OS X joined by Freeway, Real and Sorenson

Three more manufacturers have announced native support for Mac OS X. However the new releases from Softpress, RealNetworks and Sorenson add few, if any, other new features.Softpress has announced that its Freeway visual Web design tool is to be released for Mac OS X as Freeway 3.5 in January 2002. It will have exactly the same features as the current version, 3.1, although running natively in OS X, it will not require the GX Graphics extension for high-level typography and graphics.Freeway is designed to make Web site creation as easy as possible for DTP professionals. It uses the same 'page and pasteboard' approach as tools such as Quark Xpress. It's actions functionality, allows easy access to back-end functionality such as database connectivity, dynamic html and Javascript objects such as rollovers.Sorenson Video has been upgraded from version 3.0 to 3.1, adding multiprocessor and Mac OS X support.Sorenson Video is a QuickTime compatible video codec designed for developers of applications or Web sites that require compressed video segments. Sorenson Video offers superior video quality at lower data rates than other competing compression technologies. The Basic Edition of the encoder and the full decoder of the Sorenson video codec are built into QuickTime, so users require only QuickTime to watch Sorenson Video clips. Version 3.1 is a free download for registered users of Sorenson Video 3.0. RealNetworks's support for Mac OS X is coming, though it will be sometime in 2002 before it arrives."We have always supported the Macintosh platform with our RealPlayer and RealSystem Producer products," RealNetworks spokesperson Kari Day told Digit. "Unfortunately, we do not pre-announce products therefore I can't give any specific platform details. But we did say when we launched RealOne that we would support the Macintosh in the first half of next year." RealNetworks are the folks behind RealPlayer, the most popular of the top three multimedia players (the other two being QuickTime Player and Windows Media Player) with an estimated 28 per cent of the market. The RealSystem Media Commerce Suite enables rights holders to distribute movies, music and other digital content to over 200 million RealPlayer users. RealSystem iQ is an end-to-end, standards-based, OS-independent, network media delivery system. It's designed to broadcast, transport and deliver the quality of RealAudio and RealVideo as well as media formats including QuickTime, MP3, Flash and over 45 other media formats via RealSystem's extensible architecture.