Blue Sky On Mars

Thoughts on Building Software Products

Apple switching to Intel

by Kevin Dangoor

According to cnet:

CEO Steve Jobs officially announced on Monday that Apple would gradually shift its Mac line to Intel-based chips over the next two years. The move confirms a timetable first reported by CNET News.com.

My take on Apple for a long time now has been that they fundamentally view themselves as a hardware company. They’re very good at software (since the NeXT acquisition), but the software is really used to drive hardware sales. The shift to Intel processors is probably just a tactical one: they get more bang for the buck and better chips for laptops (which are a huge seller).

If Apple were to start making OS X available as a direct competitor to Windows, now that would be a strategic shift. I don’t think that’s gonna happen.

Update: I just saw the page for the transition kit for developers. This $999 kit *includes a computer*, which would certainly support the notion that Apple has no intention of letting people run Mac OS X on a stock PC.

NiceXSL: XSL without the screwy syntax

by Kevin Dangoor

Ned Batchelder clued me (and his hordes of other readers) in to NiceXSL. I’ve always found XSL to be annoying, not because it’s declarative but because it has a nasty syntax. NiceXSL has a far more natural (for a programmer) syntax that is translated directly into XSL. It looks like the current implemention is in Java.