Mac Advocacy SeyboldSF 98

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September 19, 1998

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I arrived in the dimly lit Marriott Hotel basement well before the start of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' 9 A.M. keynote speech. After seating the press and the VIPs (mistakenly I was somehow not included in this latter group), the general admission doors opened and us nameless, faceless, pro-Apple lemmings charged the seats. It took some time for everyone to find a seat in the midst of the chaos. I found a chair near one of the big screen displays (there were four of these around the room), and settled in early enough to enjoy the soft jazz music which played above the din. The music was a coordinated touch, to be sure, since a big Apple "Think Different" ad with Miles Davis was displayed prominently in the right front corner of the room.

After a brief intro and a showing of Apple's Emmy-winning "Think Different" commercial, Jobs was welcomed by rousing applause. He was casually attired in jeans and a dark turtleneck, and he looked very much at ease through the speech. Although much of his speech was a recap, it was still quite worthwhile. (Of course, I might just be saying that because I had to get up at 6 A.M. to get there in time to see him.)

The Four Spaces
Apple has simplified its product line into four spaces: Professional Portable, Consumer Portable, Professional Desktop, and Consumer Desktop.

In the professional portable department, Steve talked about the G3 PowerBooks. Apple's dropping the 13" screens, and only offering 12" and 14" models. This was very slickly handled. Steve said that since everybody lusts after the 14" screens anyway (which is true, I assure you), Apple decided there was no sense in producing 13" screens. Instead, they've opted to make the 14" models more affordable, creating a laptop that cooks the Wintel PC laptops in productivity, performance and price. Steve compared models thusly:

Steve also ran a full-screen with sound DVD "Wizard of Oz" clip off of one of the PowerBooks. This DVD expansion item slips into the expansion port where the CD-ROM or floppy drive goes. (The DVD player also acts as a 18x CD-ROM player.) Playback was flawless, and, as Steve noted, a DVD-equipped PowerBook is "the coolest way to watch movies on airplanes." I checked out of the DVD stuff later at the Apple booth, and he's not kidding. This is fantastic technology. No idea on the pricing though.

Steve didn't have much to say about a consumer portable. Apple's working on it; it will be great; look for it in first quarter of 1999.

As for professional desktops, Steve announced that Apple had sold over 1 million G3 computers. He noted that Apple recently sped up their machines as well, the top of the line now being 333-MHz (which is a lot faster than the any Pentium II machine on the market).

In terms of the consumer desktop, iMac continues to sell extraordinarily well. Steve didn't give any figures other than to say that Apple's making them as fast they can. Apparently, iMac launched in Japan recently, and they're sold out there through the end of the quarter.

Steve showed off four neat iMac commercials. They're all very well done, and the audience response was excellent.

MacOS 8.5
Next attendees got a preview of MacOS 8.5 which is due to be released next month. Steve admitted he didn't have time to show off all the cool new features, so he hit only those which he thought would be most relevant to publishing: Sherlock, improved network speed and file copying, ColorSync, and AppleScript.

Sherlock is Apple's new find technology. It lets you type words or ask questions (like "Why is the sky blue?") and Sherlock will search your local hard drive and/or the Internet search engines and return a relevancy-ranked response. Apple VP Phil Schiller showed how this made finding things so much faster: He typed "Picture DaVinci's Mona Lisa," got the relevancy-rank responses, clicked on the top one and went straight to the appropriate web site with a Mona Lisa picture. Total time was less than 10 seconds, making this a potential web revolution.

Steve was in full hype-mode about Sherlock, saying that it was reason alone to upgrade to MacOS 8.5. He might be right, however. It looked really, really awesome.

Next, Steve and Phil did a "bake-off" with a Pentium II and a PowerBook copying a 185 MB file and then a 150 MB file over a 100-Base-T ethernet connection to a Windows NT server. The MacOS 8.5-based machine was obviously faster than the Windows-based one, but this is one of those items which is obviously of more use to publishing professionals than at-home users like you or me. I haven't copied a 185 MB file in years, if ever.

ColorSync, Apple color fidelity system, is much the same. It insures great color matching between monitor, printer, scanner, etc., but I've got my doubts on how useful that it to us computer-at-home types.

The last 8.5 item Steve showed off was a PowerPC-native, up to 5x faster AppleScript. This was truly fantastic. Almost everything in the System will be scriptable in 8.5, meaning you can execute actions just be dropping things into folders, for example. With the appropriate G3 hardware, this could be a major time saver, and I think even intermediate-level users will find this a big plus.

Keynote Conclusion
Steve gave a brief rundown on WebObjects 4.0, the new version of Apple's corporate-level web site design software. It's 6 times faster than 3.0, can use Java clients, runs on MacOS X, NT and Solaris, and has undergone a major price drop down to $1,500 (previously this was closer to $10,000 when all was said and done). Apple has over 3,000 corporate clients who use WebObjects. If you want to see the power of the software, look no further than Apple's own site.

