Report Macworld Expo SF '00--Day 2

 

Hands-On Report: Macworld Expo San Francisco 2000 -- Day 2

By Roderick Martin
January 6, 2000

iCEO Steve Jobs wowed the massive audience at his keynote Wednesday morning. While not announcing the new Pismo PowerBook (the one thing almost everyone expected), he did surprise with many announcements, some rumored and some unexpected. In a nutshell, Steve reported on figures from the last quarter, showed off some cool third-party products, outlined Apple's Internet strategy (in the near future), announced and demoed Mac OS X, and announced his acceptance of the CEO position at Apple (although he's keeping the iCEO title because he likes it so much).

I choose to beat the rush to the Moscone Center and arrived at the front door at 5:15 a.m. I was 10th in line. The first three fanatics started their siege at 3 a.m. I don't know how cold it was out there, but by the time they opened the main doors at 8:30, I swear it had gotten even colder! Media and VIP-types had been flooding inside long before we were let in, and the closest we could get was 15 rows back behind the VIP seating.

Now the keynote. Steve reiterated that Apple had spent the last two years reinventing itself - and the results show the effort. In the last quarter, 1,350,000 Macs were sold, which are more Macs than have been sold in any quarter -- ever! This comes out to one Macintosh computer being sold every six seconds! Portables accounted for 11% of that total.

According to PC Data, the iBook was the number one consumer portable sold October through November. 11% of those were to first-time computer buyers and 17% were Windows converts. Of those sold, 56% were the first portable in the home! So Apple is really creating a new market here.

Numbers for the iMac were 30% for first-timers and 14% were Windows-switchers. A cool figure Steve threw at us at this point was that 66% of those iMac buyers "did not seriously consider purchasing anything else." Yes!

Two very cool products not-from-Apple that Steve highlighted were the Scalar USB microscope and a VST 100 GB Portable RAID drive made up of four 25 GB hot-swapable drives. He pulled one out from behind the podium and received appreciative "oohs and ahhs" for its small size. Holding it in one hand, the RAID looked no more than 10-12" tall.

Moving forward to their new Internet strategy, Apple is taking advantage of being in control of both the server software on apple.com and the client OS in all Macintosh computers. By using their technology, Apple is creating a group of services unmatched anywhere on the Internet, and you need Mac OS 9 to use them! A new apple.com was unveiled with a new top-mounted toolbar. Along with the obvious links to the Apple Store and Support, a wide range of iServices are being made available, with four being released today.

As a side note, Nielsen, famous in the past for television ratings, has web ratings as well. In November, media player ratings showed QuickTime rated second at 33% after RealPlayer with 53% of the market. Microsoft's Media Player came in a distant third at 14%. For those users under 21 years of age, QuickTime was the number one media player with a 30% share of the market.

KidSafe is a "safe-surfing" module that Apple downloads and installs into your OS that takes the ineffective filtering strategy and turns it on its ear. Instead of filtering out objectionable words and materials, KidSafe connects to and queries a massive database at Apple.com, a database of "KidSafe" sites that have been approved by certified teachers and librarians. So far, there are 50,000 approved sites, with 10,000 being added every month. Not only does this mean that parents don't have to worry about new objectionable sites that are always popping up, sidestepping the filtering solutions, but even doing searches for words like "sex" (a Sherlock search module is also included in the install), which would always be blocked by filtering software, will give results with approved sites including that word - sites like survey sites (which ask for gender or sex), biology, AIDS sites and many more. What's more, since it's OS-based (a) changes to the settings can only be made by the "owner" of the machine (who has to be logged in), (b) KidSafe can be active on an account-by-account basis, and (c) it can't be deactivated by the kids (this remains to be seen, of course!). As a parent, I'm finding this technology very cool and impressive!

iTools is a suite of features just for Mac OS 9 users which includes free eMail (with the mail server name of mac.com). iDisk gives you 20 MB of free disk space that places an icon for it right on your desktop. You drag and drop, just like with your regular drives, and a public folder allows you to share files with other Mac OS 9 users over the Internet. All they have to do is access iDrive and enter your user name. Your public directory appears automatically! Very cool. If only I was running OS 9. If only I knew anyone else running OS 9.

HomePage is the last of the iTools at Apple.com. HomePage is unique in a couple ways. One, it has easy templates for things like photo pages, movie pages, etc. Three steps and your published on the web. Two, HomePage will automatically access picture and movie directories in your iDrive directory (housed on Apple's server) and build the pages with that data. Very easy to use and implement. Families and long-distance friends will go nuts over this.

And lastly, iCards is a greeting card service that differs from the other established greeting card sites in several ways. First off, the pictures and images are much, much nicer; ranging from classic artwork to Think Different images, to more contemporary photos. The text you type is displayed as anti-aliased, professional-looking fonts; and these greeting cards show up in your email as inline graphics, not as attachments or links to some external site you have to go visit to view the card. Remember, all this is possible because of the integration of these features directly into Mac OS 9.

