While preparing to unleash Tiger in the first half of 2005, Apple is simultaneously working on an update to its Panther operating system that will offer improved web browsing and disc recording.
Apple seeds Mac OS X 10.3.6 to developers
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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does not render the iDVD easter egg useless.
debman…
I haven’t heard about this. What’s the easter egg?
If you add a file (i dont remember off the top of my head) to your home folder, and control-click on the burn icon in iDVD – you can create images. This is very useful for people with DVD burners that are not support as ‘super drives’. You should be able to take this image and burn it with toast or something similar. I think there is even an option to burn to un-supported drives with this egg, but it doesnt work on my drive =) cheers
“In addition to diagnosing new versions of its Safari web browser (1.2.4) and Calculator (3.2) applications…”
Seeing as how it’s just a point upgrade from 3.1 — the version in OS 10.3.5 — it’s definitely not some splendid new graphing calculator app from that newly-acquired company. So what in the hell could they have to add? This makes me wonder how a calculator app got up to version 3.1 in the first place.
Wow..after posting, I decided to look into it and see if there were any features that I hadn’t noticed, and the calculator is actually fairly complex. My only complaint is that, even after updating the currency conversion rates, the Romanian lei still isn’t represented! Romania has a population 10 times that of Malta, Bhutan, and Bahrain combined — all represented.
“idvd is only fully functional for people that buy macs that include superdrives.
its just more of apples control issues.
a developer left a tool behind in the code that allows hackers to use external burners that would otherwise not be supported by apple.
dont forget that apple also gave owc a dmca warning and forced them to quit selling a piece software that allowed their customers to use idvd with third party dvd burners.
in other words, if apple cant get the sale, they dont want you as a mac user ever getting the fuctionality of idvd.
whats even funnier is how idvd is listed as part of the bundle even on macs that cant use it….or at least cant use it unless you are a hacker that knows how to get at the left behind piece of developer tools.
cant you just see the average mac consumer (grandma hacker) hacking away to get at the easter egg that few even know about? most just go without idvd usage and pay more money to buy third party software that gets them the tools they need.
do a search on the web and you will see tons of miffed mac users that have been screwed by apple. i dealt with this issue myself back when i had a mac with a pioneer a-104 in an external firewire case….there was no easter egg back then exploit either.
just one more reason why you shouldnt support apples totalitarian and draconian control.”
Old info. The latest iDVD can make images that can be burned with other apps for Macs without internal superdrives.
There are 3rd party licensing fees to be paid for DVDs. Apple decided to charge the fee on the SuperDrives as opposed to charging it for the software.
Apple can freely give out DVD software as long as it only works with the SuperDrive. If you’ve ever had a PC and lost your DVD software (virus or whatever) you’ll realize how messed up it is that you may have to buy software to work with your drive, and how much it can cost. Apple can include the DVD software on every OS installer and on the hard drive of every Mac without having a per unit cost charged to them.
It also allows Apple to not spend all kinds of resources making sure their product is compatible with an endless amount of 3rd party products. Think of this as quality control *of* tech support.
The bottom line is that if you want a SuperDrive, Apple’s policy is much better for you, and if you want a 3rd party drive, it’s not…Don’t confuse this though with the thought that Apple’s policy is indifferent if you want a SuperDrive, as I indicated above, it does benefit SuperDrive customers to have the policy the way it is.
the towers are obviously the easiest to do, and you can buy the drives on OWC, but there are companies that will put them into your laptops and eMacs/iMacs as well. they are apple certified so you do not void the warranty.
and yes, as PPC mentioned, iDVD now lets you work with it and then publish an image file that toast or some other program can write to DVD for you. it is not as if you cannot use iDVD to make movies if you do not have a super drive.
umm, isn’t Romania in the EU now? that means that the only currency that matters is the Euro.
i am confused:
“If you’ve ever had a PC and lost your DVD software (virus or whatever) you’ll realize how messed up it is that you may have to buy software to work with your drive, and how much it can cost.”
first there are few pc makers (1?) that dont include software on cds on the cheapest pcs sold (hp used to do this, and may still do it…im not sure). if it isnt included on cd it is placed on a backup partition.
