Macworld Expo San Francisco January 2000 Report

Macintosh lovers are often accused of a fanaticism that borders on the religious. With no slight intended to anyone of the Islamic faith , I will borrow an analogy from their religion. If New York Macworld Expo is the Dome on the Rock, Macworld Expo San Francisco is Mecca--it’s the real deal, the most sacred of events and sites. The Hajj, or visit to the revered place, takes the faithful to San Francisco. The Ka'bah, or holy place is the Moscone Center for four days in January. Show promoters claimed that the event this year drew over 85,000 people.

Keynote By now, you have no doubt heard that Apple's Interim CEO Steve Jobs has decided to drop the "interim" part of his title. He says he still likes the moniker iCEO and will probably keep that part, presumably so he won't have to get his business cards reprinted. Perhaps this also means he will start taking a salary, or perhaps some stock options. His keynote was well attended by the Mac faithful and was orchestrated as well as any rock and roll show. A bevy of engineers, sound technicians and video people kept the show moving, even when the demos didn't work, (as happened when they attempted to run a Quake III demo on OS X) or Steve ambles a bit. By the end of the show, after a series of emotional waves of love, Jobs had the crowd eating out of his mouse pad. You can watch the entire two and a half hour love fest yourself thanks to the wonders of Quicktime streaming media.

Jobs didn’t have any new hardware to sell, or software for that matter, so he focussed on whipping up enthusiasm amongst the faithful, for the new operating system, OS X. He demoed “Aqua”, the new interface “look and feel” for OS X, scheduled to ship sometime in the summer. He claimed one of the design goals was that the interface had to be “lick-able”. It uses what Apple and Adobe used to call Display Postscript for rendering. Now Apple is calling it "PDF-enabled". What it means is that all fonts and vector graphics are rendered smoothly and anti-aliased. The new look is definitely attractive, and so it will need to be. Apple will have a tough sell moving Mac users from their happy friendly operating system into the dark and mysterious world of Unix. An overview of the features of the new Mac OS X Client interface can be seen online at Apple's site.

The Apple iCEO also talked about Apple’s Internet strategy. Apple has put $200 million into Earthlink and made that company the default ISP for all new Macintoshes shipped. He mentioned their investment in realtime media streaming company Akamai. Their initial $11 million dollar investment is now worth over a billion dollars, on paper. Based on that investments, Jobs claimed that Apple, based on this investment, was one of the few profitable Internet companies. He also mentioned that the Apple Online Store sells over a billion dollars of product annually.

Apple’s latest idea is to build a portal for Mac users and leverage the fact that they have control of the operating system, the hardware and the website. This is a unique situation. Two examples of this were the iDisk and KidSafe features. iDisk puts 20 megs of Internet storage onto the Mac desktop of any OS 9 client. Mac users can copy files to and fro from Apple’s servers securely over the Internet, just by dragging and dropping. The KidSafe feature allows OS 9 Mac users to set up a user for their kids that they can limit access to a database of 50,000 sites which have been reviewed by parents and teachers and deemed “safe”. Jobs plans to take more “unfair advantage” of this unique position with new products in the future. The big gotcha in all this that guarantees Apple a revenue stream is that to get the new features, users will have to upgrade to OS 9 to use these services, for around $100. According to Jobs, only about 1 million of the 25 or so million potential upgraders have so far bought OS 9. Apple hopes some of the new Internet services will encourage more to make the purchase.

