The team behind [H]Enthusiast tried out three core processors particularly for systems heavy on video editing, music encoding music and manipulating images. The contestants were Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, Intel Core 2 Duo E6700, and AMD Athlon 64 FX-32.

The mission: Determine real-world benchmarks for functions an average person would perform on a home PC with similar specs.

The tests:

• Ripping a full-length motion picture from a DVD
• EncodingFrank Zappa's Packard Goose to an iPod native .mp4 / AAC file using iTunes
• Running Adobe Photoshop v8 and Driver Heaven's testing suite
• Importing a 2.3GB avi file imported from a camcorder
• Importing an 800MB MiniDV video clip from a video camera using Windows Movie Maker to encode it to the 2.1Mbps bitrate

The findings: When it comes to editing video, manipulating images, or encoding music, the Intel Core 2 Duo and Extreme processors at 2.66GHz outclassed AMDÂ?s Athlon FX and Athlon 64 line of processors.

Adobe has now released the Public Beta or the pre-released version of Flash Player 9 software for Mac users. This content has been made available to developers and consumers alike to take it for a spin. The purpose of this beta is for the company to receive feedback to verify that the new player is compatible with existing content and for developers to get a chance to test their content and applications as well before the actual release of the product.

So far this product has garnered mixed reviews from those that has already tested it. There have been reports of unexpected quits starting from the installation process up to various browsers on wake-from-sleep when the Flash 8.5 beta is present.

Platform	Browser
Intel-based Mac OS X 10.4.6	Safari 2.03 or newer, Firefox 1.5.0.2 or newer , Opera 9 (build 3216) or newer

Download: [Adobe Flash Player 9]

After a long time of waiting, Chad Siegel, Adobe's InDesign product manager, finally offered a glimpse of what the company had in store for Mac users. During a demo using a MacBook Pro, he showed new InDesign features that are only part of a bigger selection of Creative Suite 3 features.

One of those shown was several time-saving features directed to designers as part of InDesign's "investment in workflow." New editing and image import features which will be available for the next iteration of Photoshop were also shown.

There are still some problems though with the new Creative Suite 3 as the MacBook Pro crashed while being used to demonstrate the new application's power. Adobe InDesign will continue to work on this to make its compatibility with Macs flawless. So I guess we'll still have to wait some more.

The Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is not quite ready to pounce but eager prey are restless as to what this cat can and cannot do. The grapevine flows with speculations that it it'll include a system-level, encrypted BitTorrent client for iTunes Store, a Windows virtualization software and full screen applications. But these are well inside the territory of tech-gossip.

One developer thinks resolution independence is one of those rumoured features that could turn fact based on little clues he picked up here and there. According to Dustin MacDonald, "this stuff (referring to resolution scaling) is actually in the OS already. It showed that this "resolution independent" stuff won't necessarily be all vector. Yes, NSBezierPaths and fonts automatically scale correctly, but what about graphics? Although Apple hasn't said anything yet, it only makes sense that they would further the use of .icns files, letting you have different graphics for multiple sizes, scaling near perfectly. This is already the case with all application icons in Mac OS X."

Then he cited talks regarding scaling websites. "And we're not just talking about good CSS manners here, these guys are talking about implementing Adobe's vector-based SVG as a first-class image format in WebKit, and most likely OS X. Holy shitz. Obviously, no one is simply joking around here. This is going to happen."

And finally some graphic designer spilled the beans that they were contracted by Apple to make icons for the system. "Except, these icons weren't 128x128px, no, they were a whopping 512x512px. I'd say that these kinds of icons would be big enough to be scaled down a fair bit. With larger resolutions on new Macs lately, it makes sense that Apple would do something like this. Even I find myself squinting sometimes when using my 23" Cinema Display at a far distance. Mark my words, this is going to be huge - WWDC can't come soon enough." 

Until the OS X 10.5 makes it debut at  AppleÂ?s Worldwide Developer Conference in August  this year,  it's going remain as elusive and mysterious as the cat it was named after.

Macworld tested the new Intel-based laptops, both the 1.83GHz white and the 2.0GHz black models, set to replace the G4 based Powerbook and the G4 based iBooks. The processor speeds of these new non-pro MacBooks are the same as the first generation of MacBook Pros so they hold up pretty well in processor-heavy tasks and they beat the G4 based laptops except for the Photoshop test.

Note: Because Adobe has yet to release a universal binary for the CS2 suite they were ran through Rosetta.

The results look as good as the new MacBook color, I've always been a fan of black electronics (in fact all I carry is a black cell, a black PSP, and a black iPod) but until Adobe get the universal binary of CS2 out I'm afraid I'll have to stick to my iBook G4. What do you think of the benchmark results? What do you think of the new MacBook Color? We want to hear from you in the comments!

GIMPShop is a free Open Source image editor that takes after GIMP but is designed to be more user-friendly for Photoshop users.

Creator, Scott Moschella has now announced the release of GIMPShop 2.2.11 Universal Application for OSX Tiger (Intel,PowerPC) and Panther.

If youÂ?re running OSX 10.4 Tiger and donÂ?t currently have X11 installed, make sure you install X11 from your Tiger OSX Install DVD.

Also, the cursor is light yellow in color instead of black, just take note that this is an Intel-based Mac X11 issue and not a Gimp one.

I guess Adobe just have to admit defeat when it comes to Universal Binary.

Download: [Gimpshop 2.2.11 Universal Application] (85 MB)