Faced with the threat of Windows95, its own troubled finances and a perceived haemorrhage of applications, Apple Computer Inc had to pull something convincing out of the bag at last month’s Worldwide Developer’s conference. It did not start well. The developers had been hoping to leave the convention center with an early release of Mac OS System 8 (Copland) to play with but two weeks before the San Jose bars and hotels begin to fill, the attendees found out it was not to be – Copland’s schedule had slipped again. Nonetheless chairman, chief executive (and acting head of research and development) Gil Amelio and the rest of the team appear to have made a positive impact on the attendees, who after months of glum news responded well to a mixture of straight talking, new technology and showmanship. The three-pronged basis for Apple’s renaissance? Multimedia, the Internet and the OpenDOC object framework. It was the Internet that dominated the whole proceedings, not least because of the excellent Web presence constructed for the show: a multimedia concoction, designed to turn what has, in previous years been an event surrounded by almost Masonic secrecy into a global advertisement for Apple technology.
Poke fun
Key aspects? It was timely – all keynote speeches were made available in real time at www.wwdc.apple.com in Real-Audio format. It was also technically innovative – for those that wanted more than just sound, the company put out a beta version of a Quick-time TV application, based around its Quicktime videoconferencing technology. The color pictures are a bit smeary, the sound is a bit cracked, nonetheless it managed to create a feeling of being there. But most important, it was funny. For a corporation the size of Apple to give its Web authors the flexibility to poke fun at some proceedings is no mean feat. The site is the first expression of Apple’s decision to build a more substantial presence on the Web following the demise of eWorld. A whole new division, Apple Internet Studios & Productions, has been set up to build in-house and third-party sites. In addition to a clutch of Apple-related sites to be launched over the coming months, the division is promising a fun view of Atlanta for the Olympics, coverage of the Habitat II UN conference in Istanbul and a few band conferences, including one by Metallica. As for the technology on show, the quirkily-named Cyberdog (CI No 2,924) made its long-awaited debut, proving that Netscape plug-ins and Java have cornered the market for Internet developers. Apple announced that Cyberdog, Apple’s integrated Internet browsing application would also be extended to use them. No time-scales were given for the improvement, however. The canine product is partly a showcase for OpenDOC, the object-orientated, document-centric software system Apple hopes will essentially do away with the concept of the application. Cyberdog 1.0 can be downloaded gratis at http://www.cyberdog.apple.com. The final version is faster and less memory-hungry than the predecessors and provides a welcome alternative to the Netscape-type World Wide Web browsing paradigm. In an effort to boost OpenDOC’s stock further with developers, many of Apple’s funkier multimedia technologies are being implemented as OpenDOC components.
By Chris Rose
The Kickstart suite contains versions of QuickTime, QuickTime VR and QuickDraw 3D as well as a component that will render PICT, GIF, JPEG and TIFF files. An alpha pre-release version of the stuff is available now for download from the company’s OpenDOC Web server. One of the most notable aspects of the announcement is that developers will be able to license the Kickstart technologies at no cost for redistribution with their software – which looks like OpenDOC will be the cheapest way to ship packages based on QuickTime VR. Digital cameras look set to get smarter if one of the lower-key announcements of the conference takes off. Apple used the conference to introduce its ‘Image Capture Platform’ bundle of technology the company says it will license to camera manufacturers. Most of today’s offerings are fairly simple point-and-click affairs, but Apple is proposing a system based on Motorola Inc’s MPC823 PowerPC processor, a multi-tasking real-time operating system and a set of application programming interfaces. APIs for a camera? The idea, apparently is that some of the image processing work that currently requires a personal computer will be able to be done in-camera. So Apple proposes in-camera filters, cameras that can be programmed to take time-lapse photos and stitch them together into QuickTake movies and cameras that can be directly connected to the Internet, running their own TCP/IP stack and image transmission software. The company is applying for more than 30 patents in relation to the capture system and says that the application programming interface, including sample code should be available by June with the full software development kit following later in the summer. Winner of the misleading announcement award goes to Apple’s statement that it and Macromedia Inc had an agreement to develop Shockwave for Director for the Apple Cyberdog. Develop? Er no, not really. Since a future release of Cyberdog will support Netscape Communications Corp plug-ins, Cyberdog will just use the existing Shockwave plug-in implementation. Meantime Quick-Time VR is expected to ship in August and extends the virtual reality tool kit with support for directional sound, and speech; a programmer’s ap-plication programming interface for controlling playback and functionality and full support for Internet Universal Resource Locator hot-spots on panoramas and objects. The cumbersome authoring process should also be improved with better tools and the ability to combine Quick-Time movies, still images and three-dimensional sprites in virtual reality panoramas.
For 10-year-olds
And Apple’s Advanced Technology Group has unveiled ‘Project X’ a new way of browsing the Internet where users ‘fly through’ a three-dimensional representation of the Web’s file heirarchies. It can also be used to organize the file on the user’s hard disk. Gimmick, or the best thing since Mosaic? Apple wants to know, and a technology demonstrator is available from www.atg.apple.com. Another product of the Advanced Technology Group that will go commercial later this is Cocoa – a multimedia authoring tool for 10-year-olds (no, really). Essentially a drag-and-drop visual language for kids, the package enables them to build interactive worlds. A Navigator plug-in for Mac and Windows95 enables the results to be viewed over the Web. Pricing and availability aren’t decided yet. And Apple will be bundling Adobe Systems Inc’s new version of Acrobat Reader, dubbed Amber, with its Internet Connection Kit. Amber is Adobe’s nod towards the Internet – the biggest change is the ability for users to grab just the page(s) they want to read, rather than having to down-load the whole .PDF file en masse. Mac OS support for Firewire – the high-speed serial link that is also known as IEEE1394, will be ready in the first half next year, says Apple.
