journals

Well, the good news is…

By UnnDunn, August 12, 2006

The Mac Pro can actually render a WMVHD movie with no frame dropping.

The Mac Pro can actually render a WMVHD movie with no frame dropping. This is a first for Mac in my experience.

That is all.

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Leopard First Impressions

By Nick, August 7, 2006

Yes, I know not everything was shown in today’s keynote.

Yes, I know Apple has some top secret goodies waiting for us.

But that didn’t change my initial reaction: meh. What Jobs and Company showed us today did little to impress me, Time Machine aside. I can only hope that these “Top Secret” new features really live up to the hype. Anyway, here are my initial thoughts on what we did see today. It’s late, I’m tired, and have to get to work early in the morning (and as you can guess, the sense of humor isn’t up to making snide jokes at the moment), so I’ll keep this short.

64-bit

Not much to see here; it’s pretty self-explainatory. I try to avoid MS-bashing in my blog, but I just have to wonder; how is it Apple can put together one version of Mac OS X for x86 and x64 (64-bit x86) which handles both 32- and 64-bit applications just fine while MS has to rely on two separate editions of Windows to get the job done? Granted, Apple has yet to actually ship Leopard, and for all we know there may be separate editions in the end, so this is a little unfair.

Time Machine

Insert some lame Back to the Future joke here, please.

When I first heard about Time Machine in the various live text feeds, I was under the impression that it was simply a versioning system for OS X with some backup features--think .mac Backup. I…
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Anyone Got Any App Ideas?

By Pilky, August 7, 2006

The Mail part of the keynote was dull enough to have me wishing Roz Ho was on the stage for some reason

Anyone got any spare app ideas? It’s just Apple kinda took out the market I was planning to enter. I’m now left with a half finished back up app and a jaw on the ground saying “Time Machine looks FREAKING AWESOME!!”. I thought that I’d feel some regret, some anger at Apple if they ever crushed an application of mine, but I think they’ve stunned me with how far ahead Time Machine is to any back up app on the Mac.

So… what about the rest of Leopard? iChat looks very nice, especially the screen sharing. The others are great novelties, though the collaboration looks amazing. Spaces looks like the slickest virtual desktop implementation I’ve seen in a long time and Core Animation also seems to blow away Core Image and Video in terms of coolness. The Mail part of the keynote was dull enough to have me wishing Roz Ho was on the stage for some reason, but besides that there were some pleasant confirmations in terms of Dashboard and Spotlight

There are also some significant points here too. We have Leopard’s shipping time, Spring 2007, which could be around the same time Vista comes out if it is delayed again. We also have what could be a tabbed IM system that doesn’t look like it’s a seriously flawed concept, though I could be wrong, I’d have to use it. But this seems to be Apple saying to Microsoft, we’ll take everything you might have beat us at with Vista…
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WWDC 2006 Coverage

By Nick, August 5, 2006

The 2006 WWDC Keynote is mere hours away, and as always DT will cover it (provided there are no technical difficulties; last time we tried this for WWDC, we brought the server down. Our server’s in a bit better shape this year, and we do have some safeguards in place to prevent overloading the server). We will have a live text feed of all Steve Jobs’ announcements at WWDC. If following automatically-refreshing web pages isn’t your thing, you can join us in our chat, where we will keep you abreast of the latest and you can commune with your fellow geeks: AIM chatroom ”dtgeeks” (sans quotes) or our IRC Channel. The chats are often more up-to-the-minute than the web feed, and much kinder on the server.

So please join us for what promises to be another fun, exciting event. We hope to see you here!

(Updates in reverse-chronological order)
11:26
- Keynote has finished, no One More Thing
11:25
- Xcode 3.0
- Giant leap in Xcode
- Rosyna: “It still sucks”
- Developer preview today
- Shipping in Spring
NOTE: We may lose our feed in 15 minutes while rosyna changes batteries
11:20
- iChat theater
- Shows the iPhoto slideshow in the window
- Transformations, effects, all over the internet
- Show movies over iChat via conferencing
- iChat dynamically removes the background from video chats, no blue or green screen needed
- Rosyna: “Schiller found nemo”
11:16
- Turn any webcam into a widget
- 10) iChat
-…
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Ink-spirimenting in Inkscape

By Liam, August 3, 2006

If there’s one thing I envy in a large amount of the members here is their ability to create marvelous images seemingly on demand and in inhuman times; meanwhile I’m stuck searching the internet for two images that I can somehow put together with a little bit of alpha channel thrown in for good measure. Since I wanted to take a stab at teaching myself a complex application just by experimenting and learn to create web-worthy images in the process.

Since I don’t have access to the vast fortunes required to purchase Illustrator, I naturally went for Inkscape, which I had heard someone mention on the Ubuntu forums once. Something about icons. Hmm.

Anyways, after a bit of tinkering, I present to you my take on the Deep Thought logo. Yes, the font I used is Cambria. No, it’s not going to actually be used on DT. No, nothing is aligned properly. No, it isn’t anywhere near the quality of the current logo. No, I have no idea where you could get a free .svg viewer. Yes, it is part of my plan for world domination:

1. Learn Inkscape
2. ???
3. TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION!

Ahem. You can download the SVG from here.

O YA! In order to give myself some incentive to write blog entries, I’m going to keep most of them short, with the occasional log rant to mix things up (like the rant I am this close ( || ) to typing up in all caps about my…
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