MOBODOJO

Here’s what Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, has to say about Apple’s upcoming iPhone product:

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them, than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get.”

Oh yeah! There’s no chance in HELL he’d be biased against an Apple product! Surely he’s speaking from his heart and from a stance of logic and a strong sense of fairplay in this, one of the most caring and giving markets in the world. Really, he’s just being honest. As responsible consumers, we should just take Steve’s word and simply ignore the iPhone. Mr. Job’s has just been playing us for saps all along. Only Microsoft has had our best interests at heart all this time. Thanks Steve! Too bad you have the same name as that shady Jobs character!!

If you work with code of any kind on your Mac you’ve likely heard of Smultron. If you haven’t and you’ve paid for an advanced text editor (i.e., TextMate) then you need to be let in on something… Smultron. First off, this is a SourceForge project, so its open source. Second, the developer has dedicated a lot of time to improving on the application, and it really shows in 3.0.

Smultron is a very straightforward editor, but under the hood lie a wide range of features. It comes with a load of syntax highlight definitions and scads of text manipulation tools. While its no BBEdit, it does do most everything a coder would need to get work done. It also sports a nice Snippet feature, and the new 3.x line has a scalable document dock which I hope means previews in the near future.

There are three tools I use to make Church of Tyler work and one of them is Smultron. The others are CyberDuck FTP and ImageWell. In CyberDuck I can click on Toolbar button to open a document in Smultron, edit it, and click save in Smultron to upload the changes through CyberDuck. My needs are simple Oh, and Smultron is free, though I would suggest a small donation to the project.

Fluid dynamics has never been so cool, and neither has Pong. There have only been so many variations of the classic Pong play mechanics. Sure, games like Breakout and its many iterations have been the one-player successor to Pong, but Pong itself has never seen such a cool update as it does with Plasma Pong.

The amazing aspect of this game, which you can’t see in a still, is that everything is constantly flowing in bursts of color and light. A lot of times you aren’t even sending the ball back with your paddle as much as with a stream of plasma. The two streams of plasma fight for control of the ball, and if caught just right you can make point just as the ball comes off of your opponents paddle.

Oh, and its free for the Mac (yeah, and Windows… whatever). Steve Taylor, you rock, sir!

First, I’ll fess up. I’m a hypocrit. Microsoft delivered a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate the other day and I have installed it. I said not long ago on MoboDojo that I would never touch Vista with any length of pole, 10′ or otherwise. I am glad, however, that I’m a nerd and could not resist installing it moments after the RTM version arrived from Microsoft. If I hadn’t done that I would not have learned the following two things.

A) I would not have discovered how different the release version is from the last beta I tested.

B) I would not have found out how much a clone of Mac OS X the new OS is.

Both A and B together go even further to prove to me that Microsoft is not an innovator and that Apple has been at the forefront of systems design from day one. I am going to be writing a bevy of articles, each one about a single shared element of Vista and Tiger. I do this to show in as comprehensive a way possible that Microsoft does not deserve the attention it gets.

If you want a computer, buy a Mac. If you buy a Vista system, its your mistake.

Ouch! I know. Its a terrible headline, but it looks great in the RSS feed. Anyway, TI has announced they are upgrading their ridiculously old calculator line this fall with the new TI-nspire line. These nifty looking units can likely handle a great deal of complex equations, and if I was good with math I could probably confirm that. There are some kickarse looking features, though, like Page Sorter, a kind of calculator version of Apple’s Expose´feature, and the swappable button plate which offers the old TI-83 model key layout. Sweet, in a gadget kinda way.

Oh, and on the Mac side, while there is a Windows version of the desktop software now, there will be a Mac OS X 10.4.x and up version coming out early next year. Maybe they should higher some more programmers!

Okay, so the news is that Apple has now sold its 100 millionth iPod. I love this headline over at Fark, “Apple has sold its 100 millionth iPod. Microsoft announces Zune is rapidly approaching fifteen units sold.” Maybe now we’ll see a fourth iteration of Microsoft’s DAP marketing plan in action since the last three failed (general support for 3rd party OEMs, PlayForSure initiative, and now Zune). I’m going to guess marketshare increase for Apple’s iPod this holiday season.

If that weren’t enough, Apple finally unveiled the blazingly, shockingly, abominably, ridiculously, intensely fast 8-core Mac Pro, featuring two 4-core Woodcrest Intel Xeon processors running at 2.0, 2.66, and 3.0 GHz. OMG! What a sweet deal that Apple is now offering a free upgrade to a 10-seat copy of Mac OS X Server with the purchase of one of these bad boys! Hel, they’re even offering the Unlimited version for just $349, the same price as the 10-seat version.

Oh, wait. They’re not offering that in the US or Canada. Ooops.

If you love Battlestar Galactica (its ok to love both the new series and the original), you love games, and you are on a Mac, then you’re gonna love Beyond The Red Line. Based on the classic Freespace 2 engine, this free title brings BSG to your Mac in grand style. How much will it cost you? Nothing! That’s right. Its free, as in NO MONEY. These guys are fantastic.

Check out the site here. Its very cool. You may note that there is only one Mac mirror, at least last time I looked. The site does offer a BitTorrent version, but not many people were latching on when I fetched it. With that said, you can download a copy direct from us here. Its a big file, so be prepared for a wait.