SAN FRANCISCO �- Apple and Adobe are among electronic publishing giants expected to display the heavy artillery at this week's Seybold conference.
The hottest buzz surrounds Apple, which is widely rumored to be unveiling a new professional machine featuring a new, hotly anticipated PowerPC chip from Motorola that dramatically speeds multimedia performance.
"There's all kinds of indications that there's going to be some pretty big news from Apple at this event," said Gene Gable, vice president and general manager of Seybold Seminars. "There's some excitement in the air that we haven't seen in a while."
The indicators, Gable said, were unprecedented security at Apple's booth and elaborate preparations for Apple CEO Steve Jobs' keynote on Tuesday morning, when he is expected to reveal a new line of Macs.
According to rumors on Web sites of Mac enthusiasts, Apple originally had intended to introduce a machine with a redesigned motherboard as well as the new chip, but the machine, code-named Sawtooth, was dogged by production delays.
Instead, Apple hobbled together a stopgap machine -� code named Yikes!, a moniker that indicates its origins �- in order to have something to show the Seybold design and publishing crowd that forms part of Apple's core market.
The Mac expected to debut will be based on Apple's current motherboard design and will have some of the same performance bottlenecks as existing models, but will debut Motorola's new PowerPC 7400 chip. The chip is part of the AltiVec architecture, a hardware-software combo that significantly cranks up the processing of graphics, video and communications.
Apple continues to try to stave off assaults from Microsoft for the hearts and minds of publishing professionals. Electronic publishing has traditionally been Apple's turf, but Microsoft has been increasingly raising the flag at Seybold over the past couple of years.
In 1997, Bill Gates delivered his first keynote at the conference. Last year, Microsoft's president and chief tub-thumper Steve Ballmer pitched Microsoft's Web-publishing technology to attendees.
This year, the company will be pushing Windows 2000, the forthcoming revision to Windows, as a viable publishing platform.
Microsoft is also likely to unveil e-book reader software that allows electronic texts to be downloaded to a variety of devices, including PCs and handhelds.
The Open eBook consortium, of which Microsoft is a member, is expected to release the first draft of a new standard for publishing electronic books.
The e-book publishing industry is currently mired in a soup of proprietary technologies, in which an e-book formatted for, a Palm device for example, can't be read by other devices.
The proposed Open eBook Publication Structure will set the standard for creating, formatting and delivering e-texts, eliminating the need to reformat texts for different machines.
While Apple arm-wrestles Microsoft, Adobe will be facing off with Quark.
Tuesday morning, Adobe will announce the release of its long-awaited "Quark-killing" InDesign publishing suite.
Known as K2 during development, InDesign will go head to head with Quark's market-dominating QuarkXPress publishing software.
"[InDesign] provides a quality of text and typography that previously you would have had to spend millions of dollars on a system to achieve," said Adobe senior product manager Geoff Fitch.
Featuring an open, plug-in architecture, the product will be available at the show for an introductory price of US$299.
Themed "21st century publishing," the confab of the publishing industry is likely to draw upwards of 35,000 attendees, drawn to see new wares and technologies from more than 300 exhibitors.
Organizers have also lined up big name speakers including Microsoft's vice president of technology development, Dick Brass; Quark's chairman and chief technical officer, Tim Gill; Adobe's president Charles Geschke; and Macromedia's president, Norman Meyrowitz.
