 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group APCUG Summit Report Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
 |
Fall COMDEX is the world's biggest personal computer trade show, although it is not limited to PCs. Manufacturers of peripherals, publishers, and service providers are also represented. The Fall (autumn) event is usually in Las Vegas, but a smaller one, Spring COMDEX, alternates between Atlanta and Chicago. COMDEX/Fall runs for five days and the Association of PC User Groups (APCUG) runs a full schedule of user-group related events during that week and the preceding weekend. Melb PC was represented at COMDEX/Fall '92 by Peter Smith, President; Major Keary, Editor, and myself, your APCUG Representative.
Relevance of COMDEX to Melb PC Going to COMDEX cannot be compared to going to PC 92; the user group officers get the most value from their personal contacts with vendors and with their counterparts from other user groups. Seeing the new products is a minor bonus. Those products will have been covered in the Australian trade press in November, so I am not going to elaborate on them here. Here is a list of the user group 'roundtables' held during Nov 14-15:
- Getting the Most out of Comdex
- Business and Legal Issues
- Creating Effective Meeting Programs
- Looking Good in Print (Peter and I led this session with Joe Rigo and Rob Wunderlich)
- Globalnet BBS
- Keeping Your Members Satisfied
- Why SIGs Are Special
- How Your APCUG Relationship Can Benefit Your User Group
- Accounting and Finance
- Members Helping Members
- Publicity and Promotion Building (and Keeping) an Effective Volunteer Base
- Helplines, Workshops, and Training Sessions
- Product Review Policies and Guidelines
- Building a Successful Vendor Relations Program.
- Introduction to OS/2
- Using Online Services to Expand Your Group's Horizons
- Newsletter Design and Preparation Using a Word Processor
- Maintaining Proper Financial Records, Budgets, and Accounting
- Newsletter Design and Preparation Using Desktop Publishing
- Designing a Membership Database
- Design Techniques for Brochures, Flyers and Logos
- Product Reviews: Tips from the Experts
- Design and Content of Effective Press Releases.
APCUG Daily Reports
The following edited items are from the daily newsletters produced by APCUG Volunteers. Each night several of us burned the midnight off to assemble the newsletters using material supplied by our reporters.
Sunday Workshops
by Harvey G. Otfovtch,
CorelDRAW! 's North American Marketing Manager, Kim Dixon, led the 'Brochures,
Flyers, Logos' session. Participants learned to set defaults, do fills, create shadow figures, repeat and duplicate shapes, and more. Kim made designing in
CorelDRAW! look easy and fun.
InfoWorld's Editor of Testing and Reviews, Kevin Strehlo, provided 'Expert Tips for Product
Reviews' explaining InfoWorld's testing philosophy and methodology. Writing reviews is both art and
science: the author must focus the review for the reader and maintain objectivity.
'Effective Press Releases', by Lotus' Elena Fernandez and Eliza Hibben, and
Logitech's Betty Skov, was another opportunity to learn from the experts.
An evening trade show previewed several new products. Knowledge Adventure Inc.'s Dinosaur Adventure, a graphical-hypertext, database. Logitech's color hand scanner is a new technology with application for desktop publishing needs. Shapewrare Corporation demonstrated their recently unveiled drawing product
Visio. Visio allows the user to drag and drop shapes onto a gridded work surface. ZiffNet's Support-On-Site is an online information service feature directed at individuals,
MIS and system administrators, and support personnel.
PC World's COMDEX Lookout Tips
by Claire Toynbee
Mike Hogan and Russell Glitman talked about some of the products to be watched out for.
- The one-ounce 2.5 inch removable 85 MB drive by Avatar incorporated in a product
- The nicely-designed 3.9 lb. Z-llte 386SL subnotebook with 60 MB hard drive and a backlit VGA screen, almost full-size keyboard, detachable mouse panel and sidecar floppy
- Duracell battery recharging technology, promising 40% more battery life
- Motorola's PCMCIA Newscard, to be available at under US$400 in mid-93, a fax-modem with an extendible RJ11 phone jack
- Qmodem Pro, Mustang's DOS-based communications package with a built-in online reader that does CIS, MCI, sendfax, and has other BBS support
- The 2.2 lb. NCR with a cell phone and send/receive data/fax, called "the ultimate mobile personal computing device"
- Sharp's system incorporating touch pen input - they already have full handwriting recognition in Japanese and are expected to crack the problem in English
- Hardware using digital signal processing (DSP) chips and programmable multifunction chips
- Microsoft's booth showing the most interesting and exciting things - Windows for Workgroups, Schedule Plus, Mail 3.0, and Windows sound system
A Software Publishing Corporation speaker focussed on the directions of corporate computing. Today, we use passive tools and focus on personal productivity. Tomorrow, we will use tools in an active way and the focus will shift to organizational productivity. There will be a change in the primary way we view data. Our current tabular way of viewing data will give way to seeing data in graphical form. Different levels of graphical analysis will be just a mouse click away.
