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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Software Apple

Mac OS X Software Roundup 55

Posted by pudge from the ride-em-in-let-em-out dept.
zpok writes "The Register runs an interview with the two only Mac OS X coders on the OpenOffice Project. In short: no, OO.org for Mac OS X won't be delayed until 2005, but they could really really use some help." jeblucas writes "There are new versions of Macromedia's media suite: Macromedia Studio MX 2004 with new versions of Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks. There's also a professional version of Flash (for PDA, phone, and video authoring with direct links to Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premier, and Avid Express) to be had for $700." A user writes, "Cricket Media has released a Mac OS X application for hardcore Netflix users who want to manage their accounts without using the website. The app is an interesting example of what can be done with WebKit." lordDallan writes "Opera had recently released Opera 6.03 for Mac OS X. Purchase of this version includes a free upgrade to 7.0 when it becomes available."
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Mac OS X Software Roundup More

Mac OS X Software Roundup

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  • OSX 10.3, coded-named Panther is at B49 right now, and as of B44 has labels ala the beastly operating system that was OS9.

    Also, new Powerbooks are nowhere to be seen, which is leading many, myself included, to believe that we will not seen them until the Paris expo, which is sometime in mid-Sept.

    • Re:In other Apple news... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      OSX 10.3, coded-named Panther is at B49 right now, and as of B44 has labels ala the beastly operating system that was OS9.

      Negative. Panther has had labels since before A202, the WWDC preview release.
    • Rumor has it new PBs will be out after IBM develops a low power version of the G5

  • In related news (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Mac addicts proclaim victory over Microsoft as the Macintosh software library nearly doubles in size.

    • Re:In related news (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ...and three extra feet of shelf-space are added to the short half-aisle of boxed software for the Mac in the back of the store.

  • Webkit and other open Apple developer developments (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ihatewinXP ( 638000 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @12:15AM (#6801945)

    With everyone crying about Apple ripping off Watson, pushing out Adobe Premeire, and basicaly running over a number of smaller developers, its easy to forget what they have been giving back in recent months. Lost in hardware rumors Apple is innovating in the developer scene as much as anywhere.
    Developing and then giving away Webkit instantly gets a thousand projects off the ground which were previously only musings and ideas (read: netflix manager). The best of open source is when it facilitates truly independent innovative ideas that would be shot down by 'the corporate machine' and never see the light of day (read: SubEthaEdit). Dont forget Apple saw this long ago with Hypercard and have been listening to users wail about its death. Not just of the product but of the idea and philosophy of "I own an Apple, therefore I innovate."

    Xcode, Applescript Studio, WebKit, Services, Java, Cocoa..... It looks like taking 5 years to plan a new OS from scratch is _finally_ paying off.

    • spinning beachball (Score:5, Interesting)

      by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @01:08AM (#6802215)
      It looks like taking 5 years to plan a new OS from scratch is _finally_ paying off.


      of course there was that period where steve jobs was sent off to wander in the wilderness of NeXT. being a NeXT owner it was of course shocking how NeXT like mac OSX is. all the way down to the spinning multi-colored beach ball.


      of course its not really a beach ball. its really a spinning magneto optical disk. a what??? yep the very first next shipped with a magento optical disk as its main drive. It truly sucked (speed wise) and vanished from later editions. (applications launched so slowly you often ended up double and triple launching multiple instances as you clicked on the icon over and over--that probably also one reason why the apple icons hop and can only be launched once). I've always enjoyed the subtle irony of the spinning beachball.


      in any case in the next day, NeXT created one of the best RAD gui tool kit ever invented, and a new language to go along with it (objective-C). and gave them away. lots of little groovy app, not major ones, showed up as a result. anyone could make a calculator or an interface to gnuplot. Oh yeah, there was one or two major ones: Mosaic and Zilla (Zilla was not related to 'mozilla', today the modern term for Zilla is 'Grid Computing'. So this strategy of making awesome developmer tools is not new


      Its also clear that given how much the mac of today echos its NeXT look and feel (the file browser, the dock, netInfo, three button mice, DisplayPostscript/pdf, cube shaped computers, and of course BSD unix) that not a whole lot of development has happend since its first incarnation. In other words Steve jobs vision got slowed down and only now its taking root and flourishing


      playing "what if", would we be further along if he had not cast out? one might speculate that he had to wait for technology to come along. but remember tim bernardslee invented the World wide web to justify buying a NeXT Station, we had postscript, mime e-mail, good sound cards, ethernet,giant screens, and cube shaped computers back in the hey days of NeXT. so maybe we'd be further along indeed if so much time had not been lost.


      indeed I think the reason Jobs performance now seems so amazing now is not because is doing anything different but rather because MS and the beigebox makers did not seize the opportunity to innovate during his absence from the scene. the world did not eclipse Jobs it just waited for him to return and lead the way again, showing how to be an early adopter, how to integrate ideas cleverly, and how to tame Unix on the desktop. He didn't have to leap frog his way to the front. he was amazingly enough still there with his NeXT technology. Nothing in principle Sun or MS or IBM could not have done while he was out. BeOS might have been the only one who actually tried, but it was too little too late.

