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Britain's Princess Diana died today after a car crash in Paris. Ric Ford on MacInTouch has been receiving email on cloning and has listed some of the responses.
Just for fun, assuming what I've heard is true, I decided this morning to write a for Power Computing. Hedy Lamarr is a distant relative of mine. Austin American-Statesman: Macinsearch.com -- Search every word on over 10,000 Macintosh web sites. One of Power Computing's contributions to the Mac community: Concise informative explanations of mysterious concepts such as RAM, AppleTalk and SCSI. A revolutionary software design idea: Help systems should work like search engines such as Excite or I'm using MSIE 4.0 on Windows. I want to know how to clear its cache. I fumble around the UI. Instead I'd like to ask the program what it knows about its cache. I know it's got one! Please re-read Henry Norr's MacWEEK column from last week. Apple still has a unique advantage, they make both hardware and an OS. Even the Mac cloners can't do that. Even Microsoft. The clone controversy masks much deeper problems at Apple. SJ Merc: Apple turns the screws on clone buyers. "Mail Starting 8/30/97".
DaveNet: "Inside Power Computing". "Dave Bakin on Apple Direct Sales". Apologies for the outages here this afternoon. We were testing some new software, and it produced some not-too-pleasant results. Back on solid ground again. Still diggin! Exhibit 10.20 from the Power Computing SEC filing shows that all the major issues with Apple, raising royalties, certification of new systems and processors, CHRP, even notebooks, were resolved in June. Today's Frontier toy: an agent script that processes and then deletes all files that are copied into a folder that it watches. Jesse Berst on MacroMedia Flash. Jesse, thanks for the pointers to my two pieces in June, "Macromedia Flash" and "Lineto Moveto". If only Macromedia had the cojones to go for it... A real gem from Henry Norr at MacWEEK: a pointer to the from Power Computing in June of this year. One item is especially interesting: the formerly confidential license agreement between Power Computing and IBM for the Macintosh OS. Ric Ford, the editor of MacInTouch is holding up purchasing new Mac systems, waiting for a resolution of the Apple licensing issues. Same here. Neoaccess is an affordable cross-platform object database. UserLand's ODB Engine is free (also cross-platform).
DaveNet: "Sept 30 in SF". It's free and open to the public. Jeff Veen's next Frontier website. SJ Merc: People with passion who want to be the next Apple CEO. SJ Merc: Digital Dames network their way to success. Go get em Sylvia! Every Mac user with a net connection should get "Vremya". I had a six-hour lunch yesterday with Steve Wozniak and Andy Hertzfeld. Steve designed the Apple II, and Andy was one of the lead developers of the Mac OS in the early 80s at Apple. It would have made a fantastic radio show. Sparks were flying! Burning Man or Bumbershoot? What a choice!
From Chuck Shotton, BIAP Chat for WebSTAR. So much to say! Chuck wrote WebSTAR. The chat client is in Java and runs in your browser. BIAP is an acronym for Brain In A Pan. Curl is a web scripting language from MIT. "Mail Starting 8/27/97". Today's Frontier Toy: the the color table site and Looking for a good color scheme for some web text? News.com: Lawsuit may slow push spec. Novadigm's press release. Dan Shafer on C|Net: Java class library warfare. SJ Merc: Sun says Java will improve.
DaveNet: "Amelio on Competition". PC Magazine rates ISPs. InfoWorld: What's in Microsoft Office 98 (and what's not). It's a Two-Toy-Tuesday: ASCII Table Maker. I'm listening to Scott McNealy's speech from NY via ZDNN. Requires RealAudio. Marimba, Netscape, Sun, Novell and @Home propose an open standard for replication thru W3C. In his latest TidBITS column, Adam Engst questions the value of discussing the Apple-cloners situation. My belief -- by exchanging ideas, which the Mac community is doing so well now, we can do what computer users do best -- use technology to learn and teach. Think about it, Apple has no CEO right now. It's a wierd time! There's never been a better time to influence the outcome. 8/2/97: "The Web is a Conversation". From the Tom Seaver Museum: The Sporting News article from July 1987 about his retirement from baseball. Today's Frontier toy: Unix-style args for Finder scripting. CNN: Federal judge declares encryption export restrictions unconstitutional. Is it possible to use Sun's Tk user interface runtime to front-end Frontier scripts? They provide source code for Windows, Mac and Unix. Responses on "Mail Starting 8/23/97". Send mail to dave@scripting.com. We haven't ported MacBird to Win32 yet.
