dick@lhs.woodside.ca.us (dick benster) (03/28/91)
BANG 20Mar91 Meeting Review: San Francisco Bay Area NeXT User's Group Dick Benster - La Honda Software Spring Hath Sprung With the vernal equinox occurring at 7:02pm, our most recent meeting started placidly in the waning moments of winter, but ended with a BANG in spring! Director Rick Reynolds convened a crowd of over 75 people who assembled to hear about advances in desk-top publishing from software vendors Adobe and Pages Corp. Prior to the scheduled program, the following announcements were made: 1) Adamation is looking for a NeXT programmer. Please contact Stephen Adams at (415-452-5252) if your are interested. 2) For those of you waiting for external PLI 2.88 floppy drives from NeXT Connection, they are being held up due to a lack of cables. Cables and drives will be available by 29-Mar, according to NeXT Customer Support. 3) The CD-ROM project, which has been dormant for a while, is being restarted. Please contact Rick Reynolds if you wish to help ( bang_request@bang.org ). Adobe Illustrator Demonstrated Chris Hunt, Adobe's Unix Applications Marketing Manager, provided an early look at the Adobe Illustrator for NeXT platforms. The product is currently in alpha, and will go beta end-March (Adobe has already identified 35 - 40 Beta sites), with standard customer shipments to commence end-May. Chris asked for member input on site-licenses for the Illustrator, and the audience responded very favorably to this proposal as a desirable and honorable way to purchase/distribute fixed numbers of copies of software in networked sites. Hopefully, Adobe will pursue this. The product will probably list for about $695. Many in the audience responded that this was too high a price - $495 was deemed more appropriate by several BANGites! Chris responded by saying that the development had been very time consuming, and probably would necessitate the higher price. Unfortunately, the project was accomplished via a port from the MacIntosh Illustrator, so implementation time was not speeded up by a completely NeXT-native approach to the product. Precisely the opposite occurred in that much time was spent by Adobe preparing NeXT drawing routines that worked analogously to Mac draw routines. According to Chris, the main criticism of Adobe Illustrator is its learning curve. Nevertheless, Adobe claims to be quite pleased with the NeXT version, which has three basic new features not found on the Mac 1) editing and previewing of output - i.e., WYSIWYG on screen near-real-time) 2) grids - used to "quantize" drawing to get precise lines, 90 degree angles, and areas) 3) autotracing in color - Mac versions just did black/white autotracing. This works well with color and is greatly superior to hand-tracing. Additionally, all the standard features of the Illustrator found on the Mac are supported font outlining text resizing on a per character basis text placement text on a path - draw path, and text uses path as "baseline" kerning on screen in real-time of selected text text rotating and scaling ... Many useful tools are found on the Illustrator: autotrace magnify tool free-hand tool grid tool for right-angles rotate tool ... The tools are well integrated together. For instance, you can make a "guide" out of a grid, and then use the rotate tool to rotate a grid. Complete compatibility is retained from Mac to NeXT in that files are readable once transferred to the NeXT. Note that the Illustrator is not a word processor, rather it is a "type" processor. For this reason, it can import from many word-processors, including Word Perfect. Regarding future developments, version 4.0 is being done on the Mac currently. When it is completed, all new features and error corrections will be ported to the NeXT. DEC Motif will be Adobe's next port of the Illustrator, which is a natural since it supports display post-script. Doing a Sun port is desirable, but much more difficult, as NEWS is not sufficient to support the Illustrator with out a great deal of enhancement. Additionally, Adobe Photo Shop should show up in approximately one year on the NeXT. The port is difficult, as Photo Shop is written in a highly machine dependant way: in Pascal specifically for Macs. As an aside to developers, Chris mentioned that Adobe looks at approximately 12 applications per month from other vendors and does purchase third-party software when it augments Adobe's offerings. A good example of this is the excellent "Touch-Type" from NeXT guru Glenn Reed of Right Brain Software. Adobe has acquired rights to this software, and may even incorporate components in future Illustrator upgrades. The Adobe Illustrator will be available minimally through NeXT Connection. A highly respected BANG member recently manned a NeXT booth at a major Mac show: he reported being told by several Mac user's that the Adobe Illustrator is a compelling application, that is, one that would prompt user's to purchase NeXT machines in order to use the program with NeXT higher quality screens and graphics. Page One Shows Off Text-Book Publishing Proof-of-Concept Bruce Henderson of Pages Corp. (San Diego) gave BANG members a privileged look at the forthcoming Page One object-oriented page layout program, which had previously only been shown at Seybold and at a well-known Boston computer group. Pages Corp has a