These problems may have resulted from the errors of Apple's past managers, but the company's downward spiral threatens to overwhelm all the positive things Apple is trying to do today. Macromedia closed at 95 / 16 Friday, off about 80 percent from its high of 48-3/8 in April. Apple's problems have helped make Macromedia's stock chart look like a bungee-jumping exercise. More than half its customers do their work on Macs. It sells software tools used to create multimedia. The San Francisco-based software maker reported a loss of six cents per share Thursday. Windows-based software grew a measly 3.3 percent.īut that's small comfort to a firm like Macromedia Inc. It was admittedly a tough year for software in general. The Software Publishers Association recently reported that in the first 9 months of 1996, Mac software sales fell 21 percent compared to the same period in 1995. "But they have to get parents and schoolkids and small business owners jazzed about buying the current Macs, and they have to do it in the next six months."Īnd the reason is the little companies in the Mac ecosystem are in danger of suffocating. "Apple has made some good moves lately, like clarifying its direction on the future operating system," Selvin said. Before Christmas, Selvin laid off 42 people, a fifth of his workforce, and announced a $30 million loss. So sales plummeted after last year's PowerBook recall. Although it has recently branched out to serve Windows, its modems have been particularly popular in Apple laptops. Global Village makes modems and other devices primarily for the Mac. "It's a good thing the aliens didn't attack last year or Jeff Goldblum would have been on back order," observed Neil Selvin, president of Global Village Communications, Inc.īut Selvin wasn't laughing. Apple had to yank it off store shelves because it had a battery flaw. It was ironic that Apple Chairman Gil Amelio started his keynote speech with a film clip from the movie Independence Day, showing Jeff Goldblum saving the world by using an Apple PowerBook computer to send a virus into the alien ship. That compared to an growth rate of 13.9 percent for the overall U.S. sales of Macs and Mac clones declined 19 percent to 1.5 million in the same period this year. According to Dataquest, about 1.85 million Macs were sold in the U.S. The whole ecosystem depends on Mac sales, which have declined. They are the firms that Macworld is all about.Īt the moment, however, the Mac environment seems as harsh as the icy moons of Jupiter. Small companies have arisen to sell modems and scanners, software programs and CD-ROMs. Over the past decade Apple has created an "ecosystem" around the Mac. "It's a market we can't ignore," Leckie said.Įven amidst the excitement on the show floor, I couldn't ignore the market realities either. But even this Mac lover was trying to figure out how to adapt his CD-ROM to run under Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software. "We're both Mac lovers," Leckie said of his two-person company. Of course, he created Starry Night on a Mac. Leckie won a "Best of Show" award for programming all this information in a way that was beautiful to behold and effortless to use. The CD contains 19 million objects photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. With a mouse click, Leckie revealed Jupiter's distinctive color bands. We zoomed in to pinpoint the bright light that turned out to be Jupiter. Return ( await remark().use(addCaptionsToImages))."see" the night sky as it appears at any given place and time. in-place replacement of the image node with figure Specifically, let’s use this syntax for captions: !, This post details an alternative: by writing a remark plugin, we can extend Markdown’s syntax to support image captions! This is pretty painful - it breaks up the flow of Markdown files and is a non-starter for non-developers. Instead, authors need to insert raw HTML elements into their Markdown files. Although HTML lets developers define elements with images and captions, Markdown doesn’t provide a built-in syntax for it.
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