I had a good feeling when I saw that the rental car was a convertible. Ah, yes. This was going to be a pleasant MacWorld Expo for a change. Not like past Boston sweat-a-thons. And not like the San Francisco MacWorld earlier this year, at which vendors fussed about their booths, trying not to look worried or defensive, and at which there was a depressing dearth of Neat New Stuff. Despite the fact that this Boston MacWorld was occurring a scant few weeks before the second coming of the Messiah (also known as "Windows 95"), it promised to be an upbeat show.
Then my natural cynicism and paranoia, momentarily lulled by the breeze blowing through my beard as I sped along Mass 3 with the top down, kicked in. Convertible? I hadn't asked for a convertible. Then who had? Upbeat show? Says who?
Paranoia was not slow with an answer. On the eve of the biggest media blitz in the history of the world, Apple desperately needed some good press. It couldn't hope to make much noise amid the August cacophony produced by the Windows 95 release, but it certainly didn't want a downbeat story going out from Boston's MacWorld Expo. It wanted happy little journalists, writing happy little stories about the upbeat mood at the show. And, looking at the online reports being filed daily on the net by my fellow journalists, I could see that Apple was getting just what it wanted. Could Apple have arranged things so that the Boston trip was just a little more pleasant for the press? Is that how I happened to be given a convertible? Were all of us fourth estaters being subtly manipulated to write upbeat stories?
No. Not possible. Apple probably wouldn't be quite that Machiavellian, but more to the point, it simply couldn't have engineered the positive tone of the press reports. It couldn't have done this because the chief reason for the positive press reports was the (relatively) balmy weather in Boston this year.
Usually, Boston in August is Waterworld with cabs: humidity higher than that at the ocean floor, yet somehow not actually raining. Before you get out of Logan Airport, your clothes are as soggy as a Nepali knapsack. On the trek between the show's two sites you feel like you're carrying an extra 30 pounds, and you start to think that a dip in Boston Harbor might not be a bad idea. How polluted could it be? As you head back to the airport, the glue in the seams of your press-kit bags lets go.
This year, in marked contrast, Boston was what a fair reporter would have to call balmy: not over 98 percent humidity, not over 95 degrees. Veteran journalists checked their armpits in amazement. No, Apple didn't arrange for this year's balmy Expo. Apple can't control the weather. Only Microsoft can do that.
MacWorld Expo Boston is always held in two sites, placed as far apart as possible, as dictated by the Boston cab drivers' powerful union. Anyway, that's my theory. I took the long cab ride to Bayside, not just because I feel compelled to walk every aisle of every show I attend, but particularly because that's where Developer Central was. This is the second Developer Central under the joint sponsorship of MacTech magazine and Apple. MacTech's ebullient editor-in-chief/peppy publisher, Neil Ticktin, and his merry cohorts do a good job. Their enthusiasm helps spread Apple's message that it is now a more developer-friendly company.
There was some room for improvement. You still hear the horror stories--in fact, you can still read them in MacTech magazine, in the August issue, for example--about Apple's failings in developer relations.
But Apple is trying hard to change. Change its behavior, you may be asking, or change its image? Both, apparently.
Toward both these ends, it has rehired Guy Kawasaki as head evangelist. The Windows world and the UNIX universe have nothing like Guy Kawasaki. Guy promotes himself shamelessly, including waging a public campaign to get himself on Apple's board of directors, yet he has high credibility. He writes books on marketing and, as though that subject were not fluffy enough, pads them with dating advice, yet he continues to be taken seriously. He quits Apple and rails at it in print, yet they hire him back. Give him this: few people have given more intense thought than Guy to what kind of company Apple ought to be. His vision of Apple is coherent and has been articulated often: It depends on good developer relations. Despite what I said about his self-promotion, I'd say that Guy's return to Apple is good news for Mac-platform developers.
Not to be outdone, Power Computing (Austin, TX), the first company to sell a Mac clone, has also hired itself a head evangelist. I know him well: Bob LeVitus, former editor of Macazine and columnist for MacUser, should do right by developers. Bob's a good guy.
