While most attention in the Mac-watching world is on what Apple Computer Inc will reveal about its operating system plans at Macworld Expo in San Francisco, from January 7-10, December’s big event was Internet World in New York. One of the early Macintosh announcements regarded availability of Claris Home Page 2.0 for Mac OS and Windows95 and NT. The CD-ROM package will ship in early January for $100, but registered users of v1.0 can download the upgrade for free from Claris. The new Home Page Web-authoring program now offers built-in site templates; remote- site publishing; spell checking; support for QuickTime, Java and Shockwave multimedia plug-ins; and more flexibility in frame and table manipulation. Then Silicon Graphics Inc said it had teamed with Apple on supporting VRML 2.0. Silicon Graphics will incorporate use of QuickDraw 3D as the rendering engine in its Windows 95 version of Cosmo Player, its VRML 2.0 plug-in, and it will bring out a Mac version in early 1997. Apple, in turn, endorsed Cosmo Player as its preferred VRML browser for MacOS and will bundle it with new editions of the Apple Internet Connection Kit. And NetCarta Corp announced it would be supporting Apple’s HotSauce MCF Meta Content Format in its WebMapper content management tools. The HotSauce MCF language lets you present information about other information and content, and its chief use has been visual display of information from a Web site or database in 3D or hierarchical form. NetCarta will enhance WebMapper to let it generate MCF site maps on demand and translate its WebMap Library of 30,000 maps of popular sites into MCF, viewable with Apple’s HotSauce browser plug-in. Users will be able to request and receive an MCF file of their favourite sites through NetCarta’s Sauce Your Site service. NetCarta’s vice president of marketing, Thomas Tansy, explained the importance of the deal: Now, with HotSauce MCF, we can deliver the site navigation experience to the end user in three dimensions. MCF is an important technology for the Web, and we’re pleased to be working with Apple to make it a standard. What’s curious, though, is that the pact came right after the announcement that Microsoft Corp was to buy NetCarta for $20m and was planning to use its technology in its BackOffice and FrontPage products (CI No 3,062). What wasn’t said was whether this would include use of HotSauce, but if that happened, it would really bolster the position of MCF. รก