Software

	Live Stage Pro The newest version of LiveStage Pro, from Vancouver-based developer Totally Hip Software was on display. Their software puts a great front end onto Apple's powerful QuickTime technology, giving users some of the power of Adobe Director, but using QuickTime as the base. The focus is on harnessing QuickTime's "wired sprites" technology. Worth a look for any multimedia developers who plan to deploy their wares primarily via the Internet. Some cool samples of what can be done can be seen on their website. Totally Hip Software also managed to swing a nice company profile write up on Apple's Hot News section.
	Now Up To Date Again Power On Software has revived the popular Now Up to Date and Contact software and promise a Palm conduit shortly.
	Corel Ottawa-based Corel Software had a booth promoting Corel PrintOffice and CorelDraw for the Mac. The latter product is still hovering at version 8, (PC users have version 9 already) but the obviously enthusiastic presenter gave me a useful demo and reinspired me to start using this great package again. For people who bought it a while ago, apparently there a couple of useful patches available for 8.0.
	Push Button Publishing I caught a glimpse at a truly awesome publishing system from a company in Korea called Soft Magic. From the brief overview I got, it looks like the kind of "push-the-publish-button" system that I dreamed of while publishing The Computer Paper. It may have the potential to revolutionize how publishers create magazine. There was a line up both times I was near the booth, so pricing was not established, but it is probably expensive.
	Family Reunion A few years back, I bought a great genealogy program for the Mac called Reunion from Leister Productions. I was stuck at version 4, so when I saw their booth, I ponied up the cash and bought version 6.0. It offers some great new reports, and best of all exports a very nice website version of your family genealogical charts. Well worth the upgrade. The reviews I have read suggest that it is still one of the best Mac-based genealogy programs.
	AgentSheets AgentSheets is an innovative software product that combines enduser programmable Agents,a spreadsheet-like workspaces and a Java generator. The agents can read web pages, play videos, sound, MIDI, speak, compute formulas, react to mouse, keyboard. The spreadsheets can contain agents instead of just numbers and strings to play "what-if" games and repackage information gathered from web. The Java generator turns simulations directly into interactive Java applets and JavaBean Components. This is a very interesting looking product for kids and adults who love Lego-like programming.
	Free Multimedia Software Gotta love that government funding. Not satisfied with seeding the world with free open source operating systems, the good folks at the University of Minnesota are entering the market for retail software. Upresent is a presentation software package and UGather is multimedia database for graphics, sound and video files.

Gadgets

	Palm VII to Cross Borders Eventually Palm Computing was there. I asked a representative, who seemed to know of what he spoke about when the Palm VII wireless service would show up in Canada. He said that they were in the advanced stages of readiness. He claimed that they were working with Cantel, and that they had the system working already. Unfortunately, they could get it to work in Canada and they have it working in the States, but they had problems getting the units to jump across the border smoothly. Cross-border surfing is important to the executive class who will be the target market for this unit, so they were determined to get it working before they ship.
	Palm Clones Recently, the original developers of the Palm handheld computer jumped ship at 3 Com and started their own company, Handspring , and started producing Palm clones. They had an equally large booth, and with a remarkably similar organization. They were displaying all kinds of plug-in modules for the Palm clone. A number of the products were not yet shipping, but there seems to be a buzz of activity around the diminutive units. Developers like the fact that they can easily add a module to the Palm platform. No doubt Palm Computing will add a similar feature to their next units. One hopes, for the sake of developers and consumers that they make their slot compatible with the Visor's.
	Dick Tracy Watches The geekiest product of the show was a pager-sized wrist watch organizer, complete with mini-joystick and docking cradle. The product is called onHand from Matsucom. The company promises Mac connectivity sometime this Spring.
	Brain Scanner Electrical Geodesics, Inc., had the show's most expensive product, a US $50,000- $200,000 EEG machine that plugs into a G4 Macintosh. Sounds expensive, but apparently comparable EEG machines sell for $1-$2 million. I am not sure why, but it is exciting to see this kind of product shown. It seems with technology the price keeps coming down. Last year's $50,000 product is this year's $1,000 unit. Soon I will be able to own one, my very own EEG machine. Then I will have to figure out what to do with it.
	Kid-Proof Laptop AlphaSmart was there with a new version of their affordable computer companion keyboard, the AlphaSmart 3000. This little unit is a computer with a small LED screen. It is designed for school kids to type notes in during class. It is rugged, sells for about US $200 and plugs into Mac or Windows PCs, dumping the contents of the typing to a computer. It also supports a variety of printers and has an IR port for beaming data. Transferring text is simple - launch any application on your Macintosh or PC, connect the AlphaSmart using the cable and hit the "send" key. This little computer is probably a much better idea for the average school kid than a $2,000 laptop.
	Science Class on your Mac Scalar Corporation has a USB microscope for about $300 called the Scalar Mac Microscope. It looked cool, but I have not had an up close look at the one on the PC side. In keeping with the discussion on the EEG machine above, what I really want and need is a scanning tunneling microscope for $150.
	Speaking of Voice Recognition Though not newly announced, I sat through a demo of ViaVoice from IBM, their new voice recognition system for the Macintosh. The presenter suggested that speaking in a monotone improved recognition. It still seemed rather slow, even on their presumably fast Macintosh and it was limited to a single application that ships with the product. It does not work with all programs as one would hope. Apparently this will come eventually. For now, it is an inexpensive experiment at US $79, and they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee if it doesn't work for you.

