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The excellent voice chat application, Skype, is now out for Mac OS X. Download it from the Skype website now and chat to all your other Skype using buddies.

I know lots of people that use BBEdit. They'd be pleased to know version 8 is out now.

For those of you into XGrid, which is a pretty snazzy technology, Xgrid.info is the site for you. It's a community site (like AppleTalk) to do with XGrid.

TigerTracker is a pretty cool site that is collecting all the info it can on the new version of Mac OS X, codename Tiger.

.Mac is useless. Apple-X.net has a good point. As cool as .Mac looks, you can get all it's features, elsewhere, for free or *really* cheap.

MacLevel.com have a small review of the new 4th generation iPod. They say it's fantastic, but if you have a 3rd generation, save your pennies.

iPodLounge have an article on how to import Windows Media Audio into iTunes. heh, someone said Windows.

Dennis Sellers says iChat needs multiclient support. Someone give this guy a copy of Proteus ASAP.

The Japanese iTunes music store has apparently hit a wall with DRM arguments. The Japs want a more restrictive method of DRM but Apple doesn't. Details at The Register.

A nice article by Computerworld about how Mac OS X is great to use with Active Directory.

Apple bought Curvus Pro X, to power it's new graphing calculator for Tiger.

And that should keep all you Appletalk freaks busy for a while until the next news update

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When I bought my eMac on Panther day, last year, the sales rep cheerfully offered, "And you'll need .Mac, it's on special at AU$99/year..."

"Neither need nor want," I replied.

"But you get 100Mb of storage, you'll need it for iChat..."

Cutting him off, I said politely, "I don't use chatrooms, I have a 200Mb PHP powered web host for a fraction of the cost of .Mac, the virus checker contradicts the banner plastered across the front window of the shop and I have too many alternative email addresses already. Thanks, but I'll spend 2 years .Mac subscription value on an external Firewire drive instead."

"But you'll need both..."

"You want me to buy the eMac here or will I go home and use my aging 7600 to buy it through the Applestore? I am more qualified to know what my particular needs are than you, I've been using Macs since you were in kindergarten playing Pod on a BBC B+"

"No need to be stroppy," he says, looking hurt. He swiped my Virgin card in silence and uttered only a few more words about the extra RAM being fitted in the next 5 minutes. OK, I know he was probably desperate for commission and only doing what he was told to, but .Mac has always been a crap, overpriced service since they started charging.

Oh, and is it just my employer's firewall, or is the ipod lounge the slowest loading site on the internet?!

Nope its incredibly slow for me too. Probably takes 5 times as long to load its main page as loading Appletalk AU does.

Excellent find. Thank you my friend.

When I posted it, I thought of you

Heh. Am I that predictable?

It's difficult to find a good collection of resources on XGrid. It seems most folks are building tools internally rather than trying to get stuff out in the marketplace.

Even if the shared tools are not open source (if people want to write closed/commercial tools) then at least more folks would jump onto clustered setups. At this stage if you want a cluster, it means needing a team of code/script-monkeys to sit and write your XGrid plugins. That in itself makes XGrid (and clusters in general) less desirable as a performance enhancing tool, as for the same price you can just hire more "drone" employees to get the job done the same way.

I'm hoping larger companies like Adobe, Discreet and the rest realise the potential in XGrid, and begin to ship their products built for integration with it, rather than just writing their own distribution managers with their own inherent set of nuances and difficulties.

I guess it has always taken the corporate world 3 years or more to catch up on those in the cutting edge of research. It's just a shame that these same corporates govern so much of what goes on creatively in the world these days.

Soapbox mode off now.