Jan 14
Winners and MacWorld afterthoughts
2006 at 10.21 am posted by Veerle Pieters
Winner of de-lurking day
Let's start with a service announcement. Here are the 3 winners of an iTunes Album of their choice.
- Kelly from Kortrijk
- Mike from Rochester New York
- Toriseng aka Snorre from Norway
Please send an email to veerle at duoh dot com with the correct email that I can use for sending the money through Paypal or the iTunes Music store in the case of Kelly.
MacWorld afterthoughts
First let’s talk a little bit about the idea of having a dual OS machine. Yes we have Virtual PC here at Duoh! and even a Dell machine for testing stuff and working on some Director specific jobs. For testing purpose it’s still a hassle to go to another office to boot up the Dell etc. Virtual PC is nice but slow and that can be annoying at least to me ;-)
Windows on a Mac. Are you sick or what? ;-)
So imagine that you have an Intel Mac with the possibility of switching to Windows or even Linux like you can switch users now in Mac OS X. I for one would love this. The first clue that Apple isn’t going to stop from installing Windows on a Mac has already been dropped by Phil Shiller. On the other hand Apple can’t encourage running Windows on Macs, because that would cause Mac developers to question whether they should continue investing in the OS X platform if Apple in itself is not fully committed to the OS. So I think that fast switch idea is out of the question ;-) But a dual boot would also be nice. It would totally rock if you could trash it when Windows is broken and just start over with another image file like you can in Virtual PC now or that you undo changes made during a session and restore it to the previous state.
Apple uses a framework called Extensible Firmware Interface or EFI as a replacement for Open Firmware. There aren’t any PC vendors that support this already since Apple is the first major hardware company that puts its weight behind it. It’s a replacement technology for the aging BIOS. Windows Vista will support EFI, Windows XP (at least not the 32-bit version) doesn’t but this doesn’t mean it won’t run because developers can bridge the gap with software known as a compatibility support module. This module will make it possible to run Windows XP and other BIOS driven OSes on an EFI based PC. We just will have to wait if Apple has built such a module into the new Intel Macs. Time will tell for sure and since Kenneth our programmer has already ordered a MacBook Pro I will have first hand insight in this as soon as it ships.
Virtual PC
Virtual PC (the Mac version) on the other is kind of funny because it runs on PowerPC but not on Intel. It is not clear yet but my guess is that Microsoft will have to do a complete rewrite of the application in order to make it work. So I think it’s safe to assume that it will take months before a solution is ready. Remember, most of this is still speculation of course.
Windows Media Player
Microsoft has stopped developing Windows Media Player for Mac. Not a bad thing because it didn’t work as it should anyway. Just stop a clip or move the playhead to see what I mean. Things will be out of order. Don’t worry, there is a solution for viewing wma and .wmv files inside your Quicktime Player called Flip4Mac. It’s available for free and works great. I tested it on Channel 9, the best place that I could think of ;-) Telestream seems like a company that is committed to building a great product and I hope they will improve their plugin in the future to support the latest Windows media technologies.
iWeb
Well you probably saw this coming too, no? This adds a very nice feature which will make it more attractive to become a .Mac member. Not that you really need to be a .Mac member to be able to use it. You can publish it to a folder too and upload it to your server. You just looses a few .Mac benefits. It has ‘simplicity’ written all over it and I’m sure a lot of people who don’t have a clue on how to create a website will use this. The themes look good too, they are as always designed with care. But… yeah I sure have a “but” the code the pages generate aren’t 100% Web Standards friendly and looks more like tag-soup. Todd Dominey has summed it up quit nicely. I expected more from Apple, so that sure is a bit disappointing. So Apple if you are reading this you know what to do in 2.0!
21served
1
will Intel Core Duo rock?
2
it runs on PowerPC but not on Intel.
Actually, they sell a version of VirtualPC that runs on Windows Intel—so really, what you mean is the Mac version currently runs on PPC only, right? Perhaps the existence of the Intel version of VirtualPC will help speed up the creation of a Mac Intel verison!
