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Wednesday, 17 July 2002 |
When I first saw a 15-inch LCD screen iMac in real life, I said to the guy in the store that it was crying out for a 17-inch monitor instead. The proportions were all wrong to my eye, in the new iMac’s initial configuration.
But now, “The new top-of-the-line iMac gives you an 800MHz PowerPC G4 with Velocity Engine, the ferociously fast NVIDIA GeForce4 MX graphics processing unit, the SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW), a huge 80GB hard disk—and a spellbinding 17-inch flat-panel widescreen LCD display.”
All for just under US$2000. Nothing in Windows world comes close to that price for those specifications.
11:53:09 PM 
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If I can bring myself to spend another US$400 on this crappy old Umax S900 Mac clone from the old clone era, then Sonnet has a pretty good new upgrade card available for it.
The Crescendo/PCI G4 card contains a 7455 AltiVec-enabled PowerPC G4 800MHz chip and 1MB of L3 backside cache. According to Sonnet, “It seamlessly integrates with your software, supporting System 7.5.2 up to the latest version of Mac OS version 9.1, or even OS X.”
7:36:21 PM
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It seems that both of the biggest Australian magazine publishers, Australian Consolidated Press (ACP) and Murdoch Magazines, have made the switch from Quark XPress to Adobe InDesign 2.0.
Kind of a condemnation of Quark XPress, don’t you think? InDesign 2.0 runs natively on Mac OS X. Quark XPress does not, and Quark has not revealed when it plans to get around to rewriting XPress so it runs natively on X.
Here is a quote from an Adobe press release last month:
The decision by Murdoch Magazines to make a complete transition to InDesign comes hot on
the heels of the Australian Consolidated Press move to integrate InDesign across its 58 titles.
“When the country’s largest magazine publisher, ACP, embraced InDesign, Murdoch Magazines’ decision to transition to InDesign was vindicated. It was a big plus for the industry as well,
because ACP has virtually set a benchmark that others will now have to follow,” said Michael
Vagg, Computer Services Manager, Murdoch Magazines.
All of Murdoch Magazines 30 design seats have now converted to InDesign and Vagg believes that the company’s move to InDesign has resulted in noticeable savings of time.
“It is hard to put a dollar value on it, but I would say that the efficiencies gained by using InDesign even at this early stage mean that we are able to shift our deadlines closer to the print period.
For advertisers this means the pages can be kept open for a longer period and this gives our sales staff more time to sell advertising space in our magazines.”
Quark XPress and InDesign both compete in the Desktop Publishing (DTP) software category. Other such products for the non-professional market include FrameMaker and PageMaker, Corel Ventura and Microsoft Publisher.
3:23:06 PM
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I was flicking through design magazines on the newsstand when I came across an article on the designers at Smart Design in the United States. It turns out they are the usability geniuses behind my favourite range of domestic products—OXO.
3:08:31 PM
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Every night snails invade my mail box and lie in wait for the morning’s postal delivery. Then they hoe into it, specially favouring the envelopes containing official documents, which they reduce to skeletons by the end of the day. They avoid the junk mail and department store catalogs.
I have followed the advice of friends and have covered the inside base of the mail box with talcum powder, salt and baking soda. But the snails still come.
Yet another reason to avoid using snail mail.
12:16:06 PM
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[Source: The Gainesville Sun]
$5.1 million in interest-free Federal loans made the purchases possible. Pity that some school districts are buying Dells as well as Macs, though. I guarantee the kids in these mixed computer schools will gravitate towards the iMacs in preference to the Windows machines.
Kids aren’t stoopid. They know what works right and what doesn’t.
12:06:32 PM
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Not bad for one of the hardest quarters for quite some years—recession at home and abroad, the Switch ad campaign only just starting in the States and not having reached other territories yet. Apple announced a net profit of $32 million, or $.09 per diluted share, for the quarter. These results compare to a net profit of $61 million, or $.17 per diluted share, a year ago. Revenues for the quarter were $1.43 billion, down 3% from a year ago, and gross margins were 27.4%, down from 29.4% a year ago. International sales accounted for 42% of the quarter’s revenues.
Apple could do a lot better though given the high quality of their current range of products and their very competitive prices. The facts about Macs need to better distributed than they are. Ignorance and myth is still rife.
However, Apple CFO Fred Anderson said in his financial report conference call that Apple’s channel partners and (US-only) retail stores are reporting lots of Windows users coming into the stores wanting to switch to the Mac platform.
11:42:34 AM
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Apple has releaed two more of its groundbreaking new Switch TV commercials, featuring two women who have ditched their Windows PCs for Macs—Tess Bethune and Ellen Feiss.
There are also more stories by other switchers available in the Switch pages.
11:29:31 AM
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Whoopppeeee! Apple’s terrific new version of QuickTime, version 6, is now available for download by Windows and Macintosh users. Go get it, everyone!
For those who don’t know what QuickTime is (and there can’t be many of you left anymore), it is a media layer and multimedia player for your Macintosh or Windows computer, that gives you the best quality multimedia experience bar none.
If you want to create QuickTime multimedia on your machine, just pay Apple a small licence fee to unlock the QuickTime Pro editing features.
Here is just some of what you get in the free version of QuickTime 6:
- Playback of MPEG-4 video, ACC audio & Instant-On media.
- Easy-to-use controls.
- New enhanced interface.
- Bass and treble controls.
- Balance control.
- Streaming media support.
- Ability to save movie favorites.
- Ability to view VR & interactive content.
Incidentally, did you know you can download high quality movie trailers from Apple’s Trailers web page? I go there and download the broadband versions of trailers, even though I currently only have a 56K dial-up connection. It takes some time but the high quality of the trailers makes it more than worthwhile.
I find these movie trailers an inspiration, both to go see the movie when it arrives, and as examples of superb movie-making in their own right.
10:38:56 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
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