and some other font I can't remember).  Minor registration
	problems (very hard to notice) which I was told would be solved by
	release time (sometime this fall).  Likewise, Toshiba's line of
	24 pin 360x360 printers (including one in color) include outline font
	technology.  I didn't like the Toshiba's as much, since although their
	resolution is nominally higher, the rendering of the fonts was not
	as smooth.  $699 list for their lowest priced model.

7) Memory everywhere, but nothing cheaper than what you could get mail order
	from Chip Merchant or Tech Works.

8) Really stupid product: Computer Clothes.  "Fashion" computer covers.
	Expensive.

9) Word Processors: Forget Word, I'm getting Nisus.  V2.0 is out, and includes
	the missing pieces people were griping about: footnotes and endnotes.
	It also has hyphenation now.  Very fast.  Now if they just added auto
	numbering and referencing of figures, equations and tables, I'd be
	in heaven.

10) MacroMind Director and Director Interactive.  Director is, like it has
	been said, what VideoWorks should have been.  Director Interactive
	adds most of the interactive abilities of HyperCard to it, as
	well as compatibility with various video overlay boards and what not.
	It was supposed to be a beta version, but I didn't see it crash once
	while I was there.

11) Some company whose name I forgot already had a full-blown audio/video
	editing system based on the Mac II.  They used the Mac to control
	professional videotape recorders and players and had digitized
	frame by frame displays and audio-dub capabilities.  Slick.

12) Electronic Arts had a DMCS-compatible MIDI multi-channel recorder/sequencer
	- it had various editing capabilities as well (transpose, etc).

13) Quark XPress - new version.  Impressive image manipulation capabilites
	(shifting colors to make it warmer/colder, etc).  "Font rendering"
	ie using downloadable fonts' definitions to display them on the
	screen at arbitrary sizes.  Also permitted effects on those fonts
	(stretching and what not).  Columnar linking across pages ("Continued
	on page X") which automatically updated itself.  Much smoother
	image importing and text-wrap-around-image than before.  And *speed*.
	Lots of it.  Extremely fast.  At first I thought it was running on
	an accelerated Mac II, but it was a stock II.

That's about it, though.

Some exciting products, but too much rehashing of older stuff.

Oh well, maybe next year.

-Ivan

Internet: captkidd@athena.mit.edu