DT&G Magazine Editor's Column
From the Editor: News items of interest from the DT&G Monthly Newsletter  

Macworld Creative Pro New York 2003

Fred Showker

Dramatic departure

Here are but a few of the items I'm building into my 2003 New York report -- there are a number of others which will be posted soon. It's been too hectic: getting back on Friday, and then preparations for meetings in Washington D.C. on Monday morning.

This year's New York Macworld marked a dramatic, and to some, disappointing departure from the Macworlds we've known and loved in the past. However I'm not quite as negative about the show as almost everyone else I talked to.
      Schmoozing in the various parties, talking to many other attendees was like attending a funeral, listening to the same obituary again and again. Even the speakers and presenters were showing a decidedly negative posture to the event -- very unprofessional poor taste for those of position.
      Yes, it was about a third of the size -- Javitz blocked off where the underpass usually connects north and south halls. Yes, there were many fewer exhibitors -- few of them offering any theatrics or excitement and fewer still offered anything other than paper handout and a card swipe. Quark, Adobe, and the other "big" creative players were conspicuously missing from the floor. Adobe was downstairs running special sessions in conference rooms but not displaying product on the floor. Some of the usual big-time players either had tiny booths, were part of a shared booth or were absent. A Microsoft Office demo CD was found in many show bags, and two MSN costumed butterflies greeted you at the door with an MSN CD and that was it for Microsoft. LaCie who is used to 40 x 40 booths giving away automobiles was sharing half of a 10 x 10 booth with someone else.
      Yes, you could paint a pretty dismal picture, IF you wanted to -- but I felt differently. While others bragged about "doing the show in two hours," in my two days on the floor I still didn't get to thoroughly visit all the booths. It was an excellent show for actually seeing and learning something. You could easily hold intelligent and uninterrupted conversations with the exhibitors in their booths. I got good demos and satisfying attention from literally every booth I visited -- for the first time you didn't have to fight through a throng of people to see the product! Yes, there were fewer exhibitors, but you could spend more time, and have a better experience with those who were there. I thought it was an excellent show. Bravo.

High Capacity Storage

If you went to New York looking for storage, you certainly picked the right year. All over you could find killer deals on 120, 150, 200, and 300 gigabyte drives at amazing prices. The best I saw was $120 for a 120 gig drive -- but the vendor was questionable -- a short distance away was the highly respected LaCie, featuring a 125 for $189.
      Many new configurations could be found like WiebeTech's new BayDock FireWire Storage System, which allows users to install one, two or four removable drives within one enclosure. Each drive is supported by an independent FireWire 400 bridge for high performance. Each bay may be optionally equipped with an "InfoTray" intelligent LCD indicator, providing the user with immediate visual access to vital drive health information, such as temperature, time in use and other information. This all seems rather ho-hum until you realize they're talking capacities up to 1.2 terabytes! Price points are set between $139.95 for a user configurable single BayDock and $3995.00 for a 1.2 terabyte Quad BayDock preconfigured with InfoTray intelligent removable bays, individual FireWire channels and capacities of 300GB per bay.
www.wiebetech.com

Soundtrack becomes standalone product

Soundtrack, the royalty-free music production tool previously available only with Final Cut Pro 4, will be available in August as a standalone product for $299 (US). Soundtrack includes more than 4,000 royalty-free, professionally-recorded audio loops and sound effects, giving creative professionals such as video editors, DVD authors and web developers a powerful and easy-to-use tool to create high-quality music scores. Soundtrack scales to meet the needs of audio producers, DJs and remix artists who start their projects in Soundtrack and then migrate to a digital audio workstation, such as Logic or Pro Tools, for the rest of their work.
      Soundtrack also ships with over 30 professional, high-quality audio plug-ins from Apple and Emagic. Plug-ins like Platinum Verb, SpectralGate, Multiband Compressor and AutoFilter, enable users to combine effects with individual tracks to create sophisticated audio. Furthermore, Soundtrack's support for Mac(R) OS X's Audio Units plug-in architecture allows users to further expand their capabilities with additional third-party audio effects developed through Apple's open-standard plug-in format. Check out the details at Apple.com: http://www.apple.com/pr/ and
http://www.apple.com/soundtrack

24/7 Music for the taking

Many online music fans are paranoid of all the spyware and being tracked by online music vendors or by the very P-2-P software they use.
      Some MP3 fans however have discovered that free music is everywhere with no possibility of others' prying computers and eyes. Some users merely run digital FM signal into their Macs, tune in a high-quality local digital FM radio station and punch "record". Later they come back with easily available music editing software and break the "tape" into separate songs -- or merely edit out the trash between songs leaving a lot of hours of listening. What could be more easy?

Ambrosia Software has made that a little easier with their free program called WireTap 1.0.0. This MacOS X 10.2 program allows you to record any audio playing on your Mac, saving it to a file for later listening or processing. This allows you to record news from Internet radio stations such as the BBC News, sound snippets from your favorite DVD movie, record the audio from a game, or even iChatAV conversations.
      WireTap works using a simple tape recorder-like interface. Simply click the record button, and any audio playing through your Mac will be recorded to disk. WireTap can record any sound that is playing regardless of the source, so RealPlayer, iTunes, DVD Player, Windows Media Player, etc. are all supported. WireTap will be coming to a future version of Ambrosia's fantastic (and highly recommended) video/screen capture product Snapz Pro X. But for the time being, at least, WireTap is a completely free
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/freebies/

