Newton’s Lore

If you want to use your Nintendo Wii remote (Wiimote) with your Mac (via Bluetooth) (perhaps because you liked Tony Stark’s movie UI and a Wii is a cheaper way to get accelerometer gear check out

• DarwiinRemote
• The Wiinstrument for use with MIDI and/or Garageband.
• Remote Buddy

For the more programmatically inclined there’s

• WiiremoteJ
• Wiimote Simple (an open source Java library)
• WiiJuce

Some great folklore about Steve Jobs (and people telling him Apple’s doomed) and Adam Osborne over at folklore.org.

According to this Apple technote you may find the Finder continuously restarts if you’ve got an external Firewire drive connected under 10.5.2 and you have a blank computer name or one that contains non-alphanumeric characters.

To win undying love from your true MacGeek you could always create them a steampunk modded Mac mini like David Veloz’s.

Via the MacDevJobs mailing list and the Sling Media job page

Sling Media, the makers of the Slingbox–a popular device that lets

you watch your TV remotely over the Internet–is seeking three more

experienced Mac developers to join our software team here at our

headquarters in Foster City, California, located between San Francisco

and the Silicon Valley.

[1] Req #176: Senior Engineer, MacOS X Client Application UI Developer

We’re looking for an experienced Mac OS X developer, someone who can

create a truly exceptional Cocoa UI for the Mac SlingPlayer.  We want

to enhance the user experience by including an integrated program

guide and the ability to record and upload video clips to share with

others, as well as other sharp ideas, including yours.

[2] Req #165: Senior Engineer, Web Services Client Integration

We want to extend the Mac SlingPlayer application to include all kinds

of web services, but keep the “out-of-browser” experience that native

applications do best.  That means WebKit.  And Javascript.  And the

Cocoa-Javascript bridge.  And SOAP.  And…well, join us and show how

an experienced web services client developer brings this all together.

[3] Req #139: Senior Engineer/Staff Engineer, MacOS X & Cross-Platform

The Mac and Windows versions of the SlingPlayer share a lot of key

technology, but need to share the code base more.  Join us in the

design of cross-platform interfaces to audio and video streaming,

Slingbox setup and configuration, and much more, and then use your

solid knowledge of MacOS X multimedia, networking, and related

frameworks to implement them.

We offer these positions with preference to candidates seeking

full-time or contract-to-hire on-site employment in Foster City, CA.

From the Mac OS X 10.5.2 release notes, here are some of my observations: User Interface:

• Apple has added a Time Machine icon to the Menu bar (it can be turned on in the Time Machne control panel)
• The menus are less translucent (who would have thought with everyone complaining that that would have been a problem) and transparency can be turned off in the Desktop & Screen Saver preference pane
• List view is back in the Stacks (presumably they got a lot of complaints), and they have a new grid view background (presumably for better visibility)

It remains to be seen if they’ve added the Size column back to the Spotlight column view though.

Support for new things (ie you may want to try plugging some old stuff that didn’t work in again to see if it does now!):

• You can now iSync Samsung D600E and D900i phones
• Airports Express and Extreme now support more printers connected via USB
• New RAW camera formats supported:
  • Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III
  • Canon Powershot G9
  • Hasselblad CF-22
  • Hasselblad CF-39
  • Leaf Aptus 75s
  • Nikon D3
  • Nikon D300
  • Sony Alpha DSLR-A700
• Supports more 3rd party routers in iChat and Back To My Mac

Interesting bugs fixed:

• Fixed a problem when ejecting a CD could write to it! (presumably instead of just ejecting it)
• Fixed a problem where the Leopard Setup Assistant would re-appear (as noted in this TidBITs article by Glenn Fleishman)
• Mail now automatically disables the (unsupported) third-party plugin GrowlMail version 1.1.2 or earlier to avoid issues.
• Addresses “accuracy issues” with the web content filter (in Parental Controls) perhaps to now block unboxing porn?
• The computer will now shut down if an automatic disk repair does not succeed during startup. (Hopefully it tells you why it just shut down?)

Microsoft have annouced that Mac Office 2008 will be available on shelves as of 15th January (ie after the MacWorld keynote). Ships on a DVD, includes universal binaries, requires Mac OS X 10.4.9 or later and a recommended 500MHZ machine minimum.

List price is US$399, ff course, there’s always the free NeoOffice as an alternative.