Bill Cheeseman has an extensive list of changes in AppleScript 1.1.2. Brent Schlender says the Apple-Microsoft deal is hollow. Tom Clifton updated today's Frontier toy to work with either Eudora or Claris Emailer. If you're using a CDF-aware web browser, please try our Microsoft-blessed channel definition file. Wired News: Apple Powerplay Fouls Cloner's IPO. MacAddict interview with Gil Amelio. "Apple needs to learn how to compete. It is a corporate skill set that does not exist at Apple today." Sun: Tcl 8.0 and Tk 8.0. Here's a suggestion for the browser makers... A new preference that disables the target="new" attribute that causes an <a href> to open in a new window. I think this choice should be up to the user, not up to a site designer. Save braincells. Michael Murdock would like to be CEO of Apple. For Frontier users, a new overnight script that accumulates an outline of addresses that you've sent mail to. Outline searching is much faster than searching in Eudora. Crispin Roven talks about regular expressions on WebMonkey. Eric Raymond explains how the Linux developer world works. Geek heaven... The SJ Merc tells the story of Fry's Electronics. 8/12/96: "What If... What if!" What was Apple doing last year when Power Computing was 'fighting back for the Mac'? Gil Amelio wrote an op-ed piece in Sunday's SJ Merc.
DaveNet: "Apple Avoids Competition". "Mail Starting 8/23/97". Our ISP, Conxion, makes a deal with Network Solutions. Conxion is the best ISP in the world. Henry Norr of MacWEEK writes the next chapter in Apple's nightmarish war with the cloners. A simple policy: UserLand Software will not purchase any Apple products until this mess is cleaned up. Apple website: Who's Who on the Licensing Team. If you send email, please be respectful, and understand that these people probably aren't making the big decisions at Apple. Wired News: fascinating piece on web standards bodies. Charles Randlolph Shotton, born on 8/19/97 to Linda and Chuck Shotton. What a beautiful boy! A sign seen on Highway 88, east of Jackson, California. The CGI Resources website.
"Summer Reading".
DaveNet: "Summer Vacation". Henry Norr discusses the cloning issue. Is this a secret-coded message for aliens? "News from Microsoft on XML". "Mail Starting 8/15/97". 6/16/97: "Sucking Sideways". Brooke Shelby Biggs on HotWired: Who's Behind the Curtain? Bill Gates to keynote the Seybold conference in San Francisco in September. I've already received five pointers to today's www.suck.com cartoon strip. Check out this MacWEEK article. I can hear it now... "We were getting backed into this image that the cloners were bad for the platform, when all the time we were helping them Here's a beautiful Scripting News graphic, and here's one that isn't a graphic at all.
"Microsoft/Marimba Announcement". More information from Marimba. Narrative's Enliven, does animated web ads in less than 20K; converts Director moves too. BSCW shared workspace system. Preston Holmes and rasterboy enter the Scripting News graphics derby. News.com: Microsoft, Marimba to make announcement later today. Dan Shafer on c|net: Java class library warfare. The Java Developer's Lobby wants Java to be truly portable, reliable, standard, bug-free and high-performance. Let's add "open" to the list of goals for Java. My interest: let's make it possible for people to write plug-ins for Frontier in Java. Cameron Barret't's book list. More interesting ideas on "Mail Starting 8/12/97". News.com: Mac cloners to bundle Virtual PC. CNN: Is the web a vast wasteland? Have they tried "Don's Amazing Puzzle"? Chris Nolan says, in the SJ Merc, that patents are the substantial part of last week's Microsoft-Apple deal. Apple's VP-Marketing, Guerrino De Luca, agrees.
