AppleInsider StaffA collection of notes related to Apple's OS strategies and and an update on the company's iPod shuffle digital music player.
In recent days, developers blogs have reported sightings of Mac OS X 10.3.8 build 7U7, a forthcoming maintenance release to Mac OS X Panther that currently weighs in at just shy of 20 MB.
In addition to previous reports of increased system and graphics stability, developers claim the most recent build delivers improvements to the launch time of certain applications, while offering more graphics driver and OpenGL performance fixes since the previous build.
Now believed to be in the mid-stages of its development, Mac OS X 10.3.8 is also said to sport improvements to Address Book LDAP lookup and Active Directory Plugin binding and functionality.
Mac OS X 10.3.8 is reportedly slated for release sometime next month.
Apple offers insight into latest Tiger developments
In related Mac OS X news, Apple last week quietly updated its online preview of Mac OS X "Tiger" to include movie captures from some of the latest, unreleased builds of the operating system.
Most striking are the changes to Apple's upcoming widgets application, called Dashboard. The application, now seamlessly integrated into Tiger, spawns its own dock below the Mac OS X dock when activated.
The online preview also offers clips of additional Tiger features which have previously been reported on AppleInsider, such as QuickTime movie sharing, Mail 2.0 interface improvements, and parental controls.
Sigmatel chip at heart of iPod shuffle
Confirming industry rumors which sprouted months ago, analyst Portelligent, Inc., claims to have confirmed that Apple's just released iPod Shuffle MP3 player employs SigmaTel's D-Major STMP3550 MP3 audio decoder chip for audio processing.
Shares of Sigmatel rose over 2% today to close at $37.25. The stock rose further in after hours to $32.62.
And while Reuters is reporting that Apple's online store is quoting wait times of up to 4 weeks for one of these new flash-based music players, we hear that a certain Calif.-based Apple retail store retained quite a few of them as of Tuesday afternoon.
Charles Martin
Christine McKee
Oliver Haslam
William Gallagher
32 Comments
Shares of Sigmatel rose over 2% today to close at $37.25. The stock rose further in after hours to $32.62.
Rose from 37.25 to 32.62??? Thats some fuzzy math.
Macaddict16
With the exception of the Calculator (bugs me for some reason)--and some slightly non-standard popup menus/scrollbars--I think Dashboard is looking pretty nice!
I can see what all the color is for now: telling one widget from another at a glance. Since they can all pop up at once (unlike the usual way you launch apps one at a time), those visual cues are important. They let you keep lots of widgets open and get to them all instantly.
Download the PDF from Apple's page for lots of details. There's quite a bit of functionality there!
Can't wait to make my own widgets with Shockwave Director... (I wonder if Director, Flash, etc. can have Dashboard transparency that animates?)
One question... The demo movie does NOT show the "water drop effect" happening. Nor do widgets flip over in 3D. Odd... those effects are still mentioned in the text. Are they still present?
With the exception of the Calculator (bugs me for some reason)--and some slightly non-standard popup menus/scrollbars--I think Dashboard is looking pretty nice!
I can see what all the color is for now: telling one widget from another at a glance. Since they can all pop up at once (unlike the usual way you launch apps one at a time), those visual cues are important. They let you keep lots of widgets open and get to them all instantly.
Download the PDF from Apple's page for lots of details. There's quite a bit of functionality there!
Can't wait to make my own widgets with Shockwave Director... (I wonder if Director, Flash, etc. can have Dashboard transparency that animates?)
One question... The demo movie does NOT show the "water drop effect" happening. Nor do widgets flip over in 3D. Odd... those effects are still mentioned in the text. Are they still present?
Most likely. Maybe the demo compy lacked a CoreImage-enabled GPU? Or perhaps they turned them off to make the screen capture work better, or the specific build they used has them taken out...
Most likely. Maybe the demo compy lacked a CoreImage-enabled GPU? Or perhaps they turned them off to make the screen capture work better, or the specific build they used has them taken out...
i can make pretty pictures !! see
http://www.phatcraft.com
anybody wanna partner with me to make a cool Dashboard widget? i'm gonna let the cat out of the bag...
the idea is to make a Widget that collates all the news from different Mac news sites in a slick, innovative, exteremely readble Widget.
news collation leverages XML feeds of course, plus some nifty tech to prevent too much duplication of news items, for example Columbia Uni's Newsblaster http://www.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster/
i am interested in designing cool UI... any others? maybe to help with marketing/alliances/coding!
thanks for your time people
Can't wait to make my own widgets with Shockwave Director... (I wonder if Director, Flash, etc. can have Dashboard transparency that animates?)
IMHO i am not sure if Flash or Director are supported? Just HTML/CSS/Javascript. Any clarification is appreciated...
edit: ok cool, yeah Flash supported, quicktime, java... good question on the transparency.