Apple Computer Inc made it clear at last Friday’s restructuring announcement that Internet related technologies were one of the key areas in its future, and sure enough, the company had a major presence at the Internet World show last week, where there were demonstrations of some new technology from Apple and several third-party partners. QuickTime Architect Peter Hoddie showed the new QuickTime 3.0, due out this summer for both the Mac and Windows. QuickTime 3.0 includes real-time data compression, and Hoddie reduced a 260k file on the fly to 75k, with no data loss. And Apple announced the availability of the AIAT Apple Information Access Toolkit 1.0, a set of tools that enables Mac developers to deliver content-aware applications; programs that are knowledgeable about the contents of documents and can act on them accordingly. With AIAT, developers can incorporate advanced indexing, storage, and search capabilities into applications with minimal memory overhead, essentially giving users the equivalent of a powerful search engine. This technology was originally known as V-Twin and came from research done at the Apple Labs. AIAT will be licensed to developers in the form of a software developers kit.

GoLive and NetObjects

A couple of other Mac-only products shown during the keynote could be of value to Web publishers. GoLive Systems Inc. of Menlo Park, California showed a beta version of an extremely versatile and powerful new Web authoring and site management tool, which was first shown at Milia in Cannes last month. Due to ship in the spring, CyberStudio is considered by many to be a formidable competitor to NetObjects Inc’s Fusion and Adobe Systems Inc’s SiteMill. Also shown was the new version of the Frontier scripting environment from UserLand Software Inc, which makes complicated Web publishing an easier task on a Mac. UserLand is working together with GoLive, for example, to make a powerful Mac-only bundle for automating Web publishing on a large scale. There were a few other significant Web-related announcements from Apple and others at the show. Quarterdeck Technologies Inc subsidiary StarNine Technologies Inc of Berkeley, California, maker of the WebSTAR Web server for the Mac, announced that it was to publish WebCollage, a much-discussed tool from Pensee Corp of Bodega Bay, California. WebCollage, due out in April, automatically builds dynamically changeable Web graphics containing real-time data, and uploads them via FTP to any Web server on a scheduled basis.