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New user? Wednesday, January 15, 2003
Translate CSS to English
A member of Steve's monkinetic weblog posted a great tip for demystifying CSS.
SelectORacle translates CSS selectors into English explanations of the affect. Thanks for the tip, Mark!
Ray Urban on PB's aluminum
Macintouch: Ray Urban, an architect, shares his knowledge of anodized aluminum, used in the new 12" and 17" Apple PowerBooks.
IDEA on sale until end of day
If you've been wanting IntelliJ IDEA, the wicked Java IDE, today's the day to get it. $200 until end of day for personal licenses.
iPhoto prints are great
I recevied my 100 free 4x6 Kodak prints from Apple today, which I ordered via iPhoto using my .Mac photo credit. They look... AWESOME. Truly, the quality of the prints rivals or beats the output of my 35mm camera (which sucks, admittedly).
I had 1200 pictures in my iPhoto library to choose from. It took me a few hours to go through them all, select 100, and then crop them nicely to a 4x6 constraint. But it was worth it.
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
Bump on Apple's future
Robert on Apple's transformation to a software company
I think Robert's right. Ever since the news a couple years ago that Apple was going to start making "killer apps", this has been underway. And make killer apps they have. First iTunes and iMovie, then iPhoto and iDVD. Then came iChat (less killer but still good), iCal and iSync, and now iLife and Keynote. Not to mention Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, and their acquisitions of Emagic and Shake.
Open Source is a huge piece of their strategy. I still believe they're making an Intel version of Mac OS X. But aside from pure speculation, there's a little bit more fuel to suggest Apple is going to try to cover Microsoft's bases in the Mac world. Last week I got an email from Apple's publicsource announcement list (user: archives, pass: archives), announcing WebCore, X11 for Mac OS X, and.... OpenOffice? Huh?
OpenOffice.org and the OpenOffice.org Mac OS X/Darwin porting team announces the release of OpenOffice.org 1.0 X11 for Mac OS X and Darwin (Final Beta). While this release is not final and is intended to solicit public feedback, bug reports, and to attract developers to the project, it is feature-complete for our first X11 (Final) release. The main focus will be on fixing bugs in the Final Beta to allow for a full Final release in Spring 2003."
Note that there is also a native Aqua version of OpenOffice in the works. Perhaps Ron Dumont is just being nice and linking to the OpenOffice effort to share Apple's flow, but... isn't it just as likely that they're not only cheering them on but also assisting? Could Apple's Office suite be OpenOffice?
They've used open source to give them quantum leaps advantages in time to market, most recently with Safari, but there are lots of other examples, such as CUPS for printing. OpenOffice is gaining a good reputation now, and if you look at what they did with KHTML to make Safari, it's hardly a stretch to think what they could produce with OpenOffice.
