MacEdition Pro News : July 5, 2002: Standards statements, donationware, shareware and suggestionware?

by MacEdition Staff (feedback)

They just can’t keep out of the headlines

We seem to have been talking about Opera an awful lot lately, but they just keep popping up in the news. This time they’re announcing a partnership with Macromedia that should grab the attention of many standards-oriented Web developers.

Oslo, Norway – July 2, 2002 – Today, Opera Software announced an agreement with Macromedia, whereby the two companies will work together to integrate their products for the Mac platform. Opera will deliver a full-featured, embeddable version of its desktop browser to be integrated into a wide range of Macromedia Web development products.

Opera and Macromedia will work together to develop and maintain an application programming interface (API) for an embedded browser on the Mac platform, enabling further technical collaboration between the two companies in the future. Opera’s core technology will be used as default browsing technology in a number of Macromedia products on the Mac platform and will give users the opportunity to test their Web pages with the world’s most standards-compliant browser.

“Macromedia and Opera are both committed to open solutions that are built to fully support existing Web standards,” said Susan Morrow, director of product management, Macromedia. “By working in concert with Opera, our developers can create pages that will look good across all devices and platforms.”

The initial phase of the agreement between Opera Software and Macromedia relates to product development on the Mac platform. However, all Web developers can test their Web pages in Opera to be certain that the pages will be displayed correctly in all browsers, since Opera is cross platform and adheres to the international open standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The interesting thing is that this announcement is only about Macromedia’s Mac products, and not their Windows counterparts.

Opera has quirks in its standards-compliance, but it’s in what CodeBitch calls the “good guy three”. However, Opera will have to get rid of the px-unit bug and a few other remaining errors before it can claim its “standards compliance” mantle.

A thoughtful analysis of this announcement can be read here. One can hope that with Macromedia’s claim this partnership will help create pages that “look good across all devices and platforms”, they’re talking about standards compliance and not rendering Flash.

Two for you?

Here’s something to cheer QuarkXPress users: 24U has introduced an upgrade of its DTP XTension software, 24U Paste Without Style. So what does it do?

24U Paste Without Style is an XTension software for the popular DTP application QuarkXPress which speeds up work with text. It allows you to move and paste text easily and faster with a key shortcut (Apple+Option+V). This text automatically acquires all text attributes of the location where are you pasting. The type, size, font and other text parameters you can also adapt many more. All text is adjusted correctly into place, where you paste it.

For example:

If you paste a text in font “Times New Roman”, 14 points and bold into a place, where the font is “Helvetica” and size 10 pts., 24U Paste Without Style will automatically adjust the font, the size and other features exactly the same as the ones in the new location.

No more lengthy controls and font, format, size or other features corrections! No more text discrepancies, that are easy to miss and that end up in larger format. 24U Paste Without Style manages all automatically by itself.

This product is what 24U calls “donationware”:

Today, it is our great pleasure to introduce this software as Donationware. This does not mean Shareware or Freeware. Donationware is something completely different.

This is our gift to you and you are not supposed to pay for it. On the other side we would like to raise money for developing similar gifts in the future. So we welcome any donation for developing you send us.

If you make a decision not to donate us anything it is OK. In this case just keep enjoying our gifts. But you might be considering paying it forward by doing some kind of favor to other people your own way.

That’s a very nice sentiment, but that still sounds an awful lot like freeware.

More info is available at: http://www.24usoftware.com/infoPast2.php

You can download it at http://www.24usoftware.com/downloadform.php?id=PasteWOStyle2.

Time Palette

Here’s a product that frequent international travellers may find very useful, Time Palette, which has just been upgraded to Version 5.1

Trygve Inda, developer of the premiere world time and mapping tool, Time Palette, announces the availability of Time Palette 5.1 the flagship product in a line of cross-platform world time and mapping tools.

Time Palette provides extensive features for the international business traveler including: world time, alarms, international call scheduling, an extensive almanac, distance calculator and worldwide weather. An extendable database containing detailed time zone information for more than 10,000 cities is included. In addition, Time Palette displays multiple world maps demarcating the earth’s sun and moon illumination in real-time.

What’s New:

• Added the ability to export monthly almanac data.

• Added a revised political map.

• Includes a new Atlas city database with updated time zone data.

• Fixed a bug that would cause the top two items to be deleted from the Apple Menu when after dragging a city between windows.

Time Palette requires a Macintosh computer running Mac OS 8.6, 9.x or Mac OS X. The product runs native under OS X and take advantage of the new Aqua interface.

Registered users of Time Palette 5.x may upgrade to the new versions at no charge by visiting the Time Palette website to download and install the software. Users of older versions may upgrade for $14.95.

Time Palette can be purchased online for $29.95. An evaluation version of Time Palette can be downloaded by visiting http://www.timepalette.com/download.html.

Now why can’t Apple do this too?

Apple Student Developers have launched an “App Design” contest. You come up with the best suggestion for a new app, and Apple Student Developers will build it for you. Here’s the skinny:

June 27, 2002 - Today AppleStudentDevelopers.org has launched what they hope will be a fun, informative and useful contest for all, known as, The “App Design” Contest!

ASD was fortunate enough to obtain two copies of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X signed by author, Aaron Hillegass. Rather than give these gems away in a simple raffle ASD wanted to do something of interest; something from which the community would benefit. The idea: a contest in which people submit their concepts of a cool application; after idea submissions are collected the ASD community will pick their favorite app and, as a whole, build and document its creation. The submitter of the winning app idea wins a copy of Aaron’s book while the second copy will go to a random draw from the rest of the entries.

If you are a non-developer with application ideas, send them in as well! Assuming you may not get a lot of use out of the developer book you can choose give it to a more Cocoa-thirsty student (or keep it and learn the fine art of Cocoa for yourself). If a non-developer does win, we may be able to dig up an OS X t-shirt or something, but of course the fame of their name in the About Box should be prize enough, right?

The submission deadline is July 26th. Full rules and detains can be found on the ASD site.

0 That’s an intriguing contest that no doubt will get some intriguing entries. Here’s our cheeky suggestion: “Drought: The Aqua remover”.

Looking for old ProNews segments? Check out our index at http://old.macedition.com/news/. Do you have news releases or tidbits of interest to the Macintosh professional? Send them to pronewsnotes@macedition.com.

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