Stan's List

In a post to his blog, Adobe Senior Product Manager John Nack attempts to justify the company’s decision to make Soundbooth an Intel-based Mac-only product. “Here’s the reality: Apple’s migration to Intel chips means that it’s easier to develop for both Mac and Windows, because instead of splitting development resources optimizing for two different chip architectures, you can focus on just one. That’s all good, and it makes Mac development more attractive. Users benefit from having developers’ efforts go elsewhere (features, performance tuning, etc.), rather that into parallel, duplicate work. In the case of Soundbooth, the team could leverage Adobe’s expertise in building great audio tools for Intel chips (namely Audition) to bring the app to market faster and with a richer feature set. Now, if you were Adobe and had started developing a new application at exactly the time when Apple told you, ‘This other chip architecture is dead to us,’ would you rather put your efforts into developing for that platform, or would you focus elsewhere?’” More …

Apple has released Boot Camp 1.1.2. Among other things, this release is said to offer the following:

• Support for the latest Intel-based Macintosh computers
• Easier partitioning using presets for popular sizes
• Ability to install Windows XP on any internal disk
• Support for built-in iSight cameras
• Support for built-in microphones

Boot Camp is still a beta and can be download here

If you are a .Mac member, you probably already know that Apple updated the .Mac webmail interface on Friday. The new interface is nearly identical to that of Mac OS X’s Mail application. One can choose a 2-pane or 3-pane interface with the latter including a preview pane.

The .Mac webmail one-ups Mail by including the beginning of every message in the subject line space. One can choose “Short” or “Long” message previews–the latter takes up two lines.

The .Mac webmail also contains an Address Book that can be sync’d with Mac OS X’s Address Book. More …