Volume Number: 14 (1998)
Issue Number: 3
Column Tag: Newsbits

Mar 98 - Newsbits

by Jessica Courtney

Nisus Software and Casady & Green software developers announced that they have formed a Strategic Alliance and will begin to cross market and bundle selected products. Nisus has its offices in the San Diego Community of Solana Beach, California, and Casady & Greene has its offices in the Silicon Valley community of Salinas, California.

Nisus Writer is still the only solution on the Macintosh for multilingual needs and will now be available with Casady & Greene's Spreadsheet 2000 program. Look for Nisus Software's announcements about MathHelp and other new cross platform products.

http://www.nisus.com/

Tabasoft SendGraphic 1.0 is a tool that allows macintosh webmasters to build on the fly (and send on the web) dynamic graphics from data embedded in HTML.

Usually graphics are static images in your web site linked as "<IMG SRC..." HTML tags. Suppose that your graphics comes from dynamic data and that this data changes every day (or more). If you have static graphics you have to manually rebuild your graphics every day. With SendGraphic you can avoid this. In fact it builds graphics in real time so that they always match your data. Also, with static data, SendGraphic can be very useful when you have to build many graphics and you don't want to do it manually.

SendGraphic can be used in very different situations. You may want to use SendGraphic as a WSAPI HTTP Server plug-in or as an HTTP Server ACGI. SendGraphic requires a Power Macintosh, system 7 or later with QuickTime.

A full version of SendGraphic is now available for download at http://tabasoft.ancitel.it/TABASOFT/SendGraphic.html.

http://tabasoft.ancitel.it

Roundabout Logic, Inc. announced that it is now the official publisher of the well-known QuickTime VR tools, Nodester and Widgetizer. Both these Macintosh-only applications, formerly published by Panimation, Inc., are available from Roundabout Logic, Inc. of Winter Springs, Florida, as of February 1, 1998.

By March 1, 1998, Roundabout Logic will ship the latest updates of Nodester and Widgetizer on CD with an entirely new look to the packaging. And for the first time, the product line will be available from resellers worldwide (previously they were sold direct only).

Nodester, the renowned rapid panoramic editor for QuickTime VR, first got national attention when it was included in Guy Kawasaki's address during the keynotes at Macworld Expo Boston in August of 1997 as one of his picks for the ten most exciting new Macintosh applications for 1997. Since then it has gained notoriety from most of the world's Macintosh press and has been deemed outstanding in many comparative product reviews as well.

Widgetizer is the innovative rapid object editor for QuickTime VR (QTVR). With features such as definable hot spots, custom backgrounds, frame-based animation and sound integration, Widgetizer provides the most comprehensive object creation toolset on the market. Both Nodester and Widgetizer export QuickTime VR 1.0 and 2.0.

Apple Computer, Inc. developed QuickTime VR and has vigorously supported its adoption as an industry standard. With Apple's recent beta release of QuickTime 3.0, QuickTime VR v2.1 and streaming QuickTime Plug-In v2.0, that standard has been achieved. QuickTime VR is an extension of Apple's basic QuickTime technology and supports two different types of views, QTVR panorama movies and QTVR object movies. Panoramic editors, like Nodester, produce movies which look out from a center or nodal point, allowing the viewer to to simulate turning and viewing 360 degrees around a panoramic scene. Widgetizer, a rapid object editor, generates object movies which look in at a center point or plane, simulating the effect of holding an object in the hand and turning it around to see all sides, top and bottom. QuickTime VR is an innovative enabling technology for electronic commerce. Usually implemented as a photo-realistic or 3D rendered virtual reality, QTVR is finding its way into markets such as product catalogs, real estate, automobiles, museums, education, travel industry, etc.

http://www.roundaboutlogic.com

Metrowerks Inc. announced that they have begun shipping Release 4 of CodeWarrior for Palm OS, the latest version of the company's popular set of development tools for building Palm Computing platform applications for the 3Com PalmPilot Organizer, IBM WorkPad PC Companion, and Franklin Day Planner The Palm Computing platform is an open architecture consisting of the reference hardware design, Palm OS, HotSync conduit data synchronization technology, platform component tools, and software interface capabilities to support hardware add-ons.

