After a week when Geoff sweated in Seattle heat while Tonya and Adam sweated in Boston heat, we turn our attention to the Macintosh world, with Geoff’s reaction to a Wall Street Journal article about Microsoft and Apple, news about Mac OS 8, and Apple’s Runtime for Java. We flesh out the issue with Tonya and Adam’s impressions and extensive product notes from last week’s Macworld Expo.
Progress toward moving the TidBITS mailing list from Rice University is continuing, and, barring unforeseen difficulties, this should be the last issue of TidBITS sent via the Rice LISTSERV
Amelio Outlines Realistic Mac OS Strategy -- In a move seen as simply bringing Apple's official system update policies in line with current practice, Apple CEO Gilbert Amelio announced at Macworld Boston last week that Apple intends to deliver future enhancements to the Mac OS in a series of incremental updates rather than as large, monolithic packages
Mac OS Runtime for Java -- Apple has posted a pre-release of Mac OS Runtime for Java, which is essentially designed to put a Java virtual machine into the Mac OS
In an article in the 15-Aug-96 Wall Street Journal, Lee Gomes outlines a "virtually unknown" Microsoft development group in San Jose focusing exclusively on the Macintosh, and Microsoft's plans to promote third-party Internet development on the Mac
Fueled by a melange of Internet-related software, this year's Macworld Expo had plenty of enthusiastic crowds and product announcements. We'll cover more of these products in future issues, but in this semi-annual Macworld Expo superlatives article, I chronicle companies whose gimmicks particularly stood out or whose offerings caught my eye.
Slimmed Down Approach -- The Aladdin Systems booth wasn't new, but space-constrained attendees enjoyed the StuffIt t-shirts, which set a new standard for sartorial compression
HTML software figured heavily into the Expo mix, but - to be honest - I was disappointed not to have my socks blown off by a new product that had been kept under wraps and that explored novel ways of using graphically-based tools to create and manage Web pages and sites
A saying claims that you can never be too rich or too thin, but the modern equivalent is that you can never have too much bandwidth (and all of you with T3 connections to the Internet can just keep quiet)
After every Macworld Expo, we attempt to pull the overriding theme out of the hype and chaos of the show. At the last Macworld Expo in San Francisco, it seemed as though every company had an Internet product, or they had at least managed to put the word "Internet" into their products' names