Veerle's blog

In just a few weeks we will know more of what’s coming in Apple’s next operating system 10.4 aka “Tiger”. Steve Jobs will reveal everything at this years World Wide Developers Conference 2004 taken place from June 28th till July 2nd in San Francisco. The slogan alone makes me just more curious “Innovation never sleeps. Preview the highly evolved Mac OS X “Tiger”

According to the French Macplus website our patience may be rewarded. If this report is accurate we could see the iTunes Music Store go live as soon as June. The European store is currently undergoing a live testing phase. As it looks now the store is scheduled to open in mid-June but could see delays until no later than September. A delay beyond June would somehow be attributed to the launch of 4 competitive online European music services, which are set to open in October.

The developer connection at Apple has put a page online where you can quickly discover how far along CSS support is in Safari. All tags are linked to W3C for more explanation what they stand for. Even for Windows users this link can be handy since a good webdesigner should develop cross platform.

CSS support in Safari

I was reading Jeffrey Zeldman’s post “I would like to buy the world a Mac“ where he talks about using pixellated text when designing in Photoshop because most of the world will see it that way. He has a point there because not everybody has updated to Windows XP and even if they are ClearType is off by default. Most users I know don’t even have a clue that it is there in the first place.

Ok, still no PowerBook G5, so personally I will not buy one of these but this was a much needed update to the portable line. The rumors for these machines already started way-back in 2003. First let's take a look at the new iBooks.

• 12-inch iBook
• 1GHZ G4
• iLife '04
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 with 32MB of DDR SDRAM
• Up to 1.25 GB RAM
• Starting at $1099

• 14-inch iBook
• Up to 1.2GHZ
• iLlife '04
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 with 32MB of DDR SDRAM
• Optional 4X SuperDrive
• Starting at $1299

The pro-line also got an update. Here are the specs:

• 12.1-inch PowerBook/15.2-inch
• NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 with 64MB of DDR SDRAM
• 1.33GHz G4
• 256MB DDR333 SDRAM

• 15.2-inch PowerBook/17-inch
• 1.5GHz G4
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 with 64MB of DDR SDRAM
• 512MB DDR333 SDRAM

All in all not bad, certainly those top machines. But still let's hope that the next round of updates to the portable line will bring the G5. Fingers crossed that it will be this year. Maybe by then all the G5 production trouble will be resolved. This is affecting everyone because our new Xserve is still not arrived. We've been down this road with Motorola and everybody was hoping that all that was resolved with IBM.