HandBrake has a new, much improved compilation system, which allows easy 64-bit and parallel builds, as well as providing easy extendability for future improvements to the application. 64-bit builds tend to perform approximately 10% better than their 32-bit brethren. There is no Snow Leopard magic here: the performance gains can also be realized on Intel Macs running 10.5, as well as Linux systems.
Archive for the ‘Apple Computer News’ Category
November25
HandBrake 0.9.4: Released!
September5
Parts of the Apple Store Down
Went to check the status of an iPhone order that was placed yesterday online at the Apple Store and received the following error at 8:53 A.M. EST stating that the Order Status services are temporarily unavailable due to a schedule upgrade to our systems…
Clicking on any of the following under “Your Account” on the Apple Store: View your orders, Order status, Track packages, Cancel items, Return items, Print Invoice brings you to a message saying the store is down pending an announcement later in the day.
Apple has seeded Mac OS X Leopard Server Build 9A528a to Apple Developer Connection members for download.
August21
Apple iPhone 1.0.2 Update Available
The update shows “bug fixes” as what it fixes. It does not appear to really add any new features to the iPhone. Some users are saying that speakerphone and play back of voice mail through speakerphone are louder.
This update does not appear to fix any Exchange Server email features or problems namely the deleting of emails on the iPhone still only marks the messages as being read in Outlook or Entrourage and not actually deleting them.
Users who have hacked their iPhone may see problems with their update and may be required to restore to factory default and then update. Make sure to backup your photos on the phone prior to upgrading also as a precaution.
Round 2 of our VMWare Fusion vs Parallels Speed test kind of surprised me. In Round 1, we pitted VMWare Fusion vs Parallels with Windows XP SP2 for our speed test. Parallels was the victor in every category in Round 1 which wasn’t much of a surprise since it is the more mature product and VMWare Fusion is the newcomer.
In Round 2 of our speed test, we decided to use Windows Vista with VMWare Fusion and Parallels for our speed test. All test were run 3 times and an average of the 3 speeds were used for the results. I must admit there were some really strange results in this test and the ultimate winner was kind of a surprise also.
For this test we decided to give the virtual machine a little more memory. We bumped the memory to 1500mb of memory for the power hungry Microsoft Vista. The machine that this test was run on was a MacPro with dual 2.66 processors, 5GB of memory and 4 500GB HDD configured striped. We ran the same test as we did in round 1:
Time to install from first boot to the desktop showed up for the first time.
Time to reboot with a clean OS install
Time to suspend the machine with a clean OS install
Time to boot with a clean OS install
Time to wakeup from a suspended system with a clean OS install
The burning question about whether a non-gigabit Apple AirPort Extreme (AAE) could be upgrade via a $1.99 Enabler or some other firmware update was bugging me way too much. So I set out to dissect both the gigabit and non-gigabit version of the AAE.
Mac Lovers / Gamers rejoice. EA announced late Friday that it is FINALLY shipping some of the OS X Compatible games it promised at WWDC earlier this year. The title currently shipping are Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Bettlefield 2142, Command & Conquer Tiberium Wars and Need for Speed Carbon. The games will also be available in Apple retail stores on August 21st.
The announcement did not include two highly anticipated title for Mac OS X. Madden 2008 and Tiger Woods 2008 were notable exclusions from the announcement, with no explanation from EA as to why they are being delayed.
Apple has been consistently taking over more and more market share over the last few years and getting a huge developer on board such as EA has been another step in the right direction.
**Update** – We have been digging deeper and it is now appearing that the AirPort Extreme Gigabit model is picky about patch cables. After further testing we were able to narrow it down to the patch cables causing the AirPort Extreme not to link at 1 Gb. We tried both custom made Cat 5e patch cables and pre-made patch cables with and without molded ends.
Cable Specs that we had issues with only 100 Mb Link Speed:
- E204816 CM UTP 24AWG 4PR ETL Verified to TIA-568-B.2 Category 5e Patch Cable
- E154502 24AWG CMR Verified Category 5 Patch Cable AWM FT4
Cable Specs that connected at 1 Gb Link Speed:
- CSA Type PCC FT4 LL80671 ETL Verified to TIA/EIA 568A ISO/IEC 11601 Cat 5e
- CSA 219561 FT1 Verified Category 5e UTP TIA/EIA-568B.2 CM 4PR
All cables have 4 pairs of wires terminated and are configured as straight through patch cables (not cross-over cables).
I plan I hooking the patch cables up to our cable tester to see if there are any differences shown by a cable tester…
While at the local Apple Store today to purchase a new iMac I bought two of the refreshed AirPort Extremes with the “Gigabit Ethernet” specs on the box. The Apple Store Employee actually had to go get them out of the back as they were not on the floors yet. Probably to clear stock of the 100MB version for the people not aware of the hardware refresh.
The specs on the outside of the box clearly state the following:
Interfaces
- One Gigabit Ethernet WAN port for connecting a DSL or cable modem
- Three Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports for connecting computers or network devices
- USB port for connecting a USB printer or USB external hard drive
- 802.11 wireless
First thing I noticed different is the icon that shows up in the AirPort Utility as seen below:
So, we sat down last night to do some testing on the final release of VMWare Fusion. For the test, we used a Mac Pro Dual 2.66 with 5GB of memory. We wanted to do some speed test to find out how VMWare Fusion performed against its more mature cousin Parallels. The test was done with Windows XP Professional SP2 and included the following items:
Time to install from first boot to the desktop showed up for the first time.
Time to reboot with a clean OS install
Time to suspend the machine with a clean OS install
Time to boot with a clean OS install
Time to wakeup from a suspended system with a clean OS install
Keep reading to see the results
August2
Apple Releases iTunes 7.3.2
Apple today released iTunes 7.3.2 not much detail on the Apple site as to what has been updated. Below is the information from the readme file in the 7.3.2 dmg.
What’s new in iTunes 7.3.2
With iTunes 7.3, you can now activate iPhone service and sync it with your music, TV shows, movies and more. Also, you can now wirelessly share and enjoy your favorite digital photos from any computer in your home with Apple TV.
iTunes 7.3.2 provides bug fixes to improve stability and performance.
Download seemed slow through software update, so I tried downloading right from iTunes software download and it was much faster…