News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community.
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Mail Starting 2/7/97 | |
Nice take on the Apple story!
From: rustyt@spiderisland.com (Rusty Tucker); Sent at 2/7/97; 3:14:27 PM; Re: Some Delicious Ideas!You need far more than $100M net tho, you also need enough to cover projected 97 losses. It may be that investors are pegging the net 97 loss at 500M to 1B, which is probably enough to cover the value of MacOS.
Rusty Tucker Spider Island Software
While Apple's cash position may be in the vicinity of the market cap, the minute anyone started making serious noises about buying the whole company the board would have to start an auction, or at least entertain other offers. The per-share price would almost certainly rise by a fair amount, so the cash on hand would not cover most of the cost after all.
From: dgillmor@sjmercury.com (Dan Gillmor); Sent at 2/7/97; 8:18:02 AM; Re: Apple LBO or buyout...
Dan Gillmor, Computing Editor E-mail: dgillmor@sjmercury.com San Jose Mercury News Voice: 408-920-5016 750 Ridder Park Drive Fax: 408-920-5917 San Jose, CA 95190 http://www.sjmercury.com/business/gillmor/Hello.
From: BVOLK@lightspan.com (BILL VOLK); Sent at 1/31/97; 11:30:50 AM; Re: Tricky Browser GuysNice article. By the way, Internet Explorer 3.0 does have a "view source" option ... so they DO have the code to do what you ask.
Here's another bizzare situation for you.... The commerical database(s) have evolved to the point where they can generate really pretty reports etc. etc... For example Microsoft Access ... which because it comes with the MS Office suite is popular at many companies. BEAUTIFUL Report Generation.
Well ... getting HTML out of that beast is NO FUN. Why? Because the darn program thinks it's putting stuff out to paper. So if you put a "subreport" into a header that will generate an index (using ANCHORs) for the HTML page .... it won't do it right 'cause it thinks you've run past the first page ... where the heafder "has to fit". Can't we get some acknowledgement that Databases are being used to generate HTML? 10 years ago this would have been a trival task ... now with all of the "fancyness" in the report generation .... it's quite the "living hell."
Bill Volk
P.S. Nothing clears my head better than riding my bicycle 40 miles on a working day. Best place to design software IMHO.
YES! Please get this in , Dave!
From: Geek@GeeksRUs.com (Steven W. Riggins); Sent at 1/31/97; 2:23:50 PM; Re: Tricky Browser GuysTK 2, a product from Voyager Japan, uses the View Source to get this. They point Netscape at their tool, then when you selecte View Source, they suck the source out. But this is a horrible hack.
Tell me who to push on this, I'll push.
I need it on Windows as well.
Steve
A third browser? Right on! Even though they're supposedly committed to Cyberdog, I don't see Netscape "opening up" their browser any time soon. Netscape's whole strategy is to find an Internet standard, support half of it, then add some proprietary features to differentiate themselves (Embrace & Extend). Microsoft says that you can embed IE for Windows in other apps using OLE, but it may be undocumented. They still haven't shipped ISL for Mac.
From: wesf@mail.utexas.edu (Wesley Felter); Sent at 2/3/97; 5:46:57 PM; Re: Berst Alert!Did you know that Netscape only supports about half of the SSL protocol? I have some uses for the other part, but I guess that's just too bad. Microsoft isn't much better. Nobody's figured out that you're supposed to use the <IMG> tag for plug-ins. And neither of them support PNG. The list goes on forever. I think there's definitely room for a third browser.
You might want to check out Opera, a browser that is quite different from the Netscape or MS implementation. I do not know how many hooks are exposed to outside programmers.
From: mross@alumni.caltech.edu (Mark Ross); Sent at 2/3/97; 6:45:47 PM; Other BrowsersIt has a multiple-window interface that turns out to be very convenient for browsing. You can fire up a separate window to start downloading a link while you continue reading the current document. It is also very keyboard-oriented, which I find convenient.
Finally, I use it most of the time because it starts in less than half the 30 seconds it takes Netscape to load.
Mark Ross
Dave,
From: tim@owi.com (Tim McEachern); Sent at 2/4/97; 9:18:50 AM; Re: Berst Alert!Good piece on Lotus, there are lots of Notes developers who would love a shot at the Net market that they missed out on by buying into the Note architecture.
One browser you should look at is Immedia from Quark. Interesting in that it allows complete control over the interface for some great looking stuff (what else would you expect from Quark?), they also plan a port to the Diba platform (they own it so why not) but really uninteresting in that it is a completely proprietary document style and architecture.
