Ogremindes.net » mac

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic — Universal Binary beta Patch 1.0.3d

Ogremindes — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 09:09:15 +0000

Product

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Universal Binary beta Patch 1.0.3d

Platform

MacOSX

Publisher

Aspyr

Rating

★★☆☆☆

Summary

Finally allows this excellent game to be playable on Intel Macs, but horribly glitchy sound and frequent crashes ruin the experience.

Review

Knights of the Old Republic is a superb RPG that is set in the Star Wars universe, long before the six films. Using a sped-up version of the pseudo real-time combat system in Neverwinter Nights, combat is both dynamic and tactical, and with multiple paths to almost all quests the game doesn’t skimp on the RP in the G.

The game was even ported MacOSX. The system requirements were pretty severe at the time, though. And then the Intel Macs came out. Although the new machines were far beyond the stated requirements, Knights of the Old Republic was unplayably slow. A Univeral Binary patch was promised, and after more than a year, the first betas came out.

This version works, for the most part. The sound glitches up a lot and the game crashes a lot, but with lots of saves, it’s playable. So long as it’s running it runs great.

If you already have a copy of Knights of the Old Republic for mac, and want to play it on a new mac, the patch is worthwhile. Otherwise the Windows and XBox versions are much better, if you’ve got the means to run ‘em.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1.0.3d

★★☆☆☆

hReview version 0.3

Cool things you can do on Mac

Ogremindes — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 23:26:11 +0000

This link came up recently on Digg. It covers a few cool (and mostly useful) tricks for MacOSX.

NeoOffice — MacOSX Native OpenOffice.org

Ogremindes — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 09:25:48 +0000

NeoOffice is a version of OpenOffice.org, the powerful open-source MS Office alternative, ported to be native to MacOSX. Unlike OpenOffice, the recently aqua-fied NeoOffice has a nice mac-like interface (unlike OpenOffice.org’s windows-ish one).

It’s only a beta, so stability may be an issue, however NeoOffice looks like it would be a more-than-adequate office suite for MacOSX.

Update: Shortly after I wrote this post I ran into the news of an ‘official’ OpenOffice.org MacOSX native port.

MAMP — Macintosh Apache, MySQL and PHP

Ogremindes — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 09:11:18 +0000

MAMP is the MacOSX equivalent of XAMPlite, the software some people in the class are using to ease PHP work somewhat by removing the need to upload the .php file after every change.

This is because both XAMP and MAMP put a temporary web server on your computer while, allowing you to run .php files from your computer. It also runs MySQL for the more advanced php/database work.

MAMP
XAMP

Sidenote — Note-taking program for MacOSX

Ogremindes — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 23:37:04 +0000

Sidenote is a small app that is normally hidden at the edge of the screen. When the cursor is moved to the appropriate edge it slides out with a simple rich-text-editor, useful for quickly taking notes and such. When you move the cursor away it slides back. It automatically saves and supports multiple note-files.

There are similar web-based services, but Google Notes, for example, isn’t much good without it’s extension, and that is only on Firefox and IE to my knowledge.

Smultron: Version 2.01

Ogremindes — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 02:14:48 +0000

A new version of the Smultron text editor for MacOS 10.4 has been released. The project tools have been made more useful, allowing you to easily switch between projects, save all files in a project and such. The snippets have become less useful to my mind, no longer being handy in the side draw (that is now the sole domain of projects).

Nevertheless, Smultron is still the best free text-editor for web development on MacOSX I’ve seen.

Smultron by Peter Borg