CodeWarrior for Palm OS is a tightly integrated development environment complete with editor, project manager, C/C++ compiler, source- and assembly-level debugger, direct-to-device debugger, stand-alone assembler, GUI layout tools, and linker. It allows developers to take advantage of the enhanced TCP/IP support in the Palm OS 2.0 and design new applications to quickly and easily synchronize Palm OS data over corporate intranets and in-house networks.

http://www.metrowerks.com

Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDI), has licensed the Java Application Environment (JAE) from Sun Microsystems to include in upcoming releases of BSDI Internet Server and e/BSD, the embedded systems technology for developers of network appliances.

Specifics of the Agreement

BSDI joins a large number of Java technology licensees in embracing the JAE. With this license, BSDI has access to JavaSoft's complete application execution environment, including the Java Virtual Machine and all required class libraries.

By virtue of the licensing arrangement with Sun, BSDI will provide its users and development partners a high degree of technical support, and plans to register their products in the Java Solutions Guide, as well as support Sun's Java Select Program for developers.

The Appeal of the Java Platform The Java platform is important to open computing, and as such it has become a popular environment for developing network management utilities, Web pages, and other object-oriented applications. Developers are adopting the Java language because they can reuse software components across applications to economically get their products to more markets faster. Availability and Pricing Java will be included in an upcoming BSDI Internet Server release in summer 1998. It will be available to network appliance developers using e/BSD technology in the same time frame.

http://www.bsdi.com

Glucose Development Corporation today announced the immediate availability of Data Hammer 1.5, a major upgrade of its automatic text summarization device for the Macintosh.

A powerful new text summarization engine, visual query execution, and round-trip web publishing top the list of features in this release.

In addition to the newspaper-style headlines that version 1.0 generated, Data Hammer 1.5 uses a new summarization engine to extract a bulleted list of major topics from each section of a document.

Users can also search for words or phrases and see a colored map of where they occur throughout a document.

In addition, round-trip web publishing means that any web page can now be fetched, summarized, and saved as HTML all from within Data Hammer.

http://www.glu.com

The AG Group, Inc. shipped the new version 3.5 of EtherPeek for Macintosh, an upgrade to its popular 3.1 version. The award-winning Ethernet network and protocol analyzer adds a new Summary Statistics window for baselining and monitoring key traffic statistics to its rich set of capabilities. Key features of the software include real-time and post-capture packet filtering, Plug-ins for expert packet analysis, powerful decoding with support for all major protocol suites (including IP, AppleTalk, Netware IPX/SPX, NetBEUI, NetBIOS, DECnet, SMB, OSI TARP and more), ProtoSpecs? technology for fine delineation of packet type, simple "Make Filter" command for address, protocol and offset filtering creation/modification, real-time utilization statistics for node, protocol, and filtered packet monitoring, HTML traffic statistics output, enhanced protocol definitions, and more.

http://www.aggroup.com/

Tangent Systems announced that it is now shipping BuildSim 2.0 for the Power Macintosh and Macintosh Computers. BuildSim 2.0 represents a major technical upgrade. Besides the productivity tools, increased simulation speed and more capable simulation building blocks, is the code base is now setup for a port to Windows 95. The company is also examining the option of jumping directly to a pure Java version of the application.

BuildSim 2.0 Provides an Integrated Development Environment for Simulation and Control System Development :

Developers will enjoy how easily systems can be modeled, simulated and tested. With the integrated automatic code generator in the Platinum Edition, BuildSim Projects can be synthesized in C++ or Java for embedded system control, leveraging the growing internet infrastructure for simulation and distributed process control. With BuildSim, Tangent Systems is one of the early entrants into the field of internet enabled distributed process control and monitoring systems. The Java code generator tool will allow the synthesis of robo-controllers that can then be compiled and deployed using tools already in the field. Complex dynamic models and control systems can simulated and data collected and plotted. BuildSim has been designed to make "tinkering" in the modeling/simulation world easy. On top of that, several productivity tools have been carefully designed to make it a truly unique and powerful application for developing and deploying simulations and process control systems.

http://www.tangentsys.com