But back to the Expo: By the time I'd done the aisles of the expanded Developer Central, I felt like Steve Jasik looked. Steve, who knows more about Apple's system software than most Apple programmers, sits at his Developer Central workstation twice a year, demoing his debugger and disassembler to all comers. This demoing chiefly consists of staring at hex dumps as they scroll by. On my way out, I got snagged by one of Neil's minions. Or maybe it was one of Apple's minions; anyway, a minion. The minion put a CD in my hand and melted back into the ambient throng.
The disk was named "Virtual Dev Central-08/95." It turned out to contain everything that the real Dev Central contained, except for Jasik's hex dumps, much of it in HTML. Netscape HTML. At least I didn't see any blinking text, or any of those annoying unpaid ads for Netscape with which so many Web page authors adorn their work.
Anyway, apparently I could have stayed in my air-conditioned hotel room and visited Developer Central virtually. If I had, here's some of what I would have seen: Apple was showing off QuickTime 3D and OpenDoc at the show, among other development tools. The company announced OpenDoc Development Release 3, including OpenDoc Development Framework (ODF) 1.0d9. This is a C++ object-oriented framework for building OpenDoc stand-alone applications; sort of MacApp for OpenDoc.
Newton developers will probably already know that Apple has spun off BookMaker from the latest release of the Newton Toolkit, which is supposed to allow much faster development of Newton apps on a Mac. It features the promised selective compilation option that lets developers profile code to see what sections would benefit from being compiled to machine code, and a compiler to produce that ARM code.
Prices have been cut for some developer products and services, and this is particularly welcome in the Newton realm: The upgrade is just $99.00, NTK 1.5 is $299.00, and BookMaker 1.1 is $199.00. I watched the Pippin demo for a while. You know, Apple's planned entry into the settop box fray? The real thing; there was no demo on the CD-ROM. I was puzzled. Surely they don't intend to compete with game boxes? Tell me they plan to turn this thing into a net-access device or something like that. Apple's analog to Microsoft Network, eWorld, is going scriptable. Apple is now publishing a proposed Apple Events suite for eWorld-like transactions. Between now and the end of the year, Apple is folding AppleLink, or its users anyway, into eWorld, so eWorld is going to see some increased attention, at least in the developer community.
And then there's Guide.
It's more than a little ironic that the anarchic world of Microsoft Windows (anarchic in comparison to Apple's, that is) has more consistent online application documentation than Apple. Guide is Apple's second attempt at providing something along these lines. Balloon help, a good system for a very limited purpose, has had trouble igniting interest among developers; even, to Apple's mortification, among developers at Claris.
I've written about Guide here before. It's Apple's help engine, designed for creating and running interactive, step-by-step help systems that can be built on top of applications or custom software and authoring systems without any modification to the underlying software. Or: It's a tool for creating custom help systems designed to address the specific needs of your customers and custom software solutions. Or: It's another technology Apple wants third-party application developers to spend their weekend evenings (or whatever time they still have unallocated) implementing.
Apple makes the distinction that a Guide is an electronic teacher rather than an electronic book, like most Windows and Mac online documentation. Guides are designed to lead the user through learning how to do something. Dev Central showcased several tools to make Guide development easier. Not that Guides are particularly hard to create; Guide is organized around a simple scripting language. StepUp Software (Dallas, TX) built a product called "Guide Composer" using two scripting tools for HyperCard: Double-XX from Itty-Bitty Computers and WindowScript from SDU.
In case you need help developing Guides, there are now three books on the subject: Danny Goodman's Apple Guide Starter Kit, by Danny Goodman and Jeremy Joan Hewes (Addison-Wesley, 1995); Apple Guide Complete, by Apple Computer (Addison-Wesley, 1995); and Real World Apple Guide, by Jesse Feiler (M&T Books, 1995). Each includes a CD-ROM with tools for creating guides. Danny and Jeremy's is probably the best introduction for novices; the Apple book is fat and authoritative; and the Jesse Feiler book has tips on creating customized Apple Guide applications with MPW, MacApp CodeWarrior, and Think C.
The most interesting products at the show were PageMill and SiteMill from Ceneca Communications (Palo Alto, CA). PageMill is just a Web-page editor, but with SiteMill, it becomes a serious Web-site development environment. SiteMill automatically checks links throughout your Web site to ensure that they don't get broken. Since you can pretty much expect links to break sooner or later, this is really important for true Web-site management, as opposed to vanity home-page development.
