News for Tuesday, 24 June 2008

Various readers have found an incompatibility between iWeb and Firefox 3. We let the words of Keaps say it all:

I have just raised a problem with Firefox 3 and iWeb… when you publish a site with iWeb, the photographs are invisible on Firefox 3… with Firefox 2, Safari all is well… Not very practical if everyone has updated, since this will show web sites without contents! :-(

While waiting for a official solution, a work-around is available.
It is available as a script that can be downloaded from the following address:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/27819/fix-iweb-and-firefox-3

It is now the turn of the manufacturers of hard drives (Hitachi and Western Digital) and Dell to be pursued for patent violation. The company, Convolve Inc., has sued them for using one of its patented technologies aiming at controlling the vibration of products moving very fast, in this case the platters of the hard drives.
Dell finds itself involved in the suit as a user of the disputed disks, but especially (although exactly how is not stated) as inciting the two manufacturers of disks to find quickly grounds for agreement so as to remove fault from this important customer.
The control of the vibrations of the platters is of immense importance. Indeed, if it is not controlled, it causes not only premature wear of the mechanical parts but also degraded the performances in reading and writing.
We will know in a few months if this business will be regulated in front of the courts or with the help of a large cheque.

Quite surprisingly, Apple never replaced the iSight when the product went EOL due to the RoHS regulations. If one can understand it as all MacBook and iMac feature an integrated iSight, it gives no chance for Mac Pro owners to get a Apple-branded webcam.
Logitech decided to launch a product to capture this niche market, and unveiled the first Ma-compatible webcam, the Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro.

Specifications look attractive: 2 MPixels sensor, Logitech’s premium autofocus technology and Carl Zeiss optics. Unlike other webcam, the new Logitech webcam works natively with iChat or Skype, a quite important function for AMc users, while delivering VGA-quality video at up to 30 frames per second. Using a USB2 connection, the Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro does NOT required any additional driver to natively work with Mac OS X. The suggested retail price in the U.S. is 129.99 USD, so it should be less than 100 €, less than the original iSight...
The product should arrive beginning of July.
[update] the QuickCam Vision Pro for Mac looks really similar to the QuickCam® Pro 9000 which is described as being PC-only, and available around 69 €. Let's hope that the Mac-compatible version will really bring something different, as the QuickCam® Pro 9000 might already be "Mac compatible"?

Of course this has nothing to do with the Mac, and Apple will most likely not upgrade the current Cinema displays to feature such extreme model of 108" in other words 2.75m. However, Sharp decided to bring it to the market, but you will need a rather full purse as it will cost you 185,000 USD and in Europe 120,000 €… so in other words 1,000 €/inch… who said that Apple LCD displays were expensive?

Couple of days ago, we were reporting about Cell-based accelerating card designed by Toshiba to boost HD video transcoding, Featuring only 4 active SPE units (compared to 8 for the PS3), 128 MB XDR DRAM memory (compared to 256 MB for the PS3), and clocked at 1.5 GHz, it is sitting on a PCI 1x card.
Toshiba decided to install such chips in notebooks in order to accelerate multimedia tasks. The overall architecture of the computer will remain the same, Core 2 Duo and a dedicated GPU, but when decoding or encoding HD video, the system will make use of the SpursEngine (the name of the Cell-based chips).
Of course such product is now competing with the classical graphic cards which are now starting to be used for other function than boosting graphical display and 3D rendering... soon our computers will include plenty to processors, doing other things than what they are supposed to do, or were originally designed for...

As we reported previously, LCD manufacturers as well as computer designers have initiated a transition from 16:10 LCD display to 16:9 in order to adopt the same format than the TV HD. BenQ already announced the availability of 2 products based on this ratio, a 21.5" and a 24" monitors both featuring a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, the same one used for the Full HD 1080p.
When compared to the previous ratio 16:10, we lose 120 lines, while having wider display, if it can makes manufacturers’ as well as integrators' life easier, it might not please all users who got used to such vertical extra space when organizing windows or working desktop. But as usual with the previous migration from 4:3 to 16:10, most customers' complains will not be heard by LCD display manufacturers...

As we reported it previously, Switzerland will be one of the countries where 2 carriers will officially offer the iPhone to consumers. So, Orange and Swisscom shops will distribute the iPhone 3G, as well as all Apple premium Resellers; and NOT the other Apple Resellers. This was confirmed by Daniel Forster, administrator of Swiss APR (http://www.macs.ch)

The iPhone 3G will be available in Switzerland from the following shops:
Orange: Orange Center, Orange Point, Interdiscount, MediaMarkt, and APR
Swisscom: Swisscom Shop, PhoneHouse, and APR
Allowing only APRs to offer the iPhone 3G and not to extend such possibility to all official Apple Resellers is a decision taken directly by Apple.

Almost a week after the opening of the Apple retail store in Sydney, Australia, Apple made TV shows available on the iTunes Store in Australia.

Open 24/7, the iTunes Store features more than 5 million $1.69 inc GST songs, 125,000 free podcasts, 26,000 audiobooks and iPod games. You can download, play and sync in a fraction of the time it takes to drive to any superstore.