This week TI Connect for OS X, version 1.7, was finally posted and made available on the TI website (education.ti.com/ticonnect). I've been waiting a while for this release to finally be made available. The major feature of this update over the previous one is that this release is a universal binary, running natively on either the PowerPC or Intel Macintosh architectures. I did most of the work on this a couple of years ago, but in the past couple of months, the pressure finally built to the point where it had to be released. A few tweaks here and there to finalize features, and get it through testing, and now its available!

There are a few other new features (such as contextual sending of calculator files via the Device Explorer (so we have a UI to show progress of sending; a major improvement over past contextual file sending where no UI was provided). The Data Editor now includes GDB and Window/Range variable viewers (not Editors), and on Intel machines running 10.4 or better, Quartz is used for image manipulation (screen shots, etc). Other past issues resolved in this release include problems with downloading apps and OS updates via TI Software Update from the TI Online Store (the infamous "Invalid Product ID" issue for one).

This version of TI Connect runs on Mac OS X 10.3 and later only, and the download is about 8.5MB. This release is currently in BETA form pending final release testing.