The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 38

30 The Sydney Morning Herald COMPUTERS Monday, October 18, 1993 New PageMaker to APPLE MB halt publisher drift Claris Workj $295 Ml $195 Apple Ototo $2995 OmniPage Direct $996 jest $595 All prices ex tax delivery SUPER SPECIAL APPLE LASERWRITER PflO 600 $2989 ASto new service oilers you: Network Connectors M9 $59 Halt Piica Memom Discs! anli $49 COMPLETf SOFTWARE RANGE MoosoHWoid $600 saw at $397 Excel Magnet new file tidier $179 a PRINTERS TONER HP OesnWrrter $995 Discounted to $645 Colour DeskWrrlerbSOC $1395 Lexmark A3 Colour 8Mb $7795 Toner EPS Apple HPIII $153 fax Modem Netcomm EF $995 SCANNERS UMAX Colour scanner Sinqle Pass SAVE $3000 mv $6995 Computer Extras AUTHORISED APfLt PHIfHtHAL HfcStLLtR PHONE 954 9086 Apple Printer Specials Ready for combat the online Air Warrior. Reach for the sky Apple Colour Printer prints colour and black up to A3. Vi as excellent value at i 1995, new only Urn as opposed to recommended retail or "list" prices. US magazines commonly advertise PageMaker 5.0 at about $US590 Most Australian users end up paying about $1,000 to $1,100. Quark Xpress users pay considerably more.

Freeman points with some glee to pricing of the rival Quark Xpress package in Australia: now $1,995, or $550 more than PageMaker. Not surprisingly, he says, PageMaker outsells "the competitive product" by a good margin and for the past month or so has been gaining additional ground. Aldus justifies its price rise by pointing to additional features now bundled in with PageMaker 5.0. For instance, it now includes the ability to print colour separations, a great boon for printers of high-quality colour publications. Previously, to do this, PageMaker users had to purchase an additional $800 program, Aldus Pre Print Also included in the PageMaker package are more than 20 mini-programs which handle special tasks like rearranging publication pages, creating headers and footers or insetting bullets and tabs.

One that your reviewer particularly likes adds "continued on" and "continued from" lines to stories which are broken between pages. $1595 LaserWriter Pro 600 superior quality, high performance 2995 COMPUTER GAMES 4 Personal LaserWriter 300 Apple's rmt affordable laser printer. i-irvC Compact, energ -saving design Diconix portable inkjit 2 only 395 Classic 4MB 80HD with ClarisVt'orks 1695 Colour Classic 4MB40HD with ClarisU'orks '1695 AppleCD 300 fast access, PhotoCD ready 995 SryieWritern exa-lknt value 3n0 dpi Yff inkiet printer with trailitional Apple qualiry NEW! THE COMPLETE mnCp SCANNING TOOL KIT. DuIIUUUoCAn Introductory price $895 (normally $1195) From Caere mt lh world! best handheld scanner, with optical character recognition, linage editing and fax capabilities in one convenient package. Printing speed has been improved.

Aldus claims most documents print 20 per cent faster. This has been borne out in our tests, with a typical four-page newsletter printing in around four minutes, against five under the old version. More importantly, PageMaker 5 quickly clears the printing dialogue box off the screen, allowing you to return to work much faster. In the case of our four-page newsletter, PageMaker 4 took a fidget-inducing two minutes to return the screen to our control; PageMaker 5.0 gave it back in just 40 seconds. For the first time you can print just the pages you need: just pages 3 and 8, for instance, instead of having to print everything from page 3 to 8.

Another little irritation of the old PageMaker the lengthy time taken by screen redraws has been eliminated. Under the old system, every time you made a change to your page, by adding some text, changing the size of a heading, or moving an illustration, there was a painful delay while the screen temporarily went blank, then slowly redrew itself to take account of the changes. On large two-page screens it could seem to take an eternity for a change in the text to ripple through from column to column. Designers of publications with complex illustrations have been known to tear their remaining hair out waiting for a PageMaker screen to redraw. Now you can interrupt the redrawing process by simply beginning another task.

Redrawing stops and is only resumed when you cease activity. This is a great victory for productivity, not to mention hair-restoration. An expanded control palette lets you apply type and paragraph attributes without using menus, as well as to move, resize and crop objects precisely. You can do this either by entering precise numerical values or by nudging, the objects into position. A new "library" palette stores frequently used graphics, making them easy to find and place on the page.

It works well with Fetch, Aldus's full-scale program for cataloguing large collections of illustrations. With features like these and there are many more PageMaker has finally caught up technically with Quark Xpress. It also retained two older features which Quark has yet to match: a "pasteboard" area for assembling many of the elements of a publication, including headings and artwork, and the "Story Editor" which is virtually a mini word processing program for writing new stories or editing existing ones. Both programs have their points but many people find PageMaker easier to learn and use. Given the latest improvements and the significantly lower price of the Aldus product, it's increasingly difficult to recommend any other choice.

