Data Circle

Apple Discontinues 15” Powerbooks via Forever Geek

The 15” Powerbook range, on one of which this entry is being composed, has now been removed from the online Apple store, although you can still find the product details on the Powerbook section of the Apple web site for the time being. Presumably this is the first step in Apple’s deprecation of the old PowerPC range of machines as it moves towards placing Intel chips within all of its products.

I’ve yet to figure out what’s so special about Newsvine, but if anyone wants an invitation to use the service I have twenty of them available. Reply with your name and email in the comments if you’d like one.

37signals, the company behind well-known web applications such as Backpack and Basecamp, has just released their latest piece of software Campfire. It’s a little bit like instant messaging, but with a permanent URL for the chat session and a record of everything that is said. There is a list of reasons why Campfire is better than IM on the web site for the software.

Like all of 37signal’s products, Campfire looks slick and polished, though I’m not sure if it’s worth paying $24 a month for the “plus” version (the cheapest one to have SSL encryption).

A new version of Adium, the popular multi-protocol instant messaging software for OS X, has just been released. As mentioned on the Adium blog, the release consists mainly of bug fixes, including MSN and Google Talk bugs that were causing me (and presumably other users as well) a lot of problems. I don’t know if the automatic bug reporting facility helped in fixing these (whenever Adium crashes, you can click a button and have it send debugging information to the developers), but I hope it was of some use.

Found this via BeancounterBlog.com: Open Source Mac, a listing of the best free and open source software for OS X, in various categories from web browsing to sound recording. There’s the obvious and well-known pieces of software such as Firefox and Thunderbird, but also more obscure ones (at least that I haven’t heard of) such as Smultron for HTML editing.

The site still appears to be fairly new and isn’t organised too helpfully at the moment, but I’m sure it will improve in the coming months. One of the sites on my “to create” list (which is rather long) was for open source OS X software, so I guess I’ve been beaten to it, although I’ll probably still put mine up at some point.

WordPress 2.0.1 has been released according to the WordPress developer blog. A total of 114 bugs have been closed, which is a huge number for a minor release of a relatively small piece of software (compared to projects like Gaim).

Unfortunately this now means that I have to go and update the two WordPress 2.0 blogs that I launched in the last week or so, but I’d rather have a regularly updated piece of software with bugs constantly being fixed than sitting on the same codebase for months on end.

K Desktop Environment 3.5.1 Released at KDE Dot News

The latest version of KDE has been announced. You can find out more information from the release notes and the changelog. Being a minor release, most of the changes are either performance improvements or bug fixes, but it’s good to see development on one of the two most popular desktops for X Windows proceeding at a steady and fruitful pace.