Two new ThinkMac apps will be released this month – NewsLife & InstantGallery.

InstantGallery

As the name suggests, InstantGallery is about creating galleries in an instant. It’s a tool for quickly turning a folder full of images into web gallery. It allows you to easily choose thumbnail and image sizes, watermarking, themes, thumbnail cropping and more all while your images are processed in the background. It’s a great way to share your photos with friends, create a portfolio of your work for your website or to build a browsable index of your photos for when you dump them on to a CD.

InstantGallery will go into beta on Monday April 3rd. If you would like to help beta test drop me an e-mail (rory at thinkmac.co.uk). InstantGallery will be available for download in early April priced at $15.

NewsLife

NewsLife is the result of squeezing all the coolest bits out of NewsMac Pro and repacking them into a really easy to use new iLife style interface. NewsLife will be available on April 27th, (which happens to be NewsMac Pro’s 1st birthday and my 25th!).

NewsLife will be priced at $18, more details will be coming a bit later on this month.

CocoaRadio presenter Blake Burris let me know you can get your CocoaDevHouse t-shirts now.

If you’ve not heard of the CocoaDevHouse before check out their website. It’s all about growing the Cocoa developer community and helping each other learn the tricks of the trade.

I’m busy working away on the NewsMac Pro 1.2.4 update and also a new little app that will be released at the end of the month.

NewsMac Pro 1.2.4 will feature:
• Improved keyboard navigation across all view modes.
• Bloglines integration
• Fixes for several bugs including an issue with the atom parser that can sometimes cause crashes.
• Revised demo limitations of 15 days fully functional trial which will reset on each new release.

The new app is called InstantGallery and is a tool for quickly building web galleries and creating photocasts. It’s a drag and drop affair and you can have fun tweaking all the settings such as layout and themes while all the image resizing is handled in the background – great for dual processor/dual core Macs. InstantGallery will be a universal binary and features AquaticPrime licence code handling. More details coming soon. I’m looking for some beta testers, especially those with Intel Macs so please get in touch if you would like to help out.

Since Steve Jobs will probably announce Intel Macs tomorrow it’s about time to start talking about NewsMac Pro’s transition to Intel. In theory as a Cocoa application it should just be a case of recompiling. However there are a couple of third party libraries which NewsMac uses which are not universal binaries and which I can’t compile myself, namely eSellerate’s validation library (for handling serial number validation) and Unsanity’s smart crash reports library. While I’m the sure the later will be sorted very quickly it could take a month or two for eSellerate to catch up since everyone originally thought this transition wasn’t due to occur until June. Bottom line is that the release of a universal binary version of NMP won’t happen until at least eSellerate’s library is universal which may not happen for a few months.

If you’re still hanging on to 10.3 and not planning to upgrade before 10.5 hits the shelves then don’t worry, I will continue to offer a PPC only binary for 10.3.9 and later until 10.5 is imminent. (Universal binaries require 10.4 or later you see).

Thanks to Rosetta, NewsMac should run just fine on Intel Macs with no noticeable performance degredation for the majority of users. Given apps like MS Office and all the Abobe apps are almost certainly not ready yet either it’s fair to assume that most apps being run on Intel Macs will be running in emulation for the first few months of the transition anyway.

There won’t be a universal binary of NewsMac 3.2 as it’s a discontinued project.