If about $1,000 remains too rich for your taste, Aldus offers a simplified page layout program, Personal Press, at just $295. 3It works flawlessly, and the new features are all well worthwhile. 3 Training courses available at Woollahra phone for details. AppleCenire Hurstville 12 Forest Road 570 5411 Woollahra 123 Manning Road 362 3344 Vl'eekdivs 9 am 5 Dm Saturdiw 9 am -1 nm NEWS FROM THE APPLE ORCHARD By DAVID FRITH AFTER one of the most protracted delays in Macintosh software history, a much-improved version of the popular desktop publishing program Aldus PageMaker for Mac is in the shops. The new version, 5.0, was announced and demonstrated to press and customers in a series of lavish roadshows in January, long before work on the program was finished.

This appears to have been a tactic by the Aldus company to stop a continuing drift, especially among publishing professionals, towards the rival Quark. Xpress program, marketed in Australia by Mitsui. The new PageMaker finally catches up with Quark in some areas of vital concern to these professionals mainly related to precise placement of text and graphics on a page and the ability to rotate text and graphics and surpasses it in several others. Aldus may also have been delayed by a year of constant upheaval in the company's executive ranks. This led in September to the resignation of the company's founder and chief executive officer, Paul Brainerd, a 45-year-old former journalist, generally acknowledged as the father of desktop publishing but whose management skills have not always matched his DTP vision.

Whatever the cause, the wait seems to have been worthwhile. After several weeks of using PageMaker 5.0 for Macintosh, we can report it works flawlessly and the new features are all well worthwhile. But first some bad news: at a time when software prices generally have been crashing, Aldus has put the price of PageMaker up. At 1 ,395 the old PageMaker 4.2 wasn't exactly a cheap item. The new version 5.0 however carries a recommended retail price of $1,445, or 3.5 per cent more.

But perhaps we can count ourselves lucky. In the US, the price went up by SUS100. Aldus Australia managing director Graham Freeman says he held the Australian rise down to bring the local price close to parity with the US list price, now $US895 The gap is smaller than it at first appears, at least as Aldus sees it That's because Australian PageMaker users still get free technical support US users have to pay around $90 a year for access to a help hotline after the first 90 days, bringing the total price to $US985 There remains a wider discrepancy in street prices what people actually pay 1C Technologies All pners induclr la union JMfd. Sorry, no perioral chrqurs ACN 007 H5 306 Authorised RrviltT By PHIL CAMPBELL WALK into any city videogame arcade and you'll see the latest trend in electronic entertainment row upon row of data-linked multi-player games. Usually, they're car racing simulations that pit you against a pack of friends; one coin each, one set of controls each, one screen each and a data network that ties you together in one huge gaming environment.

State of the art stuff, and jolly good fun, too. Now you can do the same thing from home. All you need is a modem to link your system to the central, game computer by phone, a healthy bank balance for the on-line charges, a reasonably fast personal computer, and a copy of Air Warrior. Air Warrior was previewed in Melbourne by Metro Games last Tuesday, with considerable fanfare. After all, this is an Australian first -and an audacious first at that.

Players from every capital city can dial in to their local "node" and immediately join in an air battle with up to 40 other players on the system. The real beauty of Air Warrior, says Metro's Sam Stewart, is that every game is different. That's because you're flying against real-life opponents who react unpredictably, who make mistakes, and who sometimes have flashes of brilliance unlike the endless lines of computer code you'll fly against in a typical simulation. He's right Shooting down real people is a whole lot more fun -especially when they're fellow computer journalists. At the Melbourne game release, my colleagues and I sat down in front of a bank of computers in a room decorated as an army bunker.

Each computer was attached to a modem, which was in turn linked to Sydney's Oz-e-mail network. Take a moment to admire the on-screen scenery. It's not quite state of the art, but it's not bad either. On the down side, the ground features are fairly unsophisticated pyramids for mountains, blocks for buildings, and not much else. Sky effects, however, are first-rate the view gets realistically hazy as your eye travels to the horizon, and clouds are puffy and light.

Cockpit details are nicely done, and motion is fast and smooth. Technology is limited to World War II standard, and I'm flying a humble Spitfire. There are no high-tech fire-and-forget missiles if you want to score a kill, it's a matter of getting close enough to your opponent to blast him out of the sky. Finally, I spot a dot in the distance. At full throttle, I gradually pull closer, and decide to hurl some invective from the keyboard the messages you type are displayed on the bottom of your opponent's screen.

While one hand types the words "Eat lead, the other pumps the trigger on my joystick. He swerves. I swerve. I fire again and the enemy plane explodes in a ball of flame. That's just a start There are 23 historic aircraft to playtest, with realistically simulated dynamics.

And there are reconstructions of famous air battles. The truth is, multi-player games like Air Warrior are a heck are of a lot of fun and they might be dangerously addictive. Be warned. At $5 per on-line hour, one or two battles each night could add up to a very expensive habit. And if you're planning to let the kids loose on the system, I have one simple word of advice.

