RAndY's RumOR RaG October 1992 NEWS IN YER FACE I hear that State of the Art will be acquiring Real World Accounting. The legwork has been done, now we're just waiting for an announcement. --------------- The folks at Banyan Systems and Novell are talking to each other about improving the interoperability of their products and cooperating to satisfy the needs of joint customers. --------------- Microsoft has some new things up it's sleeve. Look for a new version of Money and the entry-level accounting package from Great Plains. This integrated package will be called Microsoft Profit. They've also bundled Works for Windows and Publisher, giving away a mouse pad, WinFax UltraLITE, and 25 cartoon clip-art images in the bargain. Publisher is also being distributed on CD-ROM and includes the Microsoft Design Pack which has 100 clip-art images, 5 TrueType fonts, 20 professionally designed templates, and Microsoft Draw. The Design pack is also available separately. --------------- Set to debut October 23rd is Hewlett-Packard's new LaserJet IV printers. These are 600 dpi printers with an Intel 960 chip inside. You also get a TrueType rasterizer, Compugraphic Intellifont rasterizer, and the ability to upgrade to PostScript II with an Adobe ROM cartridge. I hear the price will be in the $2,300-$2,400 range. --------------- Borland is looking to jazz up DOS dBase by including a DOS extender to improve performance. Rumor has it that they'll use Rational Systems' DOS/16M extender for the project, code-named Eclipse. Use of the extender would give dBase access to 16M of memory and possibly improve performance (depending upon how well it's implemented). The concern is that the new product would require at least 4M of RAM and many dBase users are still running on low-end 286 and 386 systems. --------------- Soon-to-be-released WordPerfect Office 4.0 will include updated calendaring and scheduling modules, enhanced wide-area connection management, the ability to pre-set viewer privileges, as well as the ability to launch other programs from within mail. You'll be able to view fax forms from within the mail program and the Windows version will include a thesaurus and spell checker. Another new product called Informs is a Windows-based forms package. Included will be separate modules for developing and using forms, and forms data can be exported to external databases. Version 6 of DOS WordPerfect has an anticipated ship date of first quarter 1993. It will feature zoom editing, bulleted paragraphs, drag-and-drop, hot keys, and collapsible outlining. Informed sources say the look and feel is similar to Windows. --------------- Look for November 16th to be the unveiling day for Microsoft's Windows database Access (formerly known as Cirrus). Beta testers suggest that a December-January ship date is more realistic than Microsoft predictions. In related news, Microsoft will dump Excel's Q+E as a database access and replace it with perhaps Access. The boys in Redmond recently unveiled WinLogin, a system administrator which sets up a central database for Windows configuration and defaults so that systems are automatically set each time the user logs on to a network. List price is $29.95. --------------- Apple is recalling some of the early model PowerBook 100 notebooks due to a circuit board malfunction. It seems that an electrical short which has shown up in three systems results in the melting of a small hole in the bottom of the system's outer case. --------------- Microsoft has been recently overwhelmed with requests for the Windows NT preliminary SDK. In case you haven't heard, you can get it for $69 (plus $10 S&H). It requires 12MB of RAM and contains over 100MB of documentation in PostScript format. You will get updates as they become available and a final free copy of the operating system when it hits the market. The SDK ships on a CD and contains compilers for both Intel and RISC processors. Microsoft has been getting an average of 500 requests per day for the CD!! And speaking of NT, you read it here first last month. Windows NT will be delayed until first quarter of 1993 (there's a surprise). --------------- Meanwhile, in Intel land, they're having trouble with the P5 chip. The original design cannot operate faster than 40MHz without overheating. This may require Intel to redesign parts of the chip which would delay production, of course. --------------- Hewlett-Packard has signed an agreement to acquire Colorado Memory Systems, manufacturer of tape backup units. When the acquisition is complete, Colorado will become a subsidiary within HP's Mass Storage Group. --------------- MORE MICROSOFT WOES Microsoft has been under yet another attack recently for allegedly using undocumented functions in Windows to gain an unfair competitive advantage. Of course, we all know that such a thing would never happen (grin). I guess that Lotus asked Microsoft to fix a function in Windows 3.1 that affected the way in which charts were rendered on the screen. Microsoft said that fixing the problem would cause problems for their own Excel and PowerPoint. Another developer ridiculed Lotus saying, "undocumented calls are not the reason 1-2- 3 for Windows is a crummy product". In an attempt to dampen criticism, Microsoft released a 10- page white paper discussing the 16 functions at issue. The paper claims that four functions are documented in the SDK, six are "obsolete", five have documented equivalents, and