News for Wednesday, 26 July 2006

After a 24 hour delay relative to the US Stores, the European AppleStores now have the new wireless Mighty Mouse available for sale. This delay is unusual for such a product and supports our assumption that Apple introduced this new mouse earlier than originally planned,due to the release of the prototype photos.

Wireless Mighty Mouse
JCJ

OpenDarwin has announced that it will soon shunt down its activities.

OpenDarwin was originally created with the goal of providing a development environment for building and developing Mac OS X sources as well as developing a standalone Darwin OS derivative. OpenDarwin was meant to be a development community and a proving ground for fixes and features for Mac OS X and Darwin, which could be picked up by Apple for inclusion in the canonical sources. OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on. For this reason, OpenDarwin will be shutting down.
Over the past few years, OpenDarwin has become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects. The original notions of developing the Mac OS X and Darwin sources has not panned out. Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this. Administering a system to host other people's projects is not what the remaining OpenDarwin contributors had signed up for and have been doing this thankless task far longer than they expected. It is time for OpenDarwin to go dark.

Link to the official announcement: OpenDarwin Shutting Down

Skype has released two Mac beta versions.
The first one, 1.5.0.48 Beta brought numerous bug fixes and new features.
The second one is much more interesting, from our point of view: the 1.5.0.47 Video Preview brings video support to the Mac, with a Mac/PC interoperability.
However, this version remains unstable and places heavy demands on your CPU.
For additional information: http://www.skype.com/download/skype/macosx/changelog.html
JCJ

After acknowledging the problems with the MacBook palmrest area yesterday, Apple, today, acknowledged then noise issues encountered by many MacBook Pro owners:

If your 15-inch MacBook Pro emits a high-pitched buzzing sound, please contact AppleCare for service.

Apple finally recognized issues that have been extensively described by many Mac-dedicated websites.
Will APX reliability issue be the next one to be acknowledged by Apple? Here's hoping.
JCJ