As you might expect from an executive of a company that sells Harvard Graphics, the graphics in his presentation were impressive. If you're thinking of imitating this, remember the average full motion video window in your presentation will cost you around 10 megabytes per minute.
Other Interesting Products
by Harvey G. Ottovich
PC Comparing columnist and Contributing Editor, Stephen Manes, has completed his 544 page book, Gates - How Microsoft'ss Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man to America.
I spoke with Microsoft Senior Vice President Jeff Rallies, Steve Ballmer, Many Taucher, and Steve Manes about the Wiley Hard Drive - Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire. Stephen Manes said there are inaccuracies in the book. Steve agreed with my assessment that it appears to be a drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste term-paper-like result
MicroSpeed's new WinTRAC is a trackball and a trackwheel combination to improve point-and-shoot operations.
Even with D06 6 scheduled for a first-to-second quarter 1993 release, PC-KWIK Corporation' s WinMaster and Powrer Pak utilities may surprise you with their exciting capabilities.
In the multimedia arena Media Vision offers support for the November release of Microsoft Video for Windows. WordPerfect Win 5.2 will act as an OLE client affording full motion video in a WordPerfect Win document.
WordPerfect's Win 5.2, Office 4.0, and Presentations 2.0 (a DOS DrawPerfect with a graphical user interface that I take a double take on because I think that I am in Windows. An oooh! aaah! look.), and the new InForms forms fill in competitor to ObjectVision and FormBase.
Microsoft's new Access and FoxPro 2.5 may excite you databasers.
Intel's new Indeo video technology and preview of systems based on the Pentium microprocessor, the next generation from Intel, excites me. I describe Indeo as PostScript (scalable) Video. Indeo software interrogates your system hardware resources and provides up to a full screen, full motion, video display with full 486 resources.
Symantec's Vision
by Jeremy Dunn
Gordon Eubanks, CEO of Symantec Corp., apologised for not being able to bring Peter Norton (an APCUG regular). It seems Peter has gone to Cambodia, though no one knows exactly why. Gordon then went on to praise user groups in superlative terms
He then spoke on the state of the computer industry, noting that Windows has taken over a large share of the PC marketplace, but also pointed out that every machine that runs Windows is also running DOS. He foresees a move towards the 32-bit operating systems over the course of the next year. This will push new graphics standards into the market. The current graphic standards are all plagued with the same problem, the necessity to use a 16 bit bus with a speed as low as 25% of the processor and memory speed. By using a 32-bit interface such as the VESA 'Local Bus' standard this bottleneck can be avoided and application performance will skyrocket
Ever the visionary, Gordon spoke of a concept that has eluded the software world for twenty years. The idea that once you write a chunk of code to do something in a particular environment, you do not need to write it again for every application that needs that feature or function. With object oriented technology this seems like a workable concept now. Gordon then spoke about the usability of software. Again It seems axiomatic that no matter how many features are in a program, they are worthless, if they are not easy to learn and use.
The floor was opened to questions which ranged from mergers and acquisitions to piracy - though I am not sure there is much of a difference between those two.
Lotus Improvisations
by Mary Ellen Weider
John Landry, Sr. Vice President of Software Development and Chief Technology Officer of Lotus gave us the company's views of the future of computing. He maintains that computer systems are actually communications systems. He also promised more electronic access between Lotus and end user. John suggested new software must be radically simple.
Jeff Anderholm then treated us to a presentation of Improv for Windows. Improv was developed to allow users to more easily display and use their spreadsheets and to easily change the layout of their information. By incorporating a 'one stop shopping' info box the program allows a user to click on an item and change multiple settings. Color, alignment, and more are only a few clicks away rather than going back and forth between dialogue boxes. I have always loved floating boxes - anything you can move out of your way certainly meets with my approval.
This multidimensional spreadsheet will ship in the first quarter of '93.
Dina McIntyre gave us a look at Lotus 1-2-3 2.0 for Windows. Lotus has made it a more graphical program with new drag-and-drop features. One of the enhancements most cheered was full alignment of information in cells. Rotating labels was another feature everyone applauded. Other features included were 'version manager index'k and editing within cells.
Both Dina and Jeff assured us that 1-2-3 and Improv are meant as separate programs and Lotus will continue to support both.
