Development tidbits, struggles, revelations, and still some Flash

As reported at most of the Mac sites already, Apple released speed bumped PowerMacs today. Amazon “slipped” by putting the products on their site a few days ago, so none of us are really surprised.

New Specs:
Single 1.8GHz PowerPC G5
256MB DDR400 SDRAM
80GB Serial ATA
8x SuperDrive
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra

Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5
512MB DDR400 SDRAM
160GB Serial ATA
16x SuperDrive (double-layer)
ATI Radeon 9600

Dual 2.3GHz PowerPC G5
512MB DDR400 SDRAM
250GB Serial ATA
16x SuperDrive (double-layer)
ATI Radeon 9600

Dual 2.7GHz PowerPC G5
512MB DDR400 SDRAM
250GB Serial ATA
16x SuperDrive (double-layer)
ATI Radeon 9650

A lot of people were hoping for dual-core G5′s because Intel and AMD are pushing dual-core now. My guess (or my hope) is that these speed bumps are just to get us over the hump until later this year.

My Prediction: Siggraph (August) for Apples dual-core G5′s on the desktop, and WWDC (May) for dual-core G4′s for laptops.

[edited to shorten G5 specs]

I saw this over on Macintouch tonight. I know some people had issues with Dreamweaver when upgrading their OSX machines during the upgrade to Panther (10.3) so its good to know that so far, so good with Tiger.

MacInTouch Reader
Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 requires reactivation after upgrading to Tiger. It posts a dialog , you tell it to go ahead, and it does so. No need to reenter serial number. This is pretty well handled.

Also, Tiger appears to take screenshots in PNG format, rather than PDF (as in Panther) or TIFF (as in previous versions). I wonder why the change?

The “Tool Mode” buttons in Preview are available when viewing PDFs (and include annotation tools), but *not* when viewing bitmap graphics such as PNG, TIFF, JPEG, and the like. So, PDF’s you can drag around with the hand tool, or select regions, but bitmaps, no-go.