Winds of Change

written by Charles DeVore

from Mouse Tracks February 2002

Macworld Expo is over again and we have managed to survive another four days of vendors and User Group meetings with very little sleep. But it is worth the sore feet and unfamiliar bed to be able to see the excitement that still surrounds the Macintosh community.

The new iMacs will be shipping at the end of the January. I'm not sure how to describe them other than it is all Steve's idea. The base is the about the size of half a soccer ball, and white; the neck is chrome and very strong, and the 15 inch LCD panel is beautiful. The fact that the monitor can be moved around so easily is a great feature. Will a wireless keyboard and mouse be a future option?

All the new iMacs feature the following: built-in 15-inch (viewable) TFT active-matrix liquid crystal display, NVIDIA GeForce2 MX graphics processor, 56K V.90 fax modem, 10/100BASE-T Ethernet, built-in antennas and card slot for optional AirPort Card, built-in microphone, Mini-VGA output port. Keyboard and mouse are in white to match the iMac.

The top of the line features:
800MHz PowerPC G4
256K L2 cache @ 800 MHz
256MB SDRAM
60GB Ultra ATA drive
Apple Pro Speakers

Middle
700MHz PowerPC G4
256K L2 cache @ 700 MHz
256MB SDRAM
40GB Ultra ATA drive
Apple Pro Speakers

Bottom
700MHz PowerPC G4
256K L2 cache @ 700 MHz
128MB SDRAM
40GB Ultra ATA drive

I would highly recommend this machine to all new users who don't need two monitors or a very large monitor. The top of the line model with the SuperDrive should fill all the needs of those who wish to archive their videotape to DVD. The middle of the line fills in the need for speed and CD-RW. Bottom of the line model gives those who already own a CD-RW a great price break for an extra machine.

Apple also introduced the new, free product called iPhoto. Drawing on the latest System technology, it requires you to be using System 10.1.2; but gives a clever way to handle photos from your digital camera. The demo for this product was very interesting and may even create the desired effect, getting users to change to System X. Take a look on the Apple web site or visit one of our local Apple stores for a demo. www.apple.com/iphoto/

Many of the vendors at the Expo had smaller booths than what we are used to seeing. Some did not even show up due to the cost and recession. Many of the hardware vendors did not show, so sales at booths having hardware were brisk.

Many of the companies or products below are new. They have no proven product records and may or may not be great deals. So buyer beware is the theme here.

New products were not too easy to find but they were there. I picked up a power adapter for my iBook that is very small and compact for about $50. Compared to Apple's pricing for an adapter at $80 that was a pretty good price. The company selling these is called California Drives and their web address is www.caldrives.com, phone 877-602-1394. The device is called iadaptor2. It works with any dual USB iBook or PB G4. Also from this company is a speaker guard in silver, red, or blue for the QuickSilver G4 towers.

Orange Micro was there introducing its FireWire iBot web camera. This looks very interesting as a small direct-to-computer video camera. I can just see users with PowerBooks hooking this up and doing video on the run using an Airport to broadcast, or just using it as a portable video camera on the cheap. www.orangemicro.com, phone 714-779-2772

An Oregon company, Anthro Corporation was at Macworld to demo their new carts and office systems. When asked about the new iMacs they said they have a team working on a new cart for it. I am beginning to suspect their people look forward to custom fitting new carts to Apple designs. This is a one of the best cart and table system producers in the country. The products are well made and designed to last for a long, long time. www.anthro.com phone 800-325-3841

Wacom introduced their new Cintiq pressure sensitive draw-on-the-screen device priced at $1,899. Contact www.wacom.com for more info. Yes, this is the high end. Wacom offers several products for much less, such as the Wacom Graphire wireless pen/tablet and cordless mouse (under $100) that I am using right now.

Wiebetech introduced several FireWire bridging devices and storage devices. They can be reached at www.wiebetech.com, phone 316-744-8722. Again remember these are new guys in the field and many of their products are yet to be released.

EBeam system 3 is yet another whiteboard reader. You use special pen holders that transmit data back to your computer giving you a exact copy of all the work you just did on the whiteboard. Sells for about $650, you can find out more and be sent a CD showing a demo of the product by going to www.e-beam.com, phone 877-463-2326

HoodMan was there with all kinds of light blocking hoods for all sorts of cameras. They also have hoods for LCD screens and monitors as well as screen protectors for PDAs. To contact them go to www.hoodmanUSA.com, phone 800-818-3946

A company called eUnitek had deals on hard drives and NEC LCD 18 inch panels. You can contact them at www.eunitek.com, phone 877-686-4835

The company that had the best wow for the buck was a small outfit called AppleSkinz. This company makes a thin cover that covers the outer sides of any Blue&White G3, G4, or QuickSilver tower with everything from a American flag to Hot Rod flames. Not only that, you can have your own design (your company logo) made up. These were going for under $100 - not cheap but what a way to stand out in the dull office. You can reach them at www.appleskinz.com

