October 2006 Archives
Adobe’s John Nack took some time Saturday to tell us why Soundbooth, Adobe’s new sound editor, is Intel-only. Disregarding the awesome Parallels Desktop for a minute, Soundbooth is the first major Intel-only Mac app. As such, its release has caused something of a tempest in a teapot on the various Mac forums.
There is a simple reason for the uproar: the Mac faithful is used to getting a ridiculously long usable life out of their Macs. I often see people — Mac professionals even — happily running five year old iBook G3’s with the latest OS X version (try that on Windows). But now, an Adobe app refuses to run on a Power Mac G5 less than three months old.
It’s hard to say what Apple’s opinion of Intel-only Mac apps is going to be. On one hand, when the Intel transition was originally announced, they were incredibly careful to insist that the migration would be to Universal, not to Intel. PowerPC Macs would not become second-class citizens. Then again, I can’t imagine Apple feeling all that bad about users being forced (conveniently by third parties) to upgrade to new Intel Macs.
But there is a potential downside to Apple if Intel-only apps become the norm: the loss of flexibility in architecture choices. The transition to Universal has been about two things: moving everyone over to using gcc, and having every app working on both big and little endian processors. That’s where Linux and most of the open source community is, and their stuff runs on everything — from $50 routers, smart phones and set top boxes to supercomputing clusters with thousands of nodes — with a simple recompile. Apple would’ve loved that flexibility, and came very close to achieving it. If Mac developers only had played along…
Dave Watanabe’s Inquisitor, which gives Safari a serious search makeover, is now free. I guess Dave’s making up for the losses in volume! I was happy to pay for the earlier version, but now there’s no reason for anyone not to check this one out.
The EyeTV 2.3.2 update changes the insane Apple Remote button bindings I wrote about earlier. Yay.
…might this be?
We’re hoping to introduce a new Cocoa developer into our four-person, Helsinki-based Cocoa team. You’d work both on our private label applications and on the applications of our consultancy clients. We’ll consider applicants who are able to commute to Helsinki on either a full time or a part time basis.
We appreciate programming experience on a wide gamut of technologies and platforms, but C and Objective-C are the most crucial. You will also need to demonstrate successful software projects you’ve completed in the past.
If you’re interested, please send a freeform application, a resume and your desired salary by email to marko at karppinen fi. Thanks!
Dashalytics will not help with our Google Analytics addiction.
The popular Knox + Path Finder bundle pricing ends October 10th. So, you have about a week to to take advantage of this offer that represents significant savings over purchasing Knox and Path Finder separately. Also, if you haven’t checked Path Finder out in a while, the new 4.5 version has a bunch of great new features, such as Undo support and a new superuser mode.
So, to recap, if you use the coupon code PATHFINDER when buying Knox now through 10/10, you get a special bundle price of $46.95 (varies by country). Both the Knox and Path Finder license keys will be automatically emailed to you.
