For those of you remember the hullabaloo surrounding Apple's new distribution license when QuickTime 3 came out a few months ago, you should be pleased to note that Apple's finally posted a revised license, as promised, incorporating changes demanded by the developer community. Over a month ago, Apple promised that a new license would be delivered by the end of May. They missed that self-imposed deadline by a couple of weeks, but the license finally surfaced last week.

If you weren't following the uproar at the time, Apple's original QuickTime 3 distribution license required that developers pay $1 per copy of their application if they chose to ship it with the QuickTime installers. Since previous versions of QuickTime were free to distribute, the price hike had a lot of small developers over a barrel. There was a way to waive the $1 fee-- but it involved making one's application install the "Get QuickTime Pro" ad movie on the user's desktop every time the program was run. Many developers considered that no choice at all-- either raise the cost of their applications, or annoy the living bejeezus out of their users. The revised license is significantly less painful; the free version of the QuickTime installer now only shows the QuickTime Pro ad once during installation, and if the user trashes the ad on the Desktop, it's gone for good. MacWEEK has a nice overview of the options available to developers.

First Apple announces Mac OS X in response to developers' overwhelming resistance to rewriting their applications in a different language using a completely set of API's, and now they post a revised QuickTime license that addresses the main complaints that developers raised. An Apple that actually listens to developers' complaints! Goodness gracious, what's next-- revised membership pricing for the Apple Developers' Program? (Don't hold your breath.)

In other price hike news, UserLand's Frontier is joining the world of commercial software. Frontier is a popular and powerful scripting environment that, until now, has been free of charge. Unfortunately for its users, MacInTouch points out that its new pricing structure means that Frontierheads are going to have to pony up at least $300 a year to use the new 5.1 version. You can read UserLand's announcement email for more details.

AtAT doesn't use Frontier, but we know people who do-- and judging by the email flooding our inbox, people are not pleased with this turn of events. While we've long heard the Frontier was too good to be free, we doubt that anyone expected a cost of at least $300 a year. We don't doubt that licensees will get what they pay for, with excellent technical support and constant updates, but we have to assume that there are many, many Frontier using who absolutely can't afford the new license fees.

We're told the Frontier offers a ton of features not available in Applescript, but for budget-conscious scripters who now find themselves priced right out of Frontier's market, you might want to re-examine Apple's free offering. We personally have no idea what features a Frontiersman would lose in resorting to Applescript, but September's release of a new PowerPC-native Applescript in Mac OS 8.5 should at least address speed concerns. (We hear it blazes.)

Hands up-- your Mac or your life! A MacCentral report confirms a long-held axiom in the computer world-- thieves prefer Macs. In a frightening turn of events, several armed burglars threatened an Apple Canada security guard at gunpoint and robbed the building of about $100,000 worth of Mac equipment. Thankfully, the security guard suffered only minor injuries.

Interestingly, the robbery happened in a well-known high-tech area north of Toronto, where other big tech companies also have offices. The robbers could have plundered IBM, Compaq, Dell,or a number of other companies, but instead decided to make off with $100 grand of PowerBook G3's. (Proof positive that the new PowerBooks are irresistible, no?) This isn't a new phenomenon; over the years, we've heard lots of stories in which thieves bypassed Wintel equipment in order to steal Apple gear. Digging through past postings at the EvangeList web site reveals some other stories in which the Mac holds the dubious honor of being the choice of discriminating thieves everywhere.

In fact, your friendly AtAT staff have personally experienced this phenomenon in the past. Two years ago, some miscreant stole our beloved PowerBook Duo 230 from a hospital physics lab. In doing so, he or she completely ignored the Wintel laptop which was sitting right next to the Duo. It wasn't a pleasant experience, but it certainly was an eye-opener. And we will never forget when a certain highly-placed Apple executive (who shall remain anonymous) heard about the theft, claimed that similar occurrences had happened in the past, and offered to let us use his employee discount to buy a replacement system off the record. Now that's customer service. ;-) (We didn't take him up on the offer, by the way-- we'd already found a good price on another Duo.)