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RELEASE: SPRING 2000
Fast Food
When you're late getting home and company's due in half an hour, it's nice to hurry things along by having more than one form of culinary physics on your side. Jenn-Air's Accellis oven bombards food with microwaves, heat, and forced air all at once, cooking in as little as one-fifth the time of conventional ovens. A 3-pound chicken comes out browned and crisp in about 20 minutes - the time it takes to make the salad and set the table.
Microwave-convection combination ovens have been a secret weapon in commercial kitchens for years, but the $3,500 Accellis brings the technology to consumers, who can now roast lamb shanks as quickly as their favorite bistro. To deflate professional chefs further, Accellis requires no special techniques or preparations - all you do is reduce the cooking time. So shave already, and hit the shower.
Jenn-Air: (800) 536 6247, www.jennair.com.
RELEASE: WINTER
Delicate Character
We may spend hours online, but for sheer reading pleasure we choose paper over pixels. Yes, Web libraries lie at our fingertips, but computer displays still can't match the clarity of a cheap paperback - and if letters aren't ultrasharp, reading's no fun. A brain that's busy deciphering characters can't enjoy the story.
Microsoft Reader, out early next year, banishes the 72-dpi blues. The Windows application actually makes reading long documents onscreen pleasant. Its uncluttered interface shows only the text, rendering fonts using Microsoft's ClearType technology, which nearly triples the horizontal resolution of type on color LCD screens. Future versions of Windows will incorporate ClearType at the system level, improving fonts in all applications. But for now, it works only within Reader.
Here's how it works: ClearType controls red, green, and blue subpixels individually, rather than as blocks. Meanwhile, ClearType also adjusts the pixels to smooth out diagonals and curves, eliminating jaggedness. For black-and-white shapes, this set of optical tricks combines to give onscreen type a quality approaching that of print. As Microsoft VP of technology development Dick Brass explains, "All computer displays are optical illusions. ClearType is just another eye trick."
And not entirely new: This subpixel control is something the Apple II did back in the 1970s. Type designer Jonathan Hoefler also notes that to fulfill its potential, ClearType may require new fonts, because, as he says, "It's easier to design type around technology than to use technology to solve existing problems with type."
On high-resolution screens, Reader renders standard TrueType fonts beautifully. According to Brass, Reader will be "free or damn cheap," giving all the more reason to go ahead and curl up with a good laptop.
Microsoft: +1 (425) 882 8080, (800) 426 9400, www.microsoft.com.
RELEASE: WINTER
Webbed Footage
The video store carries loads of old movies, but television tends to disappear as soon as it's broadcast - which is too bad, since TV captures moments of earthshaking drama that other media miss.
Yahoo's growing text-searchable video archive is adding image-based search methods. Come December, you'll be able to retrieve news clips by color characteristics, so you can find more hurricane shots or sunsets. And simple face-recognition technology will support searches by people appearing in the shots. If you search for Hillary Clinton by name, you'll get a lot of footage with people talking about her. But search by name and face, and you'll get clips of the woman herself.
The free broadcast.com site, now owned and run by Yahoo!, has been aggregating content from hundreds of broadcasters and sports teams, and it's all being indexed with MediaSite software, which - like rival system VideoLogger from Virage - extracts nonimage information from video. It captures closed-captioning, recognizes where the camera cuts are, and makes intelligent guesses about when the topics change.
With all this newly available nonfiction video, expect some amateur movie critics to turn into amateur historians.
Yahoo! Broadcast (formerly broadcast.com): index.broadcast.com. Yahoo! Broadcast: (800) 342 8346. MediaSite: +1 (412) 288 9910, www.mediasite.net.
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Rest in Inner Peace
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Biodetective
Magic Markers
Head Trip
Helping Hand
Electric Avenue
ReadMe
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Words for Windows
The Boy Mechanic
Spin Doctors
Just Outta Beta
Thrash and Burn
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