Kev's Development Toolbox

Microsoft have demo’d their soon to be released external HD-DVD drive for the XBox360 at the DVD Forum conference in Las Vegas this week.

The XBox360 does not ship with a next-gen DVD drive as standard as it was released prior to the Bluray and HD-DVD formats being finalized and manufacturers having drives available. Sony’s upcoming PS3 in November will ship with an internal Bluray next-gen hidef DVD drive as standard in both models. To keep up with the Joneses, Microsoft will be selling their hidef DVD drive as an external optional add-on – no hints at the prices yet. This decision may hurt Microsoft in the short term, since new games will not immediately be available that take advantage of the huge amount of storage available, whereas new PS3 games will be using this feature from day 1.

Apple have announced that the next Mac OS X release, Leopard, will come bundled with Ruby on Rails. This is a surprising acknowledgement of RoR’s success, and this will defintely bring RoR further into the mainstream.

This week at the Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, Jobs was laying heavily into Microsoft and their long awaited XP replacement, Windows Vista. The jokes kept coming, with huge billboard apps showing a large ‘X’ on a disk, and above it read ‘Redmond, we have a problem’, ‘Redmond, start your photocopiers’, ‘Mac OS X Leopard: Introducing Vista 2.0’, and ‘Hasta la vista, Vista’.

Major annoucements at the conference: Mac OS X Leopard will start shipping in Spring next year – news on the new feature list is slim – Jobs commented ‘We don’t want our friends to start their photocopiers any sooner than they have to’, so it sounds like they’re holding back for a while until Microsoft get’s Vista’s features finalized. More info here.

Also, big news in Apple hardware – the first Intel based Mac desktop is now available, the Mac Pro. The new machine is based on two Intel dual-core Xeon chips in a shiny metal case, similar in looks to the Mac G5 that came before it. Prices start at $2,199 for a pair of 2.0GHz chips and includes 1GB RAM, an Nvidia GeForce 7300GT video card, a 250GB HDD and a SuperDrive.

This looks like a beast of a machine – check out the latest info on the Apple site here.

For Mac users who need to run the occasional Windows app, you’ve got a couple of options now. Wine has long been available for Linux users to run some Windows apps on top of a Windows API compatibility layer – CodeWeavers have taken this and produced a commerical version called CrossOver, and CrossOver Mac for Mac OS X, which offers support for running Windows MS Office plus some other apps. It’s not shipping yet, but when it does it will be priced at $59.95 which is a good price if you desperately need MS Office on your Mac.

The other options offer fuller support since they allow you to run Windows directly on your Mac – BootCamp from Apple allows you to dual boot your Intel based Mac to either Mac OS X or XP. The other option which is interesting is Parallels, which is Vitualization software (like VMWare) and allows you to install and run XP as a guest OS ontop of a currently running Intel-based Mac OS X machine.

Reghardware.co.uk have a lengthy article covering both BootCamp and Parallels, and is worth a read if you’re considering these options.