Project Ghost (Jelindo) Mac OS

The previous version of the Mac operating system is macOS 10.15 'Catalina'.Useful guides to install this version of macOS on a PC include: Install macOS Catalina on Supported PCs - A detailed guide to install macOS Catalina on some PCs from the well regarded tonymacx86 using the site's own Unibeast and MultiBeast software. The site also has instructions to cleanup kexts after installation, how. Love the concept! Reminds me of an old flash game Graphics are minimal but consistent; I really like the sounds and music. I liked that your ghost becomes fatter platforms, haha. Wished there was a way to reset your current life without resetting the entire level. I also wish the ghost didn't disappear so fast.

• After creating the image, immediately run the image verify option in Ghost, to ensure the image has no errors. If it has errors at this point, the source PC (and/or the destination PC if you are saving directly to a network share) may have bad RAM, so run a RAM tester.
• Deploy and manage any desktop operating system, anywhere FOG Project can capture, deploy, and manage Windows, Mac OSX, and various Linux distributions. Computers can be securely managed with FOG Project remotely, from anywhere in the world. requires a public facing FOG Server.

October is a pretty cool month because not only do the days get dark faster, but Halloween is just around the corner. If you enjoy finding new ways to trick your friends or spook someone out, this article has a fun and unique idea for you! Whether you're already tech savvy or a beginner at coding, you might find it enjoyable to build an app to spook someone out this year!

Using Python, GPT-3, and Twilio WhatsApp API, you have the chance to control a ghost writer and have them write a story directly onto your computer screen. No witch magic involved, just Twilio magic!

Tutorial Requirements

• Python 3.6 or newer. If your operating system does not provide a Python interpreter, you can go to python.org to download an installer.
• An OpenAI API key. Request beta access here.
• A free or paid Twilio account. If you are new to Twilio get your free account now! (If you sign up through this link, Twilio will give you $10 credit when you upgrade.)
• ngrok, a handy utility to connect the development version of our Python application running on your system to a public URL that Twilio can connect to. This is necessary for the development version of the application because your computer is likely behind a router or firewall, so it isn't directly reachable on the Internet. You can also choose to automate ngrok as shown in this article.

Configuration

Since we will be installing some Python packages for this project, we will need to make a new project directory and a virtual environment.

If you are using a Unix or Mac OS system, open a terminal and enter the following commands:

Project Ghost (jelindo) Mac Os Update

For those of you following the tutorial on Windows, enter the following commands in a command prompt window:

The last command uses pip, the Python package installer, to install the four packages that we are going to use in this project, which are:

• The OpenAI Python client library, to send requests to the OpenAI GPT-3 engine.
• The Twilio Python Helper library, to work with SMS messages.
• The Flask framework, to create the web application.
• The python-dotenv package, to read a configuration file.

Set the OpenAI API Key

As mentioned above, this project requires an API key from OpenAI. During the time of this article, the only way to obtain the API key is by being accepted into their private beta program.

If you have access to the Beta page, the API key can be found in the Authentication tab in the Documentation.

The Python application will need to have access to this key, so we are going to create a .env file where the API key will be safely stored. The application we write will be able to import the key as an environment variable later.

Create a .env file in your project's root directory (note the leading dot) and enter the following line of text, being sure to replace with your actual key:

Make sure that the OPENAI_KEY is safe and that you do not expose the .env file in a public location.

Build your scary story generator app

Seriously, who isn't curious to read or hear about a suspenseful and spooky story? Plus, the fun part is tricking someone into thinking that a ghost wrote it, and not just a couple lines of code on a computer!

The OpenAI playground allows users to explore GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3), a highly advanced language model that is capable of generating written text that sounds like an actual human wrote it. Your life mac os. This powerful model can also read a user's input and learn about the context of the prompt to determine how it should generate a response.

In this project, we will be feeding the GPT-3 engine with a sentence to create a full scary story that will keep running on your WhatsApp device.

Start your scary story

Inside of the spookystory-whatsapp directory, create a file named story.py. This file is where you will store the story prompt as well as the functions to generate text using OpenAI's GPT-3 engine.

