Say What!?

http://guide.apple.com/uscategories/assisttech.lasso
A listing of assistive hardware and software for the Mac.  A good place to surf to see what the state of the interface shows.

http://www.artforum.com/inprint/type=hotlist
from Artforum.com - requires a free registration.
“Brooklyn-based new-media artist John Klima explores connections between the virtual and the real through his interactive digital art. His browser Earth was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, and his recent work, Context Breeder, can be viewed at http://www.rhizome.org.”

Klima’s work is quite interesting and he seems to be struggling with the same issues that I have in regard to the nature of art in context of the web browser.  Nice to see a fellow rhizome artist featured in Artforum. Check out his stuff.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/jan/20safari.html
Apple has a news posting on its site discussing the rapid adoption of it’s Safari web browser. Safari is based on the KHTML (Konqueror) open-source rendering engine, rather than the much expected use of the Gecko renderer used in Mozilla/Netscape. Many believe that this will have a negative effect on the development of Mozilla for Mac OSX.  The Chimera browser for OSX is already seeing effects of Safari as it’s developers no longer see the point in trying to compete with Safari.

Personally, I use IE, Mozilla, Chimera, and Safari everyday.  I have each one set-up differently so that I can surf, login to various sites, or admin my own stuff.  Of all of them I still find Mozilla the most powerful.  I use tabs all of the time and I especially like being able to bookmark a set of tabs as a single bookmark. I also feel that Mozilla is indeed the benchmark from which all browsers that consider themselves cross-platform friendly should be judged.

http://www.firewiredirect.com/firewire/products/DVDIIPlus.shtml
You know you want one of these! I can vouch for the Sony DRU-500A drive that is packed inside the external firewire case.  I have the internal version installed in my G4 400 AGP machine and it burns!  Too bad iDVD refuses to acknowledge the drive.  Toast has no problems with it, thus, I have no problems with it.

I’m actually on the move for an external firewire/usb case so that I can transport the drive back and forth to school.  The case that looks pretty cool to me is the “Hot Buttered” case because it uses a brick rather than an internal powersupply (NO FAN NOISE).

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/olympusc5050z/
Phil Askey takes a look at the sexy new Olympus C-5050 Zoom.
I like that it has a fairly fast f 1.8 aperature.  All looks good, but
I think that I still lust for the Nikon Coolpix 5700. If the Canon PowerShot S45 only had better macro capabilities, THAT would be the camera I carry everywhere.

http://www.efax.com/products/plus/
If you don’t own a FAX machine, this could be helpful.
Quoted from the eFax site:
“The eFax Delivery Network faxes millions of pages every day all over the world. When someone sends a fax to your dedicated eFax Plus number, we process the fax and email it to you as an attached file. When you want to send a fax, you simply email the file or send it directly from hundreds of desktop applications—again, we process it into a fax and send it on its way.”

There’s also ZipFax that is similar.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/06/06/svg_future.html
by Dean Jackson
06/06/2002

“Editor’s Note—Our aim with the O’Reilly Web DevCenter is to provide readers with balanced coverage of valuable Web technologies—both open source and proprietary. More and more that line is blurring, such as with Adobe GoLive 6, a shrink-wrap application that incorporates open source tools such as Apache and PHP.

Recently we published an article, SWF Is Not Flash, that highlighted the virtues of Flash technology, a product of Macromedia. The XML community has responded with this thoughtful article about the strengths of SVG. We hope you enjoy, and we encourage you to participate in, this ongoing conversation about vector graphics.”

-- Also thanks to SlashDot for the heads up.

http://beaconschool.org/~lbrichte/lbsoftware/smallscreenx.php
SmallScreen X 2.1 is a Cocoa Mac OS X port of the “Small Screen” application that can simulate lower screen resolutions without the hassle of switching your own resolution. It supports multiple, moveable, resizable screens. [Download - 99KB]

http://www.stardock.com/

The whole concept of creating a method for folks to personalize or stylize their OS is great. Too bad that none of the the actual OS companies ever thought of that.  Of course Linux has always enjoyed things like Enlightenment and KDE.

http://www.teknidermy.com/issue4/iviewbart.html

William Bart creates interface designs for the MacOS, concen- trating on Kaleidoscope
(which includes full icon sets as well as window designs) , Audion and SoundJam .

For those of you who are interested in the previous incarnation of this weblog, you can find the old version complete with its own set of archives here

http://developer.apple.com/internet/
Although none of the articles are signed,
they are typically by noted web gurus such as, Scott Andrew.

Oh yeah, don’t forget this one too!
http://www.oreillynet.com/

New Sorenson Squeeze 3 Does MPEG-4!

Sorenson today announced Squeeze 3 for MPEG-4, an update to its video compression software. Squeeze provides a single interface to process, encode and deliver video for the Web, CD, or other devices and is designed to integrate into the video editing and multimedia production workflow; it includes all of Sorenson Media’s professional codecs—Sorenson Video 3 Pro, Sorenson Spark Pro, and Sorenson MPEG-4 Pro.

It features support for AAC audio, one-pass and two-Pass VBR compression, batch processing, video and audio filters, DV capture, and adjustable cropping. The application is expected to ship in the first quarter of 2003 as a stand-alone application ($200) or part of the Sorenson Squeeze 3 Compression Suite ($450).