News for Tuesday, 18 May 2004

We learnt the same day that Apple made available the development tools for iTunes PC and that Chinese PCs will have this software installed by default.
Here's a third news Christian told us.

There has been a huge revamp of .Mac. The interface has been "safarised" and I also noticed that from my PC (from my job) I could edit/update my Homepage on .Mac which I could only do on my Mac beforehand Quite fun this PC compatibility.  ;o)

So, if the other iApps and OS X are ported we shall all switch to PCs :))
[Actually, if .Mac still has no localized version, short of English and Japanese, who cares ?]

We're not used to spread news about things we do not like. Yet Jérôme's advices might prevent you from getting into trouble.

I'm not laughing at all : a very serious bug exists in this soft http://www.echofx.com/usbvision.html It is aimed at using a small accessory that used to be sold by "xlr8" and would work well along with Interview 2.1.2 under Mac 10.3.3. The scandal is that the firm who offer a "demo" of a new version, that would bring nothing on top of the old version short of a message "echo FX" in the copy screen and it won't work over 10 minutes either. Worse : it will erase the older version, which can't be reinstalled. And the latest detail : it will make the use of an iSight impossible and iChatAV won't work. Actually USBVsion will accaparate the video via the USB, that's what it's made for actually, but also the FireWire, which we don't care about as we have iMovie and iChat AV for that purpose. I tried everything … just to realize what was obvious from start … the only way to get rid of it is by reinstalling an entire system, as even with "Pacifist" I couldn't isolate an iChat AV installer on Pnather disks We were looking for a Mac virus : here it is. Unfortunately it's not a "fake" Word 2004 downloaded via P2P but a software distributed by a serious (?) firme. Which I told them in my better English.

We'll let you know about next developments of this affair.

Apple has officially announced that the chinese PC manufacturer "Fonder" will install by default iTunes on all computers which are produced.
We would have been more excited if Apple was selling Mac like hell in China...it might be the next step...

Barzi was eligible for a free Office upgrade.
He received his Office 2004 update this morning earlier than the official release.

Sony will release during next summer a high-end PC model. we will not describe spec of this computer, but only few interesting points:
- ATI Graphic card PCI Express 16x
- 1 GB DDR
- 250 GB HD
- DL DVD burner.
Those arecomponents of a computer which are not depending on the processor/OS type; so components which could be present in the future PMG5 revision.
For sure, this summer PCI Express graphic cards as well as DL DVD burner will be available in large amount...

Sony is developping a new optic that will be able to burn CDs, DVDs, AND Blue Ray discs. Presently, 2 optics are required to achieve the same results.
This product should be available within 2 years.

Thank you Olivier for this information.

While reading through the documentation of the Panasonic (Matshita) UJ-825 found in the newest Powerbooks, I found out that it supports +R/+RW as well as -R/-RW (and apparently RAM too) medias. So I tried to burn a DVR+RW with Toast 5.2.3 and, Oh joy, it works ! The burning process went without a hitch and so goes reading the disc from the Finder. And there is more. Disk Utility says the media is a DVD+RW (Read only), but can glady erase it for you... Feeling I was on a roll, I re-insert the said DVD+RW in the PB. The Finder mounts it as a blank disc and asks me if I would like to format it in HFS+, to which I clicked yes. Then one can write to the disc via the Finder. The result still being a DVD+RW (even the disc icon says so !) However I do not have a DVD-RAM handy, but I would not be surprised if it worked...

Thomas Perrier has just released version 1.0 of his ATIccelerator utility. This tool makes it possible to overclock all Mac ATI cards, from the Rage128 to the 9800 Pro.
Be warned !! With this you can really destroy a video card. Use with caution.
ATIccelerator

GarageBand 1.1 is available via SoftwareUpdate.

GarageBand 1.1 addresses isolated performance and stability issues, allows per-track Echo settings similar to other effects, supports loop libraries in other disk locations, supports importing unprotected AAC audio files in addition to AIF and MP3 files, and addresses issues with ReWire support, moving GarageBand songs between different computers, Help support, fixing the timing of individual notes (as well as entire regions), and dragging entire tracks in the timeline.