Inside Mac Games reports that ATI has finally brought the Radeon X800 XT graphics card to the Mac.  According to a very positive review by Bare Feats, the Radeon X800 XT beats the nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra in game rendering but is edged out in Motion rendering.  It’s cheaper and less bulky than the GeForce Ultra, and it all adds up to a rather appealing product.

The X800 XT has one Dual Link DVI port so you can use a 30” Cinema HD Display. The other port is ADC, which means you can’t have a dual 30” setup but you can use your old ADC displays without an adaptor.

Today Apple got started releasing the new kit for the start of 2005.  With the release of new XServes (now up to 2.3 Ghz) and their storage technology XSan.  Apple are proudly boasting that XSan is as little has half the price of Avid, SGI or IBM’s offerings in similar areas.  This helps to confirm that MWSF will indeed be very consumer centred, and that pro machines like the Powerbook and PowerMac will have to wait until after the event.

Defaulter tonight reached version 0.8b1 ñ the first beta release that I’m letting anyone see.  It’s not that shiny yet, but it’s working.  Hopefully my few beta testers will root out the problems.  Anyway, the speed I’m fixing bugs, it looks like I might be at 0.8b2 by tomorrow :D.

Bob

I hate writing drag/drop/copy/paste code.

That is all.

Bob

Macworld San Francisco looms large over the horizon and the rumor sites seem to be going crazier than ever hyping it up.  So I thought I’d do a little summing up of what’s been suggested is going to be happening.

• Computers:
  • Powerbook — Some suggestion of speed bumps or G5.
  • Powermac — Again, some suggestion of speed bumps to 2.8Ghz
  • eMac — G5 update
  • Headless iMac
• Software:
  • iLife ‘05 — Seems almost certain, but what features can we expect?  No body knows!
  • Keynote 2 — Also seems pretty certain
  • iWork — Bundling Keynote with a new word processor (Pages?) to create an office package
• iPod:
  • 5GB iPod Mini — Seems pretty much certain
  • iPod flash

Of these, maybe only 2 or 3 seem certain that we’re going to see — iPod Mini’s bumped to 5GB, iLife ‘05 and Keynote 2.  So lets discard them, and look at the more interesting possibilities.  At this point we have a passing mention to the iPod and a good hour’s speech on iLife and Keynote, half an hour on how Apple is doing… This leaves maybe half an hour for anything else.  So there can’t be that much more.  Speed bumps are rarely announced…
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