Apple Chronicle
Apple Chronicle MAC CD vintage computer advertisement news nostalgia demos audio Type: Application Platform: Mac Publisher: Apple Released: 1992 Media: CD The Apple Chronicle was a n attempt at a periodic, CD-based newsletter. This CD was bundled with certain Apple computers produced around 1992, including the Centris 610 (introduced Feburary 10, 1993). Even though the content hints in several places that there were supposed to be future editions of the Chronicle, to my knowledge, only this one issue was ever published.Half of the CD is the Apple Chronicle newsletter itself, a HyperCard stack enriched with the ColorizeHC and QuickTime XCMDs to feature color graphics and embedded movies. The issue’s headline was Apple’s recently released QuickTime, which at the time was a fairly revolutionary piece of technology, allowing applications to, well it’s right there in the front page article: “integrate graphics, sound, video, and animation.”Let’s check out the global news:Clicking on the yellow film icon in the top right starts a video in the picture box below of a discus thrower spinning and hurling an object, revealed to be a CD as it passes by someone stupidly using an Apple computer, right in the middle of the discus field, where people are throwing things. It is inspirational product placement at its best.And speaking of product placement!page 7 of the Apple Chronicle, showing the advertisement article "VIDEOSPIGOT: OVER 20,000 USERS AND THE NUMBER KEEPS GROWING!"page 12 of the Apple Chronicle, showing the advertisement "MOOTION WORKS Family of Multimedia Products"page 18 of the Apple Chronicle, showing an advertisement for the LaserMaster Unity 1200XL printerMost of the newsletter is dedicated to different Mac software and hardware products, especially those with interaction with either QuickTime or HyperCard. The other half of the CD consists of demos of the products highlighted or advertised in the newsletter. Some of them, like Apple’s, are merely images. Apple’s is actually a PowerPoint presentation, “Products by Apple,” exported as an animated GIF. Here are a few slides:slide 5 of the "Products by Apple" presentation, describing The Apple Advantage: created with the user in mind, intuitive and easy to use, graphical user interface, and built for growth and expansionslide 9 of the "Products by Apple" presentation, describing What the Apple Advantage Means to You: powerful technology that's easy to use, thousands of consistent applications, built-in networking, and designed to grow as your needs growslide 16 of the "Products by Apple" presentation, describing The Macintosh Classic II, affordable and fast and an ideal entry-level system, and its features: all-in-one design, memory expandable to 10MB, built-in 40MB hard disk available, connects to printers and other Macintosh peripherals, virtual memory, and sound input (microphone included)slide 33 of the "Products by Apple" presentation, describing two printers and their features, the Apple ImageWriter II (impact printer, best price, multi-part forms, and continuous feed paper) and Apple StyleWriter (laser quality, affordable, convenient small size, and TrueType fonts)A lot of the demos are HyperCard based, allowing interactive displays of product information, occasionally enhanced with movies from QuickTime or Macromedia Director (now Adobe Director).advertisement stack from Shiva Corporation, providing information on their various routers and other network productsadvertisement stack from Nisus Software, showing off the features of Nisus Solo Writer 1.3advertisement stack from Radius Inc., showing off the features of Radius VideoVisionadvertisement stack from Interactive Speech Systems, showing off the features of their Speak English product, software designed to teach English to Japanese speakersThis last one is interesting because it contains possibly the greatest startup sound any program in this or any other universe has ever had:And of course there are real demonstration apps, like FrameMaker 3.0. Claris has demos for six different languages, but, oddly, there are three different demo apps. For German, you get ClarisWorks 1.0 (the five different modes: “Textverarbeitung,” “Graphik,” “Datenbank,” “Tabellenkalkulation,” and “Kommunikation”). You speak Italian? Congrats, you’ve got MacWrite II! If you’re stuck with any of the other languages, English, French, Spanish, or Japanese, don’t fret! You can still try out a demo of FileMaker Pro.directory of Claris demo applications, showing the different apps available for different languagesAnd, oh man, demos for Discis Books, anyone ever use any of these interactive storybooks?two pages from the Peter Rabbit Preview from Discis Books, showing two sentences and an accompanying illustrationThe screenshot really doesn’t do it justice. Every page has a music loop playing in the background, and you can click the speaker icons to the left of the text to have the story narrated. The words are highlighted as they’re spoken so you can follow along. And you can click on different parts of the illustrations to have what they are read out loud: “Peter Rabbit,” “gooseberry net,” “sleeve,” “ground,” etc. Wicked awesome.Another demo is for Prescience Corporation’s Expressionist 3, an equation editor:an example equation entered in Expressionist: the integral from zero to infinity of the sine of x squared is equal to the square root of pi divided by eightFrom Vividus Corporation is a save-disabled demo of Cinemation, an animation program somewhat similar to Flash and Director in terms of creating objects in frames and adding motion and interactivity to them. Cinemation’s intended use was in creating animated presentations; it even had the ability to import PowerPoint presentations as the base for a project.Motion Works Inc. had a demo of a product similar to Cinemation, PROmotion. PROmotion’s intended use though was actually for cartoons and other animated media, not simply presentations. Also included is a stack showing off ADDmotion II, an XCMD allowing color graphics and animations to be embedded in HyperCard stacks. There are a bunch of example uses of PROmotion and ADDmotion II in a “PrimeTime Examples” folder, containing some samples of what was included in Motion Works’s PrimeTime CD Collection Vol.1, a CD of sounds, graphics, and movies to be used with PROmotion and ADDmotion II. Of particular note is the “The Principles of Animation” stack:splash screen from The Principles of Animationmain menu from The Principles of Animation, listing the techniques covered: squash & stretch, anticipation, secondary action, straight ahead & pose to pose, follow through & overlapping, slow in & slow out, arcs, staging, timing, exaggeration, solid drawing, and appealStraight Ahead & Post to Pose screen from The Principles of AnimationMost of the principles have actual animated examples, and not just a static frame like the one above.I’ll close this post with video of a short cartoon contained in the “Editorial & Comics” section of the newsletter. The cartoon, titled “Mac ‘n’ Tish!,” has no credits save the signature of the artist “Deigert” on the frames containing the two main characters, but an advertisement in the “Classifieds” section for the company Media Design has the same two characters making a sales pitch, pointing to the cartoon as a sample of their work.The cartoon is saved on the disc as seven Director files, so there are some pauses in the video during CD access of the next segment; I have left these intact to give you the authentic experience of viewing this cartoon off the CD. For Deigert, the uncredited voice actors, and everyone else at Media Design, I present to you “Mac ‘n’ Tish!”:For 1992 VINTAGE Mac [*Please review compatibility/platform sections in 'What You Get']
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