News for Tuesday, 10 October 2006

If porting Mac Office to UB seems to be longer than expected, Mac Office X and 2004 have been updated and can be downloaded from Mactopia.

This update contains several updates to enhance security and stability, including fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code. In addition, this update includes all of the improvements released in all previous Office 2004 updates.

Mac Messenger has also been updated and numerous features added:

- Chat with Yahoo! Messenger contacts
- Add a status message that your personal contacts can see
- Share what you are listening to in iTunes with your personal contacts
- Create, send, and receive custom emoticons with personal contacts
- Send and receive custom animated emoticons with personal contacts
- Search for conversation histories using Spotlight
- Check the spelling in your instant messages

Mary Starman from the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit has officially announced that the future version of Mac Office 2007 for OSX will not be ready before S2 2007. So current MacIntel owners will have to wait for at least 8 to 9 months before having a native Office package (Universal binaries).
According to our sources, the reason for such delay is the huge amount of work required to rewrite the entire suite to universal binaries. The first "alpha" versions are so unstable that it is difficult to really give them such a name.
Thankfully, the current Mac Office suite is working well via Rosetta.
Now the rumor of Apple preparing an Office-like Suite might also be part of this delay.

Over the week-end, we have updated our forum, with more than 30 categories and subcategories; it is meant to organize information and data in order to serve the Mac community, from the beginner, or the recent switcher, to a developer looking for help in programming.
We expect our forum to be a "Think different" experience with the Macbidouille/Hardmac touch, a place for sharing knowledge and information.
To contribute, you will have to register. Do not hesitate to indicate your geographical location in order to find members close to your place, it sure is the best way to build a solid network, or get quick help if you have problems with your mac.
Last but not least, we have linked the website to the forum via the link "Comments" added at the end of the title of all Hardmac news. It will give you the opportunity to directly react to the news in its dedicated topic.
Enjoy it: Hardmac forum,
Hardmac Team

As you might have read in MacRumors' forums, Rokem found a way to tweak the fan's behaviour on his MacBook Pro.
To do so, he changed some value in the Appleblower and Applefan extensions. Forcing the starting of the fans, thus, he ended up with a cooler machine. His method has already been successfully reproduced by many people and scripts especially written to make all this easier are now available for download:
http://www.filefactory.com/file/3cc9d6/
In order to use them, you should put the smc-0.01 folder in your Applications folder and then run the script whose name matches the speed to be reached by the fans.
The default script will bring back the original values.
You can monitor your computer's temperature with CoreDuoTemp, a soft written by Joe Le Bossour, our mate from MacBidouille.
Be careful : although first tests and feedbacks are encouraging, we can't know what impact constantly running the fans full-speed will have on their life-length.

Is it the sign of the end of a financial quarter, or simply the renewal of current models, European RefurbStore are once more filled up with models, from iMac Core Duo, MBPro to even MacPro!
Shortest way to the RefurbStore near you: Refurb Store

So the rumor was true. Google has acquired YouTube for $1.65 Billion in stock.
This is of course good news for YouTube, as they were struggling to find financing or investments funds to support the exponential success of online video sharing website. Google will bring its expertise concerning online advertising thanks to its "Google Ads" system.
For those thinking that Google is slowly but surely becoming the "Microsoft of the Web", such announcement will probably bring additional fuel to their thoughts. The future of the web might be strongly impacted by the growing "Google" factor. Is "Google Big-Brother" already watching you?

The recent acquisition of ATI by AMD has changed the face of the CPU and GPU market.
If some Wall Street analysts have launched the rumor of Intel acquiring nVidia, in reality it is far to be tree, yet.
However, according to Digitimes, both companies could team-up for a strategic partnership that could include Intel taking control of 8 to 10% of nVidia shares. Such partnership might have 2 goals:
- nVidia could decrease product developments for the AMD platform (especially the nForce platform).
- nVidia could invest R&D in IGP (integrated graphics processor) chipsets for the Intel platform.
This information seems to originate from Intel's side, so one will have to wait for nVidia answer.
For Mac users, we will of course benefit of such partnership as it would give Apple access to nVidia integrated chipset (nForce-type) a much more powerful graphic solution for entry-level hardware models than the Intel GMA series (even the forthcoming GMA3000).