NO-BRAINER 4U by Denise Caruso c. 1990 Media Letter 4D JOINS THE FRAY 4th Dimension, the popular Macintosh relational database from ACI, has been able to manipulate tagged laserdisc images since its pre-Macintosh days on the Apple II. So the company has always scoffed at "multimedia" per se, considering it a technical no-brainer. But the clamor is increasing in the multimedia database market, and as a result, ACI and its U.S. subsidiary ACIUS will soon release what it's calling a "Multimedia Kit" for 4D developers. Mark Vernon, director of marketing for ACIUS, says that the toolkit will provide a variety of pre-programmed extensions to 4D, allowing the development of interactive and multimedia application generators which can launch products by MacroMind, Bright Star, Farallon and others from within the database. The company plans to include plenty o' drivers as well, including those for standard-brand peripherals such as CD-ROM drives and laserdisc players. INTERESTED IN JAPAN? Then you may also be interested to know that Nikkei Electronics, known as the most influential trade publication in Japan, is opening its first U.S. news bureau in Silicon Valley (San Jose, to be exact) this month. Though his statement sounds slightly more pandering than my favorite publications tend to be, editor-in-chief Rikiya Okabe says that by establishing the new bureau, "we have improved our ability to introduce your products to Japan." He also says the most important responsibility for U.S. correspondents is to report on new technology and products developed by American firms and research institutes. You bet. I just wish our trade magazines had been a little better at doing the same thing about 10 years ago, and I sure wish I could read Japanese. APPLE DEVELOPER (RE)GROUP Big changes afoot in Apple Computer's third party Developer Group. Though the gory details aren't of much interest to outsiders, I think the last paragraph of the AppleLink mail (sent by Kirk Loevner and forwarded semi-circuitously to me) speaks volumes of what we're all (except, perhaps, IBM) hoping is a new attitude at Big Rainbow. "We are at a critical time with our developers," wrote Loevner after detailing a slough of org-chart changes. ". . .We need to challenge the way we've done things in the past and always look for ways that we can do things better. These changes will help us improve our services in the U.S. and develop stronger partnerships with our developer worldwide." Most of the people that I've talked to at Apple in the past couple of weeks or so say they are (finally) excited to be working there again. They think that maybe (just maybe, though they aren't yet holding their collective breath) the company has stopped its lengthy free-fall, caused in part by what Userland's Dave Winer calls Apple's "insidious NIH" -- its intense distrust of any technology "not invented here," i.e., not in its own labs by its own hotshot engineers. The multimedia folks seem particularly heartened, and some interesting announcement are on the way. CASE IN POINT Such changes have obviously come too late to give MacroMind safe harbor. Once a hardcore Mac-only developer, MacroMind is casting a new die with Microsoft and Windows 3.0. At the International Conference on Multimedia in Tokyo last month, Marc Canter defined publicly, for the first time, MacroMind's software strategy based on MacroMedia, an open standard for the interchange of multimedia information. The technology supporting MacroMedia is being used by Microsoft in its Multimedia Extensions. MacroMind also announced the licensing of its technology to Fujitsu for its FM Towns System. C WHAT I MEAN? I really wasn't too interested in writing about The Waite Group's interactive IBM PC-based Master C tutoring program, which teaches -- as you might expect -- how to program in the Language of C, because it seemed a little too, well, pedestrian to be a real interactive media application. You know, no 3D animated program routines doing the rhumba and singing, "if! and! or!" Mitch Waite didn't think that was a good enough reason, and said why: "I have about 100 (registration) cards from people who have bought Master C that all say something like 'Hey, I learn a whole lot better from this kind of computer-based training than from any book. This is the best example I have seen so far. Now when you gonna do more products like this?' It's a new media, it's interactive, it replaces a book, and it does that in a way that actually works." Not to mention that it sold 30,000 copies in four months, in bookstores no less. Of course, Waite also provided a kicker. Not only are there incremental improvements in the original program, but, says Waite, the company is adding IBM's M-Motion video capability and software "agents" (alert: new buzzword) to speed the learning process even further. And Waite has a whole series of Master products planned, all of which will bear "a more sexy interface so they will more quickly qualify for interactive media." TREASURE TROVE If you've ever walked around a library salivating at the possibilities for interactive learning products shelved therein, you'll be delighted to hear that Interactive Arts, based in Santa Monica, just won a contract from the Library of Congress to develop a prototype for what it's calling a "new generation of interactive library information systems." This particular CD-ROM XA-based audio program will be drawn from 55 phonograph records dated 1918-1921, part of a Library series called the Nation's Forum project. Local library visitors will be able to browse recordings, search text, and take away audio tape, printed copy and computer versions of any disc-based record, which will include speeches by such politicians and other famous figures of the time as Henry Cabot Lodge, General J.J. Pershing and Calvin Coolidge. Best of all, the Nation's Forum project is part of a larger project that the Library of Congress is developing, called American Memory, that intends to find ways to distribute copies of Library of Congress collections to libraries across the nation. This, by the way, is a project that IBM has been involved in for some time, too. DOING MULTIMEDIA WINDOWS At the end of this month -- Nov. 28, to be exact -- Microsoft is bringing the mountain to Mohammed, right into the heart of AppleLand, and sponsoring a two-day seminar at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose for Windows 3.0 developers and information publishers. The Microsoft Multimedia Developers Conference is designed specifically for those who want in-depth technical information about the company's new, highly publicized though yet invisible Multimedia Extensions to Win3. Though Microsoft and some of its third-party developers might not think so, I believe this conference would be a great success if it inspired all the information publishers and providers to form a kind of union, a la the controversial Corporate Windows Council. The CWC, formed this summer, raised hackles by expressing its desire and intention to influence both Microsoft and developers in the direction of product development (called "product concept validation") and alpha and beta testing, and maybe even make them knuckle down to some kind of upwardly mobile hardware, software and network interoperability standards. TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION A one-day conference called "Emerging Technology in Education," sponsored by the Association of American Publishers and Apple Computer is happening on Wednesday, Nov. 14 in Redwood Shores, CA. Despite the fact that it's co- sponsored by Apple, only one Apple-staffed presentation is listed in the information I received -- and that's Doug Doyle, who'll demonstrate specific multimedia technologies for college courses. The rest of the presenters are from places such as University of Southern California, the Texas Education System, Addison-Wesley and Times-Mirror. For information on this event, which is coming up pretty darned quick, call AAP's Jerry Sirchia at (212) 689- 8920.