An Intel native build of ecto was released today, and this is mostly a test to make sure it works. Apparently ecto 3 is taking a while, so Adriaans’s decided to post this Intel build. It’s not a Universal Binary, but it does load much faster than the PPC build under Rosetta, and seems to work just fine.
I had previously chided MLB.TV for their weak support for OS X. Well with the release of MLB.TV Mosaic for OS X, all is forgiven. This is awesome! The concept is really cool, this stand alone application allows you watch six game streams simultaneously! Furthermore, subjectively at least the video quality is much better than was was previously available through the browser-embedded Windows Media streams via Flip4Mac. It allows you to click on any of the six mini-views to enlarge a single game.
Here is last night’s Astros-Pirates matchup.
About the only downside I’ve detected so far is that the application is definitely a memory hog (~200 MB of real not virtual RAM). Nonetheless, for any baseball fan this is a no-brainer. Well done, MLB.TV!
So I haven’t been posting for a while, but I do have a bunch of things on the burner. However, something I have been waiting for since I got my Mactel finally happened. Brent Simmons has released a public beta of NetNewsWire 2.1. I absolutely live in NNW, so this is a big deal for me. It’s smokin’ fast, and includes a variety of other updates (like Newsgator syncing of subscriptions, including read/unread status between computers (Mac and Windows) and the web). Brent has previously promised that registered users would be given 2 year subscriptions to Newsgator at some point, so I’m looking forward to that. Anyway, go get it here.
Now if only Pathfinder and Flip4Mac would come out as UB’s, I’d be pretty much set. Evidently they’re doing a closed beta for the UB of Pathfinder right now, and there is a clunky work-around for Flip4Mac that I will be posting about later.
Even with Apple’s Rosetta realtime translation technology, the biggest problem with running an Intel iMac is obviously software incompatibility (it seems like almost every prefpane has to be updated). So I’ve been scouring the net for applications. Versiontracker and Macupdate have pages up. But in addition I’ve found some other good resources for (mostly open source) binaries compiled for x86 processors (from back in the say). I’ll be making posts about Universal Binaries in the coming days, but for you early adopters check out especially: Macrumors and OSX86 Project. I’ve also found various unreleased alphas and betas by contacting authors and searching forums.