if something caused an utter meltdown of the pc hard drive you can get all software replaced from hp for $9.99.
seems stupid, but that is part of the way that hp keeps costs down on those $369 pcs.
emachines does not do this on the same priced machines…you get software cds.
so if your cds go poof via losing them or a fire or the dog eats them, you can call the pc maker and have replacements shipped at a nominal cost. that would be no different whether it was a pc maker or apple with a mac.
whats your point?
if you buy a stand alone dvd drive you can choose to get a bare bones oem model with no software in order to save some cash if you already have dvd software.
if you dont have dvd software, you buy a model that includes software. a retail box for instance.
considering that i see dvd drives at stores on sale regularly for as little as $9.99, this is a non issue.
besides that, dvd playback software is now available for free via download:
http://www.cliprex.com/
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
http://www.real.com/ (Plays CDs, DVDs and all major file types.)
i am totally unaware of any licensing fee that has to be paid to make/burn/title dvds however. i believe the only fees are for decoders. i could however be wrong. just havent heard anything about those fees if they do exist.
Romania is not in the EU and even if it was being a member of the EU does not mean you are also a member of the single european currency.
The euro is only the currency of Belgium, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal and Finland.
The ten new member countries retain their own currency as do others like the UK.
whats even funnier is how idvd is listed as part of the bundle even on macs that cant use it….or at least cant use it unless you are a hacker that knows how to get at the left behind piece of developer tools.
cant you just see the average mac consumer (grandma hacker) hacking away to get at the easter egg that few even know about? most just go without idvd usage and pay more money to buy third party software that gets them the tools they need.
do a search on the web and you will see tons of miffed mac users that have been screwed by apple. i dealt with this issue myself back when i had a mac with a pioneer a-104 in an external firewire case….there was no easter egg back then exploit either.
just one more reason why you shouldnt support apples totalitarian and draconian control.
Oh, THAT easter egg. Sorry for sounding so uninformed, but I did know about the draconian easter egg.
Only PantherPPC is absolutely correct. Old news. Granny Hacker can edit her movie or slideshow with no worries, knowing that with iDVD 4, it’s actually possible to produce an iDVD project on a computer without a SuperDrive.
After my business partner’s Dell bought the farm (and the service guys couldn’t figure out how to fix it)*, we bought her an iBook G4 with a combo drive.** She’s currently cutting a wedding movie in Final Cut Express (that was poorly edited by the videographer using a PC***), and when she’s done, she’ll produce a sophisticated-looking DVD using iDVD 4. All she has to do, when the time comes, is save her work as a self-contained project, and we’ll burn it on my iMac’s SuperDrive.
So Scooter … er, sorry, Seeker! Is Apple’s “totalitarian and draconian control” still intact even if they’ve let this one get by them? God, I sure hope so. That’s the only reason they still get my money!
* BTW, she’s a student, so we were able to enjoy Apple’s Cram and Jam initiative. In a nutshell, she paid an extra $75 (CDN) and got a 20 GB iPod.
** I don’t hate Dell even though my colleague’s computer has outlived it’s usefulness, dying in just 3 years. But that is a foreign concept for me… I’ve owned and worked on Macs since 1984, and I’ve only had one break on me, and it was easily repaired. (Wire replaced).
*** This point was just a dig at Scooter, er… sorry… the Seeker. Some of the most creative people I know work on PCs. The fact that the video sucked had nothing to do with the PC; it’s a reflection on the person who created it.
“i am totally unaware of any licensing fee that has to be paid to make/burn/title dvds however. i believe the only fees are for decoders. i could however be wrong. just havent heard anything about those fees if they do exist.”
DVDs are covered in fees. Burners, decoders, encoders, the disks themselves, there are fees on all of it.
There are lots of fees. To show you, even Windows Media Player will play DVDs.. but not without paying for and installing a Decoder. After that’s installed (witch defeats the point of using WMP, as most decorders come on DVD playing software CDs).
Romania is not in the EU and even if it was being a member of the EU does not mean you are also a member of the single european currency.
The euro is only the currency of Belgium, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal and Finland.