Copy and paste the following code to prepare the story.py file:

The highlighted line in the code block above is where you'll add your story prompt, so it's time to get the creative juices flowing and channel your imagination. If you're having a writer's block, you can look up some ideas for scary stories and take a sentence prompt.

I decided to use this as my prompt in order to make the story family friendly:

If you'd like, feel free to replace the session_prompt with the one provided above.

Teach your ghost writer how to write

Now that the file has been created, you need to define the functions and teach the ghost writer (OpenAI's GPT-3 engine) how to process this information. Since the goal of this app is to write a story, the app needs to keep track of what's happening in the story and how to add to it appropriately.

Create a function named write_story() under the session_prompt variable. This function is responsible for generating the next line of the story and receives the current state of the story, session_story, as a parameter. If session_story doesn't exist yet, then the prompt you created will be assigned to prompt_text. Otherwise, the ongoing story generated by the OpenAI engine will be assigned to prompt_text.

Circled. mac os. Copy and paste the following code below the session_prompt variable:

After setting the value for prompt_text, this function calls the openai.Completion.create() method on the OpenAI client and passes to it a series of arguments that customize the engine's response, including the new prompt. Since the ghost writer will tell the story over WhatsApp text messages, the max_tokens variable, which stands for either a word or punctuation mark, was set to 96. You can read more about the GPT-3 customization options in the Ultimate Guide to OpenAI-GPT3 Language Model or explore the OpenAI Playground for yourself.

Teach the ghost writer to remember what happens in the story

A ghost writer is like any writer, they need to comprehend what's going on in the story and how to continue. A function named append_to_story is defined to help solve this problem. This function checks if anything has been written in the story yet. If not, it concatenates the next part of the generated story onto the existing story. Copy and paste the following code below the write_story function:

Control when the ghost writer adds to the story

As we have seen in the functions defined above, we're returning a string output, but it won't be returned to the terminal window. Since this is a tutorial to create a WhatsApp story generating bot, we will need to use a webhook (web callback) to allow real-time data to be delivered to other applications and write to a text file named spookystory.txt.

Create a new Python file in the project's root directory named app.py. This file will set up a Flask session that will reload and reflect any changes that are made in the code.

Copy and paste the following code to your app.py file:

The Flask framework allows us to use configuration values to store information specific to a user. In this case, a session is implemented so that the user can send messages to the ghost writer app which controls when the next part of the story is written. Thus, app.config['SECRET_KEY'] is a dictionary object used to encrypt an individual's session.

Any random string can replace 'top-secret!' and if for some reason, you don't like where the story is going or want to simply change the prompt, you can change the secret key value and clear the contents of the spookystory.txt file.

Inside of the /bot webhook, various functions are called upon in order to return the proper string format that TwiML requires to send as a text message over WhatsApp. request.values is a special object from Flask that parses incoming data and exposes it in a convenient dictionary format. We can assign the value of the object's Body key to a variable called incoming_msg to keep track of the user's input and use it to determine when to continue or end the story.

If it's the beginning of the story, the operating system checks if the spookystory.txt file is empty or not. If it's empty, we write in the exact string created for session_prompt in story.py. Otherwise, the ghost writer will continue to append to the story and write everything to the text file until the user signals it to stop. By texting 'the end' to the WhatsApp number, the ghost writer bot will stop writing the story, close the file, and return the WhatsApp message of 'To be continued…?' for some ominous and suspenseful effect. That is, until you proceed to message it again..

The session_story, of course, is a variable that takes the session's story and passes it to the write_story() and append_to_story() functions created in the story.py file. Every time Flask updates the session_story variable, the same newline is added to the spookystory.txt file. This updates in real time, which adds a cool effect because you can control when to deceive the eyes of the audience when they observe the text file on the screen.

Configure Twilio WhatsApp

It's time to connect the /bot webhook to the Twilio WhatsApp Sandbox. If you haven't already, log onto the Twilio Dashboard to view your Programmable Messaging dashboard. There is a section on the page that says 'Building with WhatsApp? Get started here'. Click on the link to learn how to set up your sandbox.

