Macworld Expo NY 1998: More walking the floor

Continuing our Expo report from last time, here are impressions and highlights from a second day of roaming the floor:

TypeStyler III Longtime Mac users may remember the previous incarnation of this program (originally put out by Broderbund). It allowed you to easily create almost any imaginable styling effect with text. However, it was slow and required a special font format. No more. Especially on G3 Macs, TypeStyler III zips along and can use virtually any standard font type - including EPS, PICT, JPEG and GIF. It's shipping next month.

Olympus had its whole line of digital cameras on display, including a relatively inexpensive compact with 1280x960 resolution (the D-340L). Next month, its FlashPath floppy disk adapter will be out. It allows you to take a data card from any Olympus camera and put it into a floppy disk drive for easy transfer of photos to a Mac.

Speaking of digital photos, QuickStitch is a new utility that allows you to seamlessly "stitch" together photos of overlapping parts of the same image into one larger photograph. It worked great in the demo.

MacDrive 98 2.0 is a Windows utility that allows you to mount Mac formatted disks (such as Zip cartridges) on a PC (sort of the reverse of Apple's PC Exchange). It works great, even adding the appropriate three letter suffix to the names of files when they appear on a PC. DataViz's MacOpener is similar, but a review in the June 98 issue of Macworld gave the preferential nod to MacDrive. I haven't had a chance to look at MacOpener yet, but MacDrive certainly gets the job done.

Iomega was showing (and shipping!) Buz, a relatively inexpensive "multimedia producer" that provides full screen video input and output for creating "professional quality" videos. It also increases your Mac's SCSI speed. But it only works on G3 Macs. Speaking of Iomega, what ever happened to the Mac version of the Clik! drive (that was featured at the last Mac Expo)? I have not heard much about it recently.

At the Hewlett-Packard booth, I learned that Apple's forthcoming LaserWriter 8.6 will be the driver for all Mac-compatible Hewlett-Packard laser printers. The new LaserWriter driver will also support irDA (infrared) printing from a PowerBook. I saw a demo of a G3 PowerBook printing to a HP 6MP printer via this infrared route. It worked! HP was also showing its printer cable that will allow the DeskJet 670 and 690 series printers connect to the USB port of an iMac.

[Note: Macworld magazine's "Best of Show" choices are now online.]