The ten new member countries retain their own currency as do others like the UK.
Romania is not, as you’ve said, a member of the EU yet; however I am not sure whether the new members retain their own currency. I’ve a friend in Polland (one of the new ones) and afaik they are starting to use the Euro, but I cannot confirm this without asking him.
Let’s just hope this new panther upgrades the aged samba package with a more recent build.
Romania is not, as you’ve said, a member of the EU yet; however I am not sure whether the new members retain their own currency. I’ve a friend in Polland (one of the new ones) and afaik they are starting to use the Euro, but I cannot confirm this without asking him.
To get into the EU you must make certain political changes; this has been seen recently with Turkey passing new laws; Poland, Romania and a number of new countries have already done that.
The second phase is the single currency, this has a different set of criteria; the countries must meet certain economic requirements as set down by the stability pact, including keeping the deficit below 2.7% of GDP, unemployment below a certain number etc. etc.
IIRC, there *could* be a couple of countries in the new entrants to the EU that could have made those requirements, however, I am not too sure which countries they are. With that being said, however, just getting into the EU will help these countries massively as they will have access to the largest free trading block. As trade increases, so will the average wage in these countries.
What does, however, confuse me is why Russia hasn’t gone for EU membership as the benefits it would be bring would be massive especially in the area of direct foreign investment.
So how are france and Germany who have Depression era unemployment the center of the EU?
Simple, by setting the “certain number” to whatever France and Germany can agree on 😉
So how are france and Germany who have Depression era unemployment the center of the EU?
Only the “entry”, once they entered, suddenly unemployment went through the roof. Then again, you can see why the Dutch don’t want in with the Euro, they right a tight ship, implement the right policies, and yet when the likes of Germany flaunt these rules, what should be happening, aka, punishment by the EU Commission, is not happening.
Debman – where in the world can you publish an image for burning elsewhere? I don’t have a superdrive but I have the latest version of iDVD and there’s no option that I can find to create an image. For something that’s supposedly a part of the program, it’s not enabled on my Mac.
My relatives live in Germany, and they say it’s in a sad state of affairs. It seems like they are way to social. They have alot of immigrations who the state provides everything for, and the German people have to pay for everything. Don’t worry, the way things are going in the US, we be there along with them soon.
“Caveats
As much as I like iDVD, it’s not perfect. There is one glaring problem that it has faced since version 1, and seems to be even worse at today: speed. Unless you have a very recent system (read: G5), iDVD will be sluggish at best for you. I tested iDVD 4 on my personal machine, a 17″ PowerBook G4, running at 1.0 GHz with 512MB RAM and OS X 10.3.2. I also made sure that any other processor intensive apps were closed (iTunes encoding, Microsoft Word just sitting there, etc.). From the second i started iDVD, it was slow and the responses were delayed. The startup time does not seem to have changed at all between versions 3 and 4. There was very little I could do in iDVD that didn’t suffer from lack of speed. At times the speed was so bad that previews of motion themes would stutter uncontrollably, far past any reasonable performance to review the theme. I was able to maneuver settings around and modify this and that, but the performance was still appalling. I know that iDVD is an intensive program for OS X, but I’ve never seen an app struggle so hard to keep up with the user.”
“If you have iDVD4…. There are a couple of files floating around the net that you put in the root directory of your Home folder. After they are placed there, iDVD will allow you to create a disc image of your project instead of just burning it… It also allows you to burn to external drives…something that until now has been impossible. There are many forums talking about this calling it an “Easter Egg” in iDVD. I can attest that it works. I have not heard anything about how Apple feels about this, but the interesting thing is that these files unlock features already present in iDVD so… I don’t know how it will turn out?”
“http://forum.rpc1.org/download.php?id=352 gets you the easter eggs. You then uncompress, and copy the two files to your home folder. When you hit ‘burn’ the second time, hold down ‘control’ and it will let you burn a .img instead of a disc. This will let me (and others) test a DVD without wasting a disc, and using Toast, burn a DVD-RW instead of a DVD-R which iDVD forces you to use.”
It is not a built in feature. You have to hack iDVD, the slowest program I have ever used. $49 for this turtle was a waste of money.