The sandbox is provided by Twilio, however, once you complete your app, you can request production access for your Twilio phone number.

Use your smartphone to send a WhatsApp message with the requested phrase to your assigned WhatsApp number. If you are successful, you should receive a reply as shown below.

Set up a webhook with Twilio

Open your terminal window and navigate to the 'spookystory-whatsapp' project directory if you are not already there. Start ngrok with the following command to enable the Flask service publicly over the Internet:

Ngrok is a great tool because it allows you to create a temporary public domain that redirects HTTP requests to our local port 5000.

Your ngrok terminal will now look like the picture above. As you can see, there are URLs in the 'Forwarding' section. These are public URLs that ngrok uses to redirect requests into our flask server.

Copy the URL starting with https://, then return to the Twilio Console and navigate to the Programmable Messaging dashboard. Look at the sidebar for Programmable Messaging to find WhatsApp Sandbox Settingsunder the Settings option. This is where we tell Twilio to send incoming message notifications to this URL.

Paste the URL copied from the ngrok session into the 'WHEN A MESSAGE COMES IN' field and append /bot, since that is our endpoint. Here is my example for reference:

The URL from ngrok is 'https://ad7e4814affe.ngrok.io/bot' but again, yours will be different.

Before you click on the 'Save' button at the very bottom of the page, make sure that the request method is set to HTTP POST.

Awesome - it's time to test things out!

Run the scary story WhatsApp app

We've nearly reached the end of the tutorial. If you need to check your code, here's my GitHub repo.

While one tab on your terminal is actively running the ngrok session, open another tab in the terminal. Rerun the command source venv/bin/activate to activate the virtual environment then start your app with the command python app.py.

This should be the following output once the Flask app has been booted up:

Commence a night of spooky stories… if you dare! Go ahead and type anything in your WhatsApp enabled mobile device and text your WhatsApp number. Remember that you have to keep texting it in order for the ghost to write. You control when and where to stop. If you have someone else in the room with you, simply pretend you are surprised just like them but secretly you're the one texting the ghost writer to keep going!

Keep in mind that you can't control what your ghost writer decides to write so it's up to you whether you want to read what they have to say.

If you're looking for a way to trick someone into thinking a ghost wrote this story on their own right in front of their eyes, this may be it! Check out a cropped version of the story generating demo. Here's a copy of the story as seen in the demo below, if you are curious to see just how spooky OpenAI GPT-3 can be.

Conclusion: Building a Scary Story Generating App

Congratulations on bringing this ghost writer to… well it's not life, but I'm sure the ghost is happy to be helping you write a story! Although this is a fun project to write a spooky story and impress people with what code is capable of doing, this app can even inspire you to write your own scary stories. Who knows, this new writing partner can help you write the next best-selling thriller or horror movie idea!

This fun WhatsApp story generating tutorial is just one of the many fun projects you can do using Twilio API, Open AI GPT-3, and of course, Python and Flask tools. Perhaps you can think of other ways to trick your friends using the magic of Twilio and code!

What's next for OpenAI GPT-3 projects?

If you're dying to build more, try out these ideas:

Let me know if you used any Twilio APIs or coding magic to trick your friends this Halloween by reaching out to me over email!

Diane Phan is a Developer on the Developer Voices team. She loves to help beginner programmers get started on creative projects that involve fun pop culture references. She can be reached at dphan [at] twilio.com or LinkedIn.

Picking on something that doesn't exist anymore is not a whole lot of fun when you get right down to it. There's no opportunity for an exchange of viewpoints escalating to a frank discussion (to borrow from the lexicon of diplomacy). Instead, the Search for the Historical Apple is like digging a deep well, and then when you hit water, you look down and see your own reflection, tinted Bondi Blue. With that in mind, Mac.Ars looks at the Apple That Was And Is No More, the Apple of a thousand cool technologies and projects that barely saw the light of day, the Apple that NeXT took over and reinvigorated. Why did Apple (the first) die, while Apple (the second) thrives? We'll also have a premature Apple Expo Paris wrap-up (it ends this Sunday).