Stunning! A new graphic for Scripting News? Send comments to Nick Robinson, machome@dhc.net, cc'd to dave@scripting.com. What's the thing under my face? A Twinkie? Why David Gulbransen should be CEO of Apple. Webintosh reports that Apple could have helped Exponential, but didn't. Exponential folded. Everything's OK... Just taking it easy today. DW
DaveNet: "High Roads & Big Pictures". Ben Waldman, the general manager of the Macintosh business unit at Microsoft, "Mail Starting 8/12/97". A new sample script, importImages, loads a folder of image files into a table in Frontier's object database. It's a useful utility if you're converting a large site with lots of graphics. WinBatch automates Windows applications and has Roy Leban believes it's possible to add memory protection to the Mac OS, without Rhapsody. CNN: New pictures of Hale-Bopp. Upside interviews Samir Arora, CEO of NetObjects. The Philadelphia Inquirer quotes Sun's Jon Kannegaard saying: Java is more important today than it was the day before yesterday, because Microsoft's endorsement increases the likelihood that Apple's Macintosh platform will survive. It's great to see Sun acknowledge their stake in the future of the Mac platform. Chris Bowes in the Sydney Morning Herald spins the Boy Kills Boy version of the Microsoft-Apple deal. 7/3/97: "Bill Gates's Money". Webintosh reviews Quid Pro Quo 2.0. US News: Why Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made up. One more time... Why 1997 is like 1984.
Scotts Valley Printing is a Frontier site. From julian.love@sierra.com: A new feature of OS8 (I think) is the ability to speak dialogs when they appear. The funny part is the Speech Manager pronounces Frontier as "Frontire" or "front tire!" It almost sounds a bit snooty. Try it! A historical and literary view of the Microsoft-Apple deal. A biblical view of the Microsoft-Apple deal. Wed 5:30PM in SF: Free beer for webmasters at Internet Alfredo. I'm running WinMac on my NT machine and it works as advertised. Key benefits: an Apple menu and an apps menu, and the clock is in the right place. I don't care for the about dialog ("About this Macintosh"), or the Apple logo in the upper left corner of the screen. A TCP scripting revolution for the Mac OS!
"Mail Starting 8/11/97". PC WEEK: Fusion to get workgroup features, Sun to go direct with Java for Windows. Time cover story: Steve Jobs Restarts Apple. BTW, I was quoted in today's Time piece. News.com: It's official, Jobs sold his Apple stock. Another fact gleaned from the Time piece: Scroll to the bottom of this page, read the last paragraph. Does Jobs use an IBM laptop at home too? BusinessWeek cover story: How Silicon Valley Really Works.
Tomorrow: "Nerd Garage Sale in SF". A totally juicy article about Steve Jobs in today's SJ Merc. Last year's keynote at MacWorld Expo. WinMac makes Windows look like a Mac. Does it work? (I want it!) David Pogue in the May issue of MacWorld, with songs about Apple. Funny!
DaveNet: "Free the Mac OS". Hey, I'm playing with iChat tonight. My username is 'davenet'. Send me a message! Today's DaveNet piece talks about Linux. PC Magazine: Getting the most out of Linux. 7/11/97: "A Microsoft/Apple Partnership?" Other Scripting News graphics: 1, 2, 3. Don't send me graphics as email enclosures. Instead, please put up a web page and send me a URL. Thanks! Audio: The story of a man, a deer, a dog and a phone booth. I don't know why I find this picture of so fascinating. Maybe it's like Steve and Bill? Italic comments are the voice of my evil twin.
Excellent MacWorld Expo coverage on the Webintosh site. MacWEEK's Henry Norr puts this week's news in perspective. I see it the same way as Henry. Apple management, such as it is, is miscalculating if they want to restrict what the cloners can do. Top ten reasons "Why Microsoft Invested in Apple". "Mail Starting 8/8/97". Do they have fact-checkers at InfoWorld? What is the 'default' browser on the Mac OS? As Bill Gates said about Apple's UI lawsuit of the early 90s, when MSIE becomes the default Mac browser, very few (if any) bits will change. An overview of new features in Frontier 5, coming soooon! MacWorld: Emblaze Creator doesn't require plug-ins for dazzling animated web presentations. I'm looking for the lyrics for a World War I song called Over There. It was the song US soldiers sang about what they were doing. Find me the lyrics for all songs entitled 'Over There'. Do any search engines do this? Symantec's Q&A database (1984) could handle this kind of query. For now I just want the lyrics for the song. Later I want more.
