Naturally Apple has come out with a new model immediately after I
have bought an (admittedly used, but nevertheless only 6 months old)
"new" MacBook Pro 13".
When I read the specs of the models announced today, they tell me the
new main processors and graphics processors are much faster than my
machine. In doing what? Playing games or something, it seems. Is NWP
going to run faster? Not with the stuff I'm doing! Is Canvas? Nope.
Gawd -- I think back to the old Mac Plus running the old NW and ...
it went like the wind.
But this speed comes at a price, it seems. The vaunted 10 hour
battery life of my MacBook Pro is now "7 hours of wireless web" time.
Is that just the 10 hours by another name? I can't imagine so, and
besides, the MacBook Air 13", which hasn't been chqnged, had been
formerly billed as hsvbing 7 hours bettery life rather thanb 10
hours, and that billing is now also "7 hourts of wireless web". This
would be a deal breaker for me -- if I didn't have what is now the
previous model, I would certainly be buying one rather than the
latest. The 10 hours of battery is magic.
Speaking of new and looking back, Quark Express 9 has just been
announced to ship in April. A big new feature -- the story editor!
PageMaker had this innovation in v.4 (I think it was) so far back in
history that even I have difficulty remembering it, and Quark users
used to pour s**t and derision on it while we PageMaker users loved
it. Then Adobe dropped it when they introduced the very Quarkian
InDesign, only to re-introduce it three or so years ago -- by popular
demand. The PageMaker immigrants to InDesign muttered an exasperated
"About time! What took the $#@% idiots so long?" while the Quark
immigrants made idiots of themselves welcoming this "new" feature.
Now Quark itself has finally caught up.
The joke is that the story editor, a text editor within PageMaker so
you could edit text off the page, was originally introduced as an
engineering solution to the problem of editing large amounts of
formatted text in a graphics program with relatively low powered
machines. It turned out that it also solved a problem for users by
giving them a kind of coherent space within which to work when
editing.
Adobe dropped he feature when they developed InDesign because the
more powerful machines around then did not demand that engineering
sidestep (although the first two versions of InDesign, v.1 and v.1.5,
were glacial) and they wanted to avoid some obvious PageMaker
features because they thought they might put off Quark users. As it
was, many PageMaker users were very slow to migrate because they were
put off by the Quarkness of InDesign -- and the lack of the story
editor was one of the key factors.
Fun and games!
Cheers, geoff
Geoffrey Heard
Business writer, Editor, Publisher
The Worsley Press
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