🚀 go-pugleaf

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."

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Mark Vita                              vita@crd.ge.com
General Electric CRD               	..!uunet!crd.ge.com!vita
Schenectady, NY