It was the theme song of World War I for the USA. Transcript of Jobs's MacWorld presentation. What goes up a chimney down, but not down a chimney up?
NY Times review of Mac OS 8. MacWorld's Best of Show page. News.com: ACLU paper slams filters, ratings. August 21: "Microsoft's WWLive Conference". Jeb Bateman responds to my critique of the AnchorDesk site and critiques Scripting News. We'll implement his suggestions here. Some "Answers from De Luca" to questions asked in yesterday's "Behind the Hype". MacWEEK's Don Crabb gets tough with the whiners. A question for Don, user to user, why should we give up the new designs from Power and Motorola? Also your logic about Apple needing more money seems thin. I need more money too. So do you, probably. Everyone needs more money. So what? (I'll believe Apple needs more money after they spend a year without acquiring a new operating system, firing a CEO, having a reorg or layoffs, or cancelling a major R&D project.) Another thought for Don -- since we, as users, are going to be paying that money to Apple, maybe it would be cheaper for us to buy Apple, release the source code to the OS, and let anyone who wants to build Macs. What do you think? MacWorld: Apple is playing a dirty game. A Scripting News favorite: "Don's Amazing Puzzle". Believe it or not, Maura Welch, a correspondent for the Boston Globe, wants to marry Apple. She's willing to sign a prenup! Funny! 101 Ways to Save Wired Ventures. #102: Why do their news pages display so poorly in MSIE/Mac? It took 23 seconds to load this AnchorDesk page on a full T1 line. Amazingly, they're using GIFs to do the links down the left edge of the page! How would you redesign this site's template to make it more fun to visit? Wired: US president Bill Clinton on the Microsoft-Apple deal. Jesse Berst suggests Steve Ballmer as the new CEO of Apple. In an interview with a Newsweek reporter yesterday I had the same idea! What a small world we live in. Hey, I thought Ballmer would make a good choice for Netscape CEO, back in August 1996. Chris Nolan on the Silicon Valley party scene in the SJ Merc. "Mail Starting 8/7/97".
DaveNet: "Behind the Hype". From sources close to the Microsoft-Apple negotiations... The key point of the deal was the settlement of a patent dispute. Since we don't know what Apple gave up, we can't really evaluate this part of the deal. The clone issue is still around. In the SJ Merc Jobs says "Apple lives in an ecosystem and it needs help from other partners. Relationships that are destructive don't help anyone in this industry." Hey, that's slippery. Are users, who he's stealing choice from, in the industry? News.com: More tough talk from Apple about cloners. Henry Norr reviews Apple's new machines in MacWEEK. They're the fastest Macs for now. From "Can Apple Survive?", 4/21/97: "License the Mac OS cheaply to clone makers. Look to differentiate your product with software you license from developers. The truth -- most of the value is out of the Mac OS. To charge a premium for it now defeats the purpose of having a separate platform. We all must get in line on this one and agree that we want lots of Macs from anyone, not a small number of Macs just from Apple. If that's how it plays out, the Mac loses all its remaining developer energy." DaveNet: "Microsoft Backs Apple". More info... "Mail Starting 8/6/97". SJ Mercury: Mac cloners threaten protest. InfoWorld: Marimba to add non-Java software updating. Peter Wayner in NY Times: Cross-platform Java problem.
Stop what you're doing and carefully read this MacWEEK piece about a public faceoff between Joel Kocher of Power Computing and Guerrino De Luca of Apple. The Mac's days as a cash cow for Apple are coming to a close. MacWorld: License or Die. DaveNet: "Dead Man Walking". "Mail Starting 8/5/97". MacWEEK: Timbuktu 4.0 is scriptable. David Morgenstern in MacWEEK: Keeping Jobs grounded in reality. Mazel tov! Wired News: Eternity Servers. Here's an example of an eternity server. Thanks Phil! Using Frontier with non-English languages -- especially Japanese and other double-byte languages. MacWorld: The Apple licensing saga gets stranger and wierder. Marc Canter braindump on streaming media. Microsoft buys VXtreme, launches NetShow, and Oracle announces a new real-time API. The unofficial SIGGRAPH party list. Do you dig Delphi? Borland has an executive job opening in R&D. 1/11/96: Boston Phoenix review of Dead Man Walking (the movie). 10/24/96: "Que Sera Sera". Doris Day sings Que Sera Sera. Microsoft: 100 companies license Visual Basic for Applications.