3
@Baldo: We will have to wait and see ;-)
@Matthew McClintock: Yes I mean the Mac version, sorry if that wasn’t clear. I adjusted the article so that it is clear now. Thanks :-)
4
I’m just wondering how much Codeweavers Wine and Transgaming will rock on OS X. They currently bring Windows Apps and games respectively to Linux, and since OSX is a bsd flavour, there’s no reason it should pretty decently. I only wonder if they’ll go the X11 route or use the proper OS X api’s.
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@AkaKakA:
Codeweavers have said their planning to port WINE to OS X. I don’t have the link to the press release on me, but it’s somewhere on their site.
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I down loaded Flip4Mac too and agree with you...its cool.
7
have flip to mac too, but for me it opens in quicktime only if i click on download. play doesn’t work.
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@Ine: For streaming wmv movies you have to change a setting in your “system preferences”. In the “other” row you’ll find “Flip4Mac WMV”. Then go to the movie tab and select the last radio box “import streaming movies”. Now all streaming movies will open in the QuickTime Player instead of Windows Media Player. You’ll see the line fill when data is coming in. Altough some streaming movies seem to have audio problems and others play fine.
9
I tried Flip4Mac, but uninstalled it the same day. It kept crashing any application that used anypart of quicktime. So Quicktime crashed, IMovie crashed, itunes crashed, Safari crashed, Even the finder crashed. Yet somehow, it is STILL better than MS Media Player? Now its gone, i have no way of playing, or wanting to play windows media content on a mac, and i must say, it doesn’t bother me anymore.
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@Phil: There was an issue if you had QuickTime 7 but they released an Flip4Mac WMV 2.0.1 version to fix that.
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Thanks Veerle, i’ll give that a ago
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Works a treat! i guess i was just too eager to ditch Microsoft Media Player? can’t think why . . . ?
13
I could have written this article myself, lol.
Regarding a rewrite of virtual pc…
I don’t think that is necessary, is vpc is coded with xcode, it only takes one compile to render the application as a universal binary, like steve demonstrated in his keynote at wwdc.
Flip4mac works great on Tiger, not so much on Panther, as I tested myself.
iWeb is really nice, the 2.0 release shoudl fix a lot of stuff but it will take at least 3 more builds to actually grow up, as was the case with all other iLife apps.
14
While you wait for dual boot machines or if you don’t feel like restarting when you want to test under Windows, one trick is to connect to the PC on your LAN (obviously it has to be running) with Remote Desktop or, if the PC is next to you mac, just share the mouse and keyboard via synergy.
I use the second solution all the time. Great time saver.
15
@Dion: Microsoft has already confirmed it that it will not run under Rosetta. I think there is too much interaction with the G5 so that’s why it will need a compete rewrite. The MacBU also said they are going to wait until they receive the Intel machines to make any decision about VPC.
@Colin: Yes that’s a very cool idea unfortunately Microsoft has disabled this feature in Windows XP Home. You need the Professional edition and we don’t have that and are not willing to spend extra money just for that one thing. A pity, but he maybe Microsoft will make it work in Vista ;-)
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re: dual boot machines. Interesting thought. But one downside is that if the Win Login/Boot system is not totally isolated will it not open up the possibities of virus problems? But I do see the value for testing purposes to be able to login into a VPC system.
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@veerle: there’s always VNC even if it’s not as easy to setup.
Or, as strange as it may seem, via the internet (VPN) on a remote Windows machine. I actually did that for a while, the lag isn’t too bad.
Then again, walking over to the windows machine might be easier :)
18
Vpc will die a quiet death I think.
Not being a fan of virtual pc and keeping in mind that as a webdeveloper I only need windows as a test envirenment, I think it’s best to keep my cheap dell test pc until I can run vista on an intel mac.
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@Colin: I think I’ll do the walk since I need the exercise :-)
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maybe interesting for the discussion....http://openosx.com/wintel/
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Having been an Intel developer for 20+ years I for one will buy the Intel Mac laptop as soon as they can get the Virtual PC to run.
If I can run Visual Studio .NET when I need to debug some C# code that’s got me sold....
Now if I can just get used to that single mouse button thing…