list of major talent from the publishing world, including founders Mike Parker and Vic Spindler, as well as Bruce Webster (author of "The NeXT Book"). What was demo'ed was not a prototype, but rather a "proof-of-concept" version which was part-functional and part mock-up. According to Bruce, the concept of object-oriented page layout is not new; indeed, Mike Parker and Vic Spinder had discussed it for a very long time, with the roots going back some fifteen years. The product concept has evolve with desk-top technology - specification were done for the PC, then improved for the Mac, and then enhanced again for the NeXT, for which the product will finally be introduced. Their intent is obvious - to allow people to create better documents. The key distinction which allows this to occur in Page One is the separation of design from content. Page One is built upon the interplay of 28 separate design elements (the demo'ed version showed 21 of them) that are used to guide your design (types of elements include titles, tables, captions, boxes, table of contents, fonts, number of columns, headers, footers, etc). However, the user does not normally have a "carte blanche" in combining these - you would normally use preset designs that use specific settings for the various design elements, yielding "templates" that control your documents appearance. Five presets were shown (i.e., 2 column layout, 3 column layout, etc) from "Vic's Vanillas" templates, named for designer Vic Spinder. These allow you to click and choose a format so you can "please make the doc look like that", without entering any other format control information. The layout templates are very important in establishing a corporate "look and feel." Large companies spend millions of dollars on their image yearly - by allowing a layout template to control gross "look and feel", users of Page One can more easily create documents that conform to the desired appearance without wasting the massive amounts of time that currently occurs with existing products. Instead, energies are more appropriately focused on content, allowing Page One to do the layout for you within the template. The Page Two program (which is in a true prototype stage) is used to create new templates when standard templates do not meet design desires. Thus, designers can customize/tune layouts per corporate desires, and then have them incorporated into Page One. Page Two's program's specific capabilities and availability are not yet announced - Pages Corp. will have more to say in six months. One should not have the impression that each template's parameters are cast in stone. Much flexibility is granted in many areas, for instance in titles. There are 6 title styles: full page, full column, flush left, etc. You may choose what you like - what Page One does, however, is to keep consistency throughout the doc, so choosing "center column title" will be invoked over all titles, not just a selected title. This retains consistency and quality of appearance. For graphics, however, multiple choices can co-exists, unlike titles. Such freedom is appropriate and necessary given the diverse purposes of graphics. Indeed, the major "win" of separating format from content is flexibility; it is extremely easy to change from one layout to the next by a simple cursor click without needing to change any imbedded format control. Another nice feature of Page One is the facility to inspect all the choices you've made. Every parameter setting is tidily viewable on a panel via a single menu click. The audience quickly grasped the power of Page One for large text publishing - clearly, one could set up a "school text book" format for creating that type of text. Page One includes a powerful stand-alone word processor (many features are supported, including page number variables, indexing through attributes, intelligent parsing, etc), but it also supports the import of standard word-processing docs. Pages Corp is very optimistic about the future of Page One - it sees a "level playing field" in this new world of object-oriented publishing. It does not see itself directly competing with the Frame-like products that already exist, which are more oriented towards the specifics of perfect page layout for small docs. Page One is oriented towards "get it right the first time" layout of large docs, where it is not appropriate to spend the pains-taking time per page of smaller layouts. Page One will take 12 - 18 months to complete. No pricing has been set, although internal discussion has thrown around the $400 - $500 figures. More Mega Prizes awarded in BaNG Raffle! As has become a tradition at BANG gatherings, the meeting was ended with a wondrous raffle. Prizes included Adobe Illustrator T-shirts, several copies of the latest NeXTWORLD magazine (Mar-Apr '91), two Prevail anti-theft locking systems for NeXT computers, a copy of the Adobe Illustrator (to be delivered when released end-May), and a copy of SoftPC 2.0 from Insignia Solutions. BANG offers its sincere thanks to the above vendors for their generosity and for their continued support of BANG and the NeXT users' community. Please Come To NeXT Meeting Please do! These meetings are great fun and highly informative. Join us! 17-April-91 at 7pm Stanford University Terman Auditorium Please watch email for announcement of the program. Cheers!