dacs.doc electric

THE NOVEMBER DACS general meeting featured seven Microsoft financial, graphics, and gaming products, all in the $30 to $100 price bracket and all suitable for placing under your Christmas tree.

From the Helpful Holiday Hints department: (1) Print out the first page of the November General
Meeting Preview from the DACS Website, where all these products are listed; (2) select and highlight the ones you want; (3) leave the page pinned to your kitchen bulletin board.

Our presenter was Brett Davis, Channel Marketing Rep for Microsoft in the NY/NJ area. “Channel” means retail channel, FYI. (MS delights in innovative titles.)

Brett is the quintessential Microsoft representative: young, sharp but laid back, intense but casual, highly intelligent but without pretense, and technically very good. He ran a polished and well received presentation. Above and beyond the presentation itself, however, I strongly felt that there was something more there, and that it was of major significance.

Money 99 is a suite for financial planning and investment. The screen displays were too fast and too busy to follow, but Brett conveyed the scope and power of the program. He emphasized the HTML look and the integration with the Web, which can auto-update your portfolio. Just log-on, and your accounts are up to date. During his push of Money 99, Brett several times mentioned Intuit’s Quicken, the current leader in financial packages, but he did so with respect and objectivity. In our current atmosphere of negative campaigning and competition slamming, it was a welcome breath of fresh air. Class act, Brett!

Graphic Studio Home Publishing Suite includes Home Publishing 99 for creating graphics for the Web and presentation packages such as PowerPoint.

Also included in this suite is PictureIt for photo editing. This program was the least innovative of all those covered. Brett removed scratches from the surface of a scanned photo, which is a common feature for this type of program. Then he showed Picture It’s version of morphing, distorting facial features for comic effect, but this feature is a direct rip-off of MetaCreations GOO, which has been around for several years now. He also showed a semiautomatic method of outlining and removing one person from a scanned picture of two people. In Photoshop 5.0 Adobe calls the tool that does this a magnetic lasso. The demo was entertaining, however, and well received by the audience.

PhotoDraw 2000 also does photo editing and graphic composition. It is a new product intended to work with Office 2000. As such, it features the look and feel of MS Office and all the user help anyone out there in Redmond could think of. The outstanding thing about PhotoDraw 2000
is its seamless access via the Web to a vast reservoir of clip art, fonts, and other graphic resources.

Encarta 99 is an upgrade of the classic that now includes extensive linkage to the Web. It automatically updates its material from Web downloads when you log-on. Look Ma, no hands! It also adds more user convenience features and autobuilds bibliographies for report writing. Winding up the presentation were three products that have to be called games but which are really something much more.

Combat Flight Simulator builds on Microsoft’s top-rated Flight Simulator to let the user fight WWII air battles. The realism is awesome. There was great audience reaction. We could feel the aerobatics,
the action, and the scenery. This program is also linked with the Net to support importing any compatible model of a plane or scenery out there. You can customize your war. You can create your fantasy identity. You fight and sometimes loose, but you never get hurt.

Age of Empires is a real-time strategy game that lets you build civilizations by directing military campaigns and economic policies. You watch your civilization rise and fall, and compete with others
over the Net. You are omnipotent.

Motocross Madness 3D brought the house down as Brett raced a motorcycle over obstacles and hazards. It makes full use of the latest in fast processors, 3D graphics accelerator cards, and motion
controllers. Vicarious kicks.

It was a good meeting-instructive, entertaining, well presented-but this is true of many of our meetings. So why was there something more to this one? It wasn’t until later that the message got through to me. I am quite sure that many DACS members saw it immediately, but in my doddering
old age it took me a while.

Finally I realized what I saw. Off the shelf, moderately priced packages that deliver the next plateau of computer usage. Here and now, application programs that extend seamlessly into the infinity of
the Net and personal participation in a virtual activity.

Now this is a plateau that has long been predicted. It has been exaggerated in Sci-Fi, and prototyped in current interactive games and applications, but when you actually are there, it takes on an identity of its own.

The MS products we saw are not breakthroughs, of course. But they do make real the things to come. In one way they are actually ahead of the hardware, probably a first in computerdom. The participatory, computer-based environment in which inevitably we will live will come when the information-transfer bandwidths increase substantially and when HDTV is ubiquitous. But right now, these Microsoft products let us taste it. They also clearly show the way that any startups should go.