MacEdition Pro News : October 29, 2002: Sharing transmits revolutionary belt update
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Pictures are for sharing
Rainjul LLC has taken that old mantra to heart with its new release of Aizai, an application that lets users create, view and distribute digital photos, movies, music and other documents over the Internet via virtual television channels. (Hey, this sounds like a wonderful way to watch the next episode of As the Apple Turns.)
“Aizai Version 1.1 shows how rapidly small companies can build and improve groundbreaking new products and services using Apple’s Cocoa, Jaguar, QuickTime and server technologies,” said Steven W. Schuldt, creator of Aizai. “Aizai is part of an elite vanguard of desktop web apps for Mac OS X. We’re receiving a lot of interest from the Mac community and expect Version 1.1 to generate even more enthusiasm.”
The newly released Version 1.1 sports enhanced multimedia playback, full-screen viewing options, streaming media support and traffic auditing for people using the broadcasting portion of the application. A fully functional demo of Aizai can be downloaded from the company’s Web site and comes complete with both viewer and broadcaster portions of the program. Those who pay the US$29.99 shareware fee will find themselves with a five-channel license.
Oh, and the system requirements are quite simple: No Jaguar, no joy.
Now transmitting
If secure uploads are what you’re after, then the folks at Panic Inc. might have what you’re looking for. Panic has retooled its FTP program, Transmit, to take advantage of a myriad of OS X features – not the least of which is SFTP support to access secure servers and transport encrypted data. The program is also built around the LibNcFTP Unix FTP engine for better speed and reliability.
Transmit 2 isn’t just a new version – it’s a complete and total rewrite done in Cocoa specifically for Mac OS X. This gives us many advantages, such as full long filename support, support for files larger than 2GB, drawers, sheets, toolbars, etc. And while every corner of Transmit has been rethought and enhanced, it still retains the same Mac-like interface and philosophy of Transmit that you’ve (hopefully) grown to love.
The new version of the US$24.95 program is now transmitting from a server near you.
There’s revolution in the air
Runtime Revolution announced a November ship date for the 2.0 release of its Revolution programming tool. The multi-platform, simple-language programming environment will add a Jaguar-compliant interface, XML support, Unicode and built-in documentation, according to the company’s press release.
Revolution’s easy-to-use interface builder, powerful and English-like programming language, built-in Internet and multimedia features all combine to make it the ideal for writing software with ease. Revolution has fully supported all major platforms since Version 1.0. Developers can write a single application that targets “classic” Mac OS and OS X, Windows and Linux (and other popular Unix flavors), supporting each operating system’s native look and feel – with no code changes needed.
Revolution 2.0 Features
Revolution 2.0, scheduled for release in November 2002, continues Runtime Revolution’s mission to deliver the best in easy, rapid, application development. Version 2.0 builds on Revolution’s proven ease and power, bringing these major new features to Revolution’s developer community:
- Brand new, Jaguar-friendly user interface
- Transcript Cookbook explaining a range of useful routines
- Unicode text entry and text manipulation
- Spreadsheet/table text fields
- New XML library for creating and parsing XML documents
- New SOAP support
- New report printing engine
- All-new integrated debugger including scripting support
- Improved database access on all platforms
- Windows of any size and shape on all platforms
- Fully Perl-compatible regular expressions
- MIDI music file creation and playing
- New sound-recording architecture
Pricing for the new Revolution starts at US$299 for a small-business edition and climbs to US$995 for a professional-level single user. There are student packages available and an evaluation/demonstration version of the program is available online.
What’s new, pussycat?
One of the entrants in the uDevGame 2002 contest is putting its offering under public scrutiny. Feline Entertainment has made its entry, The Belt, a freeware offering available from its Web site.
The Belt is an arcade-style turret game where the object is to blow up the other guy before he gets you. The game is a hybrid program, running on Mac OS Classic, OS X and Windows 98/ME/2000 and XP. And, in a neat twist, it uses Rendezvous as a cross-platform networking technology to enable multiplayer games.
It’s the hope of developer Rocco Bowling, who has also put the source code up for downloading, that his little effort will demonstrate how easy it is to build a cross-platform game on the Mac. From his press release:
Simultaneously developing a cross platform title can be daunting, but The Belt’s source code, also available for download, illuminates the process and shows how easy it can be: the game compiles for both the Mac and Windows platform using a single Metrowerks CodeWarrior project. This helps put to rest any fears Windows developer “switchers” might have about leaving their platform and knowledge behind when they look to addressing the growing Macintosh game market.
Anybody who thinks they can go one better than Rocco’s effort has until Nov. 17 to get their entry into the uDevGame contest.
This news update brought to you by...
4D has just posted a patch for its WebSTAR V server suite which fixes issues with passive FTP connections, SMTP relay authentications and SMTP virus scanning support. The update is available from 4D’s server.
Trinfinity Software has issued a patch for its Seagull Video Player which fixes a flashback issue where the program would show the first frame of a movie at the end of the segment. The update can be downloaded from the company’s Web site.
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