one is "entirely useless". The paper did not explain why Microsoft developed an "entirely useless" function. --------------- DASHBOARD Last month I reported on this new program from Hewlett-Packard and I now have some details. It appears constantly at the bottom of a Windows screen and includes a set of controls for accessing multiple-screen views of programs and push-button icons for launching applications. There's a list price of $99 and requires 2M of memory and 1M of hard drive space. Of course it will work in conjunction with NewWave. It can be customized to include three, five, seven, or nine screen views. Users can switch between applications by selecting one of the views. Often used screen layouts can also be saved. There is support for accessing system resources, enabling users to reconfigure or change default settings. Support for drag- and-drop is also included. There's a gauge that shows details about available memory and system resources. An alarm can be triggered if these drop below user-defined levels. The screen photographs I've seen of the product look sort of stupid, but then these are the folks who brought us NewWave. --------------- CD TALK Well, I finally did it - that SCSI interface was just sitting there on my sound card. I had installed a CD-ROM for a customer and saw the potential. Now I had to have one. My Pro Audio Spectrum 16 card has a standard 50-pin SCSI interface, so now it was time to shop for a drive. SCSI CD drives are not cheap. I was interested in the NEC CDR-84 with their new, faster technology but a salesperson told me there were problems with the drive (I have yet to confirm this). Anyway, I ended up buying a Hitachi-3750. (I just wanted a bare drive with no software bundle.) The cabling had to be obtained from Media Vision since CD-ROM manufacturers have yet to standardize the connections for audio. The kit also came with the necessary drivers for the Pro Audio Spectrum card. Fortunately, the driver and MSCDEX were able to load high. So far, the drive has worked well and I have no complaints. When a CD is loaded, a dark grey door seals the drive so you know there's already a disc in there. The Hitachi, like many others, uses caddies. I find the caddies to be a nuisance, but most drives seem to use them. Here's my recommendations for hardware: shop around. Be careful about low prices. Most of the low priced drives use a proprietary interface. For example, you often see the Sony-535 advertised at decent prices. While this is a good drive, be aware that it uses a non-standard SCSI interface. I suggest avoiding the Mitsumi with it's 700ms access time, these things are slow enough and there's no reason to get one this slow. If you want multimedia, do it right with a sound card - you'll save yourself a slot. Many of the packaged multimedia upgrades include some excellent software. OK, you've got the hardware, it's hooked up and running. Now what will you do for software? There is a lot of CD software out there, much of it under $100. Sierra sells several of their games on CD. You get the same 256-color graphics as the floppy-based games, but instead of reading narration in a box on the screen, the voices of live actors have been digitized. That means that not only is the narration spoken, but the characters also speak their parts. For example, King's Quest V has the digitized voices of 50 different actors. This brings a new dimension to gaming. It gets a little tiring when you have to listen to the same narration repeatedly, like when you've restored a game and need to go through a particular portion again. But it's still more realistic than reading text on the screen. Sierra has plans to convert more of their games to CD which will include digitized images as well as speech. And the prices are quite reasonable. Last year, I sent in an entry to the CorelDraw! contest. Just for entering, they sent me a box of stuff including a mouse pad, keychain, miscellaneous promo items, and Corel Artshow '91. Artshow is a CD which contains not only the winning entries from the previous year's contest, but all of the entries that were sent in. There's also Alchemy, a JPG compression and conversion program. Don't forget the Electronic Library of Art, over 1,000 works of art through the ages. My favorite is Corel CD-Audio which lets you play audio CD's and even remembers the titles, artists, and tracks on your audio CD's. (If you have the ArtShow CD, run it through your audio CD player - there are some orchestral tracks they don't tell you about that are quite nice.) Viewing the contest winners and entries can be automated through an attractive Toolbook interface which also includes several MIDI background tracks. If you buy a multimedia bundle, you'll likely get some kind of encyclopedia included. Media Vision bundles a special edition of Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia. I bought Microsoft's Bookshelf which is a combination of The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, The American Heritage Dictionary, Roget's Electronic Thesaurus, The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1992, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, the Concise Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, and the Hammond Atlas. Whew, that's a mouthful!! Bookshelf is easy to navigate and includes a QuicKeys utility which lets you jump to a Bookshelf module to reference a word from another document. There's