Posts tagged: MACOS

Update: It’s out. Download here. Also see PhotoshopUser.com’s review of new features.

In case you haven’t heard, Adobe’s releasing the beta of Photoshop CS3 in a few hours. It will be interesting to see how much of the Lightroom-style interface experimentation, if any, has made it in there.

This is especially big news for Intel Mac users, who have been stuck with Rosetta emulation for Photoshop.

Note that the other Creative Suite apps – remember them? – are not covered in this release, except for a “major upgrade” to Bridge. Also note that without a CS2 serial number, your download will only work for two days.

A little-used new feature in the Displays preference pane in OS X 10.4 is rotation in 90-degree increments. I tried this feature out with the 20-inch Cinema Display on my desk. Novel – it took me back to the old grayscale Pivot I wrote so many columns on in the ’90s. A base that handled rotation would make it nicer. Also, the type and other elements onscreen just don’t look as good at 90 degrees – I don’t know if it’s the disparity in vertical and horizontal viewing angles, or maybe a change in anti-aliasing behavior. (Onscreen is top running in Exterminal.)

David Brin, in a piece at Salon.com entitled “Why Johnny Can’t Code”, complains:

almost none of the millions of personal computers in America offers a line-programming language simple enough for kids to pick up fast

Maybe Apple’s marketshare is so small that they equal “almost none,” but all OS X Macs come with Python and Ruby among other options. But wait, Brin seems to have heard of some of these newfangled scripting languages:

Joel Spolsky (who started his career at Microsoft as a manager on the Excel team) has been writing some recent longer blog posts on a MacBook Pro in TextMate using Markdown. He describes the process in a recent entry. He calls it a “surprisingly good experience.”

He goes on to gripe about anti-aliasing quality (FWIW, that’s explained here), and beachballing from dropped wifi connections (which I’ve never experienced, maybe it’s an early Intel thing?).

In case you haven’t been following this mini-saga – about two security researchers, an alleged MacBook wireless security vulnerability, and a writer from the Washington Post – here’s your study guide.

The original story at blog.washingtonpost.com (does the “blog” part mean we should lower our journalistic expectations?) has the unassuming title of “Hijacking a MacBook in 60 Seconds.” An alternate, more descriptive title is “Hijacking a MacBook via a Third-Party Wireless Card that Nobody Would Ever Use, in 60 Seconds, and Also Allegedly Hijacking it via the Built-In Card that Everybody Uses, But Wait, Maybe Not, Sorry, We Can’t Talk About That.” You can see why they went with the shorter title.