hobie@sq.UUCP (02/03/87)
Monday night was the Club Amiga meeting in Toronto, where John Skeel
of Aegis Development Corp. came to demo software and to announce new projects.
The meeting was well attended, drawing about 200 people, far more than
previous meetings. While waiting for John Skeel to arrive, someone showed an
audio digitizer he had built and was selling for $100, and he mentioned an ad in
"Computer Shopper" (a mag I never heard of) for an internal 2 meg expansion
board made in CA that clips onto the 68000 socket and has a socket for a 68010.
It sells stripped (no memory) to user groups for $295 US. It was also mentioned
that a locally-designed hard disk controller is finished and working, so we may
see it soon.
John gave an in-depth demo of Aegis Draw II, which seemed to have improved a great deal (I never saw the original), including saving parts lists, better
rotation, labelling, and more. The big event was a video tape of some 3d anim-
ation done with Videoscape, due to be released by fall. It looked very good,
showing relatively complex objects (a spaceship, sportscar, Amiga system, house)
all rotating with changing camera angles, zooms, etc. He said that once you
define the objects, you can script a sequence and it will keep going (some frames taking only 5-10 secs. to generate).
Also shown were a communications program and Sonix, which I didn't stay
to see. Sonix is just MusiCraft expanded for printing, MIDI, and more. He also
answered questions about other Aegis projects, such as Draw Pro (?) and Animator
II which are apparently in the works. He mentioned a comm. program before I
left which would allow two users on different Amigas to transfer files while
simultaneously chatting (I believe he said the transfer could be both ways as
well). I don't think that was the same one that was demonstrated, since he
seemed to imply it wasn't done yet.
The event was also licensed ($2 for a beer), which could be a first in
user group history (in Ontario, at least). The new newsletter (16 pages up from
4) was given out to those who bought a membership ($15 per year, includes access
to special stuff on the club BBS, Intuition, (416) 654-8847 and any group deals
we can get hold of).
--
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Hobie Orris | "You may call it debugging
SoftQuad Inc., Toronto, Ont. | but I like to refer to it
{ihnp4 | decvax | ? }!utzoo!sq!hobie | as stepwise refinement"
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