Ok, mind you, the title of this post is not entirely true, I sort bend the information so it sounded more interesting, but nevertheless:

One thing which always bugged me under Mac OS X was that I needed to have 3 Mediaplayers installed in order to play all the kinds of videofiles which are available out there: Quicktime, Videolan(VLC) and Windows Media Player
Now, thanks to those kind people from Microsoft, Windows Media Player files can be played in quicktime via Flip4Mac. But one still needs VLC in order to play most of the other formats which Quicktime doesn’t handle very well (I always have problems with Mpeg2 files in Quicktime).

And here’s a solution to the above problem: FFusion is a version of the libavcodec library (that’s the library which contains most of VLC’s media support codecs) which has been compiled so it can be used as a Quicktime Component. This enables you to play even more Videofiles with Quicktime, no need to switch to VLC (although VLC is a really good software, it’s just an added burden to start VLC after realizing that Quicktime once again couldn’t play a file). And apart from that it makes all those Videos Frontrow compatible, too! (at least that’s what I think, my Frontrow experiences are.. limited).

You can download the package at the official FFusion page. http://aldorandenet.free.fr/codecs/, however, those are a tad outdated, a newer version can be found on “Dr. Feelgood’s” (couldn’t find his real name) page: http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~feelgood/ (somewhere around the middle of the page)

The Ruby on Rails web application framework continues to catch more and more interest. Many improvements and added features in the recently-released Ruby on Rails 1.0 gave the community another boost.

Now Apple released an article which explains how to develop Ruby on Rais applications under Mac OS X. The even concentrates on using Textmate:

It should come as no surprise that Mac OS X is a favored platform for Rails development. Rails and its supporting cast of web servers and databases thrive on the rich Mac OS X environment. The premier text editor favored by legions of Rails programmers everywhere is TextMate, a Cocoa application. And all members of the Rails core development team work with Macs.

I’ve read several Rails tutorials (and even completed some of them), and this one has much in common with the other ones available: it concentrates on creating a simple application, it tries to explain the basic ideas behind RoR. One good thing is that this article also introduces methods like ‘belongs to’, ‘has many’ or business logic, which are things not all Ruby on Rails beginner tutorials try to explain.

Developer.Apple.com: Ruby on Rails