From Apple’s release notes on the latest QuickTime update (emphasis mine):
QuickTime 7.2 addresses critical security issues and delivers:
- Support for full screen viewing in QuickTime Player
- Updates to the H.264 codec
- Numerous bug fixes
Finally! Now Steve Jobs can rest easy, knowing that nobody is going to pour boiling-hot coffee on him. Not over this, anyway.
As of yestderay, an early version of OpenOffice.org for the Mac is available for download. Not the X-Windows port, but a step toward a full-fledged native application. Until this point, you only had NeoOffice if you wanted Aqua widgetry and a semblance of native OS X experience. NeoOffice is quite good, but it launches terribly slowly. Whereas this new build of OOo launches in under ten seconds on my slowish Powerbook.
Don’t get too excited just yet; this is for tweakers only. Here are some of the problems and gaps they warn you about:
This week is so busy that I don’t have time for a longer post, but I wanted to mention DjangoKit (attentive readers may have already spotted it in the sidebar), an OS X application wrapper for Django projects. Tom Insam went and did something that I’ve had on my “someday” list for a long time. It’s very much a 0.0.1 project right now, but I think it has great potential as an application testbed and as a platform for hybrid apps.
Perhaps ironically, one of the great technological advances of OS X over previous versions is the availability of a command line. Someday we won’t need this, but today it turns out that the pure point-n-click GUI was something of a premature optimization, and that in fact certain types of users find they work faster and better when typing commands.
While its simplicity is part of its charm, terminal applications invite tweaking. One of the earliest celebrated novelties of OS X was Terminal.app’s option for translucent windows. I initially thought this was useless, but have come to really appreciate it. With the right opacity setting, you hardly notice the background, yet when you refocus your attention you can see it easily. It’s like having on-demand X-ray vision!
In case you missed it, Apple has a new product. You can’t, you know, buy it or anything just yet – that’ll be about six months. And $500, please. While you wait you can compare it to the competition.
They claim that it runs OS X. Hm. I can imagine there’s a BSD kernel (running on what processor I don’t know), QuickTime, WebKit… but really, how much of the stuff in the standard OS X architecture diagram is actually going to be in that phone?