Willamette Apple Connection Vol1No9 Oct87

= a 2 CONNECTION OCTOBER MEETING INFORMATION The meeting is scheduled for October 15th, 1987, with a starting time of 7:00 p.m.. The meeting will be held on the Chemeketa Community College campus, in Building 2, Room 112. The "Main Event", held over from last month, will be the nomination of members to serve on the Board of Directors. The positions are: President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer and one (1) Member-at-Large. ANNUAL BALLOTING The ballots will be mailed out to the members after the October Regular Membership Meeting. Make your voice count, We will need three volunteers to serve as "Election Tellers" the first week in November. These volunteers will have to be members which are not on the ballot. The ballots will need to be returned to: Election Tellers Willamette Apple Connection, Inc. 725, 0. Box Salem, OR 97303-0053 The ballots must be postmarked no later than October 31st, 1987. Any ballots returned past that date will not be tabulated. NEW PRODUCT ROUNDUP ImageWriter LQ Printer The ImageWriter# LQ printer is a versatile, wide-carriage, dot matrix, letter “quality printer. for Macintosh* and Apple# 1 computers. Printing at 216 dots per inch, the ImageWriter LQ delivers the high-quality output required in many business, educational, and administrative settings. The product supports custom-designed fonts, as well as color printing, October 1987 - Apple dealer. WAC Journal Vol. 1 / No.9 A Monthly Publication of the Willamette Apple Connection, Inc. An Apple Il & Compatible User Education Group P. O. Box 7252 . Salem, OR 97303-0083 . (503) 585-0811 A Month in Apple’s History ... AUGUST 1979 - Apple II Pascal is released. . 1981- International Business Machines introduces the IBM# Personal Computer. Apple greets its new competitor with a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal that reads, "Welcome IBM, Seriously." 1982 - Apple announces that U.S. Customs agents will detain and seize all foreign imitations of the Apple Il. Confiscated computers will be destroyed. 1984- The Apple IIc# receives the 1984 IDEA award the Industrial Design Excellence Award - sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America. _ 1985 - Apple takes a public stand against South African apartheid, declaring that, "We choose not to support those policies and are therefore discontinuing our activities in South Africa." 1986- The Apple Programmers and Developers Association (APDA) is formed. Free Upgrade for Apple IIGS Owners Apple is pleased to offer all Apple Ilgs* owners a free chip that will enhance the performance of your Apple IIGS personal computer. _The Video Graphics Controller (VGC) chip - which generates the video output of your Apple IIGS -"may occasionally produce some flickering and pink tones when black-and-white programs are displayed on a color monitor in double-high-resolution mode. Also, some rarely used color combinations may cause characters to flicker in the standard text mode. . Although you may have never noticed these minor problems, Apple would like to correct them for you, free of charge. . Simply bring your Apple IIGS to any authorized ealer.* Your dealer will replace the old chip witha new chip that resolves these ‘oblems. And, for .any ‘inconvenience you may have experienced, your Apple dealer will also install at.no charge a new, enhanced version of the Apple IIGS ROM chip. ; z We. hope you will enjoy your free Apple IIGS Upgrades. . Visit the authorized Apple dealer from whom yu purchased your system, or call, toll. free, 800) 538-9696 for the name of the dealer nearest you, WILLAMETTE APPLE CONNECTION, Inc. P.O. Box 7252 Salem, Oregon 97303-0053 President and Editor of the Journal Lawrence E. Tucker (503) 585-0811 Vice President arwin Wuerch (303) 364-4194 Secretary Harry Haley. (503) S7i-3t 7 Treasurer and Telecommunications System Operator Neal Layton (503) 370-9324 Salem Public Library Bulletin Board (503) 588-6130 Head Librarian John Moore 503) 838-4966 MEETINGS | The Regular Membership Meeting is held on the third Thursday of the month, with a start time of 7:00 p.m.. The meeting is held on the Chemeketa Community College campus, in Building ’ Room 112. The general public is invited to attend. WAC JOURNAL. is published e journal is ishe monthly. | Authors should submit their copy via MODEM to the Salem Public Librar BBS (Apple SIG), in Binary form; or mail a diskette with the article written in ASCII text file form, AppleWorks or Applewriter files by the 7th of the month. ard copy should be mailed by the last day of the month preceding the publishing month. DISCLAIMER - The Willamette Apple - Connection, Inc. discourages the. unlawful: duplication "of copyrighted _sottware and other materials; and encourages. prompt payment for “shareware” = which members. keep’. and use. Persons who do not adhere to these guidelines bear sole responsibility for their actions. A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Making a Manual: The Inside Story Inside every Apple box is a manual. And inside every manual is an untold story. It’s the story of a journey that takes a year or more and the efforts of dozens of people who ensure that the manual you pull from the box is as carefully crafted as the product itself. By the time it reaches you, each Apple manual has been shaped by a multitude of hands, undergone myriads of revisions and transformations, and may even have taken a trip to Europe and back! That journey begins in Apple’s Customer Publications group - the group responsible for all printed documentation included with Apple products. Staffed by over 80 full-time writers, editors, artists, production editors, and systems administrators, this group produces some 117 titles a year - over 12,000 pages worth. And they do it with the same tools some of their documents describe: Macintosh computers and LaserWriter# printers. In fact, since the middle of last year, all manuals were produced from a desktop using Apple technology