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  • Swad
    Logic Pro is the first of Apple's Pro family to make the jump to universal-ness. From Ars:
     
    Originally scheduled for a March announcement, Apple's Logic Pro 7.2 has been released and is currently shipping (via Create Digital Music). If you're not familiar with Apple's flagship audio development software, it's known for it's strength and flexibility in digital audio recording, digital signal processing (DSP), MIDI sequencing, and notation. Logic's 7.2 "crossgrade" is a Universal release and runs on both Intel and PowerPC machines.
     
    New features highlighted in the article include big-time compatibility with the new plug-ins from GarageBand 3, such as automatic ducking (the app reduces music volume whenever you speak) and a speech enhancer when your 10-cent mic isn't cutting it. It will also be able to use the cheese-ball jingles and sound effects from iLife '06.
  • Swad

    Win Mashugly's iPod

    By Swad, in OSx86,

    20,000 members. That’s incredible! I had no idea when we started this site back in July that it would grow so large – thanks to you it’s become one of the best Mac forums online in just a few months time.
     
    To celebrate our 20,000th member, I’m giving away my iPod. There’s no gimmick, we’re not doing it to be cool or trendy – I just have a pristine 40 gig Click Wheel iPod (along with cables and cases) that I want to give to a member of our forum . You may be saying, “Why would I want a 4G when the 5G iPods are so much better?” Well, the main reason this one is better because it’s free. The second reason is that it comes fully stocked with 40 gig of my favorite music, ranging from The Beatles to Beethoven to… well… just about everything. Since the giving away of digital music is still a legal grey area (the courts haven't figured it out yet), just be sure to delete all the music when you get the iPod. Mkay? Mkay.
     
    Anyway, getting this iPod couldn’t be any simpler. Here’s how:
     
    1. Post on the forum. The winner must have at least 231 posts by the contest’s end on March 1. The site staff will be making sure that your posts are substantial, helpful, and kind.
    2. Post in the new forums. That means that helpful guides in the Genius Bar and threads in “Reviews” will score you more (imaginary) points.
    3. Nominations. Who you think should win? Every forum member can send one nomination to ipod@osx86project.org with the subject of “iPod Nomination”. And yes, you can nominate yourself.
     
    Pretty easy, huh? On March 1, the site staff will compile all that data and decide who should win. The contest starts today and it’s a blank slate – someone with 500 posts right now isn’t any better off than the person who only has 3.
     
    I hope this will be a fun contest – we’re doing it because we like to do crazy things and this is a good way to reward you for helping us make The OSx86 Project the excellent community it has become.
     

  • Swad

    Why Aren't We Dual Booting Yet?

    By Swad, in OSx86,

    Since we started our much-anticipated Mac forum last week, it’s gotten a lot of use, especially on the topic of dual booting the Intel Macs. A few ideas have been thrown out which makes us ask the question… why aren’t we there yet?
     
    This thread poses an excellent question – if Gateway has been selling PCs with EFI-based Windows XP, why can’t we do the same with the Macintels? According to a news.com article from December 2003,
    The first EFI computer, a Gateway PC, went on sale in November. Others are expected to appear in 2004, with ever greater numbers coming in the following years. But not everyone is jumping on the EFI bandwagon. […]Gateway, which uses EFI in its all-in-one Gateway 610 Media Center desktop, said it chose to do so because EFI proved a more efficient way to code preboot software and can also help to improve the product from a long-term development perspective, a company representative said.
    Does anyone have this computer or one similar? If we could check out what makes these EFI XP machines tick, we would probably be a lot closer to getting a dual boot environment going.
     
    Another thread discusses the prospect of using both EFI and BIOS on the same motherboard. If we can’t figure out how Gateway did it, this may be the second best route.
     
    Have you come up with anything we’re missing?
     
    And of course, how could you miss this contest which intends to pay 10,000 to the first person who successfully dual boots. My question – since a lot of the work on this subject is being done on our community forum… what happens if multiple people put the pieces together? Food for thought.
  • Swad

    Adobe: "Universal? What's That?"

    By Swad, in OSx86,

    Oh, Adobe. There was this memo floating around last June – you may or may not have seen it, it didn’t get much press – about how this tiny computer company called Apple was going to switch their processor architecture. Not a big deal, I can understand how you could have missed it…
     
    …but then, wait, weren’t you at WWDC? Didn’t you give a press conference shortly thereafter? It would seem that since you had a good half-year’s head start, you could have at least given the Mac community something universal to whet our appetites. Well, there’s the Lightroom beta of course, but I know I can’t wait to use it with a beachball-ridden Photoshop.
     
