You're right---I'm not sorry! Thanks for the "heads up", Eric.
Looks as if the folks at Apple are getting putting some marketing muscle into promoting LiveStage. It's clearly in their best interests to have strong QuickTime content development tools on the market, with QuickTime 4 (QT4) soon to hit the market.
If you haven't already read about it, Apple is opening up the source code for parts of MacOS X Server. In addition to being a hugely popular move with the open-source crowd, this strategy should also help traditional developers, including THS and its competitors, improve their software. The client version of MacOS X is supposed to come out later in 1999 and will have many of the advantages of MacOS X Server. This is truly a great week for computing news!
In a semi-related story, the South By Southwest music, film, and multimedia conference is in full swing here in Austin. I saw a local TV news item as well as on-line accounts of Mark Cuban's comments that MP3 will lose out to streaming media and will die in the next few years. Cuban is the founder of broadcast.com, which uses RealNetworks's streaming technology. He didn't mention QT, but then I wouldn't expect him to, given his company's investment in the clearly inferior ;-) RealAudio/Video.
I think Cuban's wrong about MP3, mostly because MP3 is freely copyable and the alternatives aren't.
There's no denying that the content-rich era of the Internet is coming. For now, however, with most people connecting at about 2Kbytes/second, interactive media-rich web sites can be more annoying than interesting, but that will change when more people get fast data pipes into their homes. That will be the point at which innovative content like what can be produced using LiveStage and QT will really take off. I don't mind waiting a couple of years for my investment to pay off.
All for now.... Gotta get back to my real jobs of making K6 chips and being a dad.
Joel Irby
Austin, Texas |