      I wonder why apple and jobs seem to be the source of all computer creativity?

      • >>it was of course shocking how NeXT like mac OSX is. all the way down to the spinning multi-colored beach ball.

        Hang on there. I've been using Macs since the mid 1980s (how I remember the excitement of getting a 20Mb external hard drive to supplement the single 800K floppy...it took me years to fill it. But i digress), and there's always been a spinning beach ball. Of course it started out in B&W since that's how Macs started too (and NeXT was originally launched as a grayscale machine).

        NeXT too
        • Hang on yourself. I've used Macs from day one (1983), as well as NeXTSTEP (although I only started with version 2 or thereabouts, but I've still got my black hardware at home). I assure you the "beachball" in OS X was taken from NeXT. It resembled NeXT even more closely in OS X preview releases, before Apple made it puffy.
          • Make that 1984. ;-)
          • No, he's right. I also used both Macs and NeXT boxes, and the spinning colour-wheel/beach-ball/CD was originally a black and white spinning "colour-wheel" on the Mac. If you ever used HyperCard, it showed up pretty often. On NeXT boxes, it became a spinning CD, but was very similar. But you're right, it wasn't the colourful blob it is now until MacOS 10.1 or 10.2, it was the exact NeXT cursor.

  • SubEthaEdit (was Hydra) (Score:5, Informative)

    by leejor ( 41648 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @12:33AM (#6802043)
    And be sure to check outSubEthaEdit [codingmonkeys.de] This is the renamed Hydra. Okay, the new name is kinda funky, wouldn't MagrathaEdit have sounded better? And be sure to read the interview the the Coding Monkeys [macdevcenter.com] behind SubEthaEdit at O'Reilly. It is really amazing what a small group of programmers have pulled off. Give these guys another six months and they may be nearly feature competitive with BBEdit.

    Lee Joramo [joramo.com]

  • Okay.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @12:50AM (#6802130)
    SubEthaEdit or whatever is a mind-numbingly STUPID name. I'm going to continue to call it Hydra, just like I still call Phoenix "Phoenix" and Chimera "Chimera". Good lord. Any idea on what the BS "legal issues" are all about? Can't be much of a trademark as I've never heard of any software program called Hydra before. Oh well guess when the C&D hits your mailbox you better fold unless you can afford to win.

    I would've just named it "Tafkah"...

    Also, just because I"m feeling rude: those guys are really dorky-looking. Except the guy on the left he looks pretty cool. Looks to me like he's trying to get away from the others.....

    Say, isn't the guy in the OSX shirt a member of Kraftwerk...? Hmm...

  • In smaller-time news (Score:4, Informative)

    by BortQ ( 468164 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @12:55AM (#6802154) Homepage Journal
    Lux 3.0 [sillysoft.net] - the latest and greatest version of my world domination game - was released last week. It's like the boardgame Risk but with random maps and all sorts of bells and/or whistles.

  • Hey look! (Score:1, Redundant)

    by numbski ( 515011 ) *
    Slashdot is doing webcopynews of versiontracker!! :)

    *ducks*

    The Netflix app might actually get my fiancee to use my mac a little more often. It's always the little things...
  • So how does one get in touch with Dan Williams mentioned in the interview? I would like to help a bit with porting OO to mac os x. Not much of a coder but they mentioned that they could use some warm bodies for other tasks

  • SubEthaEdit is a great name (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cbuskirk ( 99904 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @12:55PM (#6806081)
    If you are going produce a piece of software for collaborative editing, why not name it for the fictionally greatest collaborative work of all time the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Thousands of Hitchhikers submit entries via the SubEtha network. The perfect geek name for a geek product.
  • I didn't seee Director MX mentioned. Everyone appears to be flash centric these days but there has been a Mac OS X version of Director out for 8 months and Director can do a lot of things that Flash can't and even can include Flash inside a Director movie.

    Plus with xtras, you can write your own C++ to extend Director's functionality. We just got another SQL database xtra today.

    Sorry to not see it mentioned in the software roundup.

  • - TeXshop (Apple Design Award winner---modelled on NeXT' TeXView.app --- add in EquationEditor.app to get NeXT's TeX eq -> eps Service)

    - Fugu - spiffy front-end to some sort of secure file transfer protocol

    - Free Ruler (but I wish Mac OS X had user-definable logical screen dpi and that so many apps weren't hardwired to 72dpi)

    - rBrowserLite - spiffy free FTP client / alternative file browser

    - TextLightning.app (shareware) - way cool fileservice which allows apps to open arbitrary .pdf files a
  • Here I see an update for the Flash program, but what about Flash Player? I find it depressing that for a Mac you need a quicksilver dual G4 to smoothly run a typical animation (God forbid if it's interactive), but it runs fine on a low-end PC. When large objects change alpha or multiple movie clips move all at once it's more like Flash Photographer. Macromedia should make a COCOA Flash player that actually remotely approaches the Mac's potential. It feels slower than an emulator, something's really wrong he

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