Last week at
the World Wide Developers Conference, Apple announced some cool new
products. The first is the PowerMac G5 Desktop. This uses a new IBM
PowerPC processor running at up to 2 GHz. Apple also totally redesigned
the case, greatly improving the subsystems so that the speed increase
is more than just the processor. Still, I'm not lusting over it since
my PowerBook is still fast enough. Once they come out with a PowerBook
G5 -- that will tempt me.
Item 2 is Safari 1.0, which I commented on a couple of days ago. Item
three is the iChat AV Public Beta. Sweet and I tried it out Friday. He
was trying to send video (over a phone line?) and it swamped the
connection. Audio only was just fine. I used my PowerBook's internal
speaker and he said it sounded great. Now I have iChat running all the
time and I'm hoping that it will also interoperate with ICQ like the
latest AIM Betas. Then I won't have to have two chat programs running.
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Of course you
might ask why I don't use a multiprotocol chat program like Fire?
Simple, iChat is from Apple and I try to stick with Apple products if I
can. There is also an iSight webcam which is a bit expensive but it
looks stylish and people say the picture quality is quite good. Maybe
iChat and iSight will be what we use to enable Sweet to join gaming
when he's in Southern California.
The last item announced was Mac OS X 10.3, which will be another paid
upgrade. I feel a bit guilty that I bought one copy of Mac OS X 10.2
and installed it on three computers, though only two of them are
active. But, if Apple goes to yearly paid OS upgrades then I will feel
less guilty. Maybe I'll get a mostly useless to me .Mac account since
the OS has so many hooks to it. Mac OS X 10.3 has a new Finder and lots
of improvements, including a new development environment called Xcode.
Otherwise no one thing really really cool but I know it will be a
worthwhile upgrade.
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