Neil Ticktin was grabbing developers and journalists as they passed the Developer Central area at MacWorld Expo 95, dragging them through a gauntlet of developer booths and stations.
Ticktin's enthusiasm was easily understood: Apple had beefed up its developer area for the show, giving it more floor space than ever before. Companies often use booth-space size as a symbol of prosperity, and Apple can't be chided for using the same symbol to suggest increased attention to developer support. Only a cynic would point out that Apple had a cosponsor to help it beef up Developer Central this year: Ticktin's company, which publishes MacTech Magazine.
There actually was a lot going on at Developer Central, although developer developments had big competition for visitor attention at the Expo. A lot was going on at the show generally, which was well attended by any standard. Exhibitors seemed cheerful. The mood bore little resemblance to last year, when there was much handwringing over the future of Apple and of the Macintosh platform.
From this point in time and space --- January 1995, San Francisco --- 1995 looks promising for Apple. Sales of PowerMacs are brisk. Profits are running ahead of analysts' predictions. The transition to PowerPC is proceeding apace. Three new PowerPC machines were introduced at the Expo, just upgrades to current PowerPC offerings, but with more muscle for less money, a nice sign.
Apple also announced the Power Macintosh 6100 DOS Compatible, containing a PowerPC 601 and a 486 DX2/66. This machine improves on a similar 68040 machine from last year. The hard disk handles Mac and PC/Windows files, support for dual monitors, including VGA tubes, is provided, and the optional CD-ROM drive reads Mac and PC/Windows CD-ROMs. Meanwhile, Apple also announced Windows client software for its AppleShare and AppleSearch software. Do you sense a theme here? Apple took pains to point out how the Power Macintosh 6100 DOS Compatible demonstrated the company's commitment to cross-platform solutions, and how compatibility should not be a barrier to converting to Macintosh. Bill Clinton should study Apple's press releases.
Not only is Apple yanking its CPU out from under its operating system, but it is also moving to a new hardware architecture, starting by scrapping the SCSI bus for PCI. After the PCI move, Apple intends to replace the operating system. That's a lot to change in a short time, but at the Expo, the signs were all positive. The transition to the PCI bus was moving along, scheduled to start in the spring with new machines. Apple announced a long list of vendors lined up to produce PCI products. But the new operating system, code-named ``Copeland'' and featuring hardware abstraction and other nifty features, was delayed until 1996.
And then there were the clones. After years of nagging from advisors inside and outside the company, after false starts and miscues, Apple had finally licensed the Mac O/S to a couple of domestic computer manufacturers who announced intentions to build private-label machines that will include the Mac O/S and run Mac applications.
Power Computing Corp. (Milpitas, CA) announced its hopes to push up to 100,000 units through mail order in a year, beating Apple's prices for similar machines. And Radius (San Jose, CA) announced that it will initially use its Mac O/S license to produce high-end video-editing systems, although it may broaden its Mac O/S-based offerings later. Later, Cutting Edge (El Cajon, CA) joined the clone crowd. Crowd? Well, by the time this sees print, maybe it will be.
The current clones are being licensed to companies that Apple thinks will not threaten its markets, but Apple claims that, as the new PowerPC Reference Platform (PReP) hardware platform phases in over the next few years, it will license the Mac O/S to more or less anybody who builds a PReP machine and pays the license fee. At that time the Mac-clone market will truly be a clone market. Just how many clones there will be is anybody's guess.
But none of those machines will be called ``Macs.''
While Apple was announcing the first clones, another erosion of the Mac mystique was under way within Apple. It was leaked during the show that Apple will begin producing machines that do not include the Mac O/S.
Code-named ``Shiner'' and designed as servers, the new machines are expected to ship by the end of the year. According to a MacWeek report, they are intended for NetWare for PowerPC for IBM's AIX operating systems, and will not include Macintosh ROMs.
After being repeatedly rebuffed by the business community, after repeatedly blowing it with server strategies, does Apple now plan to sacrifice the Macintosh name (in the business area) to save its own? Is it saying that this server is not a liberal, but a new Democrat?
