Macs

Any good child of the eighties played the original Nintendo and loved it. They loved every cartridge blowing, standing two inches from the TV playing Duckhunt, square, blister causing controller minute of it. Mega Man was a rocking game during that time. It was so popular that he was a character on the awesome Saturday morning cartoon, Captain N. Do you remember that high quality, 8-bit saturating effect when you started a level? You can see that all the time, even without playing the game, with the amazing MegaManEffect. You’ll have chills when you see the graphics and hear the sounds, or maybe that’s just me. ...

Well, after some fairly convincing evidence earlier in the week that the Macintel developer kits use DRM, followed by some vehement opposition and angst to the idea, sites are now feeling confident enough to proclaim no DRM (and again and again). Controlled Bloom My head is spinning. Let’s slow it down. First, what is using DRM in the new Apple Intels? We’ve discovered that Rosetta uses TCPA/TPM DRM. Some parts of the GUI like ATSServer are still not native to x86 – meaning that Rosetta is required by the GUI, which in turn requires TPM. ...

I’m not as surprised as much as I would have been prior to the Macintel announcement, but I still didn’t expect to see this happen. Apple is making a multi-button mouse with a scroll interface, the Mighty Mouse [Amazon link]. It doesn’t look to be a wheel, but a little nub. Apple’s site mentions rolling though. Mighty Mouse offers 360-degree scrolling capability, thanks to its Scroll Ball, perfectly positioned to roll smoothly under just one finger. I’ll need to get one for myself to play with (because I doubt I’ll like it more than my Logitech MX1000) so I can figure it out. Is it a mini trackball? A nub? Please let it not be a nub. My finger hurts just think about them. What’s really interesting is that it’s not a generic three-button mouse. Apple seems to have jumped headfirst by including side buttons, which act as a fourth button. At $50, it has the same suggested retail price as a Logitech MX518 but will likely stay at that price unlike the Logitech, which can be had for $40 right now. At any rate, this is likely to satisfy many people that have been crying for years for an Apple branded multi-button mouse. The downsides are the price, no fancy optics, and lack of a bluetooth version (big boo for that one). Hopefully Apple will start offering an option to switch out the regular mouse for this on new systems (for a discounted price of $20 or so) or even be so bold as to make it the standard mouse for Powermacs, leaving the single button for the iMacs and eMacs. Update: It even makes noises when scrolling. Cute! Update 2: Amazon has it available for pre-order.

Found via Slashdot, Apple is using DRM to keep parts of the OS from working on unauthorized computers. The Slashdot story includes links to a wiki on x86 Mac OS X, which in turn pulls its information about the TCPA/TPM DRM from this FAQ. The problem is that the site is titled Against TCPA (which is also their domain name). It’s not exactly an unbiased source, to say the least. I want to find a slightly less paranoid breakdown of the technology. ...

Apple released new iBooks and Mac minis. All in all, the updates were really minor. The good news is that all Mac models now sport at least 512 MB of RAM. That’s pretty much the whole of the update for the minis. The iBooks on the other hand, have been bumped to 1.33 GHz and 1.42 GHz. They’ve also moved up to Radeon 9550s in lieu of Radeon 9200s. Oddly enough, the 14″ also gained 9 MHz for its bus apparently. This is the only Mac I’ve read of ever to have a 142 MHz bus. That might be the only thing to make this round of revisions memorable.

Along the lines of their other recent moves, like buying Flickr, Yahoo! has acquired Konfabulator. Longtime Mac fans should recognize the product and its author, Arlo Rose, for his role in creating Kaleidoscope. Recent Mac fans should recognize the debacle surrounding Apple’s creation of Dashboard. This brings the immediate benefit of making Konfabulator free. Previously, the framework itself cost $20 to register. When comparing Konfabulator to Dashboard, the price difference (Dashboard being free with Tiger) gave Dashboard the edge. Yahoo! effecting this price change will have a dramatic effect upon its market share. Mac users will feel free to compare it directly to Dashboard without feeling obligation. As for Windows users, the new Yahoo! association should bring lots of attention. Those two effects should stimulate Widget developers into developing for Konfabulator again. That’s a good thing because as I write this, there is still no working package tracker. Very lame. ...

Apple released the iPhoto 5.0.3 update yesterday. Normally, iApp updates aren’t particularly exciting. In fact, the details are excruciatingly boring. Here are the changes according to Apple: On Tiger, images are no longer color-shifted after editing (Mac OS X 10.4.2 update required) Book layouts will not change when moving an image on a page An issue was addressed that caused some book orders to be cancelled Smart Albums will display correctly in other iLife applications Normally, I’d ignore this and just install it, but the first bullet is the interesting one. It fixes a problem that has rather profound effects. Generally, it’s referred to as the iPhoto color shifting bug. The linked article is probably the best documentation of the bug I’ve seen (complete with animation). At any rate, it means I can start editing photos again.

I’ve already updated all the Macs in the house with no ill effects. The most visual difference is the addition of a Widget Manager (for those afraid to fiddle around in their Library/Widgets folder). Apple has posted a knowledge-base article (#301722), as well as a delta updater and a combo updater. The changes as described by Apple, are as follows. The update mentions improved Safari scroll speed, so I expected that it was a recent WebKit build (with Acid2 test compatibility). Unfortunately, it seems that this hasn’t gone mainstream yet, so reliance on NightShift, SafariOnAcid, or your own builds will have to continue. ...

Apple opened up a public CVS repository for WebKit, it made it possible to get the latest source, compile, and run it yourself. They even broke the steps to do so into easily digested step-by-step instructions. All one need do is get source and compile it. You need to make sure that you have XCode installed and be comfortable with running Terminal commands. You don’t need to really understand them, just be able to type them in. If you’d like to avoid all that, there is a shortcut. Boyd Waters has put together and updated version of WebKit in an easy to use container called SafariOnAcid. The name is an homage to the fact that using the updated code, the Acid2 test passes. It’s worth checking out not only for standards compliance, but speed. ...

I’ve been subscribed to Your Mac Life‘s podcast for some time now. I subscribed a long time back before I knew what to subscribe to. Basically, there was a single show, which was a rant by Shawn. It was all right. Now, after I noticed that another show never made it self available, I did a little digging and found out that they didn’t because they made all their money on Audible, charging just about $4 a show, or $45 for a year’s subscription. Saying that he didn’t want to change their business model is a fine justification. That’s cool. ...