An anonymous reader writes "MacOpz has posted a great step-by-step tutorial on building your own G4-based Macintosh from scratch. This article includes where to get parts, what modifications must be performed, and tons of photographs. A must-read for anyone that wants a Mac but doesn't want to pay Apple prices."

Ill Mitch writes "You have to see what the guys at the [H]ardOCP have done this time. Not only is it incredible to look it, it is a powerhouse as well. This is sure to upset the Mac-addicts. 2.25GHz of AMD Athlon XP power tucked very neatly inside a customized Apple G4 case. They call it the 'Rotten Apple'."

analog_line writes "Apple is firing a shot across the bow of Quark with a new promotion bundling Adobe InDesign 2.0 with every new PowerMac G4 (that is, the towers). News.com has a story on this as well. I say go Apple. Hopefully this will either get Quark to release their Mac OS X version of XPress or start the process of killing them off once and for all." I really liked QuarkXPress a lot when I used it extensively back in the version 3 days. It'd be a shame if it they lose out on Apple's new platform. But as a capitalist, I say, let the best product win!

There are a few new product announcements recently: MATLAB for Mac OS X is available; fink for 10.2 is available for testing; Intuit has announced QuickBooks for Mac OS X; and PowerLogix has announced even more upgrades, including dual processor upgrades. And one user notes, "I wonder if the /. effect could drain the batteries of this Newton quickly?"

Etcetera writes "David K. Every (of MacKiDo fame) has written an interesting article at iGeek about Copland vs. NeXT and the decisions that Apple made back in '95-96. Although most agree that bringing Steve Jobs back was a Good Thing, a lot of cool Apple-invented technologies got left by the wayside without a fair shot at proving themselves once NeXT came in. Was it always the right call? Functions as a cautionary tale about management vs. engineering as well."

DJDaveET asks: "I'm a Windows XP user who has embraced OS X as an additional tool in my arsenal. It's a wonderful OS and the machine is a joy to use. My one major problem is thus -- currently, I'm a heavy Outlook user on my two Windows boxes. I use Outlook to manage my email, my contacts, my tasks, my calendar, etc. I currently use the fusionOne service to keep those two computers and my Samsung I300 phone all in sync with one another. I need to have that same information on my PowerBook. I don't really care what applications they go into, as long as they're all available. Integrated would be wonderful. I'm not in a position to be able to completely abandon my Windows boxes, so I'd like the Mac to play well with the others. How can I keep the data all in sync? What apps should I use on the Mac for the appropriate parts -- email, tasks, calendar, contacts, etc?"

Magnus Olsson writes "Apple announced at Apple Expo in Paris, that they are dropping the ability to boot into Mac OS after January 2003. It will still be possible to access Mac OS via the Classic environment under Mac OS X." Apparently, eWeek was right, and the final nail is being driven. So, where's mol for Mac OS X?

Freezebot writes, "Apple released his new iApp today, iCal. iCal is a calendar manager, which allows you to share your calendars online with your colleagues, family and friends, through your .Mac account. It is a free download." It also works with any WebDAV server. Friendly Canuck adds, "However, iSync is nowhere to be seen. I thought the whole point of iCal was syncing with other devices. Oh well."

option8 writes "Have an old laptop gathering dust? Here's another fun hack from Applefritter - this time utilizing an old Mac laptop (a Duo 280) but could be applied to pretty much anything with an LCD, and turning the guts into a cheap, flexible digital picture frame. Now, off to the flea market to pick up one of them cheap Duos I keep seeing..." As the author points out, this isn't a new idea -- but it's a great step-by-step.

KFox wishes to get to the core of this particular issue: "I just recently purchased an iBook and I have noticed that even in Jaguar, the system gets choppy from disk I/O. It appears that Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X don't support DMA access for hard drives, even if the drives are initialized in a UDMA mode. Wintel has had support in this area for a long time (since Win95b). Has anyone in the Mac world had any experience with DMA support on hard drives? Is it supported on iBooks? If so, which models?"

WCityMike writes "This switch document for developers details the interface differences between Microsoft Windows and the Aqua interface used in Mac OS X. Written on a layman's level, it actually makes for pretty interesting reading!"

rgraham writes "James Duncan Davidson (the original author of Apache Tomcat and Apache Ant) has an article over at O'Reilly's MacDevCenter that walks you through the steps of not only getting Apache up and running on 10.2 (pretty simple, I know) but also DNS and Mail. The aricle goes along well with Alan Graham article on how to setup your own .Mac type service."

Geert Poels writes "The uDevGame Mac Game Programming Contest was established by iDevGames in 2001 to energize game development on the Apple Macintosh platform. With the 2002 edition launched only two weeks ago, already 42 games have entered the competition. Most notable about this competition isn't the impressive collection of prizes worth $11,000 but rather the obligation for all participants to submit all source code. This kind of competition is groundbreaking for the Mac community in every way."

inkswamp writes "Interviews with Steve Wozniak are always a fun read (mainly because he is one of the few legends in the computing industry with a real personality, IMO) and this online-only Q&A on Macworld is no different. It's pretty exhaustive and seems to cover a lot of topics, including more of the by-now overly examined beginnings of Apple, and Woz's current projects."

A user writes, "Just saw at penguinppc that Mac-On-Linux can now run Mac OS X. Nothing like having Mac OS X running on a VT to switch to and from." Cool, but ... why?

hype7 writes "ArsTechnica have posted their review on Mac OS X 10.2. John Siracusa has been writing the reviews of Mac OS X since way back with the developer previews, and in my experience they've been the most thorough, thoughtful and unbiased reviews of Mac OS X on the web. Well worth a read." He does do a fine job; so if you needed one last fix of looks at Jaguar, here you go.

wayneh writes "There is a great article at ITworld.com about how Apple's Xserve is finding its way to high-end server vendors. The vendors who traditionally sold Sun and IBM servers are now looking into and stocking the Xserve as their clients become curious about the system. It'll be interesting to see how well the Xserve does among its more traditional competitors."

Etcetera writes "Apple has released their Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) Technote chock-full of useful information about the API and technical changes in Jaguar. Interested parties will find lots of neat stuff in here... including the idea of storing kernel panic info in NVRAM and writing it to a logfile on reboot."

peperone writes "I heard some complaints about the elimination of the familiar Happy Mac icon on a field of medium gray which used to greet us every time we fired up our Mac. Well, at least until 10.2. This site describes how to customize the boot screen. Fill in the old Happy Mac logo or create a new 128x128 image. Waiting for the first WinXP logos to be posted..." Cool. I made a startup image with the MacPerl icon.

gruber writes "Maarten Hekkelman, author of the cross-platform text editor Pepper, has thrown in the towel. He announced last week that he's discontinuing Pepper. He agreed to an interview with me, on topics ranging from the state of Mac OS X to the difficulties of cross-platform development." It's quite an interesting read, even if he does currently prefer Windows XP over Mac OS X and Linux.