Tim McEachern http://owi.com
Dave,
From: richkatz@earthlink.net (Richard Katz); Sent at 2/1/97; 10:31:23 AM; Re: Tricky Browser GuysStarting soon, there may be several ways to do what you want.
1) You can do it with VBA, from Excel - at least on Windows - with Sendkeys. To view the document source:
application.sendkeys("%Vs") ' Send Alt-VS application.activate("Netscape") ' So that Netscape gets the message.
If you want to save the document source you would do:
application.sendkeys("%Fafilename"+chr(13)) ' Send Alt-File SaveAs application.activate("Netscape")
Then read the document as a text file.
2) The new object interface that is being implemented in Netscape now, and which is already in IE 3 will let you send messages to the browser. Netscape is due to release their version some time in March, allegedly.
In the mean time, take solice in that you are not the only one waiting. Check Netscape NCAPI news.
Add news group: secnews.netscape.com
News group: netscape.ncapi.windows
A lot of us have been asking Netscape for just this kind of thing for a long time. The DDE interface that exists now is unwieldy - even more unwieldy than .Sendkeys. It's very difficult to use from a higher level language like VB or VFP, although it can be readily used from C++.
Hope that helps,
Richard Katz San Francisco and the world... ================================================================== OOP Rule #4: The meak is a subclass of Earth. But that object which messages self.trouble is a subclass of wind.
We need something different than HTML anyway. HTML is truly horrible, and it is doomed to remain horrible. I work with a graphic designer, sort out the html-problems for him. He throws his arms in the air complaining: "HTML is not made by people who know anything of design and layout, it's a techneut thing. Why don't they have designers advise them about what is needed for proper design?"
From: storms@pi.net (Jan M.J. Storms); Sent at 2/1/97; 9:49:53 PM; Re: Tricky Browser GuysInternet 2 has been launched. The next leap forward, just because there is a need. Why not make something new for display of data also?
And why would that not be Frontier 5, with an evolved MacBird as the "browser"?
Vriendelijke groeten,
Jan Storms
It's not that the browser wars have turned boring, it's more that what's needed has leveled out. We've reached a plateu for what's needed in the web medium. Back in the days of Mosaic we cried for more control over our documents. Netscape listened and started the first real browser war. They won hands down because they provided abilities that were needed.
From: gdavis@projectcool.com (Glenn Davis); Sent at 2/3/97; 2:15:06 PM; Re: Berst Alert!Over time, more was added to the capabilities of browsers. Today, most everything people building websites want is available, in one way or another. There's really not much more needed except for the most recent browsers to gain market acceptance. I, for one, am really looking forward to Netscape's Communicator being completed. Then I think the web will be where it needs to be in regards to possiblities versus delivery via currently available bandwidth for the masses.
As you said, Java is difficult and Shockwave is nothing more than director. But Cascading Style Sheets, Layers, and Javascript promise to be a much more powerful force than you are reckoning. But they are not really for geeks. The web has evolved. The geeks no longer play the predominant role and it's in the hands of the designers now, and the creative people who will use the powers that the geeks have given them.
Now the geeks need more toys for the web? Maybe not, maybe they just need another paradigm, another web.
Glenn Davis Project Cool, Inc. http://www.projectcool.com
OmniWeb 2.0 is our browser for OpenStep/Rhapsody. It is shipping today, it has 400,000+ customers, it is competely Netscape 2.0 compatible (except for JavaScript and Java, and Java is coming).
From: wjs@omnigroup.com (William Shipley); Sent at 2/3/97; 7:10:45 PM; Re: Tricky Browser Guys.Sure, you've never heard of it, since you don't use OpenStep, but since the first release of Rhapsody will basically be OpenStep/Mach, you'll be seeing more of it. (It's the browser NeXT was demoing at MacWorld on their machines.)
In answer to your plea, OmniWeb has loadable bundles that are completely easy to use and documented. You can drive the entire program from a bundle, or write a specific bundle to enhance some aspect. Since OmniWeb is written with Objective-C, you can write a bundle to subclass something we've written that you want to add to. You can write bundles to display new content types, or write bundles for new protocols, or to add preferences, or whatever.
We're so bundle-ified we use bundles internally -- our ftp and gopher and gif support are just bundles, and can be replaced by the user.
What you described in your column would be trivial with OmniWeb.
