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Review: Microsoft Lifecam Show webcam

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:59:44 +0100

You’ll like it if you’re looking for a high-quality webcam with decent software, autofocus, and good low-light performance.

But not if you’re a Mac user or you can’t justify spending $100 on a webcam for simple stuff like videoconferencing and short, quick videos.

Full review (with video) after the jump…

Overview and Features

The Microsoft Lifecam Show is a $99 webcam that features a 2-megapixel sensor capable of delivering video up to 800×600 resolution (default is 640×480) and still images up to 8 megapixels (interpolated, of course).

As with other Microsoft hardware products, the Show is tightly integrated with Microsoft software – in this case, the webcam uses Windows Live Messenger for video calls and even has a hardware button that, when pushed, allows you to quickly access your contacts. Of course, the Show also works with other popular instant messaging programs as well; Skype, AIM, etc.

The software package included with the camera is a decent, easy-to-use, no nonsense affair consisting of simple recording, photos, and special effects. The camera uses face tracking to superimpose digital props like hats, weird hair styles, and other hilarity.

Pros

I found the video quality to be above-average for a webcam, especially in low-light conditions. The auto-focus is definitely a nice touch, although its range is limited to between 21 and 60 inches, so you’re not going to be able to get great close-up shots like you would with the previously-reviewed IPEVO POV webcam. But for regular video with sporadic forward and backward movement, the Lifecam Show works great.

The camera features unique mounting options in that there’s a Kung Fu-quality magnetic grip on both the front and the back of the device itself. There’s a little clip for mounting the Show to your LCD screen or you can use the included mini-pole that measures about a foot in length. Since the grip is magnetic, you can easily adjust the up and down and side to side positioning of the camera once it’s been mounted.

Cons

The $99 price tag will likely be a bit steep for some people, especially those who need a no-frills webcam. Luckily, those of you looking for a solid, well-performing webcam should find the price to be relatively fair. Also, Mac users are left out in the cold as the software is designed for the Microsoft camera is Windows only (can you believe it?).

Conclusion

The Lifecam Show is a high-quality camera with nice features and thoughtful mounting options. People looking for a good webcam for a decent price won’t be disappointed.

Microsoft Lifecam Show [Microsoft.com]

Review: iTunes 8

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 06:18:57 +0100

The last few major updates to iTunes have added everything from new looks to the ability to watch movies and TV shows, download podcasts, and get recommendations for iTunes Store purchases. It would seem that all that could be done to Apple's media manager and player had already been done. But it turns out that Apple still has some tricks up its sleeve with iTunes 8. The latest version returns the sense of fun to listening to music on your Mac (or PC).

iTunes 8 isn’t a revolution in media players, but its new features, a new Grid layout, Genius Playlists, the Genius sidebar, and a very nice new visualizer, make an already capable application even more indispensable.

Product
iTunes 8.0
Rating
4.50
Pros
Genius Playlists are surprisingly good, and should just get better; totally trippy new visualizers sure to be a hit in dorm rooms.
Cons
Genius Sidebar tends to recommend music you already own; lack of preference to disable iTunes Store links in library.
Company
Apple
Price as rated
Free
OS compatibility
10.4 (Tiger), 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor compatibility
Universal

Grid view

The first thing you’ll notice after installing and launching iTunes 8 is a progress bar churning through your iTunes library. This one-time process creates album art for the new default view of iTunes: Grid view. Very similar to Events in iPhoto ’08, the Grid view displays your iTunes library as a grid composed of album art. (This view is available for music, podcasts, and videos.)

Think of it as a flattened Cover Flow, the same eye candy with about the same amount of practical use (that is, very little). You start playing an album or video by clicking on the album art. Double clicking on an album takes you to a more traditional list view with the addition of artwork in the first column. To change what view iTunes defaults to when you launch the program, simply change to your desired view before you quit iTunes.

The Grid view in iTunes 8 is a lot like the Events view in iPhoto ’08. Your library is displayed in a grid and sorted by album art.

If you’re the type who makes sure that all your albums have cover art, and all the genres are applied correctly in the metadata of your media, then Grid view is going to be your new best friend. If you’re like me, Grid view is going to serve as a reminder that yet another aspect of your life is out of control. No where is this more evident than in the Grid view sorted by genres. Apple has provided a number of tastefully designed stock art images for genres found in the iTunes Store. When in this view, you can scrub through the albums in each group by dragging your mouse across the artwork, much like Events in iPhoto and footage in iMovie. The problem arises when you have music that wasn’t purchased from iTunes. A surprising number of genre name variants crop up, leaving you to either edit the metadata for a cleaner, more organized experience or live with a sloppy iTunes library.

Genius

The Grid view is flashy, but the real game changer in iTunes 8 is Genius. Genius comes in two guises, Genius Playlist and Genius Sidebar, and is similar to music recommendation offerings by Last.fm and Pandora. If you choose to use Genius, which is optional, a few things happen. First, it analyzes your iTunes library and transmits that data, anonymously, to the Apple’s servers. That data is compared to data from countless other iTunes 8 users, and fed into Apple’s Genius algorithms. The algorithm then reports the results back to iTunes, which uses it to create Genius playlists of 25, 50, or 100 songs, based on whatever track you select. You can listen to that playlist, save it for later, or hit Refresh and have Genius create another playlist that is more to your liking. Much like Party Shuffle, you can delete songs that you don’t want to be included in the playlist, and re-order the songs.

A sample Genius playlist. The new Genius feature does a great job of helping you rediscover music in your library.

After creating countless Genius Playlists, I am a convert. This is a great way to rediscover music that has been hidden away in the depths of your iTunes library, and it groups songs that I would never think of grouping myself (“Veronica” by Elvis Costello goes well with “Debaser” by The Pixies—who would have thought?). Genius did an admirable job of creating playlist after playlist with almost everything I threw at it (including a song by Raina Rose, a folk musician who also happens to be my girlfriend’s sister).

When Genius can’t create a playlist it pops up a warning, and suggests that you update the Genius data on your Mac. Classical music, in particular, seems to stump Genius. And since this initial version of Genius appears to derive a lot of its data off iTunes Store purchases, songs by artists not in Apple's online store—like, say, the Beatles—can also flummox it. Click on a tune by the Fab Four, and Genius will be unable to generate a playlist. Presumably, as the feature gets more data from more users, issues like these should, theoretically, become moot.

The Genius Sidebar analyzes a song and displays music recommendations based on that analysis for you to purchase.

The Abbott to Genius Playlist’s Costello is the Genius Sidebar, which marries the iTunes Store’s Just for You recommendations to the mini-store interface that was introduced in iTunes 6. The Genius Sidebar takes the currently playing song and, using that fabled Genius algorithm, returns recommendations from the iTunes Store. The recommendations include songs and albums you might be interested in, as well as songs that iTunes believes are missing from your library (for example, perhaps you only purchased one or two songs off of an album). I’ve found myself losing a number of hours checking out songs that the Genius Sidebar suggested. You can preview songs right in the sidebar, while you have to go into the iTunes Store to check out albums. Both can be purchased with one click in the sidebar, so you should either disable 1-Click purchases or practice restraint.

The Genius Sidebar does have some limitations. It has a propensity to recommend songs and albums I already own (purchased from Amazon MP3 or ripped from CD). It has trouble basing recommendations on more obscure titles (though when recommendations can’t be found, the sidebar displays a list of top sellers in iTunes, so you can still spend some money if you are so inclined). Genius does take some time to analyze your library when you launch iTunes 8. It took 28 minutes to analyze my library which contains 35.50 GB of data (7,774 items), though you can still use iTunes to listen to music or watch videos as Genius is analyzing your library and then talking to the cloud.

Other new features

The new features in iTunes 8 don’t end there. HD TV shows have been added to the iTunes Store at $2.99 a pop from a limited number of networks at the moment. (There are a total of 17 shows from ABC, NBC, and Showtime available for purchase as this review was posted.) The shows look very good at their native resolution of 1,280 by 720, which translates to 720p, though when viewed on a larger television or computer screen, the picture does look a little soft. That said, HD shows look much better than their standard definition siblings.

Sadly, you can’t watch the HD files with your iPod or iPhone, but the $2.99 includes both the HD and standard definition versions of the episode. Be careful, though, because file sizes can add up quickly. I downloaded an HD episode of Battlestar Galactica, and both files took up nearly 2GB of disk space.

Another thing to be aware of, as reported in our iTunes 8 first look, is a bug in iTunes 8. If you have “Buy using a Shopping Cart” enabled the iTunes store allows you to add HD episodes to your cart, but when you purchase the episode only the standard definition file is downloaded to your Mac; “Buy and download using 1-Click” works like a charm.

iTunes 8 also gives you more control over podcast settings. Prior to version 8, iTunes would deal with podcasts as a large blob; settings applied to all the podcasts you subscribed to, so you couldn’t keep episodes of, say, PodRunner longer than episodes of the Macworld podcast. You can now customize download frequency and retention settings for each individual podcast, in addition to setting a global default.

The new visualizers in iTunes 8 are stunning.

Finally, iTunes 8 includes new stunning visualizers. I recall sitting for hours watching the visualizer when iTunes was first introduced, and the new visualizers blow the previous iterations out of the water in terms of quality and wow factor. They played back smoothly on my 2.16GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM. In fact, iTunes 8’s interface as a whole was snappy on my Mac, though using my 35GB library, I didn’t note any major speed enhancements compared to iTunes 7 during normal operations.

It is clear that with iTunes 8 Apple is hoping you’ll find even fewer reasons to venture outside of the iTunes/iPod ecosystem for your music and video needs. The only misstep in iTunes 8 is the removal of the preference to disable the iTunes Store arrows in your library. While there is a Terminal command to disable those grey arrows from showing up, Apple should make it easy for a user to turn off this little piece of visual clutter. On last thing: If you're looking for the Browse button it’s now available only though the View menu (select Show Browser).

Macworld’s buying advice

iTunes 8 is worth upgrading to for Genius alone. The refined podcast settings and new visualizers are also welcome additions. Grid view looks pretty, with a properly prepared library, but isn’t the most practical way of browsing your library especially in an age when the single is outselling the album.

[Scott McNulty is a senior contributor at MacUser. He blogs at Blankbaby, and is the co-host of Fork You.]

Review: ATI Radeon HD 3870 and 3850 CrossFire

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 10:09:30 +0100

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Mixing ATI Radeon HD Graphics Cards in CrossFire

When it comes mixing and matching different types of graphics card and running them in either SLI or CrossFire mode, you are bound to have a number of problems. You will not find too many people advising in trying this, but the video card companies are working hard at making this work. Today, we are looking at ATI's budget friendly Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870 graphics cards to seeing how they work together in CrossFire. We've previously reviewed both of these series in CrossFire before, but never dared to look at them mixed together and running CrossFire. ATI has done a ton of driver improvements since we first looked at those cards with the CATALYST 7.11 beta drivers, and the CATALYST 8.1 and CATALYST 8.2 drivers have proven to be very solid. While the ATI CATALYST 8.2 drivers will be out by the time this is posted, this article still will be useful as the only major performance enhancement in CATALYST 8.2 drivers is on Company of Heroes.

It doesn't look right, but you can connect the ATI Radeon HD 3850 and ATI Radeon HD 3870 together and enable CrossFire. ATI says you only need to use one interconnect, but since our cards came with two interconnects we used both. We have tried benchmarking with just one interconnect and then again with two and didn't notice any differences.

With Device Manager open in Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit we can see that after installing CATALYST 8.1 drivers that both video cards were showing up and the drivers are good to go.

Opening CATALYST Control Center (CCC), we can once again see both video cards in the drop down menu and that CrossFire has been automatically enabled. Setting up CrossFire on mixed and matched cards like these is just like regular CrossFire, so there isn't too much else to show or talk about.

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Review: New Sony Cyber-shot W-series compacts

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:42:45 +0100

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Sony announced today its intention to completely revamp its Cyber-Shot W series of compact cameras. Four new models – the W120, W120, W130, W150, and W170 – provide replacements for the popular Cyber-shot W55, W80, and W90, and add one new unit to Sony's broad range of compact digicams.

In the release, Sony also announced the culmination of several technological developments impacting some or all W-series models. Sony's Smile Shutter system, which prevents the camera from firing until subjects are smiling, has been upgraded to include a "child/adult priority" function. Users can now specify if they'd like the system to give priority to making sure either children or adults are smiling in a particular shot; improved face detection technology allows the camera to distinguish between the two.

A more advanced Dynamic Range Optimizer descended from the Alpha DSLR series claims to offer improvements in equalizing high-contrast shots. Intelligent Scene Detection (iSCN) is able to automatically detect six types of shooting situations, including shots with backlighting issues, and adjust accordingly. The addition of an Easy Shooting mode, which uses common-language explanations for shooting options and automatically controls most of the camera's settings, offers improvements on a conventional auto mode for novice users.

Other series improvements and features include changes to the Macro AF system that allow the camera's macro range to be always enabled with slowing down other auto-focus functions, more carefully thought out folder sorting (including a "Favorites" option) and slide show functions, and the ability to search through all photos on the camera for a paricular face or faces. New higher-end W-series cameras will also allow users to apply unsharp mask image sharpening in-camera, potentially eliminating the need for yet another post-processing task.

Finally, if these improvements don't put a smile on your face, a Happy Face Retouch feature on the W150 and W170 promises to – in a very literal way. The in-camera after-effect skews the image slightly around selected subjects mouths to make them appear to be smiling. Honestly, the idea seems gimmicky at worst, and just plain weird at best, and Sony's visual demonstration using a surly mustached man (whose facial hair took on a demonic upward tilt after the effect was applied) was perhaps poorly chosen. While most of the planned W-series improvements seem well chosen, this one may simply go too far, but who's to say how it will be received by the photo shooting public.

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LG 32LC46 32in LCD TV

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 19:08:10 +0100

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LG, you get the impression, is a company that likes to cover all the bases. In recent times it has delivered full HD TVs, Freeview Playback TVs, and high-style designer TVs. And today, with the 32LC46, it's adding to the list that most beloved of things: ‘a bloody cheap TV'.

At under £400 it really does get down and dirty with 32in TVs from the budget-specialist likes of Goodmans and Bush. Yet there's really nothing in its on-paper specifications to suggest exactly how LG has managed to sell it for so little.

For instance, its 32in screen comprises an HD Ready resolution of 1,366 x 768, and its claimed contrast ratio is a very respectable 5000:1. This latter figure reveals immediately that the TV employs a dynamic contrast system whereby the backlight can be dimmed automatically during dark scenes to deliver better black level response. This feature is by no means common in the sub-£500 32in flat TV market.

LG has furthermore managed to retain the services of its XD Engine image processing system for the 32LC46. XD Engine is not, it has to be said, the most aggressive or even successful image processing system in the world. But it still delivers some benefits in the areas of colour, motion handling, black level response and fine detailing, so we'd rather have it than not.

Yet more good news comes with the flexibility the TV offers when it comes to picture adjustments. Highlights include both MPEG and standard noise reduction routines, a black level booster, and even the option to completely deactivate the XD Engine should you feel that it's not actually helping. We have to say, though, that for the vast majority of the time we preferred to leave it on.

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First mockups of Firefox 2 theme released

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 08:36:22 +0100

The first mockups of theme that will be used as default in Firefox 2 have been released.

Three vendors (Meta, Radiant Core, and Raiz Labs were asked to submit proposals for a new theme. They were given the criteria that the new theme had to

* respect OS native look and feel
* appear modern and contemporary with current web and client apps
* appear consistent across platforms
* have minimum to zero code impact requirements (ie: all CSS and icon work)

The returned proposals led the team to focus in on four specific areas of priority for Firefox 2:

1. Search Bar: new icon required for the "search" action, design required to visually associate an "action button" with a textbox, design for showing search suggestions, design for making it clear that user can select the search engine.
2. Icon Polish: use shapes and metaphors from the existing *Stripe themes, but unify (and soften?) the colour palette and update the edges, detail, styling and gloss to match better on Vista, with modern XP apps, and OS X.
3. Tab Strip: improve distinction of selected tabs, differentiate appearance of background tabs from tab strip, optimize close tab button for use on all tabs.
4. Buttons in Textboxes: make buttons that appear in textboxes distinctive and provide affordances to indicate that they are "clickable" elements.

Of the vendors, the team selected Radiant Core to continue working towards an implementation of the new theme.

So here it is, the mockup of the theme:

* icons have been sharpened and made to look a little glossier, and colours have been / will continue to be adjusted to match OS palette
* standard treatment for "end cap" buttons on a textbox like "Go" and "Search"
* new light treatment for drop-down buttons until the user hovers in that textbox at which point the buttons will fill in
* gradients on tabs and the tabstrip to make it easier to see the selected and background tab

The tabs have been changed quite considerably and in my opinion look much better than before:

* first tab shows selected state with hover on closebutton
* second tab shows background state when mouse is hovering over it
* last tab shows deselected state

The buttons in textboxes have been given a rounded look and glow when you hover onver them:

* buttons in textboxes, dropdown buttons and endcaps will have desaturated borders and backgrounds, but when user hovers in that textbox, they will indicate that they are "active" and can be clicked

The search box has been updated consiredably aswell:

* box to the left is used to change the search engine
* it will glow when a new search engine is available
* endcap button on the right is used to perform a search

The RSS icon will make big changes to the address bar - where as, the whole bar (and the icon) will glow when there's an RSS feed on the page:

* the RSS indicator will always be present in the location bar
* when a feed is found, it will light up to draw attention to itself
* this design has since been modified to bring the glow closer to the RSS icon itself

Overall, I'm much looking forward to the new design - so I hope they'll hurry up and get the browser released.

'$100 laptop' to feature innovative LCDs, use 2 watts

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 15:39:51 +0100

The head of the One Laptop per Child project, Nicholas Negroponte, says he must be doing something right if he is upsetting Microsoft and Intel

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project will make Linux as popular on the desktop as it is on the server today, according to Nicholas Negroponte, head of the project and founder of MIT's media lab.

Speaking on the final day of Red Hat's annual user summit in Nashville, Negroponte told an audience of Linux enthusiasts and technology professionals that the OLPC project will lead to mass adoption of the operating system, if the software that powers it is efficient and usable enough.

"One of the side-effects is that it will boost worldwide consumption of Linux on the desktop so incredibly that it will be on par with where it is with servers," he said. "We need your support not to make it overweight and hard to use like all the others are."

The One Laptop per Child project aims to develop a portable PC for use by children in the developing world for around $100 (£50). The price has risen since the scheme was first announced to around $135 to $140, according to Negroponte.

"It is a floating price. We are a non-profit organisation, we have a target of $100 by 2008 but probably it will be $135, maybe $140. That is a start price but what we have to do is with every release make it cheaper and cheaper — we are promising that the price will go down," said Negroponte.

Currently on leave from MIT to push the OLPC message full-time, Negroponte said that although his project has received widespread support from companies such as Red Hat — which is building the operating system — and AMD, some elements of the IT industry are not on-side.

"AMD is our partner, which means Intel is pissing on me. Bill Gates is not pleased either, but if I am annoying Microsoft and Intel then I figure I am doing something right," he said.

Microsoft allegedly offered to build the operating system for the machine but was rejected by the OLPC project. Negrponte added that the project required an extremely scaled-down OS to enable the eventual machines to run at a decent speed, while using very little power. "About 25 percent of the cost of a laptop is there just to support XP, which is like a person that has gotten so fat that they use most of their muscle to move their fat," he said.

The philosophy behind the OLPC project is that the best way to improve the education of children in the developing world is to give them the means to educate themselves by providing them with a PC that they see as their own.

Negroponte claimed that there are around one billion children in the world, with half in remote rural locations where there are no real schools, and teachers themselves have little more than a basic education. "It is very primitive. In situations like that, more teachers and schools are not the solution — it can take decades that way. A much quicker solution is to engage the children themselves in their own education," he said.

Past attempts to give children in developing countries access to PCs have failed because the children did not see the computers as their own, and as a result did not engage with them as expected. "People say we just gave a hundred thousand PCs to schools, and they still sitting in their boxes. The problem is that you gave then to the wrong people — the kids don't think they are theirs, and see them as government property, or they are locked up after school."

The key to making computing projects work in education is scale, according to the OLPC boss. He claimed that the sheer number of machines the group is planning to build means that it can not only buy cheaper components, but it has the ability to change corporate strategies. Negroponte related an anecdote about meeting the head of a PC display company who claimed that he could not build the kind of display OLPC needed until he found out that there order would be for 100 million units.

review by Andrew Donoghue in Nashville

Apple 17-inch MacBook Pro

Tue, 16 May 2006 12:04:51 +0100

When Apple announced a 17-inch version of its MacBook Pro (Best Current Price: $2749.95), many thought that the performance of this larger laptop would match that of a custom-built 15-inch MacBook. After all, both machines run on a 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo processor.

For the most part, that assumption proved to be right—our initial tests of the 17-inch MacBook Pro produced comparable results to Macworld Lab’s benchmarks of the build-to-order 2.16GHz 15-inch configuration. However, in many of the tests, the 17-inch model managed to eke out a little more performance than its 15-inch counterpart.

Unveiled at last month’s National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, the 17-inch MacBook Pro shares many of the specifications of the higher-end 15-inch model. The notable exceptions include the extra two inches of diagonal screen space, a FireWire 800 port, 20GBs of extra hard disk space, and, of course, the 2.16GHz processor as a standard option (as opposed to a $300 add-on).

Our tests compared the 17-inch MacBook Pro with the build-to-order 15-inch laptop. As you can see in the chart below, that custom model’s faster harder drive (a 7,200-rpm 100GB drive compared to the 17-inch MacBook’s 5,400-rpm 120GB drive) gave it an advantage in our Zip Archive test, as well as file duplicates.

	Speedmark 4.5	Adobe Photoshop CS2	Cinema 4D XL 9.5.21	Compressor 2.1	iMovie 6.0.1	iTunes 6.0.4	Unreal Tournament 2004	Zip Archive
17-inch MacBook Pro Benchmarks
	SUITE	SUITE	RENDER	MPEG2 Encode	AGED FILTER	MP3 ENCODE	AVERAGE FRAME RATE	1GB FOLDER
17-inch MacBook Pro/2.16GHz Intel Core Duo	193	2:26	1:06	3:59	1:01	1:28	63.1	2:48
15-inch MacBook Pro/2.16GHz Intel Core Duo*	189	2:32	1:06	4:03	1:00	1:24	57.6	2:39
15-inch PowerBook/1.67GHz PowerPC G4	131	1:34	3:54	7:32	1:50	2:12	21.4	3:29
20-inch iMac/2GHz Intel Core Duo	217	2:31	1:11	3:22	1:02	1:19	56.0	2:32
Power Macintosh/2GHz Dual Core PowerPC G5	224	1:02	1:07	2:47	0:50	0:57	45.8	2:50
	>Better	<Better	<Better	<Better	<Better	<Better	>Better	<Better

Best results in bold. Reference system in italics. Asterisk (*) denotes build-to-order model

Speedmark 4.5 scores are relative to those of a 1.25GHz Mac mini, which is assigned a score of 100. Adobe Photoshop, Cinema 4D XL, iMovie, iTunes, and Zip Archive scores are in minutes:seconds. All systems were running Mac OS X 10.4.6 with 1GB of RAM, with processor performance set to Highest in the Energy Saver preference pane when applicable. The Photoshop Suite test is a set of 14 scripted tasks using a 50MB file. Photoshop’s memory was set to 70 percent and History was set to Minimum. We recorded how long it took to render a scene in Cinema4D. We used Compressor to encode a 6-minute, 26-second DV file using the DVD: Fastest Encode 120 minutes - 4:3 setting. In iMovie, we applied the Aged video effect to a 1-minute movie. We converted 45 minutes of AAC audio files to MP3 using iTunes’ High Quality setting. We used Unreal Tournament 2004’ Antalus Botmatch average-frames-per-second score; we tested at a resolution of 1,024 by 768 pixels at the Maximum setting with both audio and graphics enabled. We created a Zip archive in the Finder from a 1GB folder. To compare Speedmark 4.5 scores for various Mac systems, visit our Apple Hardware Guide.—Macworld Lab testing by James Galbraith and Jerry Jung

One application producing interesting results was Unreal Tournament, with the 17-inch laptop beating out all of the other models shown in the chart. It even managed to squeeze out 5.5 more frames per second than the 15-inch model, even though they have the same graphics processor and video memory configuration. We’ll run a few more game tests on these systems and see if the 17-inch MacBook Pro maintains its advantage across other applications.

One application we’d taken out of our suite for lack of a Universal version of the application has now returned to the fold. I’m happy to report that we finally received our Universal Binary versions of Final Cut Pro and can now start reporting Compressor MPEG-2 encode scores again. In these tests we found, once again, that desktop systems with similar processors still hold the performance advantage with the two 2.16GHz laptops turning in very similar scores, but with the 2GHz Core Duo iMac finishing the test in a little bit more than 15 percent less time and the Power Mac with a 2GHz Dual Core PowerPC finishing about 30 percent faster.

Stay tuned for Macworld’s complete review of the 17-inch MacBook Pro, as well as more tests using the Final Cut Pro’s new Universal Binary version.

review by James Galbraith (Macworld)

Google Calendar

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 12:11:12 +0100

Search giant Google has announced a free, Web-based 'shareable' calendar service called, appropriately enough, Google Calendar, which allows users to post up events and share them with others.

Calendar owners can send out invitations to their chums and keep track of their responses and comments (like, "Bog off weirdo - we're not coming to your party").

Conveniently, friends can still receive and add responses to your invites even if they don't use Google Calendar themselves.

A neat 'Quick Add' feature uses Google's clever-clogs technology to understand phrases like, "Dinner at the Old Scrote And Hounds with Tony, 1.30pm Saturday" and automatically slap it in the right place in your calendar.

Gmail Integration
Gmail can also recognise events mentioned in emails, letting users add events without leaving their Gmail inbox.

Naturally, you can search your own calendar, with Google adding the ability to search public calendars to look for interesting events to add to your own diary (like Cardiff City FC fixtures, for example).

Powered by Javascript and XML, the calendar offers support for Microsoft IE 6.0+ and Mozilla Firefox 1.07+, although users will need JavaScript and cookies to be enabled for the calendar to work.

Based on open calendar standards, events can be imported from popular programs like Microsoft Outlook and Apple iCal, while schedules can be viewed by any external application or device that accepts iCal or XML files.

Taking on Yahoo!
Although Google is offering compatibility with Yahoo's popular calendar service (events can be shared between the two services), there's no question that they're looking to move in on Yahoo's patch.

In fact, Google have added a whole page explaining how users can migrate their entire Yahoo! Calendar to Google Calendar, which suggests that things might get a little lively between the two services soon.

View: Google Calendar