Posts tagged: MACOS

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.

It’s long been a rule of mine to avoid broadband providers’ installer software whenever possible. (As Mos Def’s character says in “The Italian Job”: I HAD A BAD EXPERIENCE.)

The intrepid Daniel Jalkut recently posted a great dissection of a Verizon “upgrade” script gone off the tracks, explaining why it was so bad and how it could have been even worse – hard-drive-wipingly worse.

It didn’t even stuff a bunch of Verizon marketing bookmarks in there to pretty up the browser. Just a big gaping hole where my bookmarks (in the bookmark bar and menu) used to be…

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.)

So, it’s out. The real, authorized version of Google Earth for OS X.

Very cool. I’d never seen the Windows version, so it’s all new to me (except the imagery, of course, which is the same used by Google Maps). A couple features I had no idea existed: tilt-the-earth (with optional topographic modeling, i.e. making hills hill-shaped), and 3D modeled buildings (check out the Manhattan skyline). It also has massive amounts of overlay data – roads, borders, place names, schools, stores, ATMs, churches, crime statistics…

On the heels of yesterday’s lovely site redesign, Allan Odgaard has released TextMate 1.5. If you’ve been downloading the “cutting edge” builds you’ve probably already got it. It has come a long way since the last official release (1.02). And on top of all the improvements to the program, there’s now a manual.

For more on why I think TextMate is so cool, see my earlier post/review.

Camino 1.0b2 is out. Lots of great bugfixes, interface improvements, and new functionality. SVG support. Java Embedding Plugin support.

I’d like to pick out one really tiny thing from the release notes that exemplifies the kind of attention to interface detail that the Camino team is applying:

Allow shift modifier key to reverse the sense of the “load in background” preference when loading a url with Command-Return.

I would guess that the average user probably didn’t know:

Macintosh software development dustup of the month:

• Haxies Good, Rich Siegel Bothers Me (Drunken Batman, of Chicago)
• Haxies Problematic, Drunken Batman Wrong (Rich Siegel, of Bare Bones Software)
• Haxie Users Like Car Chippers, Drunken Batman Definitely Wrong (Cory Redlien, of redlien.com)