[This is an archive of the original 1996 IMUG web page. Click here to return to the event archive index.]
Gamma Productions is a leader in cross-platform, multilingual computing. Gamma's International Language Interface (ILI) is one of the few Unicode-based libraries that works on Windows, Unix, and the Mac OS. John will describe the concepts behind ILI and show how it enables systems and application programmers to create cross-platform multilingual software. ILI also includes support for an unusually rich set of scripts, and John will demonstrate some simple applications running in many scripts on both Windows and the Mac OS. Finally, John will talk about UniScript, Gamma's higher-level toolkit for developers. It includes a set of ActiveX controls that make it easy to add multilingual support to any ActiveX container such as PowerBuilder and Access.
The Web makes it easy to communicate with millions of potential customers and partners around the world. However, if we publish materials only in English, we may miss most of the potential benefits and savings of a truly World Wide Web.
Making a Web site multilingual, however, is no easy task. The added complexity in design, operation, and maintenance of a multilingual site is not well addressed by existing tools.
David Lakritz will describe Language Automation's WebPlexer, a multilingual Web site management tool that addresses the unique needs of both multilingualism and the Web, and simplifies Web site construction and maintenance for both Web site designers and Webmasters.
David Lakritz (dave@lai.com) is President and CEO of Language Automation, Inc., a language technology company providing multilingual Web publishing solutions to companies worldwide.
For the last four years, both market place and technology front have experienced ups and downs with regards to delivering the information to the home. Interactive video or video on demand, which were once seen to be the killer application which would boost the overall revolution, have been fading away. Today, another rush to deliver Internet access to the home is on. Regardless of the application, the biggest problem has been the last portion of the network infrastructure to the home (last mile). From the telecom statistics, this portion of the network presents 80% of the overall network cost. Although the cost is high, the cable operators (MSOs) and telephone companies (RBOCs and IXCs) have different incentives to invest into their winning solutions. The candidate technologies use a mix of fiber optics with wire or wireless technologies including FTTC (Fiber to the Curb), HFC (Hybrid Fiber Coax), ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line), MMDS (Microwave Multichannel Distribution Service), and LMDS (Local Multipoint Distribution Service). This talk will give you an overview of the issues that the MSOs and RBOCs face, and the pros and cons of each of the competing network technologies.
Yee-Hsiang Chang received his B.S. from the National Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan, in 1983, and the M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, in 1987 and 1990, respectively. From 1991 to 1993, he was a scientist at MCNC in Research Triangle Park, NC, where he participated in the VISTAnet gigabit testbed project in the area of high-speed protocols. From 1993 to 1996, he was a Staff Scientist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA to work on the interactive video and data services. Since 1996, Dr. Chang has been working on the Local Multipoint Distribution Services (LMDS) project within HP to deliver the information to the home via a broadband wireless solution.
In 1991, while writing his dissertation as a doctoral candidate in Art History at U.C., Berkeley, Dajuin Yao was so dissatisfied with the academia that he decided to quit and start his own software company. SinoLogic Software's first offer is HyperChina, one of the most innovative Chinese language programs available.
Dajuin Yao will share with us his views on designing a Chinese learning program that really works. He will talk about various problems he faced while developing HyperChina, such as interface design, display of Chinese characters, sound recording, drills design, selection of material, and so forth. Mr. Yao will also discuss the possibility of learning the Chinese language via the World Wide Web, various resources on Chinese available on the Internet, and introduce the "Chinese Learner's Homepage" offered by SinoLogic.
Adobe will present several new products and relationships which form the keystone of electronic printing and publishing in China. They are:
You may see the correlation with the technology which revolutionised the printing and publishing industries, first in North America and Europe, then in Japan. They key components are: a high-quality, universal core font set, a thriving collection of font developers, PostScript output devices, and PostScript-compatible publishing applications. With these announcements, the same change is poised to occur in China.
Jim DeLaHunt, Engineering Project Manager in the Pacific Rim Printer Engineering group at Adobe Systems, and longtime IMUG member, will report on these developments and what they mean for the Simplified Chinese publishing industry both in China and here.
For more information, please feel free to check out the following
URL's:
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/publicrelations/PDFS/9605/960529.china.pdf
http://www.adobe.com/supportservice/devrelations/PDFS/TN/5092.CID_Overview.pdf
http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/postscript/PDFS/cid.pdf
You can read these PDF files with free Acrobat software available
from:
http://www.adobe.com/acrobat/readstep.html
Bill Knott will present the Pippin platform, Apple's reference platform for information appliances. He will describe its technical details, and compare it to the Macintosh computer. He will also talk about the current market placing for the products and the currently announced plans of Apple's two licensees for Pippin, Bandai Digital Entertainment Corp. of Japan and Katz Media AS of Europe.
Pippin enables licensees to develop $500 machines for browsing the web, and a whole lot more. It is designed as a simplified computer for people who don't want to worry about system folders, extensions, etc. Since the Pippin system folder can live on every CD, title developers can create a known environment for end users that does not need configuration. Pippin users get a machine which has all the processing of an Apple Power Macintosh, the flexibility to use a display that matches their needs (TV or monitor), and the ease of use that surpasses a VCR.
The presentation will focus on the description of Dos and Don'ts when developing software for an international audience.
Basic rules and requirements to develop world-ready applications will be explained. The guidelines will help software developers to adopt coding techniques that are valid for any platform and sensitive to multilingual environments.
An abstract of the guidelines is already published on Ms. Perinotti's web site.
These are some of the questions which will be addressed by Susan and Jim Paulsen of International access/ability Corporation (IAC). As owners of IAC, the Paulsens have helped many software companies with their localization projects over the past seven years including America Online, AT&T;, GE Information Services, Hewlett-Packard and numerous others. IAC specializes solely in the localization of software products.
For years, Chinese text input has been a bottleneck for computer users. Hundreds of different keyboard input methods have been developed, but invariably they are either difficult to learn or slow to use.
Dictation is the fastest and most natural way to input Chinese text for most users. However, until now, large vocabulary dictation software typically required expensive high-end workstations and hardware add-ons.
In this IMUG meeting, Yen-Lu Chow and Mike Chiang of Apple Computer, Inc. will present the Apple Chinese Dictation Kit (CDK). Apple CDK is the world's first low cost, high performance Chinese dictation software. With the Chinese Dictation Kit, users no longer need to suffer through extensive training or the inefficiency of current keyboard input methods. Users can also concentrate more on what they are writing, rather than how to input it.
The Copland release of the Mac OS will contain some dramatic new international capabilities for both developers and users such as much enhanced sorting, find- by-content, and printing. In addition, powerful new features such as the locale manager will make multilingual applications easier to write and use. This talk will cover these new features from both developer and user perspectives.
The Macintosh platform has been a leader in multi-lingual computing solutions since the announcement of WorldScript and the Japanese Language Kit. Recently Apple has made several new announcements in the area of multi-lingual computing. In this meeting, Ted Kim and Lee Collins present three new language kits - Arabic, Hebrew, and Cyrillic - and give a sneak preview of the Korean Language Kit. They also show brand new language support on Macintosh including scripts for India and Vietnam.