This was followed by a run-down of MacOS X (due late 1999) features, including: protected memory, better virtual memory, pre-emptively multitasking, multi-threading, fast file i/o, PowerPC native code, and an ability to run all MacOS 8.0 applications. We saw demos of Photoshop, QuarkXpress and FreeHand all running under MacOS X. Very impressive.

Finally, Adobe showed off it's PageMaker replacement, the re-written from the ground-up layout software codenamed "K2." It looks really cool, so personally I hope upgrade pricing from PageMaker is affordable. (One effect that brought cheers was the ability to move text along the z-axis—kind of like the text at the opening in Star Wars. Text remains editable, by the way.)

On to the Expo!
After the keynote I headed over the Moscone Center where, coincidentally enough, I almost bumped headlong into Steve Jobs himself. I didn't get a chance to chat with the man, but we both marched over the Apple area (1 of 2 such Apple places) to check things out. I don't know if he was impressed, but I was. They had a bunch of iMacs out, as well as individual stations for discussing FireWire, AppleScript, ColorSync, PowerBooks, DVD, etc. I played with a digital video camera and a FireWire card and came away pretty hyped about the technology as a replacement for SCSI. Transfer rates are levels of magnitude faster with FireWire, and you can expect to see it shortly on all pro-level Apple Macintosh computers. Apple will also offer a $300 PCI FireWire card for us older Mac owners.

Next I went to the Adobe Pavilion where I asked some pointed questions about PageMill 3.0 for Macintosh and how it compares to Go Live's CyberStudio 3.0. In short, it doesn't. That's not to say that it's a lame upgrade, since it (1) adds neat Java support, (2) has MacOS 8.5-support (specifically navigations services), (3) integrates SiteMill (and improves it dramatically), (4) allows font control on HTML pages, (5) allows progressive JPEGs, (6) has a plug-in architecture like Photoshop's (though it doesn't use Photoshop plug-ins), (7) now allows source-level editing without screwing up the HTML code, and (8) only costs $99 ($49 for the upgrade from PageMill 2.0) versus CyberStudio's ~$250.

Adobe also fixed those stupid table editing bugs that made many of us want to cry.

On the downside, PageMill 3.0 for Macintosh (1) drops support for 68k-based Macs, (2) requires a CD-ROM drive(!), (3) still doesn't handle JavaScript perfectly, and (4) lacks DHTML support. Unless that CD-ROM drive thing is just a "for the install only" kind of deal, that sounds incredibly lame.

I'll be trying out a PageMill 3.0 for Macintosh demo for the next few days, and I'll be posting about it in the MacAdvocacy section.

DiamondSoft's Font Reserve 2.0 was next on my "must-see the demo" list. It is very impressive software for us font hounds out there. Not only will it automatically catalog all fonts and deal with any problems, it also will allow a user to turn fonts on the fly. It also has extensive font preview options, and it's AppleScript-able. Worth the $120 retail price? Tough call. If you're a desktop publisher or a font fanatic, I'd say definitely "yes." For others, probably not.

I stood through a rather drawn-out one-on-one demo of Corel's Draw 8 for Macintosh, a program which combines the power of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator and perhaps outdoes them both. Street pricing for the product is a relatively low $150, but I must admit that for as cool as it looked, I couldn't help thinking that moving away from the industry standards of Photoshop and Illustrator might not be a good idea. Draw 8 looks fantastic, though, so it's definitely something I'll have to consider.

I played around a little bit with Wacom's new "intuos" graphic tablets. I'm not used to graphic tablets, so this was a rather odd experience. I think for a person serious about doing digital art, this would be must, but I'm not sure I'm that person. I did come away convinced that Wacom tablets were the best in the biz, anyway.

Newer Technology didn't have any on display, but they announced today a 400-MHz G3 card for $1690 which has a MacBench 4.0 score of 1417. Zeke, my 320-MHz G3-enhanced PowerMac 7500, runs around 1150, so I can only imagine that the 400-MHz card is pretty darn speedy. Newer also had some iMac memory upgrades at their booth, and showed a side-by-side iMac demo with one upgraded machine and one non-upgraded machine. Conclusion: More memory is better. (Well, duh, guys!)

MetaCreations was busy showing off Bryce 3D (way cool), Ray Dream Studio 5 (way cool), Painter 5.5 (way cool), and Poser 3 (way cool). To sum, then, MetaCreations has a pretty full plate of way cool software products. Despite all this, my own video production efforts are a few years down the road, so I didn't spend too much time setting myself up for the disappointment of not being able to justify the cost of these neat software packages. Any digital video animators and other DV freaks will definitely want to take look, though.

Conclusion
So those represent the highlights of my day at Seybold. Perhaps it was because of Steve Jobs' keynote, but there was a definite pro-Apple feeling in the air. Compaq demo stations that at last year's Seybold were packed, were less than half full this year. The Microsoft area was more sparsely attended than last year as well. Apple's areas and the areas of developers supporting Apple were overloaded with interested people.

It's been about a year and month since Steve Jobs took over and though I've had my doubts at times, there's now no question: The Mac is back, and back in a big way.

Latest update on September 19, 1998
Feedback: [email protected]