You think the world needs a third browser? It has one, and it's coming to a Mac near you.
http://www.omnigroup.com/Software/OmniWeb
-Wil
PS: Our browser is the only one that is NOT based on the stinky old CERN library. We wrote our web stuff from scratch for OmniWeb 2, so we have an incredibly cool, extensible, truly multi-threaded pipeline architecture. It's how we were able to ship OmniWeb 2 at the same time as Netscape 2 with the same features, when we only had 3 guys on the project.
Cyberdog was a good idea, but I'm not looking to Apple for any answers for at least the next year. I've finally come to agree with you on the whole OpenDoc thing.
From: tmmoore@cmu.edu (Tim Moore); Sent at 2/3/97; 11:00:00 PM; Re: Berst Alert!I'm hoping that the answer will come from HotJava, which is more than a web browser but an entire web/net api for Java. It has components analagous to Netscape plugins, but written in Java (making them substantially simpler) and they can be loaded transparently off the net (like applets) so that there's no download-install-restart browser routine for the users.
Of course, it hasn't been delivered yet, but Sun's saying March. It remains to be seen if it will actually be useful, but it looks promising. The missing piece is lack of Apple event support. It would be good if there was some way to call public Java methods from OSA scripts. You've been hinting that there is Java-Frontier integration in the works, I think this would be a very good thing.
It would be nice to see something new, though. I'm also unsatisfied by Netscape and Microsoft--I can't even run the new version of MSIE on my aging 68k Mac. Java support is flaky at best. The barrage of new HTML tags is annoying. Memory requirements are shooting through the roof just as speed is dropping to the ground. A third party browser could be just what the market needs.
-- Tim Moore Carnegie Mellon University
What I find interesting is that IBM has already been in the browser business for some time, albeit not through Lotus. OS/2 and Windows users have had WebExplorer for some time, though IBM finally gave up on WebEx and threw its support to Netscape (predictable - Netscape isn't Microsoft). I suppose that a Lotus-based approach makes sense in light of everything going on with Notes.
From: ddeckert@ufsmain.win.net; Sent at 2/3/97; 11:48:28 PM; Re: Berst Alert!Dave -
From: bhyde@gensym.com (Ben Hyde); Sent at 2/4/97; 9:57:28 AM; exiteSome time ago you mentioned a service that would rapidly reindex news sites. www.exite.com seems to be doing something along those lines now. "NewsTracker".
I don't think you should presume that web browsers have the page's source text in memory. The one I wrote lex and parses directly into the bytecode that drives the rendering engine and mouse tracking. It sheds all the stuff the user doesn't see, and it back patchs in all the layout cruft he does. Otherwise everything will be slow. The transformation is not invertible. If show source reloads the page, and if the cache is "encrypted" then you can be pretty sure they don't have the source anymore.
Of course I agree completely that they should provide a way to get at this stuff. It is amazing the lack of vision the Browser guys seem to have about the client side oportunities they could enable.
- ben
I think that this would be a wonderful thing to have (though the timescale on the Lotus announcement looks like it is geared to IBM time rather than Internet time!) Our product is an application of intelligent agent technology to the Web. It runs on the client machine, but it has turned out that the best way to do the interface is through the browser.
From: rpandya@netcom.com (Ravi Pandya); Sent at 2/4/97; 10:09:31 AM; Re: Berst Alert!It is so much easier to develop a visually appealing graphical application when you can easily use rich text, formatting, and animated graphics, along with plugins like FutureSplash. Our art director can quickly develop comps with great production values that we can easily use as templates for dynamically generated HTML.
However, the existing browsers don't really give you enough access to do a highly interactive interface, even if you are running on the same machine rather than through a server. Simple things like responding to mouse position, or enabling based on data entry, vary from difficult to impossible. A rich object model for interacting with the browser would be great. Microsoft's Trident dynamic HTML initiative also looks like it is moving in this direction, but I don't know how far it will go.
Ravi
Is anyone interested in getting the numbers right once and for all? Apple's survival should recognize that retail distribution is DOA. Maybe they should hire the folks at Amazon.
From: slove@netscape.com (Scott Love); Sent at 2/4/97; 2:47:48 PM; which company sold more systems direct in 1996?God, I hope this will work. It seems to me this is where it has to happen. I have tried to sell Macs (as a VAR) and find that trying to sign-up at a VAR with Merisel is like trying to leap large buildings in one bound. I don't know why I have to tell them my pedigree to buy product and resell it to my clients.