APCUG Summit Meeting
by Richard Katz and Alan Jarrett
President Judy Brown opened the Seventh annual user group summit. The scope of the event was broad. It was good news to hear that the membership in the Association had grown from 212 last year to 321 with four member groups joining over this COMDEX event.
The GLOHALNET BBS has had over 175,000 messages! Larry Shaw, our enigmatic Treasurer, reported that we will have approximately $25k in our accounts by year end, only some of which is earmarked. It was also announced that on 2 December we will be switching over to CompuServe from Tymnet.
We had reports on regional conferences, all of which went well. Of considerable interest was the announcement that the Sun Coast Regional Conference had voted to form a permanent group: The Florida Association of PC User Groups, congratulations!
We had a wonderful and touching presentation from a community service panel where, among other things, a videotape of Cincinnati UG project to help the handicapped was presented. A woman who had Lou Gehrigs disease and lost the ability to move and talk was again able to communicate with her husband and children. Great work, Di Booth and gang! They have installed 17 systems using primarily off-the-shelf technology, way to go!
Jerry Schneider and Ziff-Davis' Bill Machrone announced the Computer Industry REACH awards. The object of REACH is to promote PC user groups to help schools, charitable organizations and other organizations that improve the quality of life. Focusing attention on outstanding community service will encourage other user groups to get involved. There will be 5 grants for $15,000 each, to continue funding for these projects.
Additional Ramblings
by Ash Nallawalla
Adobe's presentation included a preview of Photoshop 2.5 for Windows, which will be released in early 1993. It will be fully compatible with its Macintosh counterpart and will be worth the wait. Its new SuperATM product will be appreciated by those who receive electronic documents created in fonts that they do not possess. The program substitutes a font that preserves line and page breaks.
At the Wednesday night APCUG Summit meeting, I reported on the Australasian User Groups Conference held in Sydney last March. Thanks to Borland's Belinda Hanna and Greg Joy we were able to get seven Australasian user group presidents in one room for the first time. I am pleased to report that another vendor has offered to sponsor such an event, but so has Borland again, so we could manage two in 1993, our anniversary year.
On Thursday morning, Borland International hosted its traditional Borland Breakfast at Caesar's Palace. Philippe Kahn spoke about the rediscovery of objects, with a reference to awareness by the Greeks that the Earth is round and the later loss of that knowledge in the Middle Ages, when the flat Earth theory became popular. He the described how 'objects' were also known in the early days of computing, the knowledge lost, and lately rediscovered.
He spoke about Object Oriented Programming being necessary to keep up with the complexity of computers. Philippe Kahn's COMDEX keynote address revolved around that theme and was quite a talking point during COMDEX. It was video-taped and we should have a copy for viewing in the near future.
I manned the Borland User Group booth on the COMDEX floor for a couple of hours on Friday. It was an interesting experience. I managed to recruit one American user group for APCUG membership; a few people were encouraged to join their local groups; one person even decided to join Melb PC!
Conclusion
Our Comdex trip was an unqualified success. Melbourne PC User Group has made its mark on all the vendors we met. Our size, continued presence at Comdex, and our award-winning magazine have all been noted, and we are confident of increased support from many vendors. The fact that Microsoft is prepared to provide a presentation on Windows NT for one of our SIGs is evidence of that support.
Thanks to Sponsors
Adapter, Inc., Adobe Systems Inc., Aldus Corp., America Online Inc., Approach Software Corp., Avery Dennison, Borland International, Campbell Services, Clans Corp., Computer Associates, Corel Corp., GeoWorks, Hewlett-Packard, IBM Corp., Info-World, Intel Corp., Intuit Inc., Knowledge Adventure, Logitech Inc., Lotus Development Corp., Microgra5c hie-, Microsoft Corp., Pacific Data Products, Parsons Technology, PC-Kwik Corp., PC Week. PC World, Peachtree Software. Quarterdeck Office Systems, Shapeware Corp., Software Publishing Corp., Stac Electronics, Symantec Corp., WordPerfect Corp., Zenith Data Systems, Z1ftNEf Information Service.
Melb PC was represented at COMDEX/Fall for the third successive year. In 1990, I 'sponsored myself' in 1991 and 1992 Melb PC sent the President and Editor, while Borland (USA) sponsored me in 1991. In 1992 Borland's largesse was not as large (but still appreciated), so Melb PC filled in the gap with a similar contribution by my employers, the Australian Centre for Unisys Software. Thanks to all of them. I would have been unable to go this year had it not been for this support from our Committee, so I would like to thank them too.
Reprinted from the Jan / Feb 1993 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