Network and Power User Products

	Serve the World CD-ROM jukebox changes have been around for a while, but not at this price point. Escient, has come out with a two drive, 200 CD/DVD cartridge unit for $1500. It offers direct support for Cumulus Multimedia software. Nice unit for anyone needing a terabyte on their desktop.
	G4 Upgrades PowerLogix amongst other vendors, had a G4 upgrade, with prices hovering around $550 US. Nice units, and no doubt speedy. Upgrades such as these are tempting, but when the cost of more RAM and a new hard drive, is factored in, you might as well buy a new computer.
	USB and Firewire on a Single Card Orange Micro Inc., makers of Wintel-PC-on-a-card for Macs, has responded to requests from owners of older Macs to put out a PCI card that offers two USB and two Firewire ports onto a single card. Price was around $159.
	ADSL to the Shelf top Global Village was showing off a ADSL modem, with talk of selling them at retail. That could get interesting if you could buy your own modem and move around services. Would it bring the monthly charge down? Presumably the telcos are building the cost of these modems into their pricing. Someday, the box to the left may contain a DSL modem.
	Storage Area Networks Micronet was demoing Sancube, a storage area networks (SANs). This latest buzz word refers to a high speed connection between a small group of computers and a toaster-like hard drive--A network for power users. Other SANs use expensive FibreChannel cards to achieve this effect, but Micronet has cashed in on the fact the all G3s and G4s now ship with Firewire. The idea is to set the Sancube box in the middle of four G4's editing video and give them a shared Firewire hard drive. Their unit costs about US$1500 and offers 70 Gigabytes of storage to the workgroup.

eCommerce and Internet Solutions

WebClerk, a 4D database based system designed for store owners with a fast Internet connection. This product would not work in a web hosting environment, but it did have the benefit of being free to the first 100,000 users. The company president stated that his goal of this generosity was to create market share. The product was based on an existing point of sale package.


Toronto's own Waves in Motion was displaying a FileMaker plug-in called CC Authorize (US $799) that will link a FileMaker database to the bank and confirm a Visa, MasterCard or Am Ex transaction. They claim to have it running with Canadian banks using Authorizenet.

Purity Software announced WebSiphon 2.0 a web application development environment. WebSiphon offers a powerful language with a built-in database for Mac-based websites. Nathan Nunn, President and CEO of Purity claims that "New features like built-in support for HTTP file upload and the network libraries offer great utility and ease of implementation. With third-party products like the Valentina database engine and Pickle dynamic imaging the opportunities for WebSiphon developers continue to expand."

MC2 was there with FirstClass groupware in a small booth. They claimed it was the last time we would see the booth and the next show would witness a return to the glory days of large booths for FirstClass. They were there promoting the new FirstClass Gold servers. This product adds a calendar to the already mature groupware product. Missing still are mail rules for the client and a way to import and export data into the calendar.

