Brand: MacNews

O’Reilly has published an interesting review of Windows XP from a Mac user’s perspective. While author Derrick Story maintains his Mac preference, he concludes that for Mac users required to use Windows — especially Windows 98 — that XP is a large improvement. “If you’re suffering with Windows 98 to accomplish part of your work, I recommend you stop the pain… and seriously consider upgrading.

While Palm’s share of the global PDA market slipped from 50.4 percent in 2000 to 38.6 percent in 2001, the company maintained its dominant number one position in the marketplace, according to a new report from Dataquest. Handspring captured second place once again, nudging its marketshare to 12.6 percent, while Compaq more than doubled its share to 9.8 percent. Overall, PDA shipments in 2001 totaled 13.1 million units, up 18 percent from the previous year.

Free Ruler is a simple Mac OS X ruler for measuring pixels. The software supports the measuring objects with the mouse, displays mouse coordinates, and supports rulers from 120 pixel 2000 pixels in length.

VersionTracker notes the release of Grammarian 2.1.5, Casady & Greene’s interactive grammar checker. This version offers live text-scrolling for all scrolling text fields; support for PageMaker 7, Netscape 6.2 and Idea Keeper; a few bug fixes and more.

The release of QuickTime 6, which has been delayed pending Apple’s desired modifications to the MPEG-4 licensing structure, could be held off for as long as half a year. A c|net article quotes MPEG LA executive Larry Horn as stating the group hopes to finalize the MPEG-4 licensing structure in the next three to five months. Horn also defended the group’s decision to charge a fee to both those who license the MPEG-4 codec and those who broadcast MPEG-4 content. “A use fee is fair.