To reduce the database size and server load, all articles from 2004 or earlier are archived here.
- December 2004 (52)
- November 2004 (33)
- October 2004 (54)
- September 2004 (43)
- August 2004 (41)
- July 2004 (57)
- June 2004 (82)
- May 2004 (53)
- April 2004 (45)
- March 2004 (49)
- February 2004 (40)
- January 2004 (46)
- December 2003 (44)
- November 2003 (48)
- October 2003 (57)
- September 2003 (45)
- August 2003 (54)
- July 2003 (62)
- June 2003 (46)
- May 2003 (47)
- April 2003 (51)
- March 2003 (63)
- February 2003 (69)
- January 2003 (72)
- December 2002 (63)
- November 2002 (70)
- October 2002 (72)
- September 2002 (73)
- August 2002 (41)
- July 2002 (39)
- June 2002 (19)
- May 2002 (3)
- April 2002 (1)
Tue, 04 Jun 2002
iBook wins Mac converts
I just returned from a visit with several PC using friends, and after seeing my iBook most of them changed their mind about the Mac.
During the weekend, I took pictures with my Canon S100 and downloaded them (as well as pictures from a Nikon CoolPix 990 and other cameras), burned both music CDs and CDs containing their photos, and played DVDs on the TV.
Most of them had only limited exposure to Macs and admitted they couldn't do all of those things as easily with their PCs.
CodeWarrior 8 ships
Metrowerks has started shipping CodeWarrior Pro 8.0, the latest release of their development tools.
Version 8.0 adds support for Objective C, Cocoa, and integration with Interface Builder, as well as an improved IDE.
My copy arrived today, although I haven't installed it yet. I'm in the middle of a project, and I'm sharing my code with another programmer who still has v7, so updating would cause me to lose several days of work and prevent the other programmer from being able to work on the project.
Apple Announces Public Preview of QuickTime 6
Apple today announced that the publicpreview of QuickTime 6 is now available as a free download from Apple(www.apple.com) for both Mac and Windows. QuickTime 6 is the industry'sfirst mainstream MPEG-4 solution for streaming media to all MPEG-4compliant players. In addition, Apple announced the public preview ofQuickTime Broadcaster, which captures and encodes QuickTime content inMPEG-4 for live streaming over the web.
MPEG-4, the next-generation international standard for digital video, wascreated by the group that created MPEG-2, the "gold standard" of digitalvideo used by every DVD player and DVD. There are hundreds of companiescommitted to the MPEG-4 standard, including Apple, Cisco, Ericsson, Intel,Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Panasonic, Phillips, Real Networks,Samsung and Sun.
"QuickTime 6 delivers the world's first complete media solution forcreating, streaming and viewing MPEG-4 content," said Steve Jobs, Apple'sCEO. "MPEG-4 is an open standard being adopted by wireless, computer andentertainment companies around the world because it delivers the highestquality digital video, and allows content creators to scale thequality/bandwidth tradeoff all the way from MPEG-2 quality to dramaticallylower bandwidths for streaming over the Internet."
QuickTime 6 includes the new Instant-On Streaming feature that eliminatesfrustrating buffer delays and provides users with the ability to quicklyand easily scrub through streaming media content to locate and instantlyview specific sections. In addition, QuickTime 6 running on Mac OS X nowsupports JPEG 2000, the next generation JPEG standard that allows users tocapture still images in a higher quality and smaller file size than everbefore.
QuickTime 6 also includes Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), the standard MPEG-4audio format. AAC is the next-generation professional-quality audio formatthat delivers vastly superior sound quality at drastically reduced filesizes-better than MP3 and better than Windows Media Player (WMA).
Additional features of QuickTime 6 include:
- a new ISO-compliant video codec for encoding and decoding MPEG-4 videocontent;
- adherence to the Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA) 1.0 specification;
- DVC Pro (PAL) support; and
- an updated user interface for easier access to QuickTime content.
- live encoding with real time preview;
- the ability to record and hint in real time to the computer's hard diskfor quick video-on-demand posting;
- support for QuickTime codecs as well as MPEG-4 video and AAC audio;
- AppleScript support;
- the ability to create custom settings;
- support for reliable communication via TCP between Broadcaster andServer;
- auto configuration of connections between Broadcaster and Server.