China conquers bloglines

My bloglines feed now thinks I read Mandarin Chinese. Has China quietly acquired them?

I suspect it will be fixed shortly ...

iPhoto 6: tech notes

[There's something odd going on with this Apple search, sometimes when I run it I get nothing of interest. It's as though Apple is just now propagating these files across their servers.]

Apple - Support - Search Results - iPhoto 6

Lots of tech notes.

I would NOT touch iPhoto 6 for at least a month. It's a really big update. Apple's big updates, at least of their consumer software, tend to have hideous bugs.

Apple is a bleeding edge kind of company, and early adopters should think of themselves as major blood donors. Of course I do appreciate the sacrifice of my friends who forge ahead ...

Sound splitter with volume control

SmartShare - Griffin Technology

I want one.

Fix for some sound output problems in OS X

This is worth checking for ...

macosxhints - A simple fix for sound output issues

My 2GHz iMac G5 ... has been giving me some problems with sound playback. This has been occuring only with certain applications, such as Quick Time Player, Windows Media Player, and even iChat would stop playing sounds every now and then.

there is something quite simple that fixes this problem. This Apple KnowledgeBase document explains the problem and solution:

"Some audio applications may change your computer's audio settings to a sample rate that is too high for other applications to use. In this situation, system alert sounds still work, and does iTunes, but other applications may have no sound."

Now, I don't know which application would have changed my settings, but the fix is quite simple. You simply open /Applications -> Utilities -> Audio MIDI Setup and change the output settings to 44100.0 Hz (the iMac supports up to 96600 Hz).

Microsoft's five year deal - sad news

MS to ship Mac Office of five years 'minimum' | The Register:

Beyond the tweaks, the agreement will Apple is interesting, and may scotch rumours that Apple is working on a full-scale productivity suite to rival Office. Apple certainly has to have a contingency plan in place should Microsoft ever drop Mac support, but the agreement announced this week means it has five years to develop something of its own, or see how OpenOffice development proceeds.

No money changes hands, we are told. On the other hand, iWorks doesn't include 'Numbers' and AppleWorks won't be ported to MacTel. This deal came with a real pricetag.

It's probably the best deal Jobs could get, but it's disappointing all the same.

MyVu video googles for iPod: Cringely's prediction?

The PBS web sites are down again (they've been having awful trouble lately), so I can't check the Cringely column directly. Some time last fall he predicted Apple would acquire a company that had technology to display video images on the retina (laser painting of the retina).

So is the MyVu personal media viewer what Cringely meant? I don't think so. This is from the PR:

MicroOptical proved the myvu™ viewer’s ability to deliver portable video in France, where under the Orange brand it is paired by France Telecom with a Samsung D600 cell phone,” said Mark Spitzer, CEO of MicroOptical. “We chose Macworld as the venue to debut the product in the U.S. because of the overwhelming response Apple has had for its video iPod. As the iPod changes the way people experience video, the myvu™ viewer will accelerate its adoption by providing hands free, head-up access to a large virtual image. The myvu™ viewer makes watching portable video more practical.

This sounds more like a conventional video display. Interesting form factor. They need to get this accepted by the young adult market before old guys will dare to wear them.

Running XP apps on MacTel hardware

We won't be able to dual boot XP on MacTel hardware because Apple is using Intel's BIOS replacement - EFI. (EFI is the foundation for Intel's DRM architecture; I still believe DRM was the real driver of the MacTel deal. The more vociferously Apple denies this the more confident I am that it's true.) Vista (aka Windows XP Service Pack 3) may support this, but perhaps not this year.

So can we run better/faster XP emulators? I thought this was unlikely in the near future, but a Macintouch contributor feels there's hope (though perhaps not from Virtual PC):

Macs on Intel (Part 6)

Dave Schroeder

... What we will *definitely* see are "Virtual PC"-like programs that let you run Windows alongside OS X (in a Window, or taking over the screen, etc., with a hotkey to flip back and forth, for example).

It's important to note this will NOT be emulation: Windows will run at the native speed of the underlying hardware.

vmware already has a version for Mac OS X in development, and Microsoft may even make a version of Virtual PC. Then there are things like QEMU, Xen, etc. The Darwin/Mac OS X version of WINE, DarWINE, has even been working under betas of Mac OS X for Intel. Now that Intel Macs are shipping, it will only be a matter of weeks/months before we have several options for running Windows itself, and/or Windows applications at the native speed of the underlying hardware.

"Dual booting" might not be possible initially, because Windows XP doesn't support EFI (the "next generation" of BIOS from Intel, which Apple used on these machines), but Vista does, for example. And since EFI is the future, it's only a matter of time before x86 OSes and bootloaders start supporting it. For more information on EFI: Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI)

But, in my opinion, dual booting is annoying anyway, and the really interesting thing will be able to just run Windows and Mac OS X side-by-side.

Further, Phil Schiller reiterated that Apple isn't doing anything to prevent people from installing other OSes and Intel has communicated that Apple isn't using proprietary Intel chipsets.

As for the lack of S-Video on the MacBook Pro: S-Video output is possible from the DVI connector via an adapter; there is no longer a dedicated miniDIN-4 port.

I think the new iMac is very interesting as an Aperture or Video machine. - particularly because of the imaging system. On the other hand the new PowerBooks don't make sense to me -- unless they'll run Windows applications very well. Then they make sense.