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October 4, 1997
News
Seybold SF was a very interesting show; saws lots of cool products as well as the mighty
one himself, Bill Gates, speak. He talked about the web’s importance, the role of
content on the Web, the growth of NT 5.0 (and consumer version of NT down the road), and
pacts with Adobe to improve their support for high-end graphics and publishing. Lots of
Web stuff as well. Steve Jobs’ keynote on Thursday talked was an effort to encourage
the faithful. He did say the company plans to offers some high-speed low-cost products in
the early part of next year, so that will be interesting to watch. He also clarified that
the early releases of Rhapsody, which is Apple’s next generation operating system,
will be primarily geared towards servers and some high-end clients, so it doesn’t
look anything we’ll be putting on our Macs right away at least.
Canon BJC7000 printer was one of the neatest products I saw. It’s a $449 1200x600
dpi 7-color inkjet that can print photo-realistic images as well ordinary printouts on
both plain paper and expensive coated stock. They did a bunch of things right here: first,
while these new photo-only printers do create great quality, how many people actually
print that many photos. [comment] So they offer a trick they called Plain-Paper Optimized
printing that both waterproofs any print (B&W or color) and gives a shiny, photo-like
effect to plain paper. What they do is spray a coating-like ink in conjunction with the
regular inks to protect and enhance the output. Very clever. Plus it can print all the way
to the edge in what’s called "full-bleed" mode, which is how professional
printers work. They’ve also made the cartridges enormous so that you don’t have
to change them as often. Finally, they’ve upped their bundled Canon Creative software
to do image editing and web-optimized features. This looks like the color inkjet to beat.
Adobe was showing all its wares, including a new version of PhotoDeluxe, their low-cost
image editing app. Version 2.0 of the $49 product adds an improved interface, 50
step-by-step Guided Activities, 30+ one-click Special Effects, new editing tools,
including a Clone Tool, Adobe SmartSelect, and One-Step Red-Eye removal and EasyPhoto(R)
Organizer for creating albums or galleries of photos for easy storage and retrieval. The
product is available for both Macs and PCs running Windows 95.
Internet Explorer 4.0 finally shipped this week and I have to say, it looks pretty good.
They’ve done a much better job of explaining how channels work and cleaned up the
interface a good deal over the previous betas. The new Web desktop features seem more
stable and the new file browsing and built-in file previewing capability in Explorer
really work nicely. If you haven’t had a chance, I’d check it out, but try to
get it on CD—it’s much easier to install and saves a lot of time and hassles.
Microsoft announced over 700 channel developers on Tuesday and some of the more
interesting applications are things like Dell using a channel to communicate product
updates and other related news to its customers. This is the kind of app, as well as
automatic software updates [explain] that can really make channels useful (or really cause
big problems…).
Netscape isn’t just around of course and, in fact, the day before the IE 4.0
release, the company announced their new Aurora technology. Aurora, which is not scheduled
for release until next year, will offer the ability to browse your local drive and files
in a Web-like fashion, but Aurora will work across multiple platforms, including the Mac.
Should be interesting to watch.
Apple will be chopping prices on their notebooks and some of their high-end desktops
Macs next week, some by as much as $1,000. Look for big drops in Apple’s 3400 line
and $500 or so drops in the 1400 series. The company plans to introduce new notebooks
based on the powerful PowerPC 750 chip in the near future, so they’re dropping prices
on their existing machines to make way. The company will also apparently reduce prices on
some of their high-end 8600 and 9600 models.
If you want to add some real excitement to your gaming, you’re going to want to
check out MS Sidewinder Force Feedback, one of the new generation of force feedback game
accessories [explain]. The $149 Sidewinder comes bundled with three Win95 games:
Interstate 76, a driving game, MDK, Mission Laguna Beach, and Star Wars: Shadows of the
Empire: Battle of Hoth. You need a 75 MHz Pentium to drive this Sidewinder, and note that
the motors inside the joystick actually make noise, but expect a very different gaming
experience with it.
Looking to upgrade the storage capacity of your notebook? Check out Portable Enhancement
Products’ line of hard drive upgrades. Ranging in size from 810 MB to 4 GB, and price
for $324 to $924, the upgrades work with a wide variety of different notebooks. For an
extra $75, the company includes installation, data transfer from existing drives, and
virus checks.
HP has a introduced a new low-cost line of computers designed for small business called
Brio. The Brio line, which starts at $999 for a 166 MHz Pentium MMX system with 16 MB of
RAM, and a 2.1 GB drive, comes bundled with the HP Networking Center, which eases the
process of creating small networks and sharing devices across multiple machines. It’s
also bundled with Artisoft i.Share, which enables multiple users across a small network to
share a single modem for low-cost Internet access. Check out HP’s web site for more.
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