BBEdit, Unreal Tournament, Dolby goes public and Camino on the comeback trail

Posted on 30 Mar 2004 at 13:17

The de facto standard for Web coders everywhere (or at least those sensible enough to use a Mac) has received its latest update.

BBEdit 7.1.3 includes a good number of fixes and a couple of changes and is available from www.barebones.com/support.

MacSoft has started to ship the Mac version of Unreal Tournament 2004, barely two weeks after the PC version hit shop shelves. The ultimate multiplayer shooter has more than double the content with 'massive' additions like land, air, and space vehicles, an arsenal of new weaponry (including mines, rocket-propelled grenades and stationary gun turrets), two new game modes, more than 95 arenas and battlefields, and the return of the mighty Skaarj race.

Meanwhile, leading Mac game developer Aspyr has announced that Command and Conquer Generals should be upon us very soon, closely followed by 007 Nightfire, Call of Duty and Space Colony. The company recently began shipping Lord of the Rings: the Return of the King. It has also begun work on the Mac version of the acclaimed Battlefield 1942.

Ray Dolby, the founder of the eponymous noise-reduction technology, is preparing to sell off part of the company. The IPO (initial public offering), expected later this year, should be worth about half a billion dollars to the 71 year old.

In an interview with SFGate.com, Dolby describes how the idea of eliminating hiss from tape recordings by separating out the loud and soft parts of a sound track came to him whilist he was travelling around India in 1963. Dolby has a since branched out into many areas of audio technology, including film and surround sound, and is behind the AAC technology used by Apple's iTunes Music Store.

Finally, the 'forgotten' browser for OS X is on the comeback trail. In the days when Safari was but a twinkle in a programmer's eye, Firefox was called Phoenix and only availbale for Windows, and we were all still using Internet Explorer, Camino was seen by many as the alternative (although in those days it was called Chimera). Since hitting version 0.7 it has stagnated, but developer Mike Pinkerton has been slaving away at the bugs and a beta of 0.8 will hopefully be available soon, including the refined interface that can be seen in the latest nightly build.

Author: Simon Aughton