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Mickey's In On It (4/8/98)
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For a company who's allegedly planning on buying Apple, Disney's not doing a very good job of making Mac users feel welcome. In particular, Disney's Daily Blast, an online service for kids that provides "over 100 different activities daily," doesn't support the Mac. Try to register, and you find out you need Windows 95 and a Pentium processor.
"So what?" you ask. "Disney's site probably uses technology and plugins not available on the Mac platform. It's a bummer, but it happens." Not this time, grasshopper-- just take a look at this message posted to Guy Kawasaki's EvangeList (which you really should join if you're not already a subscriber). Apparently if you use ResEdit to hack the resources in your Mac copy of Netscape, you can trick Disney Blast into thinking you're connecting from a Windows machine. And damn near everything works just fine. (We haven't confirmed this ourselves, being allergic to giant cheerful anthopomorphic mice, but we'll take it on faith.)
So why would Disney deliberately lock out Mac users when their site works quite well with a Mac browser? To quote the Digital Guy, "think corporate sponsorship." Rumor has it that a certain richest-man-alive may have his hands in this business. It sounds silly until you consider that parents buy computers for their kids to use-- and Disney content is a hit. To be fair, Disney promises that a Mac-compatible Disney Blast will be available soon. But what we'd like to know is why it's not available now, since it appears that it was deliberately crippled for Mac clients. We always knew Disney was sinister, but this is getting very interesting...
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SceneLink (610)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 4/8/98 episode: April 8, 1998: As the formal announcement of Apple's Q2 finances draws ever closer, AtAT launches the quarterly "Beat the Analysts" contest. Meanwhile, Apple's new developer program has Mac developers seeing red, and the cryogenically frozen head of Walt Disney appears to have close ties with a certain billionaire 'round Redmond way...
Other scenes from that episode: 608: What Color's the Ink? (4/8/98) Reach for those thinking caps and magic 8-balls, because the time has arrived-- our quarterly "Beat the Analysts" contest is on once again. Next Wednesday, Apple is scheduled to announce its financial results for the second quarter, revealing once and for all whether they were able to sustain the surprise profit they reported at the end of the first quarter... 609: Natives Getting Restless (4/8/98) Oof, we wanted to hold off on discussing Apple's new Developer Program (announced this week) until some actual developers had voiced their opinions, because we weren't sure the new pricing structure was as painful as it sounded to us...
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