The home of Mac info for New Zealanders, mac-nz serves daily Mac, iPhone and related news from the world of Apple Inc.
Half-Life 2 & virtualisation
Thursday, 27 May 2010
Half-Life 2 for Mac on Steam: Valve Software has just announced its revolutionary shooter Half-Life 2 will be coming to Steam for Mac later today… to promote it, they’ve released this incredible Half-Life 2 themed riff on Apple’s own seminal 1984 advertisement (pic), with City 17 resistant fighter Alyx flinging the series’ iconic crowbar through the televised face of the Big-Brother-like Walter Breen.
The Steam release marks the first time that the game has been playable under OS X for the last six years. At this point, the game is a little long-in-the-tooth, and Valve has released much better games like Portal and Left 4 Dead II since then, this is a great opportunity to play a classic.
VMware Fusion gets major speed boost with 3.1 update: The free update is available now to all Fusion 3.x users, and promises big improvements, especially in 2D and 3D graphics. According to VMware's director of personal desktop products, this update is all about speed.
Overall virtual machine performance in Fusion 3.1 is up 35 percent, according to WorldBench 6 results. 2D graphics performance is almost four times faster than 3.0, and operations like application launching as well as VM suspend and resume are also faster. If you have higher-end hardware, Fusion VMs can now take advantage of up to 8 processor cores for added performance, and virtual disks can also be sized up to 2TB if needed.
Apple 'saddened' by Foxconn situation: Apple Inc said it was saddened by a recent spate of apparent suicides at Foxconn, one of its key production partners, and would continue ongoing inspections of all facilities where its products are made.
"We are saddened and upset by the recent suicides at Foxconn," the maker of iPhones and iPads said in its first public comment on the string of deaths at Foxconn's southern China production complex. Reuters has more.
Apple Operating Systems account for 6.8% of European internet traffic: In the US, Apple’s slice of the web browsing pie sits restlessly at around ten per cent. Apple’s operating systems are gobbling up more and more pageviews every day in Europe – according to AT Internet, Apple’s marketshare is now sitting at around 6.8% in Europe, representing 2.3 points growth since last November. iPhone OS is consuming about 1% of all European website views. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s own marketshare has gone down over the same period… with websites visited by Windows Mobile and Android devices are so insignificant that they can be comfortably lumped into “Other OS” category.
Boot Camp & dev OS10.6.4: Apple has released a Boot Camp Update for latest 13-inch MacBook Pro. The patch applies exclusively to the 13-inch Pro refreshed this year, which has had problems with headphone output, and the Boot Camp Control Panel when selecting the brightness tab. Different downloads are available for 32-bit and 64-bit installations of Windows.
The developer beta of Mac OS X 10.6.4 has been updated with a new build, 10F58. The release comes a week after the last, 10F54, and is said to have grown only 5MB in size to reach 581.3MB. Correspondingly there are said to be virtually no new changes, and no outstanding issues. Slowed evolution could indicate that a public release is due in the near future.
Mac BU at Microsoft moves: As part of the shakeup within Microsoft, the company will be moving its Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) into the company's Business Division. The unit is currently part of Microsoft's Specialized Devices and Applications team, which also contains Embedded Auto, Surface and Hardware divisions.
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