Kaidan introduced a device called the EyeSee360° that allows you to take a 360° picture with your digital camera. Your camera must be able to produce 3.3 Megapixels to use the 360°. After taking the picture the software PhotoWarp installed on your computer takes over to process the picture into a panoramic image. Right now the device is limited to support for the Nikon 990, 995, and 5000 with support for a wide range of other cameras coming in the next year. Their web address is www.kaidan.com, phone 215-364-1778

A stylish surge protector is supplied by Belkin with their Gold Series battery backup for the Regulator Pro line. You can buy colored faceplates to match your color scheme. Those of you who have watched your work disappear because of a power outage know how important battery backup really is. Well, if style is what prevented you from buying one before this model, it will look great as it also protects your computer from being fried. Contact Belkin at their web site www.belkin.com, phone 310-898-1100

ExtremeMac introduced an iPod case, earbud Pouch, and iPod car charger. Mostly known for high end RAID systems for DV users and CD duplicators, this is a new direction for this company. Web address is www.extrememac.com, phone 1-866-392-9800

For laptop users come docking stations to make life at a desk a little easier. The new iBookEndz docking station provides all those pesky connections in a one connector. When Janet and I take our iBook out of the network at home to go on the road, we are always losing the EtherNet cable or the USB cable down behind a desk. With a dock like this, all that is taken care of, plus several other features are added. The Dock converts your video connector from Apple's to standard VGA. The audio is changed from mini jacks to RCA jacks or if you want to use your internal speakers there is a slide switch that turns off the RCA jacks, and lets you use the internal speakers. There are two colors: white for $159 or black for $144.95. This appears to be a very well made product; a bit spendy perhaps, but much cheaper than the G4 PB dock that runs $244.95 and $229.95.

From the rumor mill at Macworld come the following bits of gossip. Seems that many of the accelerator vendors may very well be looking at closing their operations. Many who have said their cards will work with the new chips are having a hard time making it happen. So if you have a ZIF adapter card you may not be able to use it to move up to the new chips that should be here shortly. In fact some of those companies haven't much staff or product on hand. The only company I know of that is keeping up is Sonnet, who seems to know what it takes to stay in the market for the long run.

Face it, the economy is in the pits. If you can afford it, buy locally or from companies you want to see around in 2003.

Many of the OS X products are "new and improved" versions of applications you are already familiar with. It would be hard to detail the changes in this article, but we hope to have General Meeting presentations or member review articles on many of them in the coming year. Some of these have demo versions which can be downloaded from the company web site.

Virtual PC 5.0 adds support for DVD-ROM and removable drives, as well as the ability to undo any changes you made to your Windows session. There is also improved compatibility with some copy protected software. We were told this includes the Oxford English Dictionary, but have not had a chance to test this for ourselves.

Other products for the Mac OS X system include:

PixelNhance and TIFFany3 from CaffeineSoftware are image processing applications which allow you to enhance your photos and other images with Actions that can be applied to single files or in a batch. www.caffeinesoft.com

Another image processing application is Asiva Photo which mainly assists in correcting the colors within your photo. There has been a demo of this on the MacAddict CD, so you may have already tried it out. www.asiva.com

Open@OSX is preparing a group of applications to run on OS X. GIMP is to create and edit graphics files. AbiWord and Gnumeric are intended to fill your word processing and spreadsheet needs. They also have Web server software, and an impressive multi platform program that has raster, topological vector, image processing, and graphics production functionality. www.openosx.com

Thinkfree Office is a java based application which can be accessed in multiple ways. As yet another alternative to the Microsoft suite, you can create word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and HTML pages. The special feature they offer is that you can subscribe to a service which lets you store your documents on a server which allows you to access them through any internet connected computer. It is multi-platform and you can download and reinstall the application easily if you don't have it on the computer you are using. www.thinkfree.com

The Omni Group must have had two booths–it felt like there were two companies with very similar logos. They have some interesting products for OS X, including OmniWeb (web browser), OmniGraffle (charts and diagrams), and OmniOutliner (organize your ideas or projects). They also have been involved in porting some games to OS X such as Oni and Quake III: Arena. www.omnigroup.com

DrawWell is an application where you choose from a group of plug-ins to create reports or charts and graphs from your own data. They were showing the plug-in which allows you to create CD labels or other reports directly from your iTunes libraries. www.drawwell.com

Axel offers an authoring solution for high-impact, programming free 3D web content. The end-user does need to download a free plug-in, but otherwise this runs on both OS X and OS 9. You can imbed QuickTime movies within 2D content or create interactive animations. www.mindavenue.com

GroBoto is a 3D art tool which can be used as for freeform drawing, or to lead you to finetuning your projects through the use of algorithmic imaging. www.braid.com

e-on software won a Macworld Expo Best in Show award for their Vue 4 d'Esprit application. This allows the creation of natural looking scenery for any 3D project, and works with files from other programs such as Poser or AutoCad. The US office for this company is in Beaverton, and we hope to have them give a presentation. www.e-onsoftware.com

You can reach me at charles@cdevsol.com.

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