Archive for the 'General' Category

One year ago Steve Jobs introduced the first Intel-based Macintosh and totally changed the rules of the game. Though Boot Camp and Parallels came a few month later, the switch basically meant that from then on PCs and Macs play on the same field. No confuse-a-consumer anymore. The Megahertz Myth was fun, especially when you could drop in things like the Pipeline for ultimate confusion, but it turned off a lot of people. FUD won over RDF, if you know what I mean.

All that is history now, and the Macintosh is growing like never before. “The first 30 years were just the beginning“: RDF wins over FUD now!

But I do have a personal story to add to this:
The incredible 6,150 miles remote debugging session!

My most popular product xScope had a problem running on the new Intel hardware, so I needed access to one of the Intel Developer Transition Kits (DTK) to debug and fix it. xScope is a cooperation of ARTIS and The Iconfactory, so it looked like a waste to me to have a DTK at both, The Iconfactory and ARTIS. My friends over at the factory had a DTK, so we tried to install Apple Remote Desktop on it and give me access over the Internet. I was trying to debug and fix xScope on an Intel Mac located in southern California, from my Vienna home office in the middle of Europe. That is a distance of 6,150 miles (or 9,900 km), additional to the minor facts that the hardware was not finished, and the operating system was not finished.

It worked. Flawlessly. As expected. When Steve Jobs announced the first Intel Macs one year ago, we already had xScope ported to Intel.

The new website is online and I hope not too much is broken. This is a tremendous effort to restart again. I am releasing this website, xScope 1.5, PHPfi 2.0, and Simple List 1.3, all in one. Everything else just would have been to less too late.

The last two years ARTIS was a side business since I was employed full-time somewhere else. I am again full-time working on ARTIS which makes me totally happy. I hope to get up-to-date soon. I know I missed a few things, but I promise to catch up quickly. This mega-release-day is my first attempt to do so.