MolGOLD writes: "Well, finally OS X users are getting their wish: Adobe has finally made good on their promise to bring native OS X support to their graphical applications. C|Net is running a story on the upcoming version of Photoshop, which will feature native OS X support. Now that Photoshop 7 will run natively under OS X, will we see companies like Macromedia (who also promised native OS X support) hurry along to follow suit?"

William J writes "Here is an article with an interesting slant on the relationship between the Mac OS and Linux. The author suggests that Gnome and KDE developers can learn from the Mac GUI. Worth quoting: 'It is amazing to me that an OS which was developed largely by volunteers (and which is essentially free) can run with unprecedented stability on the same hodgepodge of PC hardware on which another company has spent billions of dollars in R&D costs and is still unable to produce a product which can run for more than a few days without crashing -- and it costs hundreds of dollars.'"

Mr. Quick writes: "An article at Wired talks about how Mac hardware is well-suited for clustering, but is being held back by the sexy cases. This follows closely on the heels of Apple releasing an optimized version of BLAST. Producing rack-mount *blades* is not in Steve's vision of world domination, but the opportunity exists. I, for one, hope that apple seriously considers developing a rack mounted dual-G4. Quad G4 maybe?"

wadeb writes: "NCSoft Austin is running a beta of Lineage (the popular MMORPG ^? from Korea) for Mac OS X (10.1.2 required). Lineage is the world's most popular MMORPG, with over 2.7 million active subscribers worldside. The demo is available from the website as well as through Apple's iDisk."

krugdm writes "Remember about five years ago when Apple announced their deal with Microsoft where Apple agreed to bundle IE with new Macs and drop a patent lawsuit, and the guys from Redmond were to continue to develop Office for the Mac as well as purchase $150 million in Apple stock? Well, that deal expires this summer. describing the love-hate relationship the two companies have had in the time since 1997 and wonders whether the pact will be renewed."

Pzykotic writes: "Apple today announced a new category to their yearly Apple Design Awards: 'Best Mac OS X Open Source Port' for individuals or collaborations. The winners will be announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California, during the week of this May 6-10. Winners receive an 'Ultimate' (Dual 1 GHz/GeForce4 TI/DVD-R/etc) Power Mac G4 system with an Apple Cinema Display."

An anonymous reader writes: "iMacLinux reported on a PenguinPPC story about Apple hardware being unable to address more than 137GB of space on IDE drives. The Apple computers only have ATA-66, which can only address 28 bits, while ATA-100/133 can address 48 bits. Solutions include using a PCI controller, FireWire or SCSI."

Leslie Holland writes "A new article from Mac insider news site Think Secret explains some of the recent iMac shipping delays. According to Think Secret, many of the first-run models were hit by firmware issues, and we shouldn't expect to see the low-end units for some time."

chobee tells us that Apple and Genentech have released an implementation of BLAST, a popular bioinformatics tool, for G4s running Mac OS X. The blastn tool of Apple/Genentech BLAST, used for finding similarities between nucleotide sequences, has been optimized to deliver up to five times the performance of the standard implementation, using the power of the Velocity Engine on the G4. Source code and binaries are available.

GlobalEcho writes: "Developers associated with Darwin are beginning to think about package management and source building. At issue is whether something like dpkg, RPM or *BSD's ports could suffice, or whether they are all just way too mid-90's. Jordan Hubbard himself (now of Apple) weighed in with his opinions (user and passwd 'archives'). Apparently he thinks it is time for something more advanced, and he gives some ideas about what that might look like. Does anyone else have good ideas?"

nbvb submitted what I'm pleased to say is our first apple.slashdot.org story. We'll be posting more news for our sizable Apple population there in the future. Anyway, He says "Apple today released Mac OS X 10.1.3. Be sure to click your "Software Update" and "Install" buttons! (Hey, if we can get an announcement every time a new point rev of a development kernel hits the FTP sites, can't we hear about Mac OS X?)" As usual, user reports of the new release have been both positive and negative.

sti writes: "Cringely's column this week argues that Apple should port OS X to the Intel platform. He makes an interesting case for it. I would definitely favour this. I've always had this warm spot in my heart for Apple but rarely had the money to pay for their overpriced hardware."

znu writes: "Apple announced at the QuickTime Live! conference today that there's a public preview of QuickTime 6 with full MPEG-4 support ready to ship, but the terms of the proposed MPEG-4 license are holding it back. For those who haven't been following this, MPEG wants $0.25 per encoder/decoder for MPEG-4, up to $2 million per company per year. Apple is fine with that. But MPEG also wants content distributers to pony up $0.02/hour for any content that's distributed for profit. Apple feels that determining just what is "for profit" will be problematic, and that this pricing will seriously inhibit MPEG-4 adoption. You are encouraged to complain to MPEG LA about this situation."

Brent Foster writes: "The staff at iMacLinux.net have Linux running on the new flat panel iMac G4s. They have an initial installation guide available here(1). It has several photos of the iMac G4 during the installation as well as cat /proc/cpuinfo. They also have some photos of the unpacking available here(2). The iMac was sponsored by PowerMax, it is nice to see companies sponsoring Linux efforts, especially in the Apple world." John Buswell adds: "It currently works in novideo mode, but we plan on testing newer kernels and XFree 4.2 with nvidia patches later this week."

MacBoy writes "The folks over at ResExcellence have a great interview with Benjamin Herrenschmidt, kernel guru for the PPC/Linux camp. He offers up some history of Linux on Apple and PPC hardware, and some discussion on Apple's current and past contributions to the open-source and Linux communities. He makes some interesting comparisons of Linux on PPC vs. Intel hardware, such as the ease of getting important patches into the kernel on PPC compared to Intel. It's an interesting read, especially if you are amoung the many who covet the new Dual-CPU GHz G4 Macs and want to know a little more about the PPC/Linux community."

HiredMan writes: "Wired is running an article comparing the set-up and admin of Linux Beowulf clusters versus Mac based clusters. Slant of the article is that the Macs are easier to set-up, maintain and are more flexible. They note that the Linux "how to" manual is 230 pages while the corresponding Apple document is a 1 page PDF file. Dauger Research of former Appleseed fame is mentioned as well, of course. MacSlash is also covering the article. Let the on-topic (for once) Beowulf comments fly..."

A huge number of readers submitted the new Dual Ghz Power Mac that Apple has announced. Includes a Geforce 4 and assorted other bells and whistles that will ring and blow for the Mac Junkie. They start at $3k and seriously make me want a Mac.

Mauro Notarianni writes: "In the Stepwise article, 'Mac OS X: Game Developer's Playground,' Troy Stephens writes, "Mac OS X has the potential to be a superb launching pad for doing game development.' The author describes how 'Cocoa's developer productivity benefits, when combined with Mac OS X's strong support for technologies such as OpenGL and QuickTime, can empower game developers to create the custom production tools they often need in a fraction of the programmer hours it takes on other platforms.'"

ikioi asks: "There seem to be plenty of books to help long time Macintosh users acclimate to the new details of Aqua, but does anyone know of a good 'Mac OS X for Unix-Heads' type book? I'd love to have one aimed at unix-admins. Maybe something that talks about netinfo, boot up process/scripts, filesystem details, Apple's GCC extensions, and so forth." For those interested in OSX who may have missed it the first time around, Ask Slashdot has handled a question on books about programming under OS X.

el.cerrito.slasher sent in an amusing bit found on MacSlash. This story is a tale of a stolen iMac that just happened to be running Timbuktu (a remote control program like VNC I believe). Well the stolen box kept getting used, and the owner was able to track it down through a variety of amusing Timbuktu Fu. Funny story.