MacWorld 91
Volume Number: 7
Issue Number: 10
Column Tag: Show Review
Boston MacWorld '91 
By Kirk Chase, Editor
MacWorld ’91 in Boston was an interesting experience. Many “System 7 savvy”
balloons could be found, but fewer “System 7 savvy” products. Multimedia products
were in full swing, including QuickTime (off the convention floor). There wasn’t very
many surprises for developers. Even Apple’s booth looked boring. Here is a quick
rundown on some of the highlights.
Products in View
MacWorld was itching with promise for the developer community. Most
products being shown were still in beta form, but they included System 7.0 savvy
features. There were a few shipping products, however among the soon to be released
ones. Here is a sampling of both.
THINK Pascal 4.0; THINK C 5.0; THINK Reference
Symantec Corporation
10201 Torre Ave.
Cupertino, CA 95014-2132
408-253-9600
Symantec came out with not just one release, but three product releases, two
new and one about a month old. Symantec went and extensively rewrote THINK C 5.0 as
well as updating THINK Pascal to version 4. THINK C has added a multi-pass, optimizing
compiler, and the debugger now remembers data and break points between runs. They
have included System 7 support in both languages, and both run in 24/3-bit modes
with or without virtual memory. The THINK Class library was updated as well. Users
can upgrade for $89 (C) and $69 (Pascal).
THINK Reference is a beautifully implemented product. It is a developer
reference application which contains the calls, technotes, and miscellaneous
information corresponding with Inside Macintosh Vols. I-V. Meant to run under
MultiFinder, this application (256K with a database of around 2M bytes) will shrink
down when not needed, allows for bookmarks and dozens of ways to search the
information. Unfortunately, due to the hyperlinks, this product is not easily
updatable, which will be needed to add volume VI. An excellent product that makes
SpInside Macintosh and other online manuals look like a snails in comparison.
MacDSP MB/A
Spectral Innovations, Inc.
4633 Old Ironsides Dr., Suite 401
Santa Clara, CA 95054
408-727-1314
I imagine the people at Spectral Innovations have not been sleeping lately. They
have been busy integrating their digital signal processing technology into many
environments. For example, they have teamed up with Letraset to create Lightning
Effects for ColorStudio 1.5; these annexes take advantage of Spectral Innovations’ DSP
accelerator hardware to get 20-40x speed improvements over Mac II’s without the
board. MATLAB is being bundled with MacDSP to provide high performance number
crunching.
Spectral Innovations was also showing the MacDSP MB/A. This NuBus board has
a 60 MHz AT&T WE® DSP32C digital signal processor capable of performing 30
MFLOPS. An on-board 68000 performs all NuBus transfers, and the board supports
A/ROSE. This board is packed with features, so I recommend you getting in touch with
them if you’re doing large numeric computations such as those used in multimedia and
other DSP projects.
Bowers Development
PO Box 9
Lincoln Center, MA 01773
506-369-8175
Bowers Development will soon be coming out with a new release of AppMaker.
This new version will be a significant improvement on the limitations of current
version. System 7 support, like Apple Events and Stationary Aware, will be added to
make your life a little easier. Text styles and better code generation will also be there.
And, very soon in the future, you can look for simulation with AppMaker documents.
SpaceMaker; Programmer’s Assistants
Aladdin Systems, Inc.
Deer Park Center, Suite 23A-171
Aptos, CA 95003-4723
408-685-9175
Aladdin Systems has been busy also. Their next versions of Programmer’s
Assistants (version 2) will be 7.0 compatible and even make some of their functions
behave better. While offering the usual bug fixes, the assistants now offer online help.
These little tools help make debugging a little easier.
A new product that is in the works is SpaceMaker. Like SuperDisk from Alysis,
SpaceMaker will automatically compress/decompress files on-the-fly giving you the
extra hard disk space you need while not taking up time for its conversions. It is fast,
and it does compact. You get rapid speeds with about 50% savings on disk space. As an
added feature, you can automatically create StuffIt archives and self-extracting
archives by appending “.sit” and “.sea”, respectively. Compression is coming of age.
CAUSE
CYMA
1400 East Southern Ave.
Tempe, AZ 85282
800-932-2873
Hobbyists, in-house developers, and the like, there is now cause to rejoice.
CYMA has taken up production of CAUSE. This simple environment allows database
applications to be created with just a little effort. CAUSE is a graphical development
environment that makes programming an ease. Although you may not want to use it for
power-house database applications, CAUSE contains many features to let you develop
quickly.
TGS Systems
2745 Dutch Village Rd., Suite 200
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3L 4G7
800-565-1978
TGS Systems has come out with a MAJOR upgrade to Prograph that has really got
me excited. Version 2.5 is packed with new features. There is support for high-level
System 7 events and IAC. There is a database application generator which will handle
just about any object type as well as support for SQL databases. A code compactor is
added to shrink methods to 25% of their original size. And there is a suite of add-on
products for linking Pascal, C, and FORTRAN libraries. Tthere are more features than I
have space to write here. Look for a review of Prograph 2.5 soon.
