News for Monday, 9 January 2006

Fred pointed to us that Adobe, through the Macromedia Labs website, proposes a beta version of its new software, Lightroom, available ONLY for Mac.
Lightroom is a direct competitor of Aperture: a pro-oriented RAW image cataloging, archiving and editing package.
The b eta version will be functional till June 2006 and requires only to register with Adobe (free).


More details:
http://labs.macromedia.com/technologies/lightroom/
Get it here:
http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs%5Flightroom
To us it is good news that Adobe fights back instead of leaving the battlefield to Apple alone: it means that the competition will drag prices down and quality up.

Last December 28, we put that picture on-line. It was sent by a Macfan wishing to show what he was working on.

It is a Powermac casing fitted with a X86 motherboard, running with OS X.
After getting some significant feedback, he decided to clean up the job and hide what the users don't need to see. Here's the result:

An end result closer to a Mac than to a PC from the shelf.

The Blu-ray Disc Association has at last finalised and published the Blu-Ray norm for BD-ROM, BD-RE and BD-R media. Specifications are now available and licenses are for sale.
Manufacturers of hardware and media are thus able to start working soon on the final versions of their products.
Now the question is: will customers buy these products? Or will they wait through the war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray?
Seeing as it started, it seems that the winner will triumph not according to its intrinsic qualities, but on the DRM field.
This is the beginning of a war between the industry and their customers [makes sense, uh?]. The industry wants to impose as much DRM as they can, relegating the customers to base Credit Card carrying devices.
And of course customers are not really happy with that.
So the winner will be declared depending on who can ignore the other for the longest time.

Many readers have had the sad experience of seeing their Airport Express Base Station die shortly after the warranty expired. We have had 10 reports of such failures in our Forums which is enough to point to a rather common problem, more so that the symptoms are always the same. One moment it works, the next it refuses to turn on: it seems to be a problem with a fragile power supply. Here is a picture taken by Dieru, who used brute force to open his dead Express.

If you encounter similar problems, please send us a report: that might help us to pin down the faulty Express series (send us the serial number).