DaveNet: Saturday, March 8, 1997; by Dave Winer.
Demo w/Amelio at InternetWorld
I'm a lucky guy! I get to demo my software on the keynote stage with Gil Amelio, Apple's chairman and CEO.Why am I so lucky? Because I get to show how great it is to use a Macintosh to manage websites. There will be lots of webmasters in the audience who are also Mac users. Many of them aren't using the most powerful features of the operating system. If they only knew! That's why it's cool. I get to show them...
But I only have five minutes. Here's how I'll do it. If you have suggestions or comments, please send them before Sunday at midnight when I have to lock down the demo. Thanks!
Software
Frontier 4.2
Netscape 3.0
System 7.6
BBEdit 4.1
It's Gil & Dave, all the way
Gil: Hi Dave, how's it going?
Dave: Just great Gil! The web is so exciting and there are so many things that we can only do on Macs. I have just five minutes to show it to you so here goes!
Gil: OK!
Start with the browser
Like a lot of web developers I spend a lot of time using my web browser to read articles and learn about new stuff.
I'm using Netscape 3.0 here. I want to make sure all my readers see this site. So I select a command from the Scripts menu, confirm that I want this page to be added to my glossary, Frontier comes to the front and shows the glossary table, BBEdit opens and an entry is added to the end of the news page. The page is displayed in Netscape.
Menu sharing
This is what scripting is about. Building the best-fit system for the way you work.
Netscape to the front. Option-select any command. Frontier comes to the front. The menu editor window opens. Enter a Hello Gil script. Switch back to Netscape. Choose the new command. Pause.
All the net apps are compatible, BBEdit, Eudora, Claris Emailer, Microsoft Internet Explorer, WebSTAR, you name it.
Gil: That's great! Can you do anything like this on Windows?
Dave: No. Maybe in a few years...
The Finder
With Frontier you can add commands to the Finder's menu bar too.
Bring the Finder to the front, scroll thru the Scripts menu, explain a few of the commands. Demo the View in Browser command. The Type-Creator dialog.
BTW, System 8.0 will ship with this capability, built-in! Thanks for supporting script writers Gil.
Gil: You bet!
Website building
Last year I did a site called 24 Hours of Democracy. Over 1000 websites were linked together as a demonstration of free speech on the Internet. Only three webmasters, one in Virginia, one in Florida and one in California. All done with Macs. It worked!
Show the 24 Hours home page in Netscape.
All the pages had a uniform look.
Click on Candidate Addresses.
Bring Frontier to the front, open up the site, open up the Candidate Addresses page.
The text for the page is just HTML with a few markups.
Open the template.
It all flows thru a template.
I can change the template to change the look of the whole site.
Edit the template attribute, rebuild the Candidate Addresses page.
I can easily change the look of the entire site without coordinating with any of the authors. Begin the rebuild, and begin the closing remarks.
Closing remarks
Gil, we're doing it again, only this time it's bigger. We're using the web to coordinate dozens of reporters here at InternetWorld, managing a large dynamic site with lots of information about the show and what the Mac net development community is doing.
There are 350 Mac developers participating in the project. We want to show everyone how much cool web stuff happens on the Mac first and help Macintosh webmasters to be the most effective people on the Internet.
Thanks for letting me show you how this stuff works!
Gil: Thank *you* Dave.