Week
of May 4 1998
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May
8
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Wired
Ventures
Inc.
has sold its print publication, Wired
magazine, to Advance Magazine Publishers
Inc., owners of lifestyle magazines,
including Vogue, GQ, and Vanity Fair.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
 
ASTARTE
M. Pack
2.1.6,
an MPEG-Encoding application for Power
Macs is now available. M. Pack can create
video streams for Video-CD, CD-i, CD-ROM
and the World Wide Web, and is compatable
with QuickTime 3.0. A plug-in is also
included for use with Adobe Premiere. List
price is $299.
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May
7
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Dragonfly Digital Design has released
FrameBlender
a freeware/shareware plug-in that uses
oversampling to increase the quality of
still images captured with a video camera.
FrameBlender is primarily useful to remove
random noise. Assuming the noise is
different in every frame, blending many
frames together acts to cancel out the
noise. FrameBlender is available in two
incarnations:
- FrameBlenderQT
is a QuickTime Movie Export component
and can be used with Apple MoviePlayer.
- FrameBlender
for Photoshop only works with
Filmstrip files. Filmstrip files can be
exported from Adobe Premiere. The
FrameBlender plug-in is not yet
available, but it's predecessor "Reduce
Noise" is.
An article
in the Washington
Post
online describes problems facing
broadcasters trying to prepare for digital
television. Problems range range from
difficulty in erecting transmission towers
to international signal-interference
issues.
A Microsoft
support
article
for FrontPage 98 explains that
users who define their root directory as
their web directory can accidently erase
their entire hard disk.
Users are encouraged to always create web
sites inside a sub-directory.
The more we see of Java, the less
impressed we are [skip the
editorials in the news items-Ed]
but if you're interested in why Java is so
slow - and what might be done to fix it -
check out the article "How
to Soup Up
Java"
at the Byte website.
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May
6
|
CNET
reports
that Tele-Communications, Inc (TCI)
Chairman Malone has said that the cable
company won't support the Digital
Television (HDTV) 1080i format. This is
the format that CBS has said they will
support in their test broadcasts, and
which NBC is considering using.
TCI prefers the 720p format (primarily
because the 1080i format takes four times
as much bandwidth.) TCI's press
release
says only "With respect to broadcasters
which are desirous of adopting more
demanding and inefficient
[ouch!-Ed] foramts, such as
1080i, TCI will continue to work with
vendors to accomodate such
demands."
In a second
announcement
(TCI) said it has chosen the Personal Java
software environment from Sun Microsystems
as the standard programming language on
its TV set-top boxes.
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May
5
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Apple has announced that it has
purchased technology from Macromedia that
will be used in future versions of
QuickTime.
There has been speculation that Apple has
purchased Final Cut, a high end
editing application that Macromedia had
been developing.
IncWell
Digital
Media Group Ltd have announced that they
intend to purchase the SuperCard
technology from Allegiant. IncWell is a
publisher of educational information on
the Web. Allegiant
had been shopping for a buyer for some
time.
MacWEEK
has a short
article
which mentions some of the plans the new
owners have, including simpler versions of
SuperCard.
Microsoft has released
a beta
of Liquid Motion, an application
for creating animations that can be played
on any browser (that supports Java.)
Liquid Motion will be released in June for
Windows 95/NT and will cost $149.
Animations will play on Macintosh
browsers, but the authoring application is
Windows only
Rumors and reports about MetaCreations
MetaStream technology for streaming
3D information now suggest that
MetaCreations is working in partnership
with Intel. The technology will be
unveiled next Monday.
Caligari
has
announced that they will including
LightWorks' renderer in future versions of
trueSpace.
MSNBC
has an
article
about artist Mattison Fitzgerald who has
started a campaign to increase public
knowledge and awareness about Art on the
Net, and to protect Artists rights.
The campaign "Protect Art It's Not
Shareware", or PAINS, is primarily a
collection of web icons that people are
encouraged to add to their web page.
Fitzgerald has a
web page
with information and the web buttons.
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May
4
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Astarte, the original developers of the
Macintosh Toast CD-ROM burning software,
has started a beta
program for
DVDirector,
a DVD authoring system. Expected in July
with a list price of $5,400, they
currently have a beta program that has two
levels, one which costs $2,7000 (but you
end up with the software) and the other
which is free, but you only get a time
limited version of the software.
System requirements - Macintosh PCI-PPC
(G3/266 recommended), 32 MB RAM, Graphic
card with minimum 1024x768 pixels and 24
bit color depth, CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive,
System 8.1 or higher.
MacWEEK reviews
Chroma Graphics Inc.'s EdgeWizard a
Photoshop plug-in for creating edit masks
and selections.
MacWEEK
reports
that Strata will release an update to
MediaPaint
in August. MediaPaint is a QuickTime video
editor that lets the user paint on the
QuickTime movie while it is playing.
The upgrade will feature a new interface,
and new effects including Vortex, Fountain
and Lava.
A CNN
report
explores the continuing problems facing
digital television.
Due to roll out at the end of the year,
broadcasters, cable companies, and
television manufacturers still seem to
have no clear idea what digital television
will be and how quickly it will dominate
the marketplace.
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