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 Copyright © 1998 Shiro Wilde |
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Apple began the iMac launch in the US last month, enjoying record sales, rave reviews, and stock hitting a 52-week high as a result. There's already an iMac Update 1.0 to improve connections with USB peripherals. World-wide launches are staggered throughout September - probably Apple's largest and most important product launch since the original Macintosh. $100 million is going into the marketing campaign including print, radio and TV ads. Apple has won an Emmy for the original "Think Different" commercial. Apple also found time to launch the Power Mac G3/333 MHz, and a slightly faster PowerBook G3 Series for September. If all that isn't enough, Apple has two new OS releases for October - Mac OS X Server 1.0 (formerly known as Rhapsody), and Mac OS 8.5 (codenamed Allegro). Allegro has sped through Beta, currently in late Final Candidate stage. Expected to be declared Golden Master this week, it will ship in the US at the beginning of October. It will include Find 2.0, now dubbed Sherlock, which incorporates web searches. This has stirred some corporate controversy as it circumvents the need to visit search engines through a web browser. Apple has sold Claris Organizer to 3Com/Palm, and far worse, it appears Claris Emailer is now discontinued, though Apple denies it. Naturally, the Mac community is petitioning for its revival. |
Adobe and Quark aren't exactly good friends these days. In a shocking move, privately-held Quark offered to buy Adobe, its long-time DTP archrival. In a superbly terse yet unsurprising reply Adobe rejected the offer. As part of the proposal, Quark had offered to buy all or part of the company, and sell off Adobe DTP products FrameMaker, PageMaker, and K2 (the supposed Quark XPress-killer). Quark, who had announced record profits recently, is a much smaller company than Adobe, and following this bizarre turn of events, Adobe stock went up on speculation that some other company may try to buy them instead. This came a short time after Adobe announced major restructuring with 300 job cuts, and an expected downturn in income. Despite shipping Photoshop 5, Premiere 5 and ImageReady recently, Adobe sales have been down - partly blamed on a sharp sales decline in Japan, which usually accounts for about 25% of Adobe's revenue. Adobe hopes to expand into new markets with upcoming new products. While K2 is not expected to ship until next year, it is aimed at recapturing some of the high-end professional DTP market it lost to Quark. Meanwhile, ImageStyler, expected in October, will target the consumer-level web graphic artist/designer. An ImageStyler Beta is now available. |
Adobe has also been busy with major product upgrades. Illustrator 8.0 ships this month, with enhanced user interface and integration with Photoshop. Adobe has added its familiar "Actions" and "Navigator" palettes, plus new features like a pencil tool that lets you sketch and re-draw at will. The eyedropper tool can now pick up text formatting attributes. PageMill 3.0 for the Mac should finally ship in October, integrating site management and featuring a much-improved interface. A PageMill 3.0 Beta is now available for download. |
Macromedia has just released the FreeHand 8.0.1 Update. It improves support for Flash 3 export, Photoshop 5 file compatibility, and external image linking. Exported Flash 3 files now retain FreeHand 8 transparency. Definitely worth the download. The Macromedia Generator family shipped last month. Template creation software Macromedia Generator Trial is available for download. The server-side engine "Generator Dynamic Graphics Server" is for Win and Solaris only. Perhaps nobody pointed out that the Mac is still the No. 1 web server platform. |
MetaCreations has announced Painter 5.5 Web Edition, a web-graphics oriented upgrade to its flagship natural-media painting application. New web-oriented features allow creation of seamless tiled backgrounds, image maps, and JavaScript rollovers. It also offers Animated GIF export, dynamic editable text, and image slicing. |
Real Software recently shipped REALbasic 1.0, an integrated development environment for Mac applications. It offers an amazingly simple visual interface for building application interfaces, and a modern object-oriented script-like programming language. By far the easiest and cheapest way to create powerful Net-ready stand-alone Mac applications. Highly recommended - download the REALbasic 30-day trial and documentation now. A more expensive cross-platform database-equipped version is due later this year. |
Power On Software has acquired Now Utilities. Qualcomm, who had acquired Now Software last year, were expected to announce the fate of Now Utilities in July, but sold it off instead. Power On currently make Action Files 1.1, a modern OS 8-compatible standard file dialog enhancement which essentially filled the void when Now Utilities was sidelined. Development will focus on Action Files, and will incorporate features from Now Utilities in future products, under the name "Action Now Utilities". |
The final word is that new and ever more bizarre means of communication are being developed. Try this glass orb of spinning blue LEDs, for instance. How long before we see these on the Piccadilly Line? |
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