12/96 News: Guess Who's Coming To Windows?
By Joseph C. Panettieri
By the time you read this, Windows 95 and Windows NT Workstation
will likely boast all of the multimedia and Internet publishing
capabilities offered by Apple Computer's MacOS. Instead of panicking,
Apple is actually celebrating-even hyping-this bit of news.
Apple will release a single multimedia API family that supports
3-D, virtual reality and dynamic media software development. The
surprising twist is that the proprietary PC maker plans to offer
this multimedia API, dubbed QuickTime Media Layer (QTML), on Win95
and NT sometime in early 1997. Windows-based QTML development
tools and components will arrive shortly thereafter.
QTML is a superset of Apple's established multimedia APIs-QuickTime,
QuickTime Conferencing and Collaboration, QuickTime Virtual Reality
and QuickDraw (pictured). Apple expects everything from PC games
to 3-D home pages to be developed using QTML. Microsoft, by contrast,
offers several multimedia API families (such as Direct3D, DirectDraw
and DirectSound) instead of just one.
Since QTML will be available for Windows 95, Windows NT, UNIX
and MacOS, "developers will have the power to create content
once, and contain and publish it anywhere," according to
Carlos Montalvo, Apple Interactive Media Group vice president.