New Products Boost Mac’s Appeal

The Apple Macintosh computer, with its helpful graphics and easy-to-use software, is becoming more and more popular in business settings. Infonetics analyst Nina Burns says that 53% of the roughly 1.5 million Macs shipped since the machine was introduced in 1984 are found in business settings.

The machine’s corporate appeal was evident at this month’s MacWorld Exposition in Boston. The first MacWorld Expo, held in 1985, was dominated by the jeans and T-shirt crowd. The techies still are there, but the marketing types are now in control. Mac vendors, like those selling IBM PC accouterments, are after that coveted “volume buyer.”

What kinds of new products will be available soon for these buyers? The company hasn’t announced any new versions of the Mac, though new machines are expected later this year or early in 1989, including a possible laptop model. Apple, meanwhile, has successfully prevented clone-makers from coming out with Macintosh-compatible machines.

At the same time, corporate buyers may be tempted by a some of the Macintosh accessories and software that are coming out.

Apple has announced that it finally will begin shipping Mac IIs with up to four megabytes of memory, instead of the current limit of only one megabyte. That’s welcome news to those who need powerful machines to run some of the newer programs that demand more memory.

These powerful programs, written both for the Mac and IBM compatibles, are just beginning to become available. But the worldwide shortage of DRAM, or dynamic random access memory chips, has made it difficult for computer companies to fill orders for the higher-capacity machines. Apple has apparently found a supply of memory chips, but they won’t come cheap. One example: In a reversal of a long-term trend, Apple and other computer companies are announcing price increases on their memory upgrade kits.

Apple’s biggest news is its $1,799 desktop scanner. A scanner looks and works like a photocopying machine but instead of producing printed copies, it takes a photograph, a page from a book or a magazine or another piece of paper and converts it into digital information that a computer can understand.

2 Software Packages

Scanners have been around for years but are enjoying increasing interest because of desktop publishing. Now that computers can be used to integrate text and graphics, users need a way to capture existing art to incorporate in their computer-generated publications. Apple is one of many companies that make scanners for the Macintosh. Hewlett-Packard, Dest, AST and others have long made similar products for both the Mac and the IBM PC.

The Apple scanner comes with two interesting software packages. HyperScan allows users to put their graphics directly into HyperCard, the easy-to-use Apple programming language that comes with all Macintoshes.

AppleScan is a more versatile program. It creates graphics that can be put into almost any Macintosh software, and it allows the user to make subtle changes in the appearance of an image, be it a photograph or a drawing. The program’s “grayscale” feature allows you to capture subtle shading. I used it to scan some photos of my children and was very impressed with the results.

Another use for scanners is text recognition. Although Apple does not provide software for that purpose, its scanner can be used with Caere Corp.’s OmniPage optical character recognition software. The program scans a printed page and turns the information into computer text that can be manipulated with a word processing program. It also can convert numbers into a format that spreadsheet programs can accept.

OmniPage is a remarkable program in that it recognizes a wide variety of type faces including type from magazines, books and newspapers. It’s even able to work with multiple column layouts and pages with graphics.

The program filters out the non-text data before it starts the text recognition process. I was impressed at its ability to read and interpret boldface, italic and other non-standard type styles. The only errors it made on a page from Family Circle magazine were from a section of type that was printed in light brown ink.

Better Print Quality

OmniPage, which sells for $795, represents a revolutionary advancement in optical character recognition software. Unfortunately, it requires a rather pricey four-megabyte Mac II or a Mac SE with an accelerator card. An IBM PC version is due out this fall. Caere Corp. can be reached at 100 Cooper Court, Los Gatos, CA 95030. Phone: (408) 395-7000.

In my Aug. 11 column, I wrote about the Diconix 150, a three-pound, battery-operated ink jet printer. Normally, the printer works only with IBM compatibles. However, GCC Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., figured out a way to reconfigure the printer so that it emulates an Apple ImageWriter. Actually, the print quality of the reconfigured printer, a $699 machine called WriteMove, is better than that of the ImageWriter.

Orange Micro of Anaheim makes a device that allows Mac owners to use a wide variety of IBM-compatible printers. The $119 Grappler Mac/GS works with many dot matrix and letter quality printers, while the $129 Grappler LQ works with the new generation of “near letter quality” dot matrix printers.

The LQ also works with Hewlett-Packard’s Desk Jet printer (suggested retail price $995) to produce very impressive material that rivals what you’d expect from a $3,000 laser printer. The Desk Jet-Grappler combination, which together can be bought for as little as $800 if you bargain for discounts, makes sense for the budget-minded Mac user.

There are two caveats. The printer does not support the PostScript page description language that is built into the high-end Apple LaserWriters and some other Mac printers. Thus, even though it will work with most Macintosh software, it will not produce as wide a variety of type sizes and styles as a PostScript printer.

Another problem is speed. The Desk Jet-Grappler chugs along at about a page every four minutes. Orange Micro is working on a new Grappler specifically for the Desk Jet that will print a page every three minutes in graphics mode or a page every 30 seconds for text only. Orange Micro is at 1400 North Lakeview Ave., Anaheim, CA 92807. Phone: (714) 779-2772.

At the last MacWorld Expo, held in January, Apple and Digital Equipment Corp. announced that the two companies would cooperate to encourage linkups between Macintoshes and Digital’s Vax line of mini and mainframe computers. As promised, the companies sponsored a developers conference in conjunction with the Boston Expo.

Independent hardware and software developers were brought up-to-date on the technical specifications for connecting the otherwise incompatible machines. No products were announced, but it appears there will be some exciting products in coming months. Future products will allow Macs and Vaxes not just to share data--they already can do that--but to act as co-processors as well. That way, the Mac can provide graphics and ease of use while the Vax does the heavy duty number-crunching.

Computer File welcomes readers’ comments but regrets that the authors cannot respond individually to letters. Write to Lawrence J. Magid, 3235 Kifer Road, Suite 100, Santa Clara, Calif. 95051, or contact the L. Magid account on the MCI electronic mail system.