It’s not like I’ve received a memo from Steve Jobs or anything, but it seems to me that the arrival of the Intel Macs marks the end of what Apple calls “the best-loved application for the Mac” – AppleWorks.
It’s still shipping with consumer-line PowerPC models (iBook G4, iMac G5, Mac mini), but the Intel iMac and the MacBook Pro both lack it.
AppleWorks, originally ClarisWorks, has had an amazingly long run.
The Open Source Mac site is a great thing. I don’t even care if they’re just doing it for the Adsense clicks – though I’m pretty sure they’re not. They’ve built a simple site devoted to “the best, most important, and easiest to use” open source desktop applications for OS X. These are popular, and popularizable, apps like Camino, Adium, VLC, and Cyberduck.
They understand the subtle wisdom that, besides being useful and OSI-compliant, a successful open source desktop application needs two things: a cool icon and a big obvious download button.
Very cool feature from the WebKit team, coming soon to a Safari near you – the Web Inspector:
The Web Inspector highlights the node on the page as it is selected in the hierarchy. You can also search for nodes by node name, id and CSS class name.
One of the unique features of the inspector is the ability to root the DOM hierarchy by double clicking a node to dig deeper.
Apple’s new MacBook Pro doesn’t have a PC Card slot. Instead, the specifications tell us, it has an ExpressCard/34 slot.
What?
If you’re a Windows notebook nerd you probably know all about ExpressCard, as many models already support it, but I suspect most Mac-o-philes have never heard of it before; I hadn’t, anyway. It’s a replacement for the venerable PC Card (formerly PCMCIA card), designed to be smaller, simpler, faster, and more power-efficient.
In case you missed the news, there’s a new laptop in town. It’s supposed to be really fast and stuff. But my favorite feature is the new MagSafe power connector.
On Tuesday morning, before the keynote, one of my students happened to stop by my office to show me what had happened to the power adapter on his PowerBook. His roommate tripped over the power cord while he was working on the couch.
Including the eponymous Steve, there are at least a two Google employees over at Forwarding Address: OS X (which I contribute to as “pbx”). Today Eric Case linked to a couple new job postings for Mac-specific work at Google, as well as listing two earlier openings I mentioned here back when they were announced.
So, if you’re interested, check it out: Google Hiring Mac Engineers
Naresh commented on Tue Mar 13 00:40:15 2007:
The Stanford Inquirer has an interesting interview with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The whole thing is worth reading, but what caught my attention was this little digression on open source software:
I just favor the whole concept of open source as being a way that companies can be not entrapped by proprietary software. And one thing we do find is that anytime you’re using something that’s proprietary, you do wind up being pretty trapped, as much as they can trap you.