Software for this millennium

We all had a hearty laugh at Terri White's comment during this year's New York Adobe presentation -- "Use some software for this millennium..." (Stabbing away at Quark) and it made me think of Sherlock compared to DEVONagent.
      If the G3 is "ancient" (to quote our friend David Pogue) then Sherlock must be really ancient -- then DEVONagent is definitely the information finding tool of the next generation.
     DEVONagent simulates the behaviour of a human web surfer scanning the Internet for a specific piece of information. Technically, DEVONagent uses a variety of searching techniques and collects the results from major search engines. Then it visits all the found web sites, downloads, analyses and weights them to find the most relevant pages, eliminating information junk (empty pages, HTTP errors, sites that don't contain the search phrase, similar or duplicate pages, or pages with too little information) automatically on-the-fly. The new "crawler" scans through lists of pages and reports seeking only those dealing with what the user is looking for. This is especially useful for anyone visiting the same pages over and over again. The final results are presented by DEVONagent in a plain list, sorted by decreasing relevance, together with a first summary of all paragraphs that DEVONagent thinks are the most relevant to the query.
      A second, more spectacular view shows a list with the most important topics related to the query and a digest instantly created for selected topics or based on the query. Ocurrences of the selected topics words are highlighted, the digest is editable and can be saved as plain text or RTF.
      Both views, page list and digest, are easily accessible through tabs below the toolbar. Also, selected pages can be exported as HTML, plain text or RTF/RTFD. In almost all cases, the results filtered and weighted by DEVONagent are much better that those returned by the standard search engines. Additionally, DEVONagent stores all or selected results in a searchable, freeform database and knowledge manager. A double-click on any link opens the pages directly in an integrated web browser built upon the fast and rock-solid Safari engine (including Java, JavaScript, Plug-Ins and all the rest).
http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonagent.php

No, OS X is not Windows. Is it?

While Andy, Bob, Scott, and Shawn continue to gush and wet themselves over X's GUI decorations, others like Bryan Derman have noticed a suspicious "Windows-ish" trend.
      At Macworld (er, uh, "Creative" whatever) in New York we heard Mac presenters using the same Windows phrases they made fun of yesterday -- navigaing X's folder/columns interface like any self-respecting Windows user.
      Thank goodness there are programs like FolderControl! This utility automatically sizes and arranges your Finder's folder windows into configurations you define. So if you don't like the endless Windows columns of files, you can easily use different preference configurations to control which folders participate in the processing - how folder windows are sized, both vertically and horizontally - how sub-folder windows are arranged, relative to their enclosing folder - how various folder-window attributes, such as sorting and view kind, are set - setting the permissions on the files that control these capabilities. But since the most popular setup configurations are pre-defined, most users can use it without any further configuration.
      FolderControl requires Mac OS X 10.2, and you can download a trial version, or purchase the real thing for $21.95 (It's free to current FolderControl licensees!)
      Whew. So, OS X users can now enjoy the same interface features we Mac users have enjoyed for years.
http://www.derman.com/

Panther on "Ancient" Macs?

Imagine the contrast: you sit through the User Group session where Chuck Joiner is drawing a line in the sand separating the Mac "haves" from the Mac "have-nots" (making some attendees comment later they felt "dejected" by the UGAB) -- then watch David Pogue shoot down an attendee's question (to get a laugh) calling the attendee's G3 "ancient" because "it won't run OS X" -- then you walk into a booth to play with Panther blazing away on a Pizmo! Don't let them make you feel bad because you can't afford the latest and greatest Mac to run OS X -- you may be able afford to get your Mac "Reloaded"
     Outside, in the real world, we see a product so radical that Apple Computer visited the booth with a cease and desist to stop running Panther on (black) G3 Pizmos, and the BW/Beige G3s!
      VaaaaVoooom... more amazing was seeing Panther opening windows, and launching programs seemingly faster on the Pizmo than it appears on even the newer G4 and 5 machines. Isn't that interesting? Better yet, when you upgrade your "ancient" Mac, they throw in the latest OS X. So if you're thinking of switching, but thought you were one of the "have-nots" definitely check out:
http://www.fastmac.com/

Animation for the Rest of Us

I spent quite a bit of time chatting with Jonathan Hollinger and Tristan Perich, two highly talented up-and-coming Mac programmers behind Loud, Inc. Their new products Stop-Motion Studio and Stop-Motion Junior are fantastic new offerings for anyone who wants to do stop-motion animation (Claymation) but balked at the complexity and tedium of it all. These packages capture each 'take' leaving a ghost for positioning the next 'take' making it ever so easy to film stop-motion. A click gives you a playback for proofing and returns to production mode. Jonathan showed me a series of "Mr. Bill" style movies made by his 10-year old brother that knocked me out! If you want to get into animation, or want to introduce it into the classroom then definitely check out
http://www.loudinc.com

More to come...

So, there are just some of the items found at Macworld. There are a number of others, and some special stories and photos I'll finish up by next Monday.
      As for the East coast Macworld for 2004, things will be very different. David Pogue predicted it will be very small and Apple won't be there. There were many other predictions and speculations including some doubts whether there would be a Macworld at all. A lot can happen in a year, and IDG could easily cancel next summer's event.
      Apple's booth and entourage at Macworld was indeed smaller but all that I talked to seemed to be higher and more excited than in years past. They too seemed to revel in the opportunity to actually talk with attendees, and make some real contacts. And, the Apple booth was continuously busy and bustling with visitors.
     My prediction is that if Apple and IDG forsake the East coast, it will be a grave mistake. So many people can't afford to fly to the West coast, and many others can't take weekday vacations to San Francisco in January.

A good time was had by all

Even though it was a smaller show, we all had a good time. If you found some cool things at Macworld this year, just pass them along to your fellow DTG readers!

Thanks for reading

Fred Showker
Editor / Publisher, DT&G Magazine
 
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