A while back, I made my own contact list style for Adium, which I called Blend. It’s extremely minimalistic and somewhat like the HUD windows in Leopard (see Quicklook):
It’s meant to float above other windows in the collapsed mode, and is barely noticable in front of other things.
If you like what you see, you can get it here.
As you can see on the Birth Of An Apple Store site, the Apple Store outside the Hynes is shaping up pretty well. I’ve walked past it a few times to check it out, and apparently a giant Apple logo has now been installed:
I’ll be at the grand opening, whenever it’s announced.
Adobe has finally released a universal binary of Shockwave Player. This means it is now fully compatible with Intel Macs (which have been out now for two years), and you no longer have to run browsers in Rosetta Mode to use Shockwave. The only question that remains is what took Adobe so long?! Waiting this long to release Shockwave just isn’t cool. There are a lot of applications and games on the internet that use Shockwave, such as the amazing Junkbot, so it really isn’t fair for Adobe to wait to release it.
Apple announced and released a Software Development Kit for people who want to make their own programs for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This is great, because before this, to put unofficial applications on the iPhone you had to pretty majorly hack the thing to get access to it. Very annoying, and this should make the situation a lot better.
The SDK itself is free, but to sell/distribute the programs you make, you have to pay a $99 setup fee. After that, you can either sell your apps (with %70 of the sale price going to you, nice royalties) or freely distribute them from the iTunes App Store.
All of this stuff won’t actually be on the iPod Touch and iPhone until June, when iPhone Software 2.0 is released, but for now anyone is able to download the SDK and start making their own apps.
nVidia (my favorite GPU producer) released the GeForce 9600 today, signaling the birth of the next generation of graphics cards, the 9 series. The 9’s are nVidia’s second generation of DirectX 10 GPUs, and are slated to become of the most powerful cards on the market.
Currently nVidia’s top-notch cards are still the GeForce 8800’s, but the 9600 is supposed to be a mainstream card, not for enthusiasts and gamers. When the 9800 debuts, it will most likely reign supreme in the world of GPUs.
This, of course, doesn’t benefit my project in any way, since all new cards are PCI-Express only, no AGP or PCI love whatsoever. Oh well, they’re still fun to drool over.
I’ve been called back into The Guild of Writers to do some work for the Kehlbet project, so I once again find myself in need of a Windows PC. I have plenty of old computers lying around in my house, so finding a victim base to upgrade to modern standards was not too difficult. The computer I chose is an old Dell 8200, my old “gaming” computer. Ha. I got it for $50 from my dad’s work, and being the first computer with a dedicated video processor (a GeForce 4 MX 4000), I used it for my graphics-heavy work (Uru).
Of course, this computer is not nearly good enough for Vista. After installing a DVD drive in it to even install the os, I was awarded a solid 1/5 in the Windows Experience Index benchmark thing. My lowest spec was, of course, that graphics card, being 4 generations old (and the base model of that generation). Of course, half a gig of memory wasn’t helping much, either, but the main thing was that GeForce 4.
So anyway, I paid a visit to Microcenter today and picked up the cheapest card my motherboard supports (the mobo doesn’t have any PCI-Express slots, and the AGP is only 4x I think, so I’m limited to PCI cards only), a GeForce FX 5200 with 128mb of memory. Certainly better than the card it was replacing, right? And it even says ‘Vista’ on the box, though it isn’t Vista Certified, it just says Vista on it. “Oh well,” I thought to myself. I bought the card for $47, and brought it home only to find that nVidia doesn’t support any cards earlier than the GeForce 6’s for Vista. I searched in vain, but nothing made Vista utilize the card. It certainly recognized it, but there was a driver issue and it disabled it, defaulting back to the GeForce 4.
I’m returning the FX 5200 tomorrow and picking up instead a GeForce 6200, which I’ve read is supported by Vista, and is indeed capable of decent performance under the hog of an OS. If I had a PCI-E slot, this would be so much simpler, because the newer PCI-E cards are actually cheaper than these old PCI ones, and they’re much more powerful, not to mention actually supported by nVidia still.
I’ve been called back into The Guild of Writers to do some work for the Kehlbet project, so I once again find myself in need of a Windows PC. I have plenty of old computers lying around in my house, so finding a victim base to upgrade to modern standards was not too difficult. The computer I chose is an old Dell 8200, my old “gaming” computer. Ha. I got it for $50 from my dad’s work, and being the first computer with a dedicated video processor (a GeForce 4 MX 4000), I used it for my graphics-heavy work (Uru).
Of course, this computer is not nearly good enough for Vista. After installing a DVD drive in it to even install the os, I was awarded a solid 1/5 in the Windows Experience Index benchmark thing. My lowest spec was, of course, that graphics card, being 4 generations old (and the base model of that generation). Of course, half a gig of memory wasn’t helping much, either, but the main thing was that GeForce 4.
So anyway, I paid a visit to Microcenter today and picked up the cheapest card my motherboard supports (the mobo doesn’t have any PCI-Express slots, and the AGP is only 4x I think, so I’m limited to PCI cards only), a GeForce FX 5200 with 128mb of memory. Certainly better than the card it was replacing, right? And it even says ‘Vista’ on the box, though it isn’t Vista Certified, it just says Vista on it. “Oh well,” I thought to myself. I bought the card for $47, and brought it home only to find that nVidia doesn’t support any cards earlier than the GeForce 6’s for Vista. I searched in vain, but nothing made Vista utilize the card. It certainly recognized it, but there was a driver issue and it disabled it, defaulting back to the GeForce 4.
I’m returning the FX 5200 tomorrow and picking up instead a GeForce 6200, which I’ve read is supported by Vista, and is indeed capable of decent performance under the hog of an OS. If I had a PCI-E slot, this would be so much simpler, because the newer PCI-E cards are actually cheaper than these old PCI ones, and they’re much more powerful, not to mention actually supported by nVidia still.
I hacked my iPod Touch the second day I owned it, so that I could put new applications on it. So far, my favorite by far is Lights Off (an awesome game where you have to turn all of the blocks dark), and my second is iPhysics (a physics simulator where you can create objects and try to get one object to a goal).
I tried to use Stack, which puts Leopard-esque stacks on the iPod Touch, and was very cool but it had this annoying problem where it stays on top of other applications once they’re launched. So I tried to uninstall it, but it kept telling me to remove the stack before uninstalling. I tried that, but it didn’t work, so eventually I had to use ftp to remove them.
Oh well…Still, a lot of good stuff…Yes.
Apple released a patch yesterday entitled “Macbook Macbook Pro Software Update 1.1”, which fixes the unresponsive keyboard issues I and other people have been having, where the keyboard will simply stop responding for a minute or so. Anyone with a Macbook or Macbook Pro should probably launch Software Update and grab the patch, as well as that security update that went out a few days ago, if you haven’t gotten it already.
Upon opening the ‘print’ dialog in Preview.app today, I noticed this button near the bottom:
A standard Aqua button, but yellow. I’ve never seen this before. My printer is low on yellow ink, so maybe the button changes color depending on what ink is low? That is very cool.