Against that background of news noise, developments at Developer Central had to be pretty significant to get much attention. It turns out that there were a number of developer developments, and some of them were pretty significant.
Dylan was in beta. Dylan is the object-oriented dynamic language and incremental development environment currently under development for Apple. The goal of Dylan is to let the developer work at a higher level of abstraction and create commercial-grade software at prototyping speed. It is to have safe and efficient memory management, compile-time and run-time type checking, and a high-level exception-handling and error-recovery mechanism. A project is stored in a database rather than in files, as is the case with conventional development environments. (For more on Dylan, see ``A Taste of Dylan,'' by David Betz, DDJ, October 1992, and ``The Dylan Programming Language,'' by Tamme D. Bowen and Kelly M. Hall, Dr. Dobb's Sourcebook of Alternative Programming Languages, Winter 1994.)
Kaleida Labs (Mountain View, CA) announced shipment of its Kaleida Media Player and ScriptX, the object-oriented, dynamic programming language designed for writing programs for the KMP (for more information, see ``Character Simulation with ScriptX,'' by Assaf Reznik, DDJ, November 1994). The KMP is Kaleida's software platform for interactive multimedia. It is a layer of software that sits above the operating system and runs a ScriptX application, providing it with all the platform-independent audio, video, and graphical support and synchronization it needs. The KMP announcement was for the Mac O/S and Windows; OS/2 Warp support is scheduled for mid-year.
Last fall, Apple sold MacCommon LISP to Digitool (Cambridge, MA). At the Expo, Digitool announced MCL 3.0, which will ship in May and support multiple processes.
Quasar Knowledge Systems (Bethesda, MD) announced VisualAgents, an object-oriented authoring tool. QKS is in the Smalltalk camp, and VisualAgents is built on its solid Smalltalk technology.
There were a number of AppleScript and OpenDoc tools at the Expo. SDU (Chapel Hill, NC) announced Version 2.0 of its FaceSpan ``interface processor,'' which generates front ends for AppleScript. Heizer Software (Pleasant Hill, CA) announced ODTools, a toolkit it describes as ``ResEdit for OpenDoc,'' and showed the first of its line of small books, Steve Michel's Scripting the Scriptable Finder. It also showed off PreFab Player, a clever tool that adds certain verbs to AppleScript to get around limitations in scriptable apps, including the scriptable Finder.
And Main Event Software (Washington, DC) released Rosanne Data Processing Package, which is: 1. a collection of tools for manipulating large text files like those used in mainframe databases and statistical databases, and 2. a hot product that really puts AppleScript to good use.
Prograph (San Francisco, CA) was at Developer Central, and justly so. Its visual programming system deserves more attention than it has been getting.
One developer tool wasn't represented in Developer Central and should have been: Allegiant Technologies (San Diego, CA) was elsewhere at the show, demonstrating its latest version of SuperCard. Allegiant is more or less the original SuperCard team from its Silicon Beach days and has done a remarkable job of upgrading a good product that started life as a HyperCard clone and grew into a serious tool for multimedia development. The latest version is PowerMac native and produces stand-alone applications. A Windows version is in the works.
The Allegiant team knew that their product was powerful, but were nevertheless taken by surprise when one SuperCard developer used the product to produce an application that won an award at the Expo. Realizing that SuperCard could be used to create a product that competed with SuperCard, they quickly established a new royalty plan for just such applications. All others fly free.
Many of these tools point to new models of programming or computer use. OpenDoc presages small, focused apps. Some of the other tools represent at least small steps forward in the areas of scripting and visual programming. Kaleida is all about new media and new markets. Dylan promises to shake up software development at least a little. With these new directions on display at the Expo, with Apple sales looking good, with new Mac O/S machines coming from elsewhere and new non-Mac O/S machines coming from Apple, the old hue and cry over Apple's and the Mac's survival seems less relevant.
Looks like the pundits will just have to dust off those takeover rumors.