Don't. Versions of Air Warrior are available for all major hardware platforms, including IBM PC (disk or CD-Rom), Amiga and Macintosh, and retail for $89.95. For more information, contact Metro Games on 03 329 1999. Another "addition" rearranges pages of a publication. Previously a pain in PageMaker involving a lot of cutting and pasting; this task is now a simple matter of dragging thumbnail depictions of the pages from one location to another.

Less successful is an "addition" that provides "expert kerning" of text. Kerning squeezes the space between letters to get a better, more natural looking fit But PageMaker's expert-kerning addition is dreadfully s-l-o-w. Most of the 100-plus new features in PageMaker 5.0 seem to work well and swiftly. Here are a few highlights: Free rotation of text and graphics is now a simple affair. Just use a "rotation tool" to manoeuvre the object to the angle you want by hand, or enter the angle in a control paneL You can now open multiple PageMaker publications and drag text or graphics from one to another with ease.

This is a long-overdue feature that has been available to Quark users for years. But Aldus has gone one better than "the competitive Quark users can open a maximum of seven documents: PageMaker 5.0 users can open any number, limited only by the random access memory of their Macintosh. We Means Business Please CALL for the BEST price on any Mac Systems not listed. Apple Mac LCII 440 $1999 Inc. Apple 14in Trinitron Colour Monitor Apple Mac Ulll 4170 $2895 Inc.

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Prices subject to change without notice. Prices include sates tax. free anywhere in Australia Castle Computers Decorator boxes SOON, very soon, designer PCs will be the go. Having run out of other differentiators, computer companies are now trying to use colour and line to define their machines. It is not before time for, with the sterling exception of the Apple line, computers have been an industrial design wasteland.

First major development in this area was the doomed NeXT workstation. Now Silicon Graphics has a new Indy line of low-end workstations which are a soft blue with the texture of granite. Setback for Deli NOT that it is a reflection of the financial health of the parent, but it is a distinct worry that after only three years of operating in the Italian market, Dell's Italian subsidiary is going into voluntary liquidation. Dell last week said the Italian phone system was a major factor in the decision. As a direct mail company, Dell relies heavily on efficient phone systems for its telesales and customer support.

Dell is looking for partners to distribute its products in Italy while on-line maintenance will be provided by Digital and Sorbus. Culture on a disk IN BRITAIN, where I write this, Microsoft has demonstrated the Microsoft Art Gallery, a CD-Rom for the Mac and PC that contains an interactive guide to London's National Art Gallery. The disk will be on sale later this year for about $100. The disk is based on the gallery's own in-house computer information system. It contains images of some of the gallery's collection of more than 2,000 paintings from Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Holbein, Rembrandt and Vincent Van Gogh.

The pictures are represented as high-quality 256-colour reproductions, digitised from the National Gallery's photographic archives. GARETH POWELL MM rarramatta CONSUMABLES Apple Stylewriter II $695.00 Apple Personal LaserWriter 300 $1295.00 New Printer Ribbons Ribbon Recycling Laser Consumables Laser Recharging Inkjet Consumables Inkjet Refill Kits Lazarus Ribbons iyAf Canon BJ-10eApple Stylewriter HP DeskietDeskwriter Refill Kits Black mne colours available 1RI-SCAN 10425 Best Street Lane Cove, NSW 2066 Phone 02-41991 57 Fax 02-428 3824 WE MEAN save you SOVo on new cartridge costs CALL US FOR A TEST PRINT 41 8 91 57 HIRE Until October 31st Apple and Connecting Point mean business with: Tnnnnm I ill I Ml; with Apple VGA Colour Monitor includes keyboard, mouse ClarisWorks 2.0 Apple Macintosh IBM compatible 386DX-486DX Notebooks BubbleJets 0 0 00 Rentals Sales GRAPHIC ARTS SYDNEY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY $1795 Lasers CD Rom Drives tr I I ((filMlfiWISKHTi KH I Free same day delivery City and suburbs Upgrades All H.gh Tech Modern Equ.pment AAA MICRORENTALS will train you and your staff in Design, Typography and PageMaker software to gain that competitive edge in all your publicity. The course is comprised of a 5 day design and typography module ($675) and an 8 day PageMaker module The full 3-week course containing both modules is Enthusiastic Professional Service y-v IV includes keyboard, mouse $1895 includes keyboard, mouse ClarisWorks 2.0 $1695 Dnmn74y 1U77 BURtt 0 FOR ft BARGMtt POWERBOOK DUO BUNDLE FOR ONLY $4,995 The prices are lean and mean at your one-stop computer shop, so burn bitumen to get there and pick our brains about the latest advances in Apple Mac hardware and software, too. This week's tyre-screecher is a PowerBook Duo 230 480 with Duo Dock, Apple Colour Monitor, Ext. Keyboard and BONUS ClarisWorks at only Tlus 3 years on-site warranty optional at $350.

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