Boinx Software and TheCodingMonkeys join forces to organise the first Munich CocoaDevHouse this coming saturday, June 24th. Sign up at the Wiki if you'd like to join.

StuFF mc of Pomcast fame came by the booth at the recent MacExpo to interview Michael and Florian. The German language interview is in this episode between 18:30 and 23:50.

Can you tell which is which?

Today, we got our new iMac with Intel Core Duo processor. Three weeks ago I had just ordered a new iMac G5. Now they sit side by side in our meeting room. What do you think? Should we... ? Of course, we should! Let's do a shootout. Using our own applications. FotoMagico and iStopMotion which are both Universal Apps.

This is by no means a scientific comparison, it is more a "getting a feel" thing. Here are the "feelings":

Test 1: Export of a FotoMagico Slideshow to an iPod movie.
Surprisingly, the iMac G5 wins by a comfortable margin. Looking at the Activity Monitor indicates that QuickTime does not make use of the dual cores of the Intel iMac. It does not even seem to use the one core it uses to its max. So we think that there is performance potential to be realised in QuickTime.

Test 2: Export iStopMotion frames to images.
This time, the Intel iMac has a comfortable lead. It is almost twice as fast. Its faster bus seems to pay off when it comes to disk access. And writing TIFFs does not require as many floating point operations.

It quickly becomes clear that we have two completely different machines on our desk. Which is faster? Never before the answer was more true: it depends on what you are doing. Certainly the iMac Intel is a great machine for the price. The graphics chip is better than anything currently available built-in to a Mac. But should you be frustrated that you just bought an iMac G5 three weeks ago at the same price? Of course not. The iMac G5 still holds great appeal for people who want to run Photoshop, Logic, Final Cut and others - at least until the Universal version of these apps become available.

Last Tuesday, the Boinx Team gathered for our annual Xmas dinner at the "Colonial" restaurant. Of course, we had to make a short slideshow with FotoMagico. Watch it now...

We are in the middle of the preparations of the Macworld Expo booth that we will have in San Francisco in January. I've opened a new category on this weblog to collect all postings associated with the Macworld Expo appearance.

This is what the booth looked like in January 2005. The booth in 2006 will be roughly the same. We hope to feature hardware that is a bit more sexy, but details still need to be worked out. Currently we hope to have two iMac G5s for presentation, a Power Mac G5 running the display at the top of the booth and a Mac mini for taking a time lapse of all the people passing our booth and stopping by to get some info.

Three people will be at the booth: Achim and Oliver Breidenbach and Werner Nieke will answer your questions.

We are looking forward to meeting you. Watch this space on information on how to get a ticket for the expo.

For users of Apple's Backup 3, it is now as easy as never before to back up License Keys and Preferences for Boinx Software Products. Boinx Software introduces the QuickPick for Backup 3:

To use this, you'll need Apple Backup 3 which is available as part of their .Mac service. Allegedly, you do not need to be a paying member to get it, it is also available if you sign up for a trial account.

Download the QuickPick installer from the link above and start it. It will put the QuickPick files in the proper location and give you instructions on how to create a backup plan that includes Boinx Software license data and Preferences.

It works for all Boinx Software products.

If you use other Backup programs, the QuickPick backs up the following directories and files:

• ~/Library/Application Support/Boinx/Licenses/*.license
• /Library/Application Support/Boinx/Licenses/*.license
• ~/Library/Preferences/com.boinx.*

If you did not understand that part, you'll know why it is so cool to have the QuickPicks in Backup 3...

There are tons of nice things about iStopMotion, FotoMagico and other Boinx Software products to be said and the backlog of postings for this weblog is phenomenal. But, it is all marketing, the cool factor is clearly lacking. So we are doing a couple of things: We are going to introduce new categories and new posters. All of the team will be able to post stuff in the future, once I figure out how to connect the Blojsom weblog engine with OpenDirectory. There is help, but it it remains a challenge... Onward!

New categories are:

• Cool Stuff - Things we find around the web
• Mac Programming - Information on Mac Programming
• Music Discovery - Music to be found at the iTunes Music Store or elsewhere
• Mysterious Cool New Thingy - Really cool feature, soon to be revealed.