Another set of iTools Announced Long time developer Tenon Systems best known for their Unix-on-a-Mac (MachTen) and Apache-on-a-Mac (WebTen) products, were at the show displaying iTools for Mac OS X Server. This product brings a more administration friendly web interface to some of the sparsely interfaced Unix programs provided with OS X Server. Apache web server gets the treatment. iTools also provides a "HotMail" web interface to email. SSL for secure ecommerce is provided. A keyword searching engine and HTML caching are included and DNS and FTP are given the interface treatment. This may be the tool set that was missing from Apple's original OS X package that will allow administrators and web hosting companies make truly usable and useful. iTools seems to be a bargain at US $495.

Printers

Macs used to suffer from a shortage of printers. In the early days, it was Apple's goal to sell all the printers that went with Macs. This was an expensive, but acceptable approach, when they had a decent printer lineup, including the LaserWriter, Imagewriter and StyleWriter. Then in the Dark Days, when everyone was abandoning ship, and they started throwing entire departments overboard, the Printer division got the heave ho. This left Mac users with a very short supply of printers. Fortunately, Burnaby, BC-based Infowave (formerly GDT Softworks) was there through thick and thin making printer drivers for the Mac, so that they could be connected to the much more available PC printers. One item that has been missing for a while has been a decent multifunction device for the Mac. At last the drought has ended and there are options available from HP, Brother, Cannon, Epson and Samsung.

FileMaker News

A nasty rumor popped up at one of the Mac rumor sites shortly after the show, suggesting that FileMaker Inc. was having trouble getting an OS X version of FileMaker out the door. This was directly contradicted on the Thursday evening FSA session held by FileMaker Inc. Although they would not give dates, they stated something to the effect that "We are owned by Apple, we are increasingly profitable, and we will have a Carbon version for when OS X ships and we have plans for going much beyond that to support the new opportunities contained in OS X." This statement was made believable by a number of positive factors at FileMaker Inc. According to company President, Dominique Goupil, sales are up significantly for the recently launched FileMaker 5 and FileMaker Server. In addition, retail and licensing volume is growing. They also claim to have scored a hit with their box set pricing. Looking at MySQL, Oracle 8i Lite, 4D and will cause the technology-shy to run screaming if they have to build something quickly for the web. FileMaker still rules in this area. I sat through demos of 4D and OpenBase at the show. They are certainly competent products, but they are much more demanding that FileMaker. FileMaker recently got a number of nice awards for FileMaker 5, including MVP from PC Computing, winning over MS SQL and Oracle 8i.

Also, in contradiction of the rumor, I saw all the same faces I have been seeing for the last two years at FileMaker's booth. It seems unlikely that a major bailout was under way. FileMaker Inc., is in their 27th consecutive profitable quarter, that is something like seven years of making money. Not bad for a company that this rumor site claims is on it's last legs.

No doubt there are some challenges for FileMaker Inc., notably the increasing move towards web databases. The pricing on FM Unlimited has annoyed many developers, but if you look at the price of the options, (and include the cost of a Linux guru to keep MySQL running) it is still quite cost effective.

The 2000 FileMaker Developer Conference was announced. It will be held in Palm Desert, California on August 27-30th.

Back Home

Speaking of Linux, and who isn't these days, while I was away at Macworld Expo, my partner at HomeBase Internet, Joshua Paul was taking a well deserved Christmas break. Of course, he couldn’t leave his computers at home for long and decided to install a Mac Linux on his Powerbook. He was very excited at finding a little utility called MOL. MOL stands for Mac on Linux. After installing Linux, you boot into a Mac session that will happily run Mac software inside a Linux session. If the applications bomb, you drop out to Linux. According to Joshua, “it's a little slower because there is no accelerated video but it's coming - best of all it's faster than Mac OS X Server's Blue Box. Next up - how many MOLs can I run??” The developers of MOL can get away with this little programming feat because they are using the Apple ROMs contained right in the Macs it is running on. In the past developers who attempted such things ran afoul of Apple’s legal department because emulation usually meant that the patented Apple ROMs were usually being lifted from somewhere.

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