A rash of Apple news

With the 2007 Apple WWDC on this week, there's been a pack of updates coming out for Apple computers. The biggest, in my opinion was the release of Safari for windows, technically its real names is Safari 3 and its available for both Mac and Windows. They didn't announce it and then release it later either, they announced it and its downloadable now. I've had a look at it, downloaded it and run it on my work pc and essentially it does the same thing as it does on Macs, looks the same, acts the same.... sadly its still not enough to lure me from Firefox on either Mac or PC, but at least there's now another tabbed browsing system available for PC aside from Firefox... i know there's Internet Explorer 7 but its so clunky I dont really think it counts. What should be noted is that its still in Beta, its a public beta, but that is not to say its fully functional, anyone whose used Beta software before should know the deal. Unfortunatley I cant run it on my eMac at work, which I've taken to using primarily, you know why, because my employer hasn't upgraded its operating system since 10.3, which means most new software which comes out wont run on it (including our latest software release).

The new features of OS 10.5 were also previewed at the WWDC, it has some good features too, for instance Spaces which actually gives you 4 desktops, however to be fair, if you've been using Linux you've had this functionality for some time, its nice that Apple has caught up with them on it. More importantly, 10.5 comes with Boot camp, at the moment, if you have a Macbook or Macbook pro, you can get a Beta Version of Boot camp and install it, but its not supported. 10.5 comes with boot camp natively. Whats that mean? Means you can run any Windows operating system (including Vista) on ain Intel Chipped Mac.

And another big news feature? Macs have been largely avoided by the gaming community until now due to the meager selection of titles available. You could get Quake, The Sims, World of Warcraft (of course), War craft and some others but usually the release date was months after the pc version as the code would have to be ported to the Mac platform. Two game development houses EA and ID have announced they're going to start supporting Macs. That means, when a games released for PC, it'll also be available for Macs. This probably wouldn't have mattered so much anyway if you had BootCamp installed because you could just boot into windows and run the games from there but as a gesture its quite touching.

So, after all this news the question of when my new Mac book Pro is coming becomes more pressing. I've had my salary sacrifice deal cleared through my bosses, I've submitted specs for the one I want (the brand new 2.4 ghz released last week) I just have to wait for it to get ordered and arrive. Hmmmmmmm, even more things to spend my hard earned tech support dollars on.