Year: 2002

Research firm Gartner Dataquest projects that 15.5 million PDA units will ship in 2002, an 18 percent increase from 2001 shipments of 13 million units. In 2001, the industry experienced a similar growth rate of 18.3 percent, which fell considerably below the 2000 growth rate of 114 percent. Gartner expects many of the 14 million current Palm users to upgrade to new devices in the second half of 2002, as Palm OS 5 licensees introduce devices with faster ARM-based processors.

Apple today released NVIDIA Driver Update 3.0, a new version of its Mac OS 9 drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards, such as the GeForce2 MX, GeForce3, and GeForce4 MX, as noted by VersionTracker. Changes in the new version are not immediately available. The update is also available through the Software Update control panel.

A new Apple Hot News article chronicles the transformation of Berlin-based artist and illustrator Detlef Surrey, who changed from a pen and pencil sketch artist to an avid Mac user that creates color graphics and Flash animations for a range of magazines, newspapers, Web sites, and advertising agencies using his 1GHz Power Mac G4.

Your Mac Life, an Internet-based Mac radio show, has announced its lineup for tonight’s broadcast (21:00 – 23:00 ET), which will feature Larry Horn, Vice President of Licensing for the MPEG LA group, who will discuss the issues surrounding MPEG-4 licensing, which Apple has accused of holding up the release of QuickTime 6 and other MPEG-4 compatible products. Other special guests will include cartoonists Nitrozac and Snaggy of GeekCulture and Alias|Wavefront President Doug Walker.

Publicspace.net today released JQA 1.0, a new Java development tool for Mac OS X designed to provide comprehensive software quality assurance. The software is designed for use by both developers and managers and promises to improve the overall quality of the Java software’s code and provides an objective assessment of quality improvements over the life of a project. JQA sells for US$49.95 per developer to companies with ten or more employees; smaller organizations may purchase a license for $9.95 per developer.