know | Future

A credible and detailed report from Apple Insider claims that we will be seeing the first Intel based Mac coming out of Cupertino as early as Januarry Macworld. The first machine to be moved over to the dark side seems to be the iMac, not the Mini as most expected. They also believe that there is a new Powerbook in the works that should be available as early as February 2006 which will be much thinner than the G4 and will undoubtedly run circles aroung the G4.

IDC is reporting that Instant messaging has achieved critical mass to be considered a mainstream tool. With 12 billion messages being transmitted each day the statistics support it. Personally I feel that IM is important less as a means of communications, after all, who doesn’t have their e-mail client open all the time, but more as an instrument of presence in an increasingly distributed environment.
You can read a teaser of the article here, of course, you will have to pay much bucks to get the full study.

I am sensing some real momentum building for the adoption of InDesign. Though some of the news lately comes from Adobe’s PR department claiming a high rate of adoption of InDesign in newspaper production, I think that we may be soon to turn a corner and be able to say goodbye to Quark Xpress once and for all. Adobe has also recently announced the availability of the Adobe InDesign Server which will only be available from system integrators that will use the core InDesign engine running on central servers to design end to end workflow systems.

Another interesting bit of news is that a company called Markzware has released a converter plugin to export Quark Layouts to Indesign called Q2ID that promises to be much better than the conversion provided by InDesign. Though pricey at $199, if it works as advertised, may pave the way for some serious defection from Quark. Every shop I know is testing InDesign with more or less vigor, and if you aren’t yet, you should…

Update

CreativePro has a new article up talking in depth about Aperture and though it is strictly based on what Apple has made public and an interview they conducted, it provides more detail and some screenshots of the product. If you are an agency IT guy, you need to be ready to get at least one copy in to test. Though I suspect, and most concurr, that Aperture will not kill Photoshop like Final Cut killed Premiere, it may be close.

Apple has just surprised everybody (except me of course, I said they had something extra up their sleeve) by introducing Aperture a RAW format end to end workflow and photo editing software. There have been some rumblings that the Macromedia Adobe merger would endanger Photoshop on the Mac platform. Though Aperture is not as feature rich as Photoshop, it is finetuned to provide services needed by photographers not provided by Photoshop and as such may eat into their market. Some of the features are a lightbox, versioning that provides non-destructive modification to originals, etc. Aperture will be available in November for $499.
read more at Apple’s web site.

Microsoft has released a bug fix for Office 2004 for Mac to fix problems with service pack 2 that could cause Entourage to nuke entire mailboxes off Exchange servers. Our friends at MacWindows have some more info on the problems.

If you have yet to take a look at Zimbra, an open source Exchange replacement, this may be a good time to take a peek.

Software publisher Extensis announced the December availability of a new version of their workflow/catalog system Portfolio. Though the web features have been extended to allow for custom searches to autopublish collections to the web, and support for SQL has been added, it is still essentially a client-server product.

E Ink and Phillips have announced a breakthrough in electronic ink technology: a 10.1 inch flexible e-ink tablet with a resolution of 100 dots per inch (comparable to standard newspaper). This is another step towards a prctical electronic newspaper. Electronic ink is an ideal display medium for books, newspapers and magazines as it needs to be powered only to change and is a purely reflective mechanism that needs no backlighting and is as sharp as ink on white paper.
The full text of the release is here…

Engadget reports this morning that Apple’s invitation only event slated for today in New York City will be to unveil the much rumored PowerPC G970 dual core chipped G5 towers. The event is taking place at the Jacob Javitz on the eve of PhotoPlus Expo and the rumor mill is also expecting new G4 PowerBooks with increased resolution displays. I suspect Apple will throw in some other goodies into the bargain to convince you to not wait for the first gen Intel products slated for June 2006 but everybody expects an announcement in January’s Macworld Expo. My recommendation is to sit tight unless you have machines catching fire and wait for the Intel generation which will make these G5s look like an Atari 2600.

The DOJ has approved Adobe’s the 3.4 billion dollar acquisition of Macromedia leaving European approval as the only hurdle to the transaction. What this means is that you can say goodbye to Macromedia’s Freehand and Adobe’s GoLive in favor of Illustrator and Dreamweaver respectively. Though the demise of Freehand will only be mourned by about eleven users in all, GoLive has carved a nice niche for itself. I suspect that the FUD seeded by Microsoft with its announced 2006 release of new web design and authoring tools to replace the almost forgotten FrontPage must have had something to do with this marriage. I also think that this consolidation and churn may open the door for more mature development and popularity of open source alternatives like Gimp.

More info on this story here…

If you felt a disturbance on the web this morning it is because there are big powers on the move. In a first step to eliminating the need to have multiple IM clients running just to keep up with your friends, MSN and Yahoo have announced yesterday that they will make their IM networks interoperable. Now this is a reversal of their previous (now musty old) deal to interoperate with AOL but MSN clains AOL was “difficult to deal with”. No surprises there though, when you are number one on your own you have little incentive to merge with number two. The biggest winner in all this though will be Google. Now AOL has to play ball with Google, Google needs AOL because they carry about a third of Google’s advertising traffic and Google’s IM is an afterthought and should be dumped in favor of AIM. Though today Time Warner is denying that there is a deal afoot, I still think that where there is smoke there is bound to be fire.
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