    Ok, well, maybe I’m being too hard on Adobe. I understand that they have a massive number of products that they would need to transition. But in light of their announcement yesterday that we may not see Universal apps like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Illustrator, and the rest until 2007, it would seem that they have been nowhere to be found during the switch. Since Adobe knows that the millions of creatives who use Macs at work would at least need Photoshop, couldn’t they at least switch one or two apps over and then give us the suite next year?
     
    In my opinion, there is no excuse for this. Their corporate line…
     
    "As we've refined our software development process over the years, we've generally found that the most effective way for us to support these types of changes is to incorporate this testing into our regular development cycle. This enables us to advance our technology at the aggressive pace that our customers expect, while also adding support for significant new system configurations."
     
    …doesn’t address the fact that as one of the world’s largest and most important software houses they had plenty of advance warning to at least prepare a universal Photoshop for MacWorld. I could even understand an interim universal release sometime in the next few months. But forcing Mac users to wait until the end of this year or the beginning of the next (at which point we’ll be using Leopard) essentially sends the message that we’re not all that important. And that’s a shame.
  • Swad
    Let’s face it – the Mac is an awesome machine. Somewhere along the line, however, Apple decided that it was SO awesome that upgrades weren’t that important. For many years, especially in Apple’s early history, expandability of hardware was a touchy issue for Mac users. As Andy Hertzfeld (and isn’t it every geek’s dream to have “hertz” in their last name?) notes in a folklore.org entry, Steve Jobs and other Macintosh pioneers thought that hardware upgradablity was “a bug instead of a feature.”
     
    It was for this reason, among others, that Macs never quite caught on with the gaming/overclocking community as did PCs. Granted, there were many who overclocked their Apple computers or modded them to fit their needs, but the large group (like myself) who enjoyed swapping out cards and upgrading components were left out in the (liquid cooling system equipped) cold.
     
    All of that may be changing with the new Macs. Maybe. We’ve seen several things in the past few days which point to a change of heart in Cupertino. One article tells the ease with which users are able to upgrade their ram (as opposed to previous iMacs), while another at Accelerate Your Mac tells of intrepid Japanese users who successfully upgraded their Core Duo CPUs.
     
    I can tell that at this point you are underwhelmed, as well you should be. PC users have been upgrading processors for eons… or at least the past 15-20 years. The significance here is that Apple has, in the case of the RAM, gone out of its way to ensure that users can quickly and easily upgrade components. This is a seismic paradigm shift from previous Apple eras and causes us to wonder if Apple has had a change of heart with the move to Intel processors.
     
    Will Apple take this opportunity to attract the mod/gaming/overclocking/leet crowd who are more than content to spend their Friday nights swapping out graphics cards (hey, who you lookin’ at?)? Let’s hope so.
     
    Liberty for Mac components is a winning move for all users, since it means wider adoption and higher production of third-party products. Meanwhile, if you need me, I’ll be building my (imaginary) custom iMac at the Apple website… and hunting down a few upgrades to go along with it.
     
    [Digg this Article]
  • Swad

    OSx86 10.4.4 Leaked

    By Swad, in OSx86,

    While we knew it would just be a matter of time, OS X for Intel 10.4.4 has leaked. As usual, the recovery disc is being seeded via torrent on a major bit torrent site. The following oh-so-brief note accompanies the 4.2 gig .dmg file:


    This is the Mac OS X 10.4.4 Restore Disc included with all the Intel iMacs. It's unpatched so don't bother trying to install it.
    No word yet as to the integrity of this file, nor is it known the method with which Apple will keep hackers from breaking their hardware restrictions. In other news, somewhere in Europe a man with a name that, when translated, sounds vaguely like Maxxuss, was seen dashing through the snow covered streets towards his computer shouting something like "Viva la x86! I must get to my hackintosh!"
     
    Watch this space for more news as it develops.
     
    [Digg this Article]
  • Swad

    Our New Forum Structure

    By Swad, in OSx86,

    After careful thought and a ton of suggestions from everyone, we've gone ahead and rearranged the forum structure to make things easier to find, as well as to make way for all the new interest in the Macintels!
     
    The biggest change is that there are now two forums for talking about OS X – one on Macs (due to the advent of the Macintels) and one on PCs. This accomplishes several things, not the least of which is simplicity: it’s now very easy to know where posts go, based on where you’re running OS X. Also, the Genius Bar will be transformed into the one-stop place to get started in understanding the world of OSx86.
     
    We also added “Real Life,” “Patches and Tweaks,” and “Dual Booting” forums along with a few other features to make your life a little easier. We want to become the smartest and most accessible Mac forum around, so keep doing what you’re doing – posting!
     
