Monday evening, 8:30 P.M., January 13, 1992. I'm on Third Street just outside the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The gaudy tower of the Marriott hotel squats like some Brobdingnagian jukebox over the city tonight. It fits. It's showtime, and San Francisco has been invaded by the Hollywood virus of glitter and glitz.
I'm in town for MacWorld Expo, one of two such expos that showcase Mac products and technology each year. (Until last week there were three, in Frisco, Beantown, and the Big Apple, but this year the Big Apple expo took the Big Sleep.) The night before last I disguised myself as a guy who would wear a tuxedo and helped hand out Eddy awards at a ceremony that looks more like the Academy Awards show every year. Hollywood.
I could lie and tell you I'm writing this on a portable computer as I walk down Third, my camcorder over my shoulder, ready to grab the gritty facts. I'd only be lying a little; I've got the portable and the camcorder, but they're both in the hotel just now. The governor of California can invent composite poor people for his State of the State speech and the president of Apple Computer can hire a stooge to put on a charade to show that it's easier to make a Mac multimedia-ready than a PC. But those of us who report on the mean streets of the new Hollywood are held to a higher standard than governors and company presidents. Sort of like the movie producers are held to a higher standard of verisimilitude than commissions appointed to investigate assassinations.
The expo is lousy with multimedia-supporting software and hardware. The quick path to multimedia on the Mac is QuickTime, Apple's system software architecture for integrating and compressing sound, video, and animation. QuickTime was released this week, and every multimedia-supporting app or board I saw was taking that path.
There are over a hundred QuickTime-supporting products here at the show, from existing apps that now recognize the QuickTime movie format and display movies to video cards that save captured video in the QuickTime movie format. More new multimedia tools have been coming out, mostly from Macromind-Paracomp, the major multimedia company in the Mac universe (and with a growing presence in the Windows universe). I find the Infini-D animation package particularly dazzling, with its morphing capability. (Morphing is the smooth visual transformation of one 3-D object into another, as in Terminator 2.) The Premiere video editing software from Adobe and the VideoSpigot board from SuperMac also look hot.
The multimedia theme of the show takes two unofficial tracks. Most of the experts showing how to do multimedia are delivering pre-QuickTime advice. I sat in on some of their sessions today and I'll sit in on more tomorrow and Wednesday, hoping for some advice on what to do with the footage I'm collecting. But most of the products claiming multimedia support are QuickTime-compatible.
Yes, I have used the camcorder. The standard gag to throw at anyone carrying a camcorder here at the show, I discover, is "Send me a copy of the QuickTime movie." With no prompting, a journalist friend says she's been wowing 'em in the office with her QuickTime movies. It's so easy, she says. It's the future of multimedia on the Mac, I think.
But QuickTime will also be implemented on other platforms, according to Apple. Earlier today, Scully demonstrated this with a prototype QuickTime implementation for Windows, taking a disk out of a Mac, inserting it in to a (486) Windows machine, and running a Mac-created movie on it without a hitch.
Apple stands a better chance of doing cutting-edge work for Windows than Microsoft does of doing ditto for the Mac. Apple, not trusting the wall between app and system groups at Microsoft, has stripped away Microsoft's most-favored developer status. These days, Apple is about as likely to reveal its plans to the company Apple employees often call the "Evil Empire" as Nina Totenberg is to reveal her sources for the Clarence Thomas story.
I can reveal the source for the best Clarence Thomas stories: Jean-Louis Gassee. He's collecting the best; maybe when he's got enough he'll take them to his publisher. Or to Hollywood.
I'm going to wait for the QuickTime movie.
Copyright © 1992, Dr. Dobb's Journal