Blóm Mac OS

Dr. Bott has announced another product sure to tickle the fancy of System Administrators everywhere. The company will release later this month the MoniSwitch Pro 8, a switch box that allows 8 USB computers to share one monitor, keyboard, and mouse. According to Dr. Bott's:

Dr. Bott is pleased to announce MoniSwitch Pro 8 which allows the sharing of up to eight USB computers between a single monitor, keyboard and mouse.

Dr. Bott has been receiving only one complaint about the original MoniSwitch USB series: How to manage more than 4 computers?

Their response is MoniSwitch Pro 8: 'We have taken the simplicity and ease of use of the original MoniSwitch plus 8 standard video and USB connectors and put all of it into the same sleek and well-designed case that MoniSwitch USB users have come to love.'

Pixar Animation Studios' Mac Systems Guru, Cory Knox said 'I haven't had any trouble with MoniSwitch at all. It's been a tremendous help in allowing me to reclaim my desk space! I've used many different switches from many different companies, and this one is by far the best. Thank you so much for such a great product!'

The straight forward design of the MoniSwitch USB series allows it to function with any computer that supports standard video and hot swappable USB. Supported systems include Mac OS 9, Mac OS X Server, and Windows 98/2000. Dr. Bott's MoniSwitch USB was even used by Steve Jobs in his MacWorld keynote demonstrations of the new Mac OS X.

• Standard VGA (HD15) video interface.
• Looks and works great with new G4s!
• Supports 5-8 computers (see MoniSwitch USB for 2-4 computers).
• Includes all necessary USB and super premium VGA video cables! (6 feet)
• Lighted LED indicates selected computer at a glance.
• Compatible with Windows 98, Mac OS and other operating systems that support USB.
• Compact design measuring only 2 7/8' x 5 7/8' x 6 1/2'

You can find more information on the new switch at Dr. Bott's Web site. The unit is priced at US$399 and will ship later this month, and the company is accepting pre-orders.

The Mac Observer Spin: For those who have never worked with more than one computer at a time, something frequently needed by Sys Admins and others, being able to share one keyboard and monitor is vital to one's productivity. Dr. Bott has shipped boxes for 2 and 4 computers, something attractive to many graphic artists, developers, and other power users, but this new product from the company is aimed at serious networking users.

Weak retail sales numbers released this morning spurred a relief rally from yesterday's dreary lows, but the consternation ahead of next week's Federal Reserve decision dampened enthusiasm. Apple bounced back into the triple digits.

The weaker than expected retail sales figures gave investors hope that the Fed's higher interest rate policy may be starting to slow the economy. But one month's data doesn't make a trend, nor is the data likely to slow the Feds down next week.

Today's low volume rally seemed unconvincing to traders. Tech stocks are way off their peaks of March. Semiconductor stocks up 4.8% today are down by 23% from their highs. Software stocks gained about 3% today, but are still 37% below recent highs, while Internet stocks barely up 1.0% on the session are down 49% since March.

After the bell, Dell announced earnings of $0.19 per share beating earnings forecasts of $0.16. Revenues rose to $7.3 billion, up 31% from last year at this time. Sales climbed 41% in Asia and were 17% higher in Europe. Worldwide shipments rose by 32%. Margins slipped about a point to 20.5%. Dell closed down 1/4 to 44 11/16 before the announcement.

The Mac Observer Stock Watch Virtual Portfolio hardly moved at all as Apple's and IBM's gains were offset by Akamai's tumble on news that the Internet media streaming company has new competition--Intel.

Apple regained 3 1/2 or 3.52% to close at 102 13/16 on high volume of 4.4 million shares. The 25% above normal volume in AAPL provides some hope that the stock found support, not visited since late January, in the high 90s.

However, a chart of AAPL shows a clear bear pattern of lower highs and lower lows since March 23. AAPL may rally from here but will encounter stiff resistance in the $113 range unless some insanely great news from the WWDC can overcome selling pressures. The head and shoulders distribution pattern in the AAPL daily chart points towards an extended period of consolidation in the mid-$90 range while the stock market rides out the interest rate hikes expected into the summer.

The Nasdaq bounced 114 points (3.39%) to closed at 3499 on volume of 1.35 billion shares traded.

The Dow climbed 178 points (1.72%) to close at 10545 on volume of 953 million shares.

The S&P 500 gained 24.76 points (1.79%) to close at 1407.81.

In Apple related businesses: Akamai lost 4 11/64 dollars to close at 73 13/64. ARM Holdings climbed a dollar to close at 29. Adobe traded higher by 2 3/16 to close at 108 3/8. Earthlink fell 11/16 to close at 18 5/16. Motorola climbed 4 5/16 to close at 91 1/16. IBM gained 1 1/16 to 104 1/16.

