It looks like with Boot Camp, Apple just jumped into the gaming market. The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a post about how the author installed World of Warcraft on his 17″ iMac Core Duo, and no surprises here, it runs better than on a normal PC. This brings up an interesting point, while we’ve heard that Apple’s hardware is clearly out-performing its counterparts designed to run Windows XP, are game enthusiasts going to make the leap to Apple’s hardware?
Mac users can now buy the “PC Only” titles that they couldn’t in the past, and more importantly, Apple can compete with other high-end PC makers, such as Alienware, which was recently snapped up by Dell, within the gaming market. The market is saturated with low cost PCs, but I believe there is some room for one more in the high-end market. Apple’s name is synomous with high-quality products, looks like the competition has someone else to worry about.
More on Intel-Mac/Windows XP game performance at TUAW.com
Apple officially announces a tool to dual boot Intel-based Macs with Windows XP.
All the hacking to run Windows XP on Macs is unnecessary now. Currently Boot Camp is available as free download and is still in beta.
Boot Camp will be a feature in “Leopard,” Apple’s next major release of Mac OS X that will be previewed at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in August.
You can download the beta of Boot Camp on the Apple site.
The availability of Boot Camp does not mean that Apple plans to support Windows. Apple says they just reacted to customer demand.
System Requirements for Boot Camp are an Intel-based Mac with a USB keyboard and mouse, or a built-in keyboard and TrackPad; Mac OS X version 10.4.6 or later; the latest firmware update; at least 10GB of free space on the startup disk; a blank recordable CD or DVD; and single-disc version of Windows XP Home Edition or Professional with Service Pack 2 or later.
More details in this Apple press-release.
We recently launched LarryVigon.com, the portfolio of one of the founding partners of former Los Angeles design studio, Vigon Ellis. His breadth of work has spanned a more than two decades, with clientele ranging from musicians, film & television studios, to corporate clients including Sony, Gemstar, IBM, Dreamworks, Epson and the Los Angeles Opera. You’d be surprised at the amount of work that you’ll recognize in his portfolio, and while your at it, you can take a look at his book, Dream, for which we created a simple interactive book to view samples of his personal work.
It looks like the Eolas/Microsoft patent problem has escalated to the point where Microsoft is changing the way that Internet Explorer handles plugins using these tags: applet, object and embed. This change will force users to click on any elements on a page that use those tags before they start to work or play, so no Flash movies will play unless they are clicked.
This will make our lives as developers a little complicated, since we’ll have to go back and make changes to ensure that our projects work as intended. The good thing is that deconcept has a write up on how we can use the FlashObject method to get around the changes to Internet Explorer. We’ve started using this on some of our projects recently and I think it works great!
Since this whole mess only affects Internet Explorer on a Windows machine, can I once again recommend using a better browser, like Firefox if you’re on a PC or Mac and Safari if you’re on a Mac.
Found this interesting and debatable article on Sitepoint: “We’ve published an article on the way in which fonts are used on the Web. We found that a large “x-height” (the height of a lowercase ‘x’ in relation to the total height of the font) makes fonts more readable on a computer screen, as does a wide “punch width” (the width of the hole inside letters such as ‘o’ and ‘b’). Helvetica is a good font to use online. The designer’s choice of fonts is usually limited by the user’s OS, but techniques such as SIFr (example) are allowing Web designers to provide their own fonts.”
![Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Design Standard [Mac] [OLD VERSION]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41-GUZmZtpL._SL75_.jpg "Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Design Standard [Mac] [OLD VERSION]")
