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QuickTime Gets Scripty (1/20/00)
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Amid little to no fanfare, QuickTime 4.1 is now available for your streaming pleasure. Those of you who keep up on this stuff probably recall that this latest version has actually been completed for several weeks-- for a while it was mistakenly made publicly available on one of Apple's European download servers earlier in the month. That's why we were so darn surprised not to see QuickTime 4.1 make its official premiere during Steve's Macworld Expo keynote a couple of weeks back. According to Mac the Knife, the holdup wasn't the software itself, but Akamai's servers, which weren't ready to carry the new architecture. Go figure.
As for what QuickTime 4.1 brings to the party, well, a lot of it might not sound all that impressive to you as an end-user. According to a MacWEEK article, 4.1 brings such e-commerce advances as the ability to insert ads into video streams and support for "pay-per-view" authentication. From an end-user standpoint, the biggest new features are probably support for variable bit-rate (VBR) MP3 files, HTTP tunneling (which may make streaming video more easily available for those of you trying to tune in from behind a firewall), and Applescript support.
Now, we're not going to pretend that the e-commerce features of QuickTime 4.1 are no big deal-- we bet QuickTime's going to get a healthy boost in market share on the web once the, uh, "adult entertainment" industry realizes what those new features have to offer. For us, though, the big advance is Applescript support. We love Applescript. It's a fun, relatively easy-to-learn way to automate all kinds of drudge work that you might do on your Mac. The fact that the QuickTime Player has never had decent Applescript support has bugged us for years. Now, though, Apple's finally made good: not only did they add Applescript support to the player, but they also posted a slew of sample scripts to get us started. Something new to play with...
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SceneLink (2046)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 1/20/00 episode: January 20, 2000: All of Wall Street jumps in to upgrade AAPL after Wednesday's glowing quarterly results. Meanwhile, Steve's obsession with amassing aircraft is revealed, and QuickTime finally says howdy to Applescript...
Other scenes from that episode: 2044: Analyst Peer Pressure (1/20/00) Wow, maybe the curse has been lifted! Traditionally when Apple posts better-than-expected end-of-quarter results, Wall Street's reaction is as reliable as it is unfathomable: AAPL's price starts bottoming out faster than the box office receipts for the last "Ernest" flick... 2045: Stockpiling Air Power (1/20/00) Hey, about that jet that Steve received as a "special executive bonus..." Do you suppose there's any particular reason the Board went with a Gulfstream V? Sure, we hear that the GV is the ultimate executive status symbol and all, but we can't help but wonder if there was another factor to the decision, especially after eagle-eyed faithful viewer Harold noticed something interesting while cruising the Gulfstream web site...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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