Apple's competitors: Hewlett Packard climbed 4 5/8 to close at 130 7/8. Gateway gained 13/16 to close at 49 1/16. Compaq jumped 1 1/2 to close at 26 1/2. Shares of Microsoft gained 1 11/16 to 67 7/8.

Intel climbed 9 1/2 to close at 115 9/16. Reuters said that the chip maker, 'announced a plan on Thursday to spend $200 million over two years to build an Internet media business that will allow customers to transmit everything from movies to conferences to online training via the Internet'.

The move will bring Intel into competition with the likes of Akamai and Yahoo. However, there may be room enough for all. The Reuters article points out that forecasters predict 'the market for streaming media services -- audio and video on the Web -- would soar more than 20-fold to $2.5 billion by 2004.'

Retail sales fell by 0.2%, their first drop since August of 1998, surprising economists who had forecast retail sales would expand by 0.4%. Most of the decline was due to falling fuel prices and sales at the pump. The retail sales figure for March was revised upward to 0.5% from 0.2%.

In a separate news from the Labor Department the initial jobless claims fell by 7,000 to 297,000, about half of the decline expected.

The bellwether 30-year US Treasury bond gained 6/32 to 101 10/32. The yield, which moves inversely to the price, fell to 6.14%.

For full quotes on all the companies mentioned in this article, we have assembled this set of quotes at Yahoo! for your reference. We also have many of these same quotes reported live (20 minute delay) on our home page. For other stories regarding Apple's stock activity, visit our Apple Stock Watch Special Report.

The MUG Center, in association with The Mac Show and The Hershey Apple Core, announces the Web's newest resource for Macintosh User Groups! It is a venture focused on the needs of MUGs and their members. According to MUG Center:

The MUG Center offers information for and about Macintosh User Groups from all perspectives. Part-portal, with links to a wide variety of resources, part-original content, with articles, essays, and more, all focused squarely on the MUG community, the MUG Center helps User Groups do more and do it better.

New to the Macintosh User Groups? You can find one near you, or learn how to start your own. Already involved in a MUG? Use this site to get new ideas, or contribute your tips, tricks and successes to our archives.

The resources and archives will be built through a series of focus projects. User Group enthusiasts and interested parties are invited to join the mailing list, and contribute either original material to be hosted on the site, or links to your original material on your site.

Visit The MUG Center now and participate in the first project/contest, the design of the MUG Center logo.

You can find more information on the MUG Center at their Web site.

The Mac Observer Spin: Mac User Groups have played such a pivotal role in the development and maintenance of the Mac user base. Providing support and resources not found in the commercial world, MUGs have helped many Mac users use their Mac to their fullest. Some MUGs fell on hard times during Apple's darkest days, including some of the biggest and oldest.

We hope this new resource will help existing MUGs flourish and new MUGs form.

MUG Center - The Mac Show - Hershey Apple Core

LuraTech has announced a host of new products, including an application allowing color documents to be easily scanned into a Web-ready image. According to LuraTech:

LuraDocument Capture at AIIM 2000

April's AIIM 2000 show in New York marked the debut LuraDocument Capture. LuraDocument Capture is an all-in-one, scan-to-web software solution for converting colored documents to electronic files. File sizes are small enough to be exchanged via email and viewable in a browser window with the LuraDocument browser plug-in. Currently in it's beta stage, LuraDocument Capture may be downloaded from our Web site.

LuraTech & JPEG2000 at Spring Internet World 2000

LuraTech CEO, Michael Thierschmann joined other industry experts from Eastman Kodak and Adobe Systems in a technical forum at Internet World to discuss applications and features of the coming JPEG2000 standard. The Digital Imaging Group (DIG), an industry consortium working to drive the adoption of JPEG2000 sponsored the event and will be posting the presentations on their Web site next week.

LuraWave Java SDK and Applet Now Available

For the first time ever, wavelet-compressed images can be viewed on the Internet without a plug-in! LuraTech now offers both a Java-SDK for developers as well as a sample Java applet created from the SDK to allow viewing of LuraWave images using Java.

ACDSee Now Compresses with LuraWave and LuraDocument

LuraTech and ACD Systems have teamed up to offer cutting-edge wavelet compression within the popular ACDSee(R) image management software, which currently boasts over 15 million users worldwide. ACDSee users can now download plug-ins allowing them to save and view files in the LuraWave and LuraDocument formats. Available on our Web site is a special shareware version of ACDSee with the LuraTech plug-ins automatically installed.

Adobe photoshop cs5 for photographers download. New LuraWave Browser Plug-In for Linux

Due to popular demand, LuraTech now offers a browser plug-in for the Linux operation system. The LuraWave browser plug-in for Linux 6.x can be downloaded for free from our Web site.