exclusively. Described as the largest desktop publishing group in the country, the Customer Publications department writes, edits, illustrates, and produces not only hardware and software manuals, but all Apple’s technical reference books - books such as Inside Macintosh (all five volumes), as well as all the computer-based training materials - the interactive disk-based tutorials that are often your first introduction to a new Apple product. How do they do it? Here’s the story of a manual’s journey from concept to finished product. The road to the box begins with the writer - the product’s first end user. Long before a product rolls out of production or is even announced, a writer is assigned to the project based on his or her special area of expertise. Working closely with the product’s engineers, the writer gathers information, tests one of the rare prototypes of the product, and prepares a document outline. The outline, which gets hammered out chapter by chapter, is the road map everyone agrees to before the first paragraph is written. The next step is writing - getting the basics down on paper. The writer prepares the alpha draft - the first copy written about the product for the end user. This draft, which may make the rounds several times, is reviewed, critiqued, revised, and finally approved by the engineers. But since the product itself is continually changing, so must the manual. With hundreds of revisions occurring almost daily, the writer depends on the responsive: cut-and-paste technology. of the Macintosh and the speedy, legible drafts produced by the LaserWriter; These tools allow the writer to incorporate changes almost as fast as they occur - changes that not even an army . of typewriters and red-pencils (the writer’s traditional tools) could Keep up with! A second draft ~ the beta draft - then follows the same path as its predecessor. This time around, any missing pieces are fitted into place and the first graphics take shape. The writer makes “screen dumps” or pictures of the screen and may even prepare simple line drawings so the reviewers can visualize the emerging document. The beta cycle ends in a group review meeting that may last as long as two days! This meeting marks a turning point in the development of the manual. From now on, it travels with the writer as well as an editor, art director, artist, production editor, and production supervisor. The editor works closely with the writer to create the clear and open style that distinguish all Apple manuals. In the process of polishing the text, a final art list is generated that describes all the graphics, photographs, line drawings, and conceptual art planned for the manual. The preliminary graphics, along with the near-final manuscript, are passed on to the art director who determines how the art will be created, who will do it, and how it will look on the printed page. Then, just before the manual heads down the home stretch, it is tested by dozens of neophyte users to ensure that it achieves it’s goal: to show people how to use and make the most of their new Apple product. From then on, it’s like the last leg of a relay race, run by the production editor who is responsible for putting all the pieces in place. As the product’s shipping date gets closer and closer, the final pages are laid out, art is put in place, an index is created, and hundreds of checks are made to ensure that everything is where it belongs. The production process ends when the final pages are printed in near-typeset quality from a LaserWriter Plus - a process that may take only two hours for a manual of several hundred pages. These pages are then reproduced on film and sent out for printing and binding. The fact that everything at this point has been done on Apple products ~ all the writing, editing, drawing, and printing - is a real tribute to the speed and- reliability of the technology. It also says a great deal about the pride that goes into ‘every Apple manual. But the story of the manual doesn’t quite end there. Every manual produced by Apple is translated into seven or eight different languages even before the English version is printed and shipped. The hub of that activity is centralized at Apple’s facility in Cork, Ireland - also the location where many Apple manuals are printed - which is why some Apple manuals make a quick trip overseas. The manual’s journey really ends when it arrives at its final destination - your desktop. So the next time you pick up a new Apple manual, take a look at the inside back cover. The inscription there, called a "“colophon"” in book publishing Jargon, describes the software, fonts, and equipment that were used to produce the manual. But that, of course, is only part of the story. Putting Quick Connect to Good Use We've talked to a lot of groups in the last few months about how they’re using Quick Connect. Many, it seems, are using Quick Connect as we hoped they would - as the User Group Connection’s outreach to the members of User Groups across the country. Some, like the New York Macintosh Users Group and several others, even include a Quick Connect insert in their own monthly newsletter - something we hear has been very well received by their members. Whether you're using Quick Connect in a library or resource center, in reprints, or adapting its copy to your own newsletters, we hope it’s helping your members get some unusual insights on Apple’s. people and products. Comments and suggestions are always welcome. Link us at LEANSE1 or FARNAM, or write to us at 20525 Mariani Ave. , M/S 36P, Cupertino, CA 95014, and tell us how we can make Quick Connect the best possible resource for User Group members. 1987 Apple Computer, Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, Image wr ‘iter, LaserWriter, Apple IIc, Apple IIgs, and acimtosh are trademarks of Apple OM, puter» Inc. is a registered ade mark of international Business Machines Corporation. — OL SSVTO LST €S00-€0€26 voGbai9 ‘wares @SZL XO “Od “Uy ‘UOTIaUUND atddy azawWeTIIM