Well, that was an interesting keynote. While it didn’t carry the sheer shock value of the iPhone announcement or the thrill of last year’s keynote, there were some extremely surprising announcements which will affect gamers, Mac users and PC users.
Games for Mac
In an unexpected move, Steve Jobs announced that EA Games was bringing several new titles to OS X based systems under the brand ‘EA Mac’. These titles include Command and Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoneix, Need for Speed Carbon, Madden NFL 2008 and Tiger Woods PGA 2008.
While these are not Grade A quality titles, they are some of the biggest current and forthcoming titles in the EA roster. The introduction of new versions of Madden and Tiger Woods will hopefully mean that more EA titles will be launched on Mac and Windows systems simultaneously.
iD Software’s Tech 5 Engine Demoed
For years, iD have been known for making great shooters with some of the most up to date graphics. These include the Doom, Quake and Wolfstein series, and a number of other games have been built using their Quake series of game engines, including Half-Life and Call of Duty.
Tech 5, which is the latest of iD’s engines, and direct competition to to Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, looks stunning. It is also able to run on Windows and Mac based PCs, Xbox 360 and PS3. One of the key features of Tech 5 is that it does away with file limits for developers, which means that a great number of much higher definition textures can be displayed at any more time.
A screenshot is posted below and further details are due to be revealed at the E3 event in a few weeks time. I’ll attempt to upload a video of the demo when I can find one.
Leopard Details
The news that the Mac Geeks have been waiting for.
Despite being nearly silent on the latest incarnation of OS X for some time, Apple has finally broken it’s silence. OS X Leopard contains more then 300 new features. Amongst some of the most anticipated and useful are:
- A redesign of Finder, which visually integrates with iTunes 7 and Safari 3. It also uses the Coverflow feature from iTunes.
- Full integration of Boot Camp, allowing users to boot Windows XP, Vista or OS X on any Intel based Apple system. Drivers are included as standard.
- A redesign of the OS X desktop, with the removal of the traditional blue background and improved menu bar and dock. Icons can now be ’stacked’ on the dock for easy access.
- Revamped and improved versions of Mail, iCal, PhotoBooth, DVD Player, Frontrow and Automater.
OS X Leopard is due for release in October. For full details, see Apple’s OS X Leopard page.
Safari 3 Beta for Windows
And one more thing… (as Steve puts it), Safari, Apple’s home grown browser, is now available for Windows XP and Vista. You can download the Beta version here, and you can expect the final release in October, along with Leopard.
New features include the ability to drag and drop tabs, shift them to a new window, updated visual appearance and much much better HTML and Java handling.
I’ve been playing with both the Mac and Windows versions for a couple of hours now, and I’m pretty impressed by both versions. It defiantly seems to perform better then Firefox, Opera or IE, despite having a few bugs. The only thing stopping me from switching it to my default browser on my PC is the fact that it doesn’t like WordPress’s editing tools.