If video killed the radio star, who killed Apple Computer?

A former Director of Marketing (among other things) for Apple, Michael Mace, has posted 'Who Killed Apple Computer', a reflection on his time working for Apple between 1987 and 1997. His essay is not intended as a critique of Apple's current direction or strategy, but is rather meant as a reflection of Apple's internal culture during the time he was there and why it didn't see the kind of success it hoped for. What makes it a particularly interesting topic at this point is that Apple is in a period of resurgence right now. The Dual 2.0 GHz G5 towers are shipping in volume (including 1,100 of them to Virginia Tech), the entire PowerBook line just got a long-overdue facelift, and the next revision of OS X, Panther, is due for release in the next three months. This parallels where Apple was at the close of the 80s/beginning of the 90s -- cool products and technologies either here or close to arrival. Yet Apple squandered its many advantages and nearly became totally irrelevant a scant half-decade later. What happened?

I did it. I killed Apple Computer.

Of course you helped too, if you worked there. Sure, we were assisted by a number of feckless executives, and by venal behavior at Microsoft. But more than anything else, Apple -- the old Apple we knew and loved, the one we're celebrating here -- was destroyed by its own diseased and dysfunctional culture. By the time Steve Jobs returned to the scene, very little could be saved. I salute him for what he accomplished; I don't think anyone else on this Earth could have pulled it off. And maybe the new Apple he's building will someday have the same authority and heft as the old one. But let's not lose sight of the fact that he had to burn the old company to the ground in order to salvage something viable out of it.

Ouch. How was the grisly deed accomplished? By a number of means, chief of which seems to have been a passive-aggressive stubborn refusal to play nice with one another:

It's easy to blame all these failures on the company's senior execs, but frankly, I don't think they were powerful enough to inflict damage this comprehensive. Far too often, the problem was that we didn't work together toward common goals. This was partly due to the usual politics you get in any large company, but in addition we all believed we were so smart that we were unwilling to compromise and follow the visions of others. Passive resistance was the company's dominant culture. We'd sit in meetings and smile and nod at the plan of the day, then go back to our offices and swear about how stupid that idea was and how we were damned if we'd every cooperate with it.

New buzzwords and super-secret project names (some of which were attached to actual technologies!) flew out of Cupertino at a dizzying pace during that time. The lack of an overarching, compelling, and authoritative vision at Apple as described above kept the majority of them from catching on or even being released. Look at all the technologies that either never saw the light of day, or were quickly snuffed out after release: Pink, Taligent, Kaleida, OpenDoc, Jaguar (the first), Copland, Sybil.. the list goes on.

Some of the readers who have been using Macs or following the product line for some time will no doubt recognize some of these names from the past, much like the half-lit light bulb that goes on when looking through your high school yearbook 15 years after graduation ('Devon Torkel . . . wasn't he that nerdy guy who used to get upset when someone else got to run the projector during health class?'). For those of you who don't recognize these products that emerged stillborn from Apple's birth canal, here's the 411:

• Pink was Apple's first attempt at the operating system of the future. Originally conceived in the late 80s as a possible successor to System 6, Pink was to have been an object-oriented OS running on a microkernel. It was a very forward-looking project, but found itself on the outside looking in as Apple's Operating System of the More Immediate Future, System 7, began growing to Xbox-like proportions. System 7 was a great leap forward for the Mac OS, and as such was quite resource-hungry, leaving little room for Pink. Pink also fell victim to the culture Michael Mace describes, as people were cherry picked off of it and the project itself was marginalized within Apple until . . .
• Taligent came along. Taligent was launched in 1992 as a joint venture between Apple and IBM. The original ideas from Pink were rolled into Taligent, which was also to have been an object-oriented OS. Instead, it became more of an application development framework and was gradually rolled back into IBM between 1996 and 1998, first becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary, and then completely absorbed.
• Kaleida Labs was another joint venture between Apple and IBM, also launched in 1992 'to develop and license an open software standard for multimedia development and playback.'
  Its main accomplishments were fighting over job responsibilities and developing a multimedia programming language (Script-X), according to the obituary that appeared in a November 1995Business Week. Script-X was also to have been the basis for the mysterious Apple set-top boxes that occasionally pop up on ebay to this very day.
• Jaguar (the first) was to have been a new RISC-based PC that would not have had backward compatibility with older Macs. It was based on an new Motorola chip -- the 88110 -- which was eventually used by NeXT, and ran a version of UNIX. In its excellent write-up the original Jaguar, Architosh notes that this too, fell victim to the diseased corporate culture at Apple.
• OpenDoc made it further into the light of day than any other Apple project, with a couple of applications actually being released and adopted by a few brave souls. It was a cross-platform, document-centric programming environment, which attempted to place the document (cart) before the application (horse). IBM and Novell were involved in making it truly cross-platform and portable, but they lost interest in the project for a number of reasons and the barely-breathing husk of a technology was euthanized shortly after Steve Jobs returned to Apple. It saw release as a part of System 7.5, and I actually used the OpenDoc web browser Cyberdog as my default browser for a while. Nisus Software's Nisus Writer word processor also used it.
• Copland. Where to begin? Copland was the Next Big Thing in the early- to mid-1990s. It was the ambitious project to bring a fully-modern, multi-threaded, memory-protected operating system to current Mac hardware while keeping full backward compatibility with System 7. It included Apple's first attempt at themes (including the famous gizmo and high-tech themes, abominations that are probably a large part of the reason Steve Jobs wants everyone's OS X GUI to look identical) and was to have run on PPC 60x-based hardware. An alpha version was shown MacWorld in 1996, but the demo crashed repeatedly, and it never made it out the door. Some of the technologies were gradually incorporated into OS 8 and later releases, but it was the utter failure of Copland that spurred Apple to look for alternatives for its next-generation OS.

There was much to be admired in that list of failed projects in terms of interesting technology, but Apple could never get it together well enough to actually ship one of them. Mace identifies the problem:

Those of us who were managers often failed to insist that our teams work together. Instead of integrating them to cooperate toward a goal, we settled into walled fortresses, protecting our projects and budgets from attack by others. Ideas and initiatives from the outside were rejected as vigorously as your body's immune system rejects a germ.

We told ourselves that our core competency was designing user interfaces, but we were better at designing t-shirts and org charts. In ten years at Apple I worked in basically three roles, but reported into 12 different VPs.

We all wanted to be chefs. Nobody wanted to be a busboy. Our senior managers lacked the wisdom or the will to call off the game. And so our company fell.

The end result of this is that Apple squandered what advantages it had over alternative computing platforms. One can argue that Apple should have followed the lead of IBM and let other companies build less-expensive clones. The competition may very well have driven prices down and increased the market share of System 6 and System 7. Given the dark picture of the culture at Apple painted by Mace, it is difficult to believe that it would have made much difference.

How does the Apple of today differ from the Ghost of Apple Past? The largest difference is Apple's single-minded focus. Despite branching out into different markets (e.g., enterprise with Xserve, education with the iBook and eMac, and consumer electronics with the iPod), all of the products are designed to work closely with one another and are tightly integrated into OS X. In addition, there are far fewer of them than there were 10 years ago. Let's compare the product lines from then and now. In 1993 you could choose from the following mind-bending, hydra-like selection of Apple product (all of which were shipping during that year):

• Centris 610, Centris 650, Centris 660av
• Mac LC III, LC 520, LC III+, LC 475
• Macintosh IIci, Macintosh IIvx
• Mac Classic II, Color Classic II
• Quadra 800, Quadra 840av, Quadra 660av, Quadra 605, Quadra 610, Quadra 950
• Performa 405, Performa 430, Performa 450, Performa 410, Performa 475, Performa 460, Performa 550,
• Macintosh TV (!)
• WGS 60, WGS 80, WGS 95
• PowerBook 145, PowerBook 145B, PowerBook 165, PowerBook 165c, PowerBook 180
• PowerBook Duo 250, PowerBook Duo 270, PowerBook Duo 270c

