Apple G4, On Display
by Christopher J. Feola
Even in its diminished form, Seybold San Francisco is a maelstrom of flash and noise, with enormous booths and crowds pressing everywhere.
Except at Apple. A Zen-like aura of calm surrounded the Apple booth, its epicenter a mobile of clear plastic and LCD–the 22-inch Apple Cinema Display. The giant flat-panel monitor appears to float in midair, suspended by its clear frame and legs. And the crowds gathered silently about it, filed past, pausing to look, to stare. Invariably, a hand would reach out, a finger trailing down the clear frame.
It’s
that impressive.
The Cinema Display is a 22-inch active-matrix LCD flat-panel display. It has the same aspect ratio as a movie, rather than the more boxy television set. This is, of course, entirely for doing high-end graphics work, and never for watching DVDs in native High Definition Television format.
Impressive as the Cinema Display is, you’ve got to attach it to a computer to get any work done. Fortunately, Apple had a new one of those, too–the G4, which with the usual Apple flair for understatement, is billed as "the first supercomputer on a chip."
And an impressive chip it is. Called the Velocity Engine, the 128-bit processor is capable of a sustained performance of more than one billion floating point calculations a second–a gigaflop. Apple claims the Velocity Engine has "a theoretical peak performance of four gigaflops."
The result, says Apple, is one screaming machine. (The-top-of-the-line G4 500 megahertz machine was shown at Seybold, but was not yet on sale.) The claim? "The 500MHz G4 was, on average, almost three times as fast as the 600MHz Pentium III."
Apple did not, however, show results comparing the 500 MHz G4 with high-end Wintel graphics boxes such as the quad Xeon Silicon Graphics workstations, which run about the same price equipped with what now seems a paltry 17-inch LCD screen.
Which brings us to the subject of price. A racked-out G4 450 MHz machine with the Cinema Display is on sale at the online Apple Store for $6,498, $4,000 more than an identically equipped machine without the big screen. Apple has a one-to-a-customer limit, too, which you should know about just in case you have a sudden urge to pick up a dozen. There doesn’t seem to be any way to order the Cinema Display with the G4 500 MHz machine, but those are on 60-day backorder, anyway. Apple is selling the 450 with 128 megs of RAM and a 20 gig hard drive for $2,499, and the 500 with 256 megs of RAM and a 27 gig hard drive for $3,499.
The bottom line: The G4 is a screaming-fast machine, but this year’s screaming-fast machine is next year’s entry-level model, so long as Moore’s Law holds sway. But that screen...
The Cinema Display was the show-stopper at Seybold, and it will still be stopping traffic on your desk in a year.
Feola is senior editor for information commerce and technology at Belo Interactive Media. E-mail, cfeola@belo.com; phone, (214) 977-4057.
Tools Ease Web-Format Headaches
by Pete Wetmore
With the advent of Internet sites, newspapers have faced the tedious task of taking content destined for print and converting it to Web-ready formats. Now, three suppliers of publishing applications have created tools that make life easier for multimedia editors and designers.
Macromedia Inc. of San Francisco has introduced Flash Writer, a plug-in for users of Adobe Illustrator. Flash Writer enables a designer to put artwork online without having to go through multiple steps to convert the item from Illustrator to such Web-oriented formats as JPEG or GIF.
"This is a luxury Illustrator customers never had," says Eric Wittman, Flash’s product manager. Macromedia’s Flash, its SWF file format and its Flash Player software for end users have gained wide acceptance as a way to post vector graphics on the Web.
Wittman calls Flash Writer "an easy conduit" for Illustrator users. When installed, the plug-in adds a "Save as SWF" choice to the file menu, and a designer need only click there to create "extremely small" graphic files which download quickly and automatically adjust to the screen size of the end user’s computer.
The free Flash Writer software is available from Macromedia’s Web site, www.macromedia.com.
San Jose-based Adobe, meanwhile, has introduced Adobe Photoshop 5.5, the latest version of its popular image-manipulation program. The new version incorporates Adobe’s file-conversion application ImageReady 2.0, creating a seamless environment allowing images to be prepped for both print and online.
Buyers "end up getting two applications," explains John Kranz, general product-marketing manager for Adobe’s Internet products group. For the first time, designers can "finally do some Web-specific commands within the Photoshop document," he adds.
Photoshop 5.5 sells for $609; upgrades cost $129.
Quark Inc. of Denver will be extending the reach of QuarkXPress, the dominant page-design program, with an ’XTension due in early spring. Called avenue.quark and now in beta testing, the new tool will extract content from an ’XPress page for Web use.
"It’s literally a couple of button presses to get an article online," says Mark Lemmons, Internet-publishing business unit manager for Quark. Initially, avenue.quark will handle only text, although it will manage links to image files, according to Lemmons.
Pete Wetmore is an Urbana, Ill., writer and editor. E-mail, pwetmore@earthlink.com; phone, (217) 367-6521.