Today, we tested the new Airbus A380 Super-Jet at Boinx Software Headquarters... Pretty impressive.

Yeah! The team just accepted the Apple Design Award 2006 Best Mac OS X User Experience Runner-Up for FotoMagico.

Boinx Software is at the Apple WWDC again this year. If you are there, say hello to any of us: Florian, Michael, Achim and Oliver (from left to right). The background of this picture is the "lovely" Fire Watching Tower atop of Mt. Tamalpais.

As Boinx Software grows, it becomes more important for us to take an interest in politics. So I enjoyed reading Jonathan Schwartz's account of his lunch with Tony Blair. An important point he makes:

So if you want to attract companies like Sun to your economy, focus on investing in education, in your students, and in your leaders. Focus on educating your policy makers as to why you're committed to education - not to build presitigious institutions, but to invest in progress, academic as well as economic. Focus on the value of broad based talent as a competitive weapon, don't be distracted by cost reducing labor."

Curious about what happened at the Munich CocoaDevHouse on June 24th? Watch this Time Lapse of the event created with iStopMotion.

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...