From: bleadon@dbs.xo.com (Charles Bleadon); Sent at 2/4/97; 3:26:11 PM; Apple Reorg(We develop a Point of Sale/Inventory Management product for almost 10 years. We know more about the Mac than most people at Merisel) We are asked by people, from time to time, to bundle the "whole package together."
I have complained for years about the inability to buy and/or sell Macs to the public. Like the Newton, if Apple wants to keep the product difficult to buy, then they are likely to own it all alone, along with their creditors.
I love the Mac. I just don't like their marketing and distribution of product. They seem to let fools run the show for them and no matter how much money they loose, they never find the biggest source of their problems. I think this may be a step in the right direction, but it could be a day late and a penny short.
Charles Bleadon
Dave,
From: jhebert@lab.housing.fsu.edu (james hebert); Sent at 2/5/97; 12:47:12 PM; Microsoft VB and dogsYah - killer past few days of flow on that news page... woo!
I read that Microsoft Visual Basic article and couldn't help but think of Apple! The article blasts M$'s decision not to license VB, in favor of keeping it proprietary, the same way I recall you blasting Apple, saying they should have licensed the MacOS for a dollar to everyone in sight, and sought ubiquity. Great pointer!
Also, thanks for posting that page flipper link - I've been messing with everyone I know for the past 2 days with that one. =)
My mom and dad would get the biggest kick in the world if you put a link up to their dog's page. If you don't want to start doing that for me (and then everyone else - I know how it goes) then I understand... but if you're game, it's
Lovin' Frontier 4.2, DaveNet, and the rest. Keep Diggin!
Best, Jim Hebert jhebert@lab.housing.fsu.edu
> Berst says the world revolves around Gates and Andreessen.
From: searls@batnet.com (Doc Searls); Sent at 2/3/97; 8:38:42 PM; MS. vs. Netscape -- not!He's paid to say that.
You know what the top Web server is? Check this out:
http://www.netcraft.com/survey/.
Number One isn't Netscape or Microsoft. It's Apache, which is freeware from geeks. Number 2 is another piece of freeware: NCSA. Does either get covered worth a shit by the PC rags? No. Why? Two reasons: 1) they're not in a 'war' with anybody, and therefore don't self-generate empty copy; and 2) they don't pre-qualify for coverage because they don't advertise.
> The web is what's happening, not the companies.
Right on. To read the trades, you'd think Netscape and Microsoft invented everything. The truth, of course, is that the web was driven by USERS and by GEEKS. Without their altruism and inventiveness, it'd be somebody's closed "intranet."
Nice story about Apple....but....everyone knows that once an acquiror starts to buy on the market, the price starts to move up....fast. It would take alot of buying to buy enough quickly enough....it could happen but the price would likely be somewhere n ear what SUN proposed or beyond it. Is anyone interested at that price? It is ALOT MORE than $100M....Alot.
From: jrusso@computerlaw.com (Jack Russo); Sent at 2/6/97; 10:47:14 AM; Some Delicious Ideas!Is Apple stock "undervalued"? I think that is the big question and the answer, in part, depends on the question: Will there sales continue to decrease faster than their expenses? Paying $400M for Next is a big expense; is there $400M in immediate add itional sales from it -- is there even $40M there for 1997? 1998? 1999? It is telling that SJ did not take Apple stock -- isn't there a big message there?
Yesterday, a friend called who has been a Mac enthusiast for over 10 years -- she has over 10 Mac machines. She has had one of every model since day #1. She loves it. She was embarrassed to say that she was moving to Windows 95, but she was, because " too many of my clients want their electronic files immediately in that format" and "the software they use and they want me to use is all in Windows 95...."
This is a one person company now also captured by Microsoft; next I will hear that college, high-school (and perhaps last) grade school students say the same thing. It is sad; they are sad. But decisions made 5 years ago seem to be having their consequ ence. Aren't they?
Hey Dave,
From: lisap@cw.com (lisap@cw.com); Sent at 2/6/97; 10:55:45 PM; Re: Some Delicious Ideas!My dream, which will probably be hated by Apple loyalists and microsoft bashers, is to have Steve Ballmer run Apple. There aren't very many people with his amazing business sense and huge level of enthusiasm. In the old days that guy worked up a sweat extoling the virtues of OS/2 and people bought into it (of course, until Microsoft changed directions on IBM). He clearly knows how to run a massive company - he has been the key factor in Microsoft's success since the beginning.
Also, as we all know, its good for microsoft to have apple alive and kicking.