From the March 1994 Bits of Blue

MINUTES OF 3/9/94 MEETING and PERSONAL COMMENTS

By: Jim Clark

This was our second meeting in our new quarters at the Ybor City campus of the HCC. Things went more smoothly this time, and it was a very good meeting. Actually, it was an excellent meeting, with a “Biggie” vendor presentation -- CorelDraw 4.0. Our facilities are quite flexible now, and we have the space to set up for different size crowds. Hence, CorelDraw was not a “standing room only” session as they had been in our IBM facilities. For those who haven’t been out to the Ybor City site, you should certainly do so. The location is easy to find and very accessible from the interstate.

Your Board of Directors has not yet found a solution to our pressing need for a 486 computer and a color panel for our meetings, but we have managed very well so far -- borrowing at the first meeting here, and Corel had their own equipment, as do most of the larger vendors. But we can’t rely on that -- Anyone have a spare 486/33 and/or color panel they don’t need and can donate to the group?

USER GROUP NEWS

Special Interest Groups (SIGs): John Lucas is organizing an OS/2 SIG. It should get started in the very near future. Meetings will be held at the IBM building from which we just moved. Look for more info on the BBS and in newsletters.

Phillip Ficarota has volunteered to organize a CorelDraw SIG if there is sufficient interest. Decisions about time and place have not yet been made. If you are interested in participating in this SIG, please get word to one of the User Group officers or Phil -- via the BBS or any other way, but the sooner the better.

Microsoft/Stacker Conflict: - The courts have rendered a decision in the disagreement between these software leaders. Stacker has been awarded some $120 or so million from MS, while MS has been awarded about $12 million as result of their countersuit. And, MS is restrained from using the technology that the suit was all about. Hence, MS will soon be coming out with MS-DOS 6.21, which will have a version of DoubleSpace that is minus the “borrowed” technology, and presumably it is now illegal to use the DoubleSpace version in MS-DOS 6.2.

Stacker/MS Windows for WorkGroups Incompatibility: Stacker 4.0 is not compatible with the recently released MS Windows for WorkGroups 3.11. Stacker is working on a fix which you might expect in the not-too-distant future. Meanwhile, be aware.

DX4s Coming Soon: Word is that the new 486DX45 (75 and 100 MHz 486s) will be coming out in the near future. As we have previously reported, they are only minimally slower than the Pentiums and are a good bit cheaper in price. If nothing else, they will likely produce continuing downward pressure on prices. Then, too, how fast is fast?

Superbase Becoming History: SPC, Inc. has announced that they are dropping their Superbase database program from their product line. I personally hate to see that happen because Superbase is a super database program; the competition and pricing are apparently overpowering it.

Dell Shows Big $$ Loss: Dell Computers recent financial statement shows a loss of $40 million on sales of $2.9 billion. We report this not to imply that Dell is in financial trouble. Rather, we can all expect some changes to be made at Dell, for they won’t long stand for those kinds of losses. Pricing action is forcing all to cut their costs and/or improve productivity and efficiency.

PRESENTATION -- CorelDraw 4.0 The Corel Corporation was good enough to allow their Product Specialist, Antonio Sanchez, to visit with us and give a presentation of their newest release of CorelDraw, Ver. 4.0. As has been reported before in this space, CorelDraw is a very powerful program, and one could not hope to demonstrate more than a small portion of its capabilities in the time available at our meetings. So, Antonio elected to highlight the differences between versions 3.0 and 4.0 -- and those that we saw are significant. Actually there have been many changes. Here are just a few:

Powerline: A capability has been added to take any line (s) you might want to draw and convert that line (s) into a wide variety (like hundreds) of designs, including ribbon, trumpet, wedge, teardrop and woodcut shapes.

• Creative Bitmap Editing: Allows creating startling combinations of graphic images with special effects and animation.
• Scanning Support: Advanced direct scanning has been added, including a powerful OCR.
• New Fills & Graphics: With added fills, CorelDraw now includes over 1.2 million. The clipart library has also been increased from 14,000 to 18,000.
• Welding of text and graphics is now provided and eliminates a problem that existed with earlier versions when text and graphics overlaid.
• Animation capability has been greatly enhanced and can produce really impressive results.
• Blending capability has also been enhanced and gives the power to blend literally any object to any other with user-defined sequencing.
• Powerful animation of graphics in MOVE has been further enhanced, and includes 125 Corel MOVE animations and 420 cartoons.
• The word processor has also been enhanced.
• Now supports 99 levels of undo.

News to me is that CorelDraw has a comprehensive DTP capability. Imagine creating a flyer, newsletter or other similar publication with the graphic and text manipulation capabilities of CorelDraw. WOW!!

CorelDraw 4.0 comes on 11 - 3.5” HD floppies and a CD. The program itself takes 37 MB of hard disk space when fully loaded, but the user has the option of selecting out any portions of the program not needed. The CD contains the 18.000 graphics and 750 fonts included with CorelDraw 4.0. One needs an IBM-compatible 386 or better machine for the program, Windows 3.1, 4 MB Ram (8 recommended), a mouse or tablet, and a VGA or better resolution monitor. Cost is $595 MSRP ($249 upgrade) and about $399 street. Companion to CorelDraw are several Photo CD Collections, each containing 100 beautiful pictures with a common theme, which list for $49.95 each.

Antonio reports that CorelDraw 5.0 is to be released on 20 May, which will provide further improvement in an already very, very powerful program. We can all recall Ventura Publisher. Well, Corel now owns that program and a greatly enhanced and improved version of that program will be bundled with CorelDraw 5.0. Seems like a great combination to me.

Antonio and Corel, THANKS MUCH for a super presentation of your very impressive program, CorelDraw; it is truly an amazing program. Antonio did a bang-up job of showing many of its new features.

AND THE WINNER IS Thanks to the generosity of Corel Corporation, who donated all of the door prizes, there were some very nice door prizes. Those among us to have the good fortune to win are:

In addition, five members were lucky winners of a Corel Mouse Pad.

The meeting adjourned at about 8:35 PM. u