    Also, be sure to stay tuned in the next few weeks. We have a lot of exciting things coming down the pipe (including a celebration for our 20,000th member!). Plenty of fun times ahead.
     
    Let us know your comments here.
  • Swad

    10.4.5 Is On Its Way

    By Swad, in OSx86,

    AppleInsider is reporting that developers should be expecting 10.4.5 this week.


    Apple Computer this week is expected to begin widespread testing of Mac OS X 10.4.5 Update, the next in a series of maintenance updates to its Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" operating system and the first update to address bugs lingering the company's initial release of Mac OS X 10.4.4 for Intel-based Macs, AppleInsider has learned.
     
    Contacts often familiar with Cupertino, Calif.-based company's operating system plans say the Mac maker this week began distributing the first external builds of Mac OS X 10.4.5 Update, which weigh in at approximately 15MB.
     
    Two of the most recent builds are rumored to have appeared as "Mac OS X 10.4.5 build 8H3" and "Mac OS X 10.4.5 build 8H5."
     
    While the specific fixes and enhancements planned for the update are unknown, Apple is reportedly asking that its developers and partners put weight on Safari, Core Graphics intensive applications, Quartz Composer, and the Mac OS X Dock.
     
    The company also reportedly asked that developers test networking, the Mac OS X crash report, File Sync, Software Update and the MSDOS File System.
    One astute OSx86 Project forum member noticed that Apple is already requiring 10.4.5 for some applications, such as J2SE 5.0.
     
    This also marks the first OS X update that Intel users should (presumably) be able to use via Apple’s update system. In the developer builds, updates were not available through Software Update.
  • Swad

    Linux Jumps on the EFI Train

    By Swad, in OSx86,

    Although "mum" is still the word from Redmond (and, for that matter, any English speaker outside the U.S. saying "mom"), Red Hat has announced their intention to support the new Macintels along with their EFI trimmings. That is, as soon as Red Hat actually buys one.
     
    As Ars Technica notes, Linux support EFI has existed for some time.


    Linux EFI support already exists in the form of elilo, a special version of the LILO bootloader designed specifically for Intel systems that use EFI and the IA64 architecture. The current elilo code base will have to be ported to Intel's x86 architecture before it can be integrated into Linux distributions capable of running on Apple's new systems.
     
    Although such a port is theoretically possible, members of the Ars Technica Linux community have pointed out that bootloaders are generally written with plenty of assembly, and consequently are not easily ported. Elilo is not particularly stable and Red Hat representatives have not discussed the methodology they plan to use, so the solution could end up being something else entirely. In other news, Ars also wins the award for Best In Show in the national “Longest Run-on Sentence Competition.”


    Since Mac OS X operating system is based in part on BSD, and since running Linux on Apple's new hardware will not provide any unique or compelling advantage over running it on commodity x86 hardware from vendors like Dell and HP (Apple's benchmarks aside, pretty cases do not improve the performance of a laptop's software), some users and developers feel that such porting efforts are unnecessary.
  • Swad

    iMac Sales Not Leaping Ahead

    By Swad, in OSx86,

    ThinkSecret is reporting that sales of the new iMac have not been as high as Apple hoped.
     


    Apple's decision to unleash Intel-based Mac systems six months ahead of schedule is proving less successful than the company anticipated. Two weeks following the Macworld Expo San Francisco keynote, sources report that sales of the Intel-based iMac are lower than Apple expected, even taking into account the seasonal post-holiday sales dip, suggesting the 2006 transition to Intel may be more difficult than the company has expressed.
    I would have no problem with that assessment, except that they've been out for all of two weeks so far (and no MacBook has shipped yet). Keep in mind that the vast majority of computer users out there have no idea what it means to have an Intel processor as opposed to one from IBM. Few people besides some interested geeks (like most of us) really care about the architecture.
     
    The article does raise an interesting question about Apple’s relationship with its software developers.
     


    The earlier release of the Intel-based systems—"a little ahead of schedule," in the words of Apple CEO Steve Jobs—caught some developers off guard. Last June, Apple only told developers that the new Intel systems would begin shipping by June 2006, suggesting that they might have a year to convert their applications to Universal Binaries. Sources report that many prominent software developers have expressed their displeasure over the move to Apple management.
     
    Major software vendors like Adobe and Microsoft have been careful not to shed any light on when their popular and performance-critical programs will be ready as Universal Binaries. Both companies' products are extensively Carbonized—a result of Apple's transition to Mac OS X—which are far more difficult to convert to Universal Binaries than Cocoa applications written from the ground up for OS X.
    Should Apple have let their developers know ahead of time that January was the date? Some companies, like Quark, were able to release their apps at MacWorld. Whence Adobe and Microsoft?
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