haniblog

I’ve been happily using the Mail app in OS X for the past few years. Since I moved to Prime Focus I hit a brick wall when it comes to our corporate email and that brick wall has a name: Outlook Web Access. Slow, lumbering and exasperating as with all Microsoft products. What made the situation worse is that Exchange 2003 is unsupported in Snow Leopard (but supported perfectly well on the iPhone!)

I downloaded and installed a trial of Office for Mac to use Entourage and immediately hated the software. Uninstall and eradicate. After loads of searching I found DavMail, an open source solution for Exchange 2003 and Mail. DavMail sits in between Mail.app and the Exchange server and acts as a bridge. The config instructions need to be followed carefully but it works perfectly. And it has full support for Global Address Lists and iCal events as well.

According to John Nack, Photoshop’s Principal Product Manager, all Adobe CS5 applications will be fully 64-bit on OSX! There will not doubt be tons of new features but I’m very impressed with what will go into Photoshop as you can see from this technology demo:

And Adobe will finally kill their incredibly hostile installers and use Apple’s robust PKG format. To add icing on the cake, the licensing errors that many people faced is due for a change as well. With CS5, product licensing will not stop the application from launching and will display a serial number re-entry interface.

The product suite is slated to be released in April 2010.

I was a little bit disoriented with Quicktime X, to be honest. What, no export preferences? Only Sharing to iTunes? The UI looks very nice and the promise of GPU-accelerated playback is theoretically good, but what about 1080p MKV files playing natively? Quicktime X doesn’t recognise anything besides MP4 or iTunes’ M4V files. Perian was a constant presence in Leopard but a second-tier citizen with 10.6. Until now!

Thanks to the info in this thread on the cocoa forge board and the latest version of Perian, this utility will let Quicktime X recognise and play .mkv files. Front Row will happily play AVI files (as long as you have Flip4Mac installed) and SD MKV files but not 720p or 1080 movies unfortunately.

Of course, there’s always Plex which plays all movie codecs flawlessly without the need for Perian.