a lot to any of these encyclopedias, especially the multimedia ones. Bookshelf has narrated animations, animations without narration, musical examples, and lots of digitized images. Many of the words are pronounced for you, the Atlas plays national anthems of each country for you (and also has the words). There's so much here, it would take me reams to describe it all. You could easily spend hours exploring all the possibilities. I wish they had these things when I was in school (pre-PC days). Just bring up a topic, select Edit-Copy to copy the text to the clipboard, load up the word processor and paste the text. Need the flag of Ethiopia? Just bring up the information for that country, copy the flag to the clipboard, then paste it where you want it. JEEZ, I could have done great in school. As you surely know by now, CorelDraw! now comes with a CD. You'll need a CD-ROM to get to the 12,000+ clipart images contained therein. There's also a ton of fonts and symbols on the CD as well as animated sequences and more. You can even set it up to run Corel from the CD and save hard drive space if you wish. Multimedia Beethoven: The Ninth Symphony is an exhaustive CD combining text, graphics, and an audio CD performance of this famous work that is absolutely stunning. You can study the life and times of Beethoven as well as take a music lesson which includes a glossary of musical terms. When listening to the work, explanatory notes guide you with commentary on what musical devices are used in each passage. There's no way I can adequately describe what this CD is all about. You must experience it for yourself. Remember, I'm a rock-and-roller and this one blew me away! --------------- VENTURA PUBLISHER 4.1 Ventura Publisher has just released a new version with a new interface that includes flexible menus and dialog box positioning, multiple zoom levels, and a customizable 3-D buttonbar. Also new are frame tags which let you define, apply, and revise frame attributes as you do with paragraphs. You can set tabs, margins, indents and outdents with a mouse. Paragraph and text modes have been combined into one. This new version includes Ventura Scan and Ventura Separator which were previously separate products. I just hope the damned thing is more stable than past versions. Another new product is Ventura AdPro, which is an advertising design and layout program. You can create, comp, and produce ads, flyers, and other single-page promo pieces. --------------- NEW BORLAND STUFF I just returned from the Borland Power Breakfast. This is an event Borland uses to roll out new products. Resellers are treated to a free breakfast, sit through a sales pitch, and go home with evaluation software. When I went to the rollout for Quattro Pro 3 and Paradox 3.5, the food was fantastic. Today, well, I've had better breakfasts at McDonald's (and I should know). The program was OK and I got to see demonstrations of Quattro Pro 4 for DOS, Quattro Pro for Windows, and Paradox 4. Paradox for Windows is still in beta testing and will be released when Borland feels it's ready - no timetable given. Both Quattro Pro's looked real good. They continue to enhance their offerings and the Windows version will likely give Excel a run. The notebook metaphor doesn't excite me, nor do the Object Operators, but they're well done and the public should love these and other features. They've done an especially good job in making slideshows easy to produce. As I mentioned in the RaG last month, they are bundling both versions of Quattro Pro for the price of one. That's an outrageous deal. Paradox is still the fastest relational database around. They've given the interface a facelift, but if you prefer the old style, it's still there as an option. All of these products are mouseable and network ready. --------------- NEW TEAC DRIVE A while back I reported on the new floppy drive by TEAC. I just had the occasion to install this new drive which contains a 1.44MB and a 1.2MB floppy in a single half-height space. If drive space is a concern (maybe you want to add a CD or tape drive and don't have the room) then check out the TEAC FD-505. You only connect one drive cable and jumpers on the back let you set which drive is "A". I usually don't like floppy drives that use buttons to release the disk, but this one has a very secure feel. I may end up getting one for myself. Be aware that you cannot write in 360K format. This is not as big a deal as you may think - you shouldn't write in 360K format in a high density drive anyway. --------------- ================================= DISCLAIMER RAndY's RumOR RaG is published on a monthly basis by AINSWORTH COMPUTER SERVICES and is available on various local BBS's, GEnie, and America Online as well as in Modem News. In case anyone cares, RAndY's RumOR RaG is produced on a DTK 386-33 with 16 megs of memory, Cyrix Fasmath co-processor, ATI VGA Wonder+ card (1 MB), 105 MB Toshiba IDE hard drive, Teac 1.2 MB and 1.44 MB floppies, Hitachi 3750 CD ROM drive, Sceptre SVGA display, Microsoft mouse, WordPerfect for Windows and transmitted through a US Robotics HST Dual Standard modem. Opinions expressed are those of the author. Comments should be addressed to Ainsworth Computer Services on GEnie, America Online, phone, analog mail, or whatever method makes you feel good. AINSWORTH COMPUTER SERVICES 605 W. Wishkah Aberdeen, WA 98520-6031 (206) 533-6647 GEnie Address: RAG America Online: RumOR RaG