Stack Enhancers
Cheshire Grin Productions LTD
2145 Sherobee Road, Suite 43
Mississauga, Ontario, Canada L5A 3G8
416-896-8077
Stack Enhancers is a unique set of tools for HyperCard 2.0. There are many
attractive packages which can be installed and removed by simple installers that come
with the product. No knowledge of scripting is needed for the novice, but it has features
even a developer would like.
For example, the Bookmark System allows users to place visual bookmarks on
individual cards; navigating back to that card is as easy as clicking on the bookmark.
For more navigation as well card information, there is the Browser Palette. And
installation of the Progress Gauge gives stacks a scroll bar. This remarkable collection
has items you would see in professional stacks, aids in stack creation, and is very
simple to use.
Conferences in View
The developer’s track at MacWorld Expo in Boston contained a number of old and
new sessions. Here are just some of the highlights.
IAC Issues and Answers
Now that System 7 is out, Inter-Application Communication is becoming a
reality, although there are very few applications that take advantage of being
scriptable. This session looked at some of the products now being developed for creating
and running scripts. The creators of Frontier, Control Tower, and QuickKeys were
there to share their insights into IAC.
One thought brought up was the Object Model vs. the user-terminology
resources. Basically, Apple’s object model of verb-noun was viewed as perhaps too
broad and, although quite powerful, was geared toward object oriented programming.
The three IAC champions pushed for user-terminology resources; this means putting
the vocabulary that you understand as a set of resources that any application or user
may be able to read and understand how to use.
Another issue brought up was the passing of functionality rather than data. For
example, a spell checker has to deal with thousands of words. To pass these words back
and forth from the word processor to the spell checker application involves heavy
traffic e specially if run across a network. Passing functionality would involve passing
the spell check engine across the network instead of the words to be checked.
As to all the complexities of IAC, the big guys know how hard it is. Frontier will
be out in October, just now going into beta, and Michael Odawa is shipping a developer’s
version of Control Tower. These will be needed for testing your IAC products. And as
Don Brown said, “A little IAC is better than none.”
Keeping the Bugs Out
This session was on debugging. A number of helpful suggestions on how to go
about trouble shooting your code and how to keep your code from being shot down were
discussed. A number of products are out or being released to help in this area.
EvenBetterBusError is an INIT for tracking down those NIL pointers and handles. The
Leaks dcmd as well as the ZapHandles dcmd are useful in tracking memory
allocation/deallocation problems. Their were also a couple of demos of TMON
Professional and Jasik’s Debugger.
Best of MacHack
This session was much improved over its last session in San Francisco.
Unfortunately all the testing on the INITs and hacks were done on machines other than
the IIfx they were being demonstrated on, and so there were a number of crashes, and
the winning hack never did make it up and running. However, there were a number of
interesting hacks that kept everyone on their seats.
One System 7 hack was DTPrinter; just drag what you wanted printed over to
this icon, drop, and DTPrinter would launch the documents to their respective
applications for printing. Another System 7 hack was Alias This; By dropping and
object on this icon in the Finder, an alias would be made and placed in the Apple Menu
folder to appear in the Apple Menu. Related to this was droppleMenu which did the
same if the icon was dragged and dropped on the Apple Menu. Cool LW was an
interesting hack by Byron Han that allowed Chooser selection of printers in the Print
Dialog. The Grouch INIT was finally made a standalone application; it seems kids were
throwing away all sorts of things to see the Grouch. And finally for the practical joker,
DOSsHELL brought up an ugly DOS screen when the Mac was turned on, but only stayed
until a mouseclick occurred.
MacHack has been around now for six years. It is like summer camp. It allows
you to talk to a number of industry famous people about your ideas. Many of the ideas
discussed at the World Wide Developer’s Conference are discussed. The next one will be
June 16-20, 1992 in Ann Arbor, MI. You can get more information from ExpoTech at
313-882-1824.
The In’s and Out’s of INITs
This vetran session has always been a wealth of information and guidelines for
writing these simple, yet powerful pieces of code, and this session was no different.
INITs are very dangerous pieces of code, and Chris Derrossi of Apple said that soon an
Apple document, perhaps in the form of a technote, would be out to make your INITs
more robust. Another major point brought out was that INITs should check for only
those features that they need and not for specific system versions; it was hinted that
there might be future versions of System 7 which may not include all the features that
are on the current version (a scaled-down , single-floppy version perhaps).
Brought out in the session was InitInfo stack by Baseline Publishing (1770
Moriah Woods Blvd., Ste 14, Memphis, TN 38117-7118). This stack has detailed
descriptions of practically every INIT in existence. This is a must for every person
who would like to know more about the INITs in his system and how they operate. This
might save a lot of headaches later when you come across an INIT conflict.
MacTutor Live!
MacTutor Live! covered a number of subjects. Neil Tictin was there to talk about
Neuron Data’s Open Look; this cross-platform product is a high-end GUI design and code
generation product allowing developers to do their designing for multiple platforms,
but like I said, it is a high-end product with a high-end price tag. Tim Cotter of Delta
Tao, the Color Mac Cheese people, talked about CopyDeepMask() and all the things you
could do with it, along with techniques for anti- aliasing. John May, author and
president of Devil Mountain Development, discussed CDEFs and how to debug them with
source level debuggers. I myself talked on resources to get you started and finished
with your Mac development product. As usual, we also gave a number of prizes away at
the end.