The iMac's Place
Differences of opinion are what make horse racing interesting.
My opinion of the iMac is that it will become a very popular intro level Mac. For instance, the fancy case will fit very nicely on Mom's desk in the kitchen, flanked by a vase of flowers and a boombox. It will fit just as nicely on the desk in the daughter's bedroom where she will use it mostly for school work and e-mail.
Her brother will want something that looks like a truck to put in that jungle he calls his room. Make his a low to mid level G3, good 17-inch monitor, and all the bells and whistles that make the world of shoot-'em-ups go 'round. This dolt might not want a Mac, having been brainwashed with the notion that the WinWorld is the place for gamers. The family may have to threaten to disown him.
Dad's G3 will be in the office/den. It will be a mid or high end G3 with an extra hard drive which will be a server on this tight little in-the-home network.
I won't buy an iMac for myself. I presently have a 7100/66 to which I have added extra RAM and VRAM, and an L2 cache. It came in an educational package with a 15" Apple multiscan monitor. A few months ago I bought a 17" Sony 200sf monitor and connected both monitors to the computer.
I'm in no hurry to buy a new computer but when I do it will be a mid-level G3.
Life is good.
Calvin E. von Weissenfluh
cal@comug.org
![[dots graphic]](../images/dots.gif){kind=small}
Outlook and Emailer
I read ATPM with interest every time I find it at Info Mac. I was interested in the Outlook Express article.
Your article doesn't specifically say it's only available as part of Internet Explorer, but that seems to be the only option I found when searching over at Microsloth.
So What gives?
I love Emailer, but am intrigued by something Apple seems so optimistic about that they're including it with their OS.
Thanks for your help and for the intriguing writings!
Gordon Kelly
nodrog@pond.net
Microsoft's ActiveSetup installer allows you to download which ever components you want, to make your own custom installer. --MT
Scorpio and Nisus are Nice
Scorpio is a very good light word processor. I use Nisus for high-end.
David PR Bailin
dprb@openix.com
Abbott Systems' Scorpio was reviewed in ATPM 3.03:
http://www.atpm.com/3.03/
Games Construction Kit
Here is some thoughts about building a Games Construction Kit for the Mac If the iMac and Apple together with it shall succefully break into the home market it clearly needs more games of all kinds. Games like Quake and Final Fantasy VII. I'm sure Apple is working hard to convince developers to realese MacOS versions of the top ten Windoze games. And I'm sure Apple is encouraging developers to make original games for the Mac and iMac escpecially. But there is another thing that Apple could do.
In the 80's and early 90's there were two computers companies called Commodore and Atari that had their home computer plattforms that were incompatible with each other. But Commodore were more succesful and had many more games than Atari did. Along comes a program called Amos for Commodores Amiga computer and a similar one called STOS for Ataris ST computers and the shareware game market exploded. Now everyone with a some BASIC skills and some talent for graphics could make a decent game or two. And as it supported extensions there were addon packages like STOS 3D for 3D graphics (on a 16bit 8mhz computer!) and better and more advanced sprite routines.
If Apple developed a simplified game language that had built in routines for 3D graphics as advanced as Quake 2 and fast sprite routines as well as scrolling. You should be able to program a game like Unreal as well as a simplfied excel but offcourse it should be optimized for games. All controlled in BASIC style. It could be bundled with the iMac for a limited period and then sold at the price of an expensive game. And apple could release upgrades and extensions. Third partys could also make extensions if they thought their scrolling engine were better than apples or if they wanted to support a new 3D card.
Examples of similar programs is Shoot 'em up Construcion Kit for the C64, Amiga and Atari. Director and mTropolis for the Mac wich is mainly for multimedia purposes and not really fast enough to make a good game. Klick and Play for the PC wich is good for some purposes but reallisticly too limited.
This is just an suggestion but it would be great it it came true and I for one would be making games for the Mac like crazy, all for free.
Oskar Glauser
Sweden
Apple Likes Office Just Fine ;-(
What a great publication! Where have you been all my life?
Seriously, this is good, good stuff. As a Mac manager in a Windows shop I particularly enjoyed last month's article on Microsoft Word. I have recently become a reluctant expert on the many important differences between PowerPoint 97 for Windows and the much-celebrated PowerPoint 98 for Macs.
Since my office started using the program I have had to contact Microsoft four times about capabilities available on the windows version but that do not correctly work on the Mac. Each time I was told, politely and efficiently, "that part just doesn't work in the Mac version--tough."
Is there nobody at Apple that has any pull with these people?
At least for Word, Excel and Access there is some decent, equivalent program for the Mac. But PowerPoint is basically it for presentations, especially if you need some degree of compatibility with the other side.
I used the Microsoft hype about PowerPoint 98's equality to PowerPoint 97 to sell a bunch of my folks off of PC laptops and into G3 PowerBooks. Now that they are learning all of the things they can't do they're about to lynch me.
Y'all keep up the good work.
Brett Trent
vector@cutco.com
Microsoft's Tactics
I have come to see very clearly how Microsoft manages to get ahold of markets: Spend time on the features, not the quality. Look at IE and Outlook Express for example:
Outlook Express has the ability to connect to multiple servers, supports rules-based message handling, MIME messages, signatures, multiple users, etc. Great, except it tends to munge enclosures, corrupt its preferences file, and other quirky stupid stuff.
Internet Explorer has great features like archiving your "visited sites" by day, so you can go back and find something you had looked up the other day, plus it remembers passwords for sites, has a nice consolidated "Download Manager," faster display speeds, and some other niceties that make it often preferrable to Navigator. Again, Great, until you find things like that it doesn't run Java or Javascripts correctly, rendering many sites useless...
Microsoft always hooks me on the features, but I invariably find myself back with my original pre-MS application, wishing it had some of the features from Microsoft's product.
Justin Leavens
jtleavens@bigfoot.com
We'd love to hear your thoughts about our publication. We always welcome your comments, criticisms, suggestions, and praise at editor@atpm.com. Or, if you have an opinion or announcement about the Macintosh platform in general, that's ok too.
![[apple graphic]](../images/apple.gif){kind=small}
Reader Comments (2)
Add A Comment