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Kaleidoscope Cease Fire (2/27/98)
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The Great Reality / Kaledoscope War of 1998 was short but explosive. After Reality published screenshots from a leaked beta version of Kaleidoscope 2.0, the K team cut many of its beta testers and severed ties with Reality and MacNN. Some of the beta testers fired a volley on Reality by emailing MacNN sponsors in a slander campaign, which prompted Reality to shut its doors. Reality had posted a farewell note which gave their side of the story, but that has since been removed.
Today, Greg Landweber (the Kaleidoscope programmer) posted his version of events, though it may be gone by the time you read this. To make a long story short, everything was essentially a big misunderstanding, with frayed nerves and overreactions on both sides. MacNN is reporting that a cease-fire has been reached between both parties, and that Reality removing its farewell note was part of that treaty. We assume that there was probably significant backlash from that note, when Reality readers spammed Greg for allegedly causing the shutdown of their favorite site. (Note that even though the farewell notice is gone, Reality is still closed for business.)
We're glad to see the end of this issue; it's one thing when large bureaucratic corporations engage in soap-opera-worthy behavior, but we find it all much less entertaining when it involves cool shareware developers and members of the Mac web community. By the way, AtAT is a fan of Kaleidoscope (though we've had to disable it since it was making our primary system crash every ten minutes once we upgraded to Mac OS 8.1), and we managed to see those screenshots before they got pulled. The only phrase that comes to mind is "absolutely gorgeous." We're looking forward to its release.
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SceneLink (490)
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 2/27/98 episode: February 27, 1998: A long-time cast member is finally killed off, though the show's producers are already hinting at a twin brother joining the cast next year. Meanwhile, the Great Reality / Kaleidoscope War reaches its end quickly, and Artemis again rears its ugly head (and we do mean ugly)...
Other scenes from that episode: 489: Newton, Rest In Peace (2/27/98) The years-long rumors finally came true: today, Apple laid the Newton's troubled spirit to rest. According to an Apple press release, as of today they will cease all development of the Newton OS and the products that use it (including the MessagePad and the eMate)... 491: The Curse of Artemis (2/27/98) Something wicked this way comes-- or if not wicked, at least horribly misshapen and deformed. No, we're not making an oblique reference to any high-placed political figures (at least not consciously), but rather to the long-awaited low-cost G3-based home Mac known as Artemis...
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