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TidBITS Watchlist: Notable Software Updates for 1 September 2014

Microsoft Office 2011 14.4.4 — Microsoft has updated Office 2011 to version 14.4.4, a short but sweet maintenance release that should alleviate a few frustrations. The update improves keyboard language detection in Word to prevent incorrect updates, and adds descriptions for supported account types in Outlook to help you choose correctly when configuring an Office 365 account. It also fixes an issue in PowerPoint that caused slides to display random artifacts when displayed in Presenter View mode on a screen with a high resolution (such as a 4K monitor). (Free update from the Microsoft Download Center or through Microsoft AutoUpdate, 113 MB, release notes, 10.5+)

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BBEdit 10.5.12 and TextWrangler 4.5.10 — Bare Bones Software has released BBEdit 10.5.12 and TextWrangler 4.5.10 with but a single change added to the two text editors — implementation of new code signing procedures that will ensure compatibility with “future releases of OS X” (in particular, the upcoming OS X Yosemite). If you’re running the public beta of Yosemite, you’ll definitely want to update to these latest versions. ($49.99 for BBEdit, free update, 12.5 MB, release
notes
; free for TextWrangler, 9.4 MB, release notes, 10.6.8+)

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LaunchBar 6.1 — Up until now, Objective Development’s LaunchBar has relied on five superpowers — Abbreviation Search, Browsing, Sub-search, Send To, and Instant Send — to help you carry out tasks on your Mac more efficiently. But with the release of version 6.1, LaunchBar gains a sixth superpower called Staging, which enables you to select multiple items and work on them all at once. Objective Development’s blog post introducing Staging includes several examples (such as selecting multiple files and attaching them to an email message, or opening a Web
search in multiple search engines), the basics of creating multiple selections in the staging area, and a list of keyboard shortcuts. (Kirk McElhearn will cover Staging in depth in the next version of “Take Control of LaunchBar.”)

The keyboard-based launcher also improves the flexibility of adding calendar items (accepting description, location and date/time in arbitrary order, though still requiring the location to come after the description). Additionally, LaunchBar 6.1 improves the Zip archive compression action to support multiple selections, permanently displays contact labels while browsing, