Apple’s Universal Binary program
With the release of QuarkXPress 7 for the Mac OS X, the move toward Universal Binary — applications which contain bits for both Intel x86 and PowerPC processors — is progressing very well.
In studying my own software usage with Apple Activity Monitor, the only business-critical non-x86 binaries on my iMac are Microsoft’s Office 2004 suite and Adobe’s Creative Suite CS2 . Those continue to run through Rosetta, Apple’s translation layer. With Rosetta, applications consume huge amounts of virtual memory, and bog down to poor garbage collection.
Considering that Apple’s move to Intel processors was only announced in June 2005, and that the first Intel hardware began shipping in January 2006, this is a lightning fast transition.
Apple’s Safari browser is not as successful. Many Web applications (including the blog-writing system on blogger.com) don’t work correctly under Safari, and require Firefox to run on the Mac. This is particularly true of AJAX applications, and those which rely upon Flash. Safari’s RSS capabilities are dreadful; I use NewsGator’s NetNewsWire. I hope that Apple does a better job with Leopard.
I wonder why you say Safari’s RSS implementation is miserable?
I prefer to any other browser implemented reader and it was one of the reasons I pretty much stayed away from FF.
That and the fact that FF didn’t so spell checking without help from Google.
Now that I have been playing with Vienna as my RSS reader and FF 2.0 finally has spell checking built in I have been using it for a week or so – the longest I have stayed with it to date.
Safari’s RSS dreadful? How so? Fling a bunch of feeds onto a tab, use “Open in Tabs”, and work left-to-right. I have a mouse button wired to “Open this in a new tab”; I whack, whack, whack on interesting stories, close the feed tab, go on to the next. At the end I’m left with a bunch of interesting stuff already on tabs.
Clearly I’m missing something. Enlighten me, would you?