LA Times: The engine of innovation that will keep the Mac competitive has to include clone makers. A sample page on the Fortune website. It takes 10 secs to load on a full T1 here; and the images don't have heights and widths so you can't start reading until the page is fully loaded. How would you redesign this site to make it more fun to come back to? PC WEEK: Rob O'Regan wants to bury the Mac. He says the Mac isn't a religion. Right on. So why are his arguments religious? InfoWorld: IBM/Motorola offer faster PowerPC chips. MacWorld (the magazine) will webcast the Steve Jobs keynote on Wednesday at 6AM Pacific. MacWorld: Vector graphic formats for the web. Jesse Berst tunes into fat web pages... a concept that was pioneered here on scripting.com. I agree it's the right way to go. Mark Tebbe in InfoWorld: Microsoft won't fully support Java. Now what? News.com: Microsoft has a search engine in development. Great piece by Jorg Brown, Apple developer since 1984. Great piece by Danny Goodman, one of the leading writers of the scripting world since Hypercard 1.0. Suggestion to the WebCollage people -- do a graphic that displays the current market cap for Apple. "As of 10AM Pacific on 8/4/97 it would cost $3.2 billion to buy Apple." Boston: Be OS for Intel CPUs. Help needed... I won't be in Boston on Wednesday for the opening of MacWorld Expo, but I'd like to listen to the keynote on the web. If you're part of a news organization that will have audio and/or video coverage, please send me an email, dave@scripting.com; I'll put up a page with pointers. Thanks! MacPower launches; a Scandanavian Mac user site. There was a six-hour outage here between approx 3AM and 9AM Monday, Pacific time. It seems that PacBell tripped over a wire. Sorry for the outage! It happens...
"Mail Starting 8/3/97". Got RealVideo? Steve Jobs at the 1997 WWDC. The the Vonnegut commencement speech wasn't exactly a hoax. Here's the explanation. TechWeb: Buy a Macintosh, improve your return on investment.
DaveNet: "The Web is a Conversation". Perfect! of the young Steve Jobs saying "let's show them why 1984 won't be like 1984." From Jean-Louis Gassˇe, re "Ellison to Join Apple's Board": "This is great news. I like and admire Larry. He's got brains and balls neatly wired together. Great addition to Apple's board, great opportunity for Apple to enter new markets. All you need now is SPJ as Chairman and Apple is back kicking butt." Summer reading: Top books of the 20th Century. Watercolors look great on the web. I helped my friend Upada get some of her paintings online. She has postcards and a poster for sale on the site. If enough people buy some we'll be able to get more coool content to flow from the Harbin community. SJ Mercury: Apple warned -- keep cloning. MacWEEK: Mac OS licensing in jeopardy? News.com: Apple has death wish, says cloner. Wired: MacUser folds, MacWEEK and MacWorld merge. Apparently the Vonnegut commencement speech was a hoax.
DaveNet: "He was Beautiful". PC WEEK: Netscape to offer standalone browser. Thanks! Got Java? FlowFazer is cooool. MacWorld: Licensing pullback could boomerang on Apple. InfoWorld: Web-enabled FileMaker is an HTTP server. Confirmed with individual sources at four Mac clone vendors... Early this week Apple's board of directors discontinued licensing the Mac OS, withdrew their committment of CHRP, and decided not to license a laptop or their new desktop designs. According to a former Apple executive, Jobs spoke out against cloners at high-level internal Apple meetings earlier this year. And in a May speech, Jobs disparaged what he called 'leech' cloners and complained they weren't paying Apple enough.
I'm looking for a picture of Jobs at the 1/24/84 Mac rollout for a piece I'm working on. Please send email to dave@scripting.com if you find one. Thanks! Kurt Vonnegut: Do one thing every day that scares you. Thursby Software's awkwardly named software makes a Mac a full peer on a Windows NT network. It's strategic software. From Larry Tesler, tesler@pobox.com: "After seventeen years, I am leaving Apple to co-found a software company that will develop products for children."
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