News for Friday, 3 August 2007

During the last WWDC, EA Games proudly announced the future porting of its flagship titles on Mac thanks to the proprietary version of Wine available from Transgaming and entitled Cider.
If we are still waiting for the announced games to be released as the expected date was on July, other games taking advantage of Cider are already on the market, such as Heroes of Might and Magic V, Myst Online: URU Live, X3: Reunion or the game engine offered by GameTap. As Transgaming did not lock its application package, many users have been performing their own porting of PC games! They successfully launched Far Cry, GTR 2, or even Colin Mac Rae 2005 natively on Mac OS X, simply by using X3: Réunion or GameTap-distributed application as starting basis...
To give you an idea, a reader posted a video of official and unofficial Cider-powered games:

The list of compatible games increases everyday, and there is no reason for any stop, as long as Cider keeps being updated, and EA Games releases new titles. If might end if Transgaming modifies its SDK and force developers to protect their package... (but there is no real reason for that).
Of course, Cider does not support anti-copy protection, and hackers have been manipulating codes of "cidered-games"; but we could imagine Transgaming releasing a user kit or Apple integrating in Mac OS X a similar technology (based on Wine i.e.) which would be the Rosetta for games, making the library for Mac games the largest ever.

Here we go for a second round of recent updates released within the last days till the last hours:
- During the night, iTunes 7.3.2 was released for both Mac and Windows. As usual with Apple, details are rather limited and might simply reflect some changes required following the recent iPhone system or Security updates:

iTunes 7.3.2 provides bug fixes to improve stability and performance.

- Couple of days ago, Microsoft surprisingly released its Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac version 2.0 while the application did not evolve within the last 4 years.
This TSE client for Mac offers many improvements and features:
- Remote Desktop Protocol 6.0, to ensure compatibility with Vista
- Universal Binary
- Multiple Sessions
- Improved User Interface (style similar to current Mac applications)
- Dynamic Screen Resizing (as in Parallels)
- Improved Printing Support
- improved sharing management (possibility to share only a dedicated folder instead of an entire HD)
As a reminder, this application allows Mac users to connect to a Microsoft Terminal, WinXP or Vista PC and to work with local Windows programs and files on that computer from their Mac. Something similar to Timbuktu, except that many users can be logged on the same Terminal Server without problems.
The current version released by the MBU is still a beta, but for having tested it on a Mac Intel, it is really promising, the session is instantly opened and very reactive.
Many Mac users are still waiting for Apple to develop a similar application for its server offer, especially as Unix and X11 are designed from the root for allowing distant session...