News for Friday, 3 December 2004

I proudly present you my first review on hardmac.com, as with a little help I even managed to get how to upload it and so on. Now the photos are there, so the review is complete :)
I tested the impressive Future sonics EM 3 earbuds, which I've been using for two weeks now in Paris with my iPod, and I must say this is a revolution in my digital life!
I let you read my review so you'll get to know why this is, to me, the iPod earphones I'd been looking for for two years.
(See the "articles" column)

ATI had just finished announcing its new flagship GPU X850 XT, that several PC websites were releasing tests related to this graphic card.
Conclusions are a bit mixed. It cost around 10% more than the X800XT, but is performing almost identical. It will be available soon, and in stock, not like the X800XT or the nVIDIA 6800 Ultra which have been announced already but can hardly be found on the market.
Both GPU manufacturers in their marketing war, have the tendency to announce products before knowing if they can really produce them.
This reminds me a computer company with a fruit as a logo...
Let's hope that ATI will succeed in a short term to release a Mac edition high-end graphic card to compete with the Geforce 6800.

Live Cut is an OpenSource tool which let you create multi camera shots with Final Cut Pro for Mac OS X (Live Cut is used as a preprocessor for Apple's Final Cut Pro, indeed Live Cut generates XML files which can be imported into FCP).
Live Cut is a very simple and intuitive tool for editing multi camera shots (up to 4 cameras).
Editing can be done in realtime, very much as in a live editing suite, by simply switching between four synchronized sources.
Live Cut is adding functions to FCP, without being a complete editing suite, it allows you to focus on your search for "the best shots". then editing, effects, etc... can be added later on in FCP, Live Cut can help you to save a lot of time.
Live Cut runs on my 876Mhz G4 PowerBooks - two tracks when the footage remains on the internal harddisk
Up to 4 tracks if footage is split over different (external) harddisks
Live Cut only works in DV-PAL Resolution at the moment. It wouldn't be too difficult to change the xslt file that does the transformation from Live Cut to Final Cut Pro XML, but I dont have this priority for the moment. Any help is greatly appreciated...
Live Cut is coded with MAX/MSP and softVNS, porting it to PureData would be nice but will require help...
For images and info, please visit http://livecut.sourceforge.net/

[FRANCE]
We announced that the Apple Store at last shipped iMacs within reasonnable delays. We just learnt that retailers are starting to mass ship backorders from the last two month, in 17 and 20" configs.
Rejoice my friends it's the Miracle of Xmas... you might even be able to grab one in a store in time for decorating the christmas tree...

During the Las Vegas CES (February 2005)Clarion plans to release a new in-car DVD player sporting a 7" LCD screen, that can be linked to an iPod (Clarion is actually insisting primarily on this feature). Where Clarion say they do better than others, it's the fact that the touch-screen will be used as a remote display/control for the iPod, displaying all the song details and such...
Along with this flagship product, Clarion will announce a generic interface to connect an iPod to CeNET powered car stereos, which should be available around mid 2005.
One more evidence, if needed, that most manufacturers consider the iPod to be THE MP3 player around...

Thank you Julien for pointing us to this little Samba util, coded by the guys over at SUPINFO's Labo Apple. It's appropriately called SMB Manager. This will help you manage accounts and passwords, which is currently not possible when using the Finder.
Samba refers of course to the network file system used by Windows, called SMB.
http://www.labo-apple.com/en/software/smb+manager/

Axel received his pack of iPod Socks. He took a few pics of them.

The rest of the photos can be found on his .Mac page : http://homepage.mac.com
Very nice Xmas socks... though we still can't figure out how the heck they came up with this product

Get it via the SU panel

Security Update 2004-12-02 delivers a number of security enhancements and is recommended for all Macintosh users. This update includes the following components:
Apache
AppKit
HIToolbox
Kerberos
Postfix
PSNormalizer
Safari
Terminal
For detailed information on this Update, please visit this website: http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n61798

12.7MB worth of fixes.