As unlikely as it seems, Steve Jobs has thrown caution to the wind and dumped IBM for Intel with Intel-based Macs coming this time next year. This switch brings many questions like “Mac OS X on a machine from Wal-Mart?”, “Every virus in existence now works on Macs?” and “Steve Jobs didn’t wear blue jeans at the keynote, what the hell?” so we’ll give-in to speculation and try and shell some information.
Technology
Huffington Post and Sploid Miss The Boat
With the huge launches of news weblogs like Gawker Media’s Sploid and Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post, you’d think that the medium they’re utilizing would actually be utilized. Weblogs are all about two-way communication between writers and readers, but commenting features on these two sites are noticeably absent. What happened here was that they wanted to exploit the hype and media attention surrounding weblogs for their gain, without all the aftertaste of reader opinions. What a waste.
Light My Firewire
I wanted to share my iBook’s wireless internet connection with my Power Mac G5, but all my ethernet cables are back home so what was I to do? Internet sharing over Firewire to the rescue.
I’ve got an 6-to-6 pin Firewire 400 cable I use for transferring files between computers, so I just plugged one end into the iBook and the other into the G5, and followed the instructions at MacDevCenter. It was literally a 1 minute ordeal, and it really seems fast to me. Think it would be this easy in Windows? Yeah, right.
Adobe to Buy Macromedia
And in the largest news our industry has heard in a very long time, Adobe will be purchasing Macromedia for nearly $3.4B in an all-stock transaction.
Okay, so now we’ve got PDF, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Shockwave, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and all the other applications these two powerhouses have out there all under one roof. Can you say, “dynamic PDFs displayed within Flash movies”?
Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.
What’s next? Google acquires Six Apart? Hmmm…
Firefox Extension Tutorial
For my final class at RIT I had to create a Firefox extension using XUL, CSS, and Javascript. Just to shake things up around here, I decided to post the tutorial about its development here instead of on a standalone website. I know that extension development may not be your cup of tea, but maybe you’ll find some of it interesting. Here we go!
IE7 Now Separate From Longhorn
And now for some good news from Redmond, so straight from a News.com article here it is:
Reversing a longstanding Microsoft policy, Bill Gates said Tuesday that the company will ship an update to its browser separately from the next version of Windows.
A beta, or test, version of Internet Explorer 7 will debut this summer, Microsoft’s chairman and chief software architect said in a keynote address at the RSA Conference 2005 here.
Let’s hope they jump on the CSS and PNG bandwagon. Maybe even tabbed browsing too, but one can only hope.