News for Wednesday, 8 February 2006

When announcing its partnerships for its news ViiV platform, Intel has forgotten to mention a main actor that has been during years the official partner of Santa Clara giant: Microsoft. Intel justifies it by communicating on the capabilities of its platform to run many other OS than the historically associated Windows.
Of course Intel did not provide a specific list of partners interested to adopt it for alternative OS, but Apple is an obvious customer; and probably the only one able to promote ViiV to the level of Intel's expectations...
In parallel, AMD is preparing its "ViiV" multimedia platform equivalent named "Live!", with an official partner... Microsoft.

A report from David :

For the first time on OSX, a software is able to deal with NMR files, its name: iNMR (a native OSX application).
NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) is a technology widely used in R&D (physics, chemistry, biology-biochemistry, ...), and everyday scientists have to manipulate NMR files.
So far it was of course possible to use the famous application SwaN-MR running on Classic, or via Java or X11 environment. One could use this application, but it was not really corresponding to the usual MAc applications standards; simple, reliable, powerful and easy to use.
iNMR allows you to manipulate and analyze your NMR spectra directly in OSX without sacrificing speed and graphical rendering.
iNMR has been developed by a really motivated user, Giuseppe Balacco, and is currently distributed by MestreLab Research (http://www.mestrec.com/) already known for its famous application MestReC for Windows. The price of iNMR is really competitive for such a Pro application.
http://www.inmr.net/

Yesterday in the USA, and this morning in Europe, Blizzard has released an Universal Binaries version of its flagship game World of Warcraft, this is the second game to be ported to MacIntel. The performance improvement is similar to the one recorded with UT2004: the iMacIntel (2.OGHz, 2GB RAM 128MB VRAM) displays 40 fps with a rather high resolution (1680x1050) coupled to high definition settings as shown on those screenshots.
It confirms that the iMacIntel is well designed for games, so far they are available in Universal Binaries version.
As we already mentioned it couples of days ago, you should have a look at the iPod Blizzard, you can even download for the iPod format a trailer of the future update of WoW: here.

If the availability of the iMacIntel could have been a sign for a similar availability of the MacBook Pro, today we can say that it is not the case. Hereafter is a message received by many customers who have ordered this notebook model immediately after its announcement :

The request for this product has exceeded our expectations, we plan to be able to ship your order on February 28th, 2006. So your your order should be in your hand around March, 3rd 2006...

Originally the expected shipping date was February 7th.
Let's hope that this delay will contribute to deliver a bug-free notebook featuring a good battery half-life.