Suz wrote:
> Kathy wrote:
>
> >EEEKKK.
> >
> >of course, I still prefer PageMaker to QuarkXpress -- but that's my 10+
> >years of learning/experience speaking.
>
> The article goes on to say that Adobe is developing yet another supposed
> rival to Quark.
I think the code name is "K2". It was demo'd during the keynote speech that
Steve Jobs gave at Seybold, SF a few days ago. I think it was one of the
head engineers at Adobe that presented it. I don't think he did a very good
job of presenting it, though. He showed some cool features, but nothing
earth shattering. I'll bet, though, that some pretty cool features are
coming. I think the idea is to make a program that functions kinda like
PageMaker, but has more vector drawing and bitmap image editing tools built
in. Would be nice to have a program that did that well, I tinkered with
Deneba Canvas, but it seemed kinda rinky-dink.
On the whole, I don't think Jobs' announcements were too exciting, either.
How many years have they been promising the next OS? Seems like they're
sticking to the OS 10 (OS X) idea for now. It uses an API called Carbon that
will allow Mac apps to run native on OSX and the current OS (or is that OS
8.5, soon to come?). Anyway, Jobs said that if someone develops with the
Carbon API now, the app will run out of the box on OS X. He also said that
they have a product that helps developers port existing Mac OS code
(non-carbon) to the Carbon API with relative ease: less than 10% of the code
has to be tweaked by hand after automatic conversion.
He talked a bunch about the multitasking of OS 10 and it's protected memory.
Sheesh, I've had that on NT for quite a while. He made the audience laugh
with the new crash dialog. I forget the wording exactly, but it was
something like:
"Your application has terminated unexpectedly. You do NOT have to turn off
your machine."
Personally, I'm hoping that OS X brings forth a new realm of creativity,
stability and power. I'm just not sure he made that clear in his
presentation.
On other fronts, Jobs talked about "Sherlock", their new search tool. It
will index your hard drive at night and let you find files faster, it will
also run searches on multiple search engines at once, displaying the colated
results with relevancy rankings (slight yawn).
He also did a demonstration of how fast OS 8.5 will copy files. Wow. Yes, I
must admit I was nearing a snooze at that time. How much mileage can you get
out of file copying? I think he demonstrated that last year at Seybold, too.
Finally, IMO, he got to the good stuff: a new version of AppleScript that
will let you automate practically everything on the system. He ran a demo of
dropping a file into a folder, having it open Photoshop, do a bunch of
things to the file, save it and close. Apps can communicate with each other,
etc. Seemed like a tool for someone who has the patience to do scripting,
while the other things seemed more oriented toward the "ease of use" crowd.
The iMac presentation was the expected humor and hype. He showed some clever
TV ad footage and talked alot about how fast they are, in comparison to
Pentiums.
He also mentioned that Apple is working on a new personal computing device,
but would not go into details. I'll be watching for that.
A few kingpins came out and praised Jobs' recent work at Apple: one from
Adobe, Quark and, um, can't remember the other. They were all glad that
Steve has brought some life back into the market, because their futures look
brighter (they can sell and develop more stuff).
Jack
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