But SiteMill also displays all your pages, images, page titles, and so forth. It automatically fixes changed links when possible and warns you when it can't (if the resource is unreachable). It alerts you about unused resources. And it allows drag-and-drop link creation. It is very cool. The latest version of WebSTAR from StarNine (Berkeley, CA), formerly Chuck Shotton's WWW-based MacHTTP, was being demonstrated at the show. This version is faster and can be configured remotely from any Web browser. StarNine was even prouder of a study that showed that 66 percent of the commercial Web servers in use are running WebSTAR or MacHTTP. When you look at all sites, not just commercial sites, this dominance entirely disappears, but the commercial-site figures support their claim that their product line is to Web publishing today what PageMaker initially was to desktop publishing.
I have always thought of the powers that be at CompuServe as a bunch of clueless Midwest mainframers. (I mean this in the nicest possible way. I myself was once a clueless Midwest mainframer.) But I have to admit that these Ohioans threw the best party at the Expo. It was held at Mama Kin, a club that was purchased by the rock band Aerosmith as a venue, not for their own performances, but to showcase new artists. There were hints that Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler might show up there, although that didn't happen. (For those of you who don't know, Tyler is the guy who looks just like Mick Jagger, but isn't. Mick Jagger, of course, is the singer of the Windows 95 theme song, "Start Me Up," which Mac fanatics now refer to as "You make a grown man cry.") But Tyler wasn't even missed. There was too much going on.
The party had an Upstairs/Downstairs ambiance: Two upstairs rooms were reserved for VIPs like me, and stocked with lots of faux Chee-tos and other culinary delights. Bouncers politely kept the riff-raff downstairs.
Down there, two bands played to a packed house. Morphine, a very hot, bluesy band comprising guitar, sax, and drums, went over very big. And very loud: at one point Peter, a longtime friend and former Apple employee, came over and shouted in my ear that he didn't think these guys were used to playing to an audience most of whom were standing right in front of the speakers. At least I think that's what he said.
In the front bar area, there was a very hip artist. Known as "The Butt Sketcher," he was doing free, 2-1/2 minute drawings of party-goers that they could take home with them. The gimmick: All his drawings are southern exposures of people facing north. It's all he does, and he apparently makes a very good living at it. We do live in an age of specialization.
But a party isn't defined just by what goes on inside. Any guests who attempted to leave early quickly discovered that CompuServe had booked the party into a venue next door to Fenway Park in the middle of a Red Sox game. Or not the middle, exactly: The game let out halfway through the party. Most guests decided not to fight the Sox fans for the cabs, and stuck around for another hour. Leaving then, they found themselves stepping gingerly between the motorcycles of the fifty or so Hell's Angels who had shown up and were lounging about the entrance.
All in all, it was a party to remember.
Back home in the Bay area, I was favored with a report from the place where the software really meets the road: the Second Annual Robot Wars at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. Although I attended last year's Robot Wars, I missed this year's event, but at least I got the virtual experience. My friend, Jurgen, attended and shot video of the whole fracas, and brought the video to Stately Swaine Manor that evening. He had videotaped the carnage to show on his Web site, which is at http://www.ix.de.
The event, you may recall from my report last year, is basically gladiatorial combat among homemade robots, mostly radio-controlled machines built from washtubs and 2x4s and a dizzying variety of junk-heap and machine-shop materials. The combatants rip at each other with chain saws and bash each other with iron arms, all the time dodging nets and swinging wrecking balls that the sponsors of the event include to give some additional excitement to the already wild action. This year, the show was bigger, with more sponsors and more participants, and ran two days instead of one, but it was just as insane.
As we sat at my kitchen table discussing the battling robots in the video that Jurgen had shot that morning and that he would be publishing on his Web site later, it struck me how much of my life involves technology that was the stuff of science fiction when I was a child. As John Rennie, editor-in-chief of Scientific American, says in the 150th anniversary issue of his magazine, "the future is now not even when it used to be." I half expect to wake up one morning to find that the future has slid right past the present and into the past. See you in cyberspace.
Copyright © 1995, Dr. Dobb's JournalThe New Evangelists
Was it Live or Was it HTML?
Guide Gets Guides
Web Development Gets Tamed
CompuServe Gets Hip
No Place Like Home