The Greenhouse will be returning to Macworld again this year. The Greenhouse is cooperative effort between sponsors, Power Computing, MacTech, MHA, Freeman and Associates, Shiva, Asante', and Farallon Computing. Apple Evanglism group with the assistance of several long time Macintosh advocates identified 18 new companies with significant new products. Each sponsor is donating time or equipment to make the show affordable for the small companies in the Developer GreenHouse.

These companies include solo developers who until now could only offer their products as shareware, to companies that have had product in the european market for a number of years, but had not entry into the US or world markets. The products span the markets for the Mac, from the internet to desktop publishing, to games and multimedia.

137 companies submitted applications to the volunteer judges who chose the final 18. "The explosion of new Macintosh developers is beyond belief" states Doug Houseman, one of the volunteer coordinators for the area.

The products range from Pointcast's personal news service on the internet to Hong Kong based Abaca's new page layout program that is designed from the ground up to take advantage of the Macintosh's World Script capabilities Abaca makes mixing english, chinese and japanese in the same document painless. Virtually Unlimited from Europe offers full virtual reality with ChaosVR, a fast paced new Macintosh game.

Florida Based Royal Software allows Hypercard stacks to be added to Web pages very quickly. "We can hardly wait for HyperCard 3.0, and what it will offer to people who what to do Java like things for the Web, but do not want to program." States Ro Nagy, the senior developer at Royal.

IRIS brings their successful OCR pen to the US market for the first time. The easy to install and use pen makes scanning parts of articles into the Mac a snap.

Other companies and products in the Developer GreenHouse are: - Rockstar with software to set-up a whole network of Macs for the internet - Pacific Coast with their WebCatalog software - NetManage with ChameleonNFS for the Mac, making the Mac a full partner on Unix networks - Excelsior with disk management software that cleans up your system folder. - DiamondSoft with software that manages fonts as a single database, negating the 128 font barrier. - PaceWorks' Dancer multi-media authoring tool - Adrenaline's OpenDoc based spreadsheet and graph tools - Alco Bloom with his URL Manager Pro - Pedagoguery's GIF based Web animation tool - Digital Harbor's OpenDoc word processor - Eclipse's OpenDoc based outliner - Terry Morris's HTML document conversion utility - Digital Comet's smart page for making better Web pages

Each of these companies would have had to stay home if the GreenHouse was not available for them.

"It is sad that we left over 100 companies at home." stated Russ Havard of Apple Developer Relations. Havard and others at various sponsoring organizations are promising the resources to double the size of the Developer GreenHouse in San Francisco. Since the call for companies went out two weeks ago, there have been 30 applications already, all from new and different companies. the first 5 spots in San Francisco will be announced Friday Morning at 10AM in the GreenHouse at Bayside.

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