Contrast that dizzying array of Quadras, Centrises, Performas, and Classics with the current line-up:

Project Ghost (jelindo) Mac Os X

• iMac 15', 17'
• iBook 12', 14'
• PowerBook 12', 15', 17'
• eMac
• PowerMacintosh G4, G5
• Xserve

Apple may have been killed in the 1990s by the screwed-up, me-first culture that pervaded the company combined with a stunning lack of focus and commitment to external partnerships. Of course, some of the partners back then left much to be desired -- not many companies in the tech sector saw the benefit of cooperation, preferring to work towards dominating the market themselves (which was only successful for one of them). Perhaps Steve Jobs had a late-night visit from the ghost of Michael Spindler a few years ago. Whatever the reason -- and hopefully an ability to learn from the past is a large part of it -- Apple is a much more focused company, eyeing markets and technologies carefully, and choosing to go after only those in which it believes it can successfully compete. And they still have cool nicknames.

Early Apple Expo Paris wrap-up

Faced with the choice of waiting for the 2003 Apple Expo Paris to wrap up and writing about it and meeting the deadline for Mac.Ars, I shrewdly have elected to have my cake and eat it too. Thus, my somewhat premature take on the goings-on of Steve and the Aqua Blue Crew in Paris. Once upon a doll story mac os.

First of all, new PowerBooks. Finally. As I noted in my news write-up on them, overall they are a solid update with one caveat: no L3 cache. What happened to it? The previous incarnation of the 15' and 17' PowerBooks both had it. Perhaps the 7455, used in the previous 15' and 17' PBs couldn't be clocked up faster, and the fabled 7457 still isn't ready. A processor family such as the 74xx with its addled FSB benefits greatly from L3 cache which helps keep the CPU saturated. At least they bumped the L2 cache on all the lines up to 512K.

We told ourselves that our core competency was designing user interfaces, but we were better at designing t-shirts and org charts. In ten years at Apple I worked in basically three roles, but reported into 12 different VPs.

We all wanted to be chefs. Nobody wanted to be a busboy. Our senior managers lacked the wisdom or the will to call off the game. And so our company fell.

The end result of this is that Apple squandered what advantages it had over alternative computing platforms. One can argue that Apple should have followed the lead of IBM and let other companies build less-expensive clones. The competition may very well have driven prices down and increased the market share of System 6 and System 7. Given the dark picture of the culture at Apple painted by Mace, it is difficult to believe that it would have made much difference.

How does the Apple of today differ from the Ghost of Apple Past? The largest difference is Apple's single-minded focus. Despite branching out into different markets (e.g., enterprise with Xserve, education with the iBook and eMac, and consumer electronics with the iPod), all of the products are designed to work closely with one another and are tightly integrated into OS X. In addition, there are far fewer of them than there were 10 years ago. Let's compare the product lines from then and now. In 1993 you could choose from the following mind-bending, hydra-like selection of Apple product (all of which were shipping during that year):

• Centris 610, Centris 650, Centris 660av
• Mac LC III, LC 520, LC III+, LC 475
• Macintosh IIci, Macintosh IIvx
• Mac Classic II, Color Classic II
• Quadra 800, Quadra 840av, Quadra 660av, Quadra 605, Quadra 610, Quadra 950
• Performa 405, Performa 430, Performa 450, Performa 410, Performa 475, Performa 460, Performa 550,
• Macintosh TV (!)
• WGS 60, WGS 80, WGS 95
• PowerBook 145, PowerBook 145B, PowerBook 165, PowerBook 165c, PowerBook 180
• PowerBook Duo 250, PowerBook Duo 270, PowerBook Duo 270c

Contrast that dizzying array of Quadras, Centrises, Performas, and Classics with the current line-up:

Project Ghost (jelindo) Mac Os X

• iMac 15', 17'
• iBook 12', 14'
• PowerBook 12', 15', 17'
• eMac
• PowerMacintosh G4, G5
• Xserve

Apple may have been killed in the 1990s by the screwed-up, me-first culture that pervaded the company combined with a stunning lack of focus and commitment to external partnerships. Of course, some of the partners back then left much to be desired -- not many companies in the tech sector saw the benefit of cooperation, preferring to work towards dominating the market themselves (which was only successful for one of them). Perhaps Steve Jobs had a late-night visit from the ghost of Michael Spindler a few years ago. Whatever the reason -- and hopefully an ability to learn from the past is a large part of it -- Apple is a much more focused company, eyeing markets and technologies carefully, and choosing to go after only those in which it believes it can successfully compete. And they still have cool nicknames.

