Winds of Change

written by Charles DeVore

from Mouse Tracks August 2003

This month finds Janet and me on vacation in Northern Idaho, where in the old days we would have to dial into the Electric Sheep or our email accounts. This tended to make our emails few and far between, with very little web browsing. However this trip is different. My brother has upgraded to a cable modem and making the connection consists of moving his Ethernet cable over to my TiBook and launching whatever on-line product I want to use. Traveling with my Mac has been moved to a new high.

Apple has introduced the G5 and it is due to start shipping in late August or early September. It has many new features to help it compete with the Intel lines—everything from faster memory to faster hard drives and bus speed. In fact, the minus I see here is that most people really don’t need the kind of speed this machine is going to put out. Gamers and workstation users should be in heaven and we shall find out how the rest of the world feels about the new machine shortly. However, if you need or want some items like USB2 built into your computer, one of these new machines may be right for you. The other minus of the new machines is the cost of the add-on items like RAM and serial hard drives. The cost to add eight gigabytes of RAM is higher than the cost of the top-of-the-line Mac—coming in around $3,700. Yes, that’s just for the RAM.

Quark has announced that QuarkXpress version 6.0 is now shipping. However, they may already be shooting down their attempt to regain lost market share with their software protection scheme. Although unconfirmed, I have heard you will only be able to load the software onto one computer. If this is true, Janet and I will move to InDesign and sell our versions of Quark. Not having a copy on our portable computer as well as on our desktop computer is unreasonable. We do way too much moving data around from unit to unit. We like Quark but not enough to pay $800+ dollars just so we can work on Mouse Tracks at home and on the road.

The swap meet is coming up shortly! Please bring your old goodies to sell or trade. Tables are $15 and there is no entry fee for buyers. The swap meet is on August 11th and takes the place of the General Meeting. Be sure and tell all your Mac friends that the doors open at 6:30pm at the NNCC building.

Apple has introduced a new video camera (iSight) for use with the beta version of iChat AV. The camera is small and appears to do a great job of broadcasting video over the beta software. You can download the beta software directly from Apple if you have a FireWire camera you want to test it with. The finished software will be retailed at $29. Janet has done some testing of the audio portion of this product with some pretty good results. She spoke to a Mac user in England who had put his name on a list of people willing to talk to others to test the product. The only thing I would suggest is that users invest in a good microphone and possibly a set of headphones or speakers as background noise can make hearing the person a little hard.

Microsoft has announced that it will no longer be producing a Macintosh version of Internet Explorer because Apple users have Safari. This is both a good and bad thing. While it is true that two companies compete for users, it is bad when there are no competing products. When you are competing, you try to build better products; when there is no other product there is no reason to make your product better or work out the kinks. It’s back to the old “learn to like it the way we make it or else.” The biggest problem is if you run into a problem (like several PMUG users have), there is no good workaround to get past it. Currently several sites will stall under Safari— and these are sites I read daily to get research completed. As of now, I still have to launch Internet Explorer to get to sites like macintouch.com. This is not a DNS problem and the site is very reachable using IE as the browser. Yes, I can also use Netscape but would prefer to use the Apple product if possible.

In a way, no matter what Apple does, it’s wrong. If Apple waits for third party vendors to update or produce products, everyone yells about the lack of an upgrade or the lack of a product in that area. On the other hand, if Apple produces a product that does what we want better than the third party vendors, we hear the cry that Apple is putting the third party vendors out of business. Take Adobe Premiere, the video editing software. Adobe has just announced that they will no longer produce a Macintosh version of the product. The fact is that the product was long in the tooth anyway and that Apple hurt the Adobe product when it produced Final Cut Pro, and then Final Cut Express for those of us who do not need a thousand bucks worth of video editing program. These are impressive products that Apple was forced to create when no one stepped up to the plate with cost-effective programs. Avid had a program for this kind of work but you could have paid them $6,000 to use it. They treated Mac users like poor relations and wanted to halt production of the Mac product and move all the users to the PC. Apple is doing everything it needs to do to survive. If someone writes a better program, people will move to that program. So let there be competing programs.

You can reach me at charles@cdevsol.com.

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