You can find more information on all of these new announcements at the LuraTech Web site.

QPS announced that it is shipping its new 8x4x32 Que! Fire CD-RW drive. It includes a FireWire interface, and is one of the few FireWire CD-RW drives to hit the market. According to QPS:

The Que! Fire Drive with a FireWire controller card is compatible with iMAC DV, G3/G4, Power MAC and all PC desktop computers. It allows users to record, erase and rewrite CDs again and again at 8x write and 4x rewrite speeds. In addition, it offers up to 32x read performance on both CD-R and CD-RW media, can archive 650 MB of data, and comes with 2 MB of buffer RAM to support greater application flexibility. The drive is ideal for archiving and exchanging any kind of data including MP3 audio, and the produced CD-ROM discs are fully compatible with all CD-ROM drives and audio players.

The FireWire controller card makes three hot-pluggable IEEE 1394 ports available for high-speed flexible connectivity, and works with various 1394 FireWire devices including DV camcorders, hard disk drives, digital cameras and printers.

Complete and ready to install, the drive comes with CD-mastering software, CD-RW media, a 1394 cable, a protective carrying bag and all accessories needed to get started immediately.

The new drive will cost US$479 and you can find more information at QPS' site.

Aestiva has announced a new technology allowing dynamic web sites to reside on multiple servers and handle an extraordinary number of hits. 'Server Jumping' allows sites sitting on multiple machines to act as if the entire site was with the same host. According to Aestiva:

Aestiva announced this week a new scaling technology known as 'server-jumping.' An innovation of Aestiva's Webputing technology team, server-jumping enables dynamic sites to span multiple computers in support of hundreds of thousands of users in the same way 'static' sites have historically been able to do.

Aestiva insiders familiar with alternative technologies claim server-jumping is a breakthrough that could shake up the high-end computing market. Server-jumping allows Web-applications to operate across multiple servers with no programming required.

Server-jumping eliminates the need for CORBA, DCOM and other well-known distributed-computing technologies. Best of all, the technology is Web-centric. It can be deployed on Unix, Windows and Mac OS X servers, a cross-platform capability unavailable to existing technologies.

Server-jumping gives Web sites the ability to scale up as needed. Users can start with a site hosted at a shared virtual server. As the site gets more traffic, it can be expanded and scaled up to world-class levels without redevelopment.

Aestiva HTML/OS is available for US$799. You can find more information at the Aestiva web site.

The Mac Observer Spin: Welcome to the wonderful world of Mac OS X. This type of technology has enormous implications in the server world, and it is simply not possible with the Mac OS as it is today. Products like this from Aestiva certainly propel Mac OS X to the forefront of advanced site hosting.

IBVA is making it easier for users with limited motor functioning and other special needs to effectively use a computer. The new MindReacher expansion to their IBVA brain/computer interface system allows the computer to be controlled by brain impulses alone. According to IBVA:

Named the 'MindReacher' it allows people with special needs, such as individuals with limited or no motor control to use special needs devices using only their brain activity. Mortar combat mac os.

'When we made this new Expansion Pak for our brain/computer interface system we just felt we had to give it away,' said Drew DeVito, Executive Vice President of IBVA Technologies, Inc. 'This technology was obviously needed in this world and it just never felt right to put a price tag on it. If we could we'd give our entire system away. It's a great technology. I hope it will eventually be available to anyone who is interested at any time.'

MindReacher allows anyone to use their brain activity to control switch activated and switch adapted machines as well as musical keyboards, toys, communicators, tools, and many other assistive devices.

The IBVA System allows anyone to use their actual, real time brainwave activity to change movies as they are watched, create interactive brainwave influenced music, control digital video and sound, study hard-core brain activity, fight brain Vs brain against another person, trigger external devices and software as well as a full featured range of other brain/computer interface functions.

The IBVA core system is available for US$1300. The MindReacher expansion pack is free. You can find more information at the IBVA web site.

Alco Blom and Palm developer Rene Laterveer today announced the availability of Web Confidential 2.0 for Macintosh, and 1.0 for Palm. Web Confidential allows users to safely and easily store web site passwords. According to the authors: Minimum wage: influence the election mac os.

Web Confidential for Palm is supplied with a Macintosh Conduit, which synchronizes data between Macintosh and Palm.

Although widely imitated, Web Confidential is still the most powerful password manager on the Mac today and is currently the only password manager which is able to HotSync with a Palm device using a Macintosh Conduit.

Like the Macintosh version, your data on the Palm handheld can be protected by state-of-the-art encryption technology.

Web Confidential is an intuitive, easy-to-use program for managing user IDs, passwords, registration numbers, and the like.