Then Steve pulled out the big guns! Mac OS X! First Steve spelled out the goals and the timeline. The goals of Mac OS X are to provide a single OS strategy, state of the art technology, killer graphics, designed for the Internet and gentle migration. The timeline Apple is hoping for is the final beta in Spring, OS X for sale in the Summer, and January 2001 will see OS X preloaded on all new machines.

Apple has been secretly working on an all-new interface for OS X. While it is still very similar to the OS we all know and love, Apple has been working hard to take the Mac OS, which is admittedly fifteen years old, to the next level. This new interface is called Aqua. Steve demoed Aqua to an amazed audience.

Gone is any semblance of the early OS look. Buttons, sliders and check/radio buttons are all glassy and three dimensional. Default selection buttons (the ones that are selected when you hit Return) no longer have a black bar around them, but the color fades in and out, pulsating on your desktop. Windows are solid as they move around the desktop, and they now have a dropshadow that darkens what's beneath. The familiar boxes at the top of every window (close, zoom and minimize) are replaced and moved. Now three round buttons appear in the upper left of every window. They are colored in traffic-light style, from left to right, red (close), yellow (minimize) and green (zoom). Even when a window is not selected, these buttons are active, so you can affect windows when they are behind others.

Save and other "application-specific" dialogs are now seemingly incorporated into the window of the application they belong to, for when Steve selected "Save", a Save dialog slid down from beneath the top bar of the window related to the file in question (ala the advanced controls in QuickTime 4.0). It was much smaller than the Save box we have now, with just a box for the file name, a dropdown menu with such subsections as Recent Locations and Favorite Locations, and of course, Save and Cancel. A small down arrow expanded the dialog to a more conventional Save box with access to your drives. When the window the Save box appears in is smaller than the Save box, the box does this really, really cool trick (which is very hard to describe). The box "squeezes" out of the available space into the Save box which becomes larger than the window. The cool part is that the sides of the box as it expands are not square, but curved (kind of like a sine wave or bell curve on its side). You really have to see it to get the concept. Apple uses it in several places throughout the OS now. This effect received a loud and awed response from the audience. When the window is small and up against the side of your screen, the OS slides your window away from the screen side as it's unsqueezing the Save box.

Menu dropdowns now have a texture that looks like the lined "ice" plastics in the iMacs. It's also slightly transparent, so you can barely see what's behind them. When you make a selection or leave the dropdowns, they now fade away instead of immediately disappearing. Sweet.

Icons are now (almost) infinitely resizable, as Steve showed us a slider bar that scaled all the icons on the desktop from very small to very large.

Steve also introduced the "Dock." When you minimize a window in OS X, instead of the windowshade effect that leaves the titlebar on your desktop, the window minimizes to a large icon centered at the bottom of the screen (which can be hid so that it only shows up when your pointer hits that area), using that same squeeze effect. You can also drag anything (icons, windows, documents, applications) directly to and from the Dock and even shift the icons around by dragging them. When the icons fill the bottom of your screen, they begin to resize down, becoming smaller and smaller as more items fill your dock. A preferences box allows you to set the maximum and minimum size of these Dock icons. Text relating to the item also appears over the icon when the mouse passes over it.

So what happens when your Dock becomes too small to make out what they are? Enter the magnification feature! As your pointer passes over the icons, they expand and shrink in real time, so as you slide your mouse along the bottom of your screen, a wave of growing/shrinking icons follow your pointer across them. Again, it has to be seen to be believed! Steve played a QuickTime movie and squeezed it down to the Dock. The video image squeezed right along with the window, and Steve promised that in the release, you could even play video in the Dock.

I'm sure there was a lot more Steve showed, but there was so much information it was hard to keep up. All I can say is that Apple has redefined the user interface experience. Prepare to be awed.

Oh! I almost forgot! Steve did not point this out, but when he was playing the QuickTime movie, I noticed that the dreaded volume thumbwheel was gone and replaced with a more standard slider tool! Yay! Someone is listening to us over in Cupertino!

Okay. Digest this info. There's a lot happening at Apple and it looks like things are only going to get better! Although I am saddened that no new PowerBooks were announced, there's so much more here to chew on I'm not as sad as I thought I would be. If you thought 1999 was a big year for Apple, you are in for a big surprise!

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Roderick Martin, web site consultant and Mac fan, has been using Macs on and off since 1987 and became a Mac owner in 1996 when he changed careers from television promotion and marketing to web site development. His web development company, Network 23 uses Macs every day to enhance the Internet surfer's experience. Rod left 70-degree weather in Illinois to attend MacWorld Expo in San Francisco where it is 50 degrees and much less flat.

Copyright © 2000 by Bill Fox
All rights reserved--no use permitted without attribution.

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