Brand: MacNews

Microsoft may face a fine as high as US$2.5 billion and be required to drop features in Windows by the European Commission, as part of the EU’s antitrust case against the company. Microsoft maintains that it has not violated European antitrust law.

Charles Haddad’s latest “Byte of the Apple” column for BusinessWeek Online discusses Apple’s need to maintain Mac OS 9, noting that it’s still the default operating system on new Macs. Haddad predicts that it will take another 18 months until Mac OS X hits critical mass, due in part to the need for more applications, as well as persuading users accustomed to the older operating system to make the migration.

Summary.Net has posted Summary Pro 2.0.2, their industrial strength Web log analysis application for Mac OS Classic and Mac OS X. This update offers a host of bug fixes and a few minor new features. A free trial version is also available.

Electric Rain, Inc. has announced the release of Swift 3D Version 2.0, a new version of its Mac and PC software that allows users to design and render 3D scenes to the Macromedia Flash (SWF) file format, as well as Adobe Illustrator, EPS, and SVG. Improvements have been made in both modeling and rendering, including new extrusion and lathe editors, PostScript font support, targeted cameras and lights, shadow rendering, specular highlights, and up to 50 times faster rendering.

Adobe has posted SVG Viewer 3.0RC1, the latest version of the Web browser plug-in for viewing Adobe’s Scalable Vector Graphics format. The plug-in is available for both Mac OS 8.6/9 and Mac OS X 10.1. Among the features of version 3.0 are more elements, CSS properties, DOM support, and performance improvements.