While Web Confidential is suitable for a wide variety of personal data, from credit card numbers to serial numbers, Alco Blom designed Web Confidential particularly for the World Wide Web in mind. 'Increasing numbers of Web sites maintain some form of user registration,' points out Blom. 'You may not realize it, but in the course of time you may registered at a couple of dozen sites. Do you remember the passwords you entered for all of them?'

Web Confidential allows Web surfers to store URLs, user IDs, and passwords in one secure location. Web Confidential can automate the process of logging into a password-secured Web page by automatically passing URL, user ID, and password to your Web browser.

For opening pages containing personal account information at commercial sites, Web Confidential allows you to automatically fill in WWW Forms with user ID and password fields.

To ensure the personal information stored in Web Confidential remains confidential, the program's password files can be encrypted using state-of-the-art encryption technology.

Web Confidential is available as shareware for US$20. You can find more information at the Web Confidential web site.

SSEYO has updated all the products of its Koan software product line for audio creation. It now supports full MIDI file playback allowing generative augmentation of existing MIDI material. According to SSEYO:

In this release SSEYO have upgraded its entire product range to include the new engine. Major products are versioned as follows: SSEYO Koan Pro 2.5 PE (Win / Mac), SSEYO Koan X V1.5 XE (Win) and the SSEYO Koan Plugin V7 (Win / Mac).

The new integrated hybrid digital/analogue synth allows authors to create and control low-bandwidth audio, realistically from files as small as 1Kb. It also lets authors apply synth sounds and MP3 samples to MIDI tracks and even to add FX to the MP3 samples! It features the following: a range of effects units including distortion, chorus, reverb, delay, compression, ring modulation and filter; a range of highly specified generator units including tone generator, granular synthesis, percussion synth and virtual sample generator; a range of powerful transformer and modulator units including: synching/non-synching LFO, envelope, multiply, add, pan and amplify; a built in limiter.

The Koan Pro authoring system costs US$200 and the Koan X drag and mix system costs US$30. You can find more information at SSEYO's Web site.

Casady & Greene have released a new version of their system wide grammar checker utility, Grammarian. Version 2.1.1 addresses some minor problems, and the program now functions properly in Outlook Express under OS 8.5. According to Casady & Greene:

Version 2.1.1 addresses minor problems recognizing older Grammarian 2 files which some users reported with the recently released 2.1 updater. Grammarian 2 v2.1.1 now works properly with ATM (tm), PageMaker 6.5, and Outlook Express running on Mac OS 8.5.

Grammarian 2 is a grammar checker you can use with most system software on your computer, whether it has a built-in grammar checker or not. Grammarian can check grammar mechanics, punctuation, and phrase usage in either an interactive (as you finish a sentence) or batch (user selected text) mode.

Grammarian 2 has over five times more grammar checking power than the limited grammar checkers in MS Word 98(tm), or Microsoft Office 98(tm). Grammarian 2 has 150 built-in grammar checks compared to Offices' 26 error corrections. Grammarian 2 can even check grammar in such popular programs as Outlook Express(tm), Excel (tm), Adobe GoLive (tm), Adobe InDesign (tm), AppleWorks(tm), Eudora (tm), or Macromedia Freehand (tm) to name a few.

While grammar is not an exact science, Grammarian often notices things, such as sentences written in passive voice, or cluttered with clichés that might otherwise be overlooked.

Feature rich Grammarian:

• Checks a large number of homophones.
• Provides new rule groups and writing styles with preset rules such as American Psychological Association and Associated Press for the publishing industry.
• Updates immediately after you add phrases or make changes with the Grammarian Editor, without restart.
• Supports third-party application programs such as FileMaker Pro 5 (tm), Alpha, Canvas 7 (tm), IBM Via Voice (tm), and DeltaGraph 4.5(tm).

Grammarian is available for US$39.95 as an electronic download, and US49.95 as a boxed CD. You can find more information at the Casady & Greene web site.

Vincent's Softwares has updated the handy system function manager, MacOS Items Manager, to version 1.6.3. MacOS Items Manager gives users the same type of control over Control Strip Modules, Contextual Menu items, and fonts that the Extensions Manager provides for Control Panels and Extensions. According to Vincent's Softwares:

MacOS Items Manager is a friend of Extensions Manager. It allows to enable/disable Contextual Menu Items, Control Strip Modules and Fonts, in the same way Extensions Manager does for extensions and control panels.

New in this version:

• Fix a bug (Fatal Error 4) when clicking on the Restart button.
• 'Out of Memory' Warning, instead of crash!
• Improve speed.
• Other small bugs fixed.

MacOS Items Manager is available as shareware for US$5. You can find more information at the Vincent's Softwares web site.