Mar 99 Viewpoint
Volume Number: 15
Issue Number: 3
Column Tag: Viewpoint
by Nicholas C. "nick.c" DeMello, editor@mactech.com
Plays Well with Others
My mother told me that the secret to getting ahead in life is being flexible and learning
how to get along well with others. Frankly, you can often loose more by insisting on
having things your way, than you gain by doing something the "right" way. I think
Apple has taken this wisdom to heart last year and has learned to pick their fights very
carefully. Today's Mac definitely plays better with others, and that may just translate
into a larger market share in the coming year.
The Macintosh is a wonderful and unique instrument that offers so many powerful
features and is so easy to use and fun to explore that one has to wonder why everyone
doesn't have one on their desk. Well, the reason often comes down to compatibility.
Macs are great, but replacing my hard drive costs twice as much as it should, it can be
easier to find an honest politician than a really great joystick, and you can't get good
games for it for love or money. Well at least that used to be true. It simply didn't make
good business sense for third parties to address those markets.
Apple's adoption of IDE hard drives may have been the first sign. Buying a Macintosh
computer suddenly became a lot more cost effective (by hundreds of dollars on the hard
drive alone) and Mac users now have access to expansion options that simply weren't
available before - at any price. I still remember turning over every stone I could to
try and find a 800 mb SCSI hard disk for my Duo, when my buddy with the ThinkPad
could pick up a 2 gb IDE HD at the corner computer store - cheaper. Adopting IDE has
made the Mac a more useful tool for many of us and therefore an easier choice for first
time buyers. Adopting USB was an even better move.
Over the years, many vendors have made wonderful peripherals for the Macintosh, but
let's not kid ourselves. You could walk into any computer store and see aisles of
joysticks, keyboards, specialty mice, and other input devices. It was always a lot of
fun exploring these aisles... until you realized that the Mac section was over there
(that bottom shelf with two mice and one Joystick). For most vendors, it just didn't
pay to build an entirely separate piece of hardware for the Mac, the market was too
small. But that lack of choice also kept the market from growing, creating a vicious
cycle that Apple has tried very hard to fight against for over a decade.
Well, it seems Apple has given up. Or, more accurately, realized that there are some
battles that it is simply foolish to fight - especially when those same resources can
better be applied elsewhere. Why not tap into the huge reservoir of peripheral
vendors that happen to be making tools for the PC and make it easy and profitable for
them to sell to the Apple market as well? With the emergence of the USB standard it
was perfect time to do so, and now I can get a great Joystick for my iMac. It's no longer
a hard sell to convince a vendor to support the Macintosh, instead it's a no brainer for
them to increase their market share by simply creating a Mac OS driver for the exact
same hardware they're already selling to PC customers. It now makes good business
sense to support the Macintosh.
Then there's OpenGL. If you're not familiar with OpenGL, that's not too surprising. It
hasn't been very popular with Mac programmers over the years - it's just the rest of
the computer world that's been relying on it. OpenGL is a graphics library that, since
1992, has been the de facto standard for 3D Graphics programming. The OpenGL engine
supports the easy and platform independent generation and manipulation of detailed 3D
constructs as well as advanced rendering options like reflections, refraction, and
transparency. This full ray tracing engine has been incorporated into most modern
operating systems. Because you could count on OpenGL being available in every
installation of Windows 98, you only had to write a fraction of the code that you needed
to to create the same game for the Mac. At Macworld San Francisco, Apple has finally
announced that OpenGL will be implemented in the next release of the Mac OS 8.x and
will be integrated into Mac OS X as well.
So what does this mean to game programmers? It means exactly what USB meant to
peripheral manufacturers: all those wonderful 3D games out there, the ones based on
OpenGL game engines can now be ported to the Mac with very little work. It means that
the Mac can take the best that Windows has to offer and make it our own with very
little effort.
While many Macworld attendees were off toasting OpenGL, those who weren't
programmers were focused on another announcement. Connectix, those wonderful folks
who brought us Virtual PC, announced the Virtual Game Station - a Sony PlayStation
emulator for the Mac. After all, if the Macintosh is going after computer gamers just
trying to match the Windows offering isn't really setting much of a challenge for
ourselves. Sony is the king of play time.
With Apple promotions that bundle Virtual PC with new Macs and Connectix selling the
Virtual Game Station at an extremely attractive price, the Macintosh is now the only
system on which you can play just about any game made. There may be a new king in
town.
Steve Jobs doesn't need any back patting from me. He's a shrewd businessman who
understands the computer market better than I ever will. Never the less, I want to tip
my hat here. Apple has created a new line of computers that offer tremendous speed,
powerful graphics, easy expandability, and an increasingly stable and reliable feature
rich operating system. But I think we may just come to see that the real strokes of
genius in the resurgence of the Macintosh lie in the quieter moves Apple has made to
set the stage for a growth in market share. Beyond candy colored boxes and
monstrously powerful CPU's, Apple's subtler decisions with regard to standards and
emulation allow the platform to effortlessly tap into the tremendous third party
hardware support of the Intel PC, the army of game programmers relying on OpenGL,
and the wealth of existing games on Windows and PlayStation platforms. This just may
mean the difference between a reinvigorated Mac platform reclaiming our comfortable
niche in the computer industry, or expanding to become something larger.