As reported at Gizmodo and elsewhere, the MacBook Pro has gotten a speed bump. The original announcement listed two models, 1.67GHz and 1.83GHz. Now, before even shipping the first one (they reportedly start today), those numbers have been bumped to 1.83GHz and 2.0GHz respectively, with a 2.16GHz configure-to-order option.
That makes the top about 18% faster than before; significant, but not exactly exciting (unless you’re easily excited by this sort of thing).
Songbird, an open source would-be iTunes killer, was made available to the public for the first time today. Version 0.1.0. It builds on well-tested open source projects such as VLC and Firefox.
Since iTunes is free, and most consumers don’t particularly care one way or the other about open source, the success of Songbird will hinge on the things it can offer that Apple can’t or won’t. The most promising one is easy access to, and integration with, non-iTunes online music retailers like eMusic.com and CDBaby.com – and free sources like archive.org.
I’m living happily with my Palm TX, but I’m already thinking about what comes next. (It would be nice to have a multitasking operating system.)
There has always been a lot of overlap between the Mac and Palm worlds. The original developers were Apple refugees. I know this is facile, but as I look at what has passed and what’s been announced for the future, I start drawing parallels between Apple’s operating systems and Palm’s:
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. ClarisWorks 1.0 was released in the fall of 1991 – almost fifteen years ago. It was a great program in its day, and I certainly mean no offense to anybody who worked on it when I say that I imagine there are enough Krufty Karbon Kobwebs in there to dissuade even the most seasoned Apple application programmer from wanting to attempt an Intel-compatible update.
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. (And you know I like big obvious download buttons.)