Newton’s Lore

Apple have revamped the iPod range with

• iPhone price drop - Apple has dropped the 8Gb iPhone to $399 for “this holiday season”, some US$200 off! Probably to align the pricepoint with the iPod touch. You can now set a 30 second soundgrab from (some several hundred select) iTunes songs as your ringtone for only US$0.99.
• iPod Shuffle - “new hues” (PRODUCT) RED, silver, black, blue and green
• iPod Nano - now in a new form factor with a 60% brighter display with 320×240 resolution display at 204 pixels per inch, it plays video. Colours: Silver, black, blue, green and (PRODUCT) RED. Includes new games Vortex, iQuiz and Klondike. AU$199 in Silver (4Gb) and AU$279 for 8Gb models. iPod nano TV ad here.
• iPod (now “iPod classic”) now with AU$349 for 80Gb or AU$479 for 160Gb or storage (as much storage as my laptop!). Available in Black or Silver
• iPod touch - with an iPhone like touch interface and wireless connectivity (it detects when you enter Starbucks and lets you download music from the iTunes store free of download charges (I think)). Flash based, the touch comes in at AU$419 (US$299) for 8Gb or AU$549 (US$399) for 16Gb. Shipping date estimated at 28th of September. Assuming you don’t wait until the iPhone arrives in Australia of course
• iTunes 7.4 - Syncs songs you’ve downloaded onto your iPod touch. Automatically grabs incomplete downloads from your iPod touch and completes them. Larger video viewing area.

Blizzard software (Makers of Warcraft/Diablo/StarCraft) have a job ad for a Mac Software Engineer.

Bare feats has speed tests of the new Santa Rosa Macs.

Perhaps you’re a fan of Professor Falken in Wargames, or you miss playing Global Thermonuclear War over AppleTalk with GameMaster. Defcon from Ambrosia Software is like that, but updated with modern graphic, soundtrack and network play.

Unfortunately real nuclear war is probably a lot faster.

I was randomly searching for some software when I came across this page of Mac game demos. Games are divided into Action, Adventure, Cards, Kids, Puzzle, RPG, Simulation, Sports, Strategy, and Tools (amongst other things, SDK’s for writing your own games).