Early Apple Expo Paris wrap-up

Faced with the choice of waiting for the 2003 Apple Expo Paris to wrap up and writing about it and meeting the deadline for Mac.Ars, I shrewdly have elected to have my cake and eat it too. Thus, my somewhat premature take on the goings-on of Steve and the Aqua Blue Crew in Paris. Once upon a doll story mac os.

First of all, new PowerBooks. Finally. As I noted in my news write-up on them, overall they are a solid update with one caveat: no L3 cache. What happened to it? The previous incarnation of the 15' and 17' PowerBooks both had it. Perhaps the 7455, used in the previous 15' and 17' PBs couldn't be clocked up faster, and the fabled 7457 still isn't ready. A processor family such as the 74xx with its addled FSB benefits greatly from L3 cache which helps keep the CPU saturated. At least they bumped the L2 cache on all the lines up to 512K.

It was also heartening to hear Steve Jobs reaffirm Apple's (and thus IBM's) commitment to ship a 3 GHz G5 by the end of next summer. As I have said before, it is highly unusual for Apple to give such insight into product plans, especially committing to certain speeds in a specific timeframe. Doing so signals to the market that Apple will be competitive with the CPUs powering its high-end line for some time. It invites speculation as to the timing of product refreshes on the G5 line. Apple generally goes around 6 months between speed bumps (the recent PowerBook drought being the exception), so there should be one iteration of the G5 between now and the 3 GHz models (MacWorld San Francisco anybody?). This Apple-IBM partnership will definitely bear more fruit than Kaleida and Taligent.

Apple also introduced its new Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, both of which have a 30-foot range and 128-bit encryption. They're white, which I don't think matches the G5 too well (perhaps I need a visit from Queer Eye for the Mac Guy). The mouse still is basically one big button which is aesthetically very cool, but kind of impractical in an OS that has excellent contextual menu support.

Aside from the new hardware, there have been a few software announcements, although nothing of the magnitude of Quark 6 a couple of months ago. Quickly, there are inTouch and RemoteTunes from Ovolab, previews of the Cumulus digital asset management tools from Canto, and Piranesi for OS X, a 3-D painting application for producing hand-drawn effects on 3-D models.

&c.

MacWorld UK has a brief write-up on a conversation with Apple SVP of Hardware Engineering Jon Rubinstein. While repeating the Apple company mantra of 'it is not Apple's policy to comment on unannounced products,' he nonetheless gave some insight into the possibility of a G5 PowerBook. Getting the G5 into a PowerBook enclosure is essentially 'an issue of good, solid engineering.' The current line of G5s is strictly for desktop machines. Given the incredible amount of thought put into cooling the PowerMac G5, I fear that using a PowerBook G5 at this time would cause my pants to smoulder, leaving third-degree burns on my leg. Ok, so maybe it wouldn't be as hot as a Rev. A 12' PowerBook, but a cooler-running version will be necessary for the Apple professional laptop line to transition away from the Motorola 74xx. Given the fact that he was willing to acknowledge the possibility of this happening, it's easy to conclude that Apple is indeed working on getting the PPC 970 into thin aluminum enclosures. It is also useful to note that it was once thought impractical to have a portable running a G4.

If you're looking for some further education about the Apple CPU line-up, check out a couple of threads in Macintoshian Achaia. First is the Official 2nd Perpetual 970 and G5 Architecture thread. Also check out the G3 and G4 processors and news thread. There are some really good insight in both of these threads, thanks to the PPC CPU experts that post regularly there.

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That's all for Mac.Ars this week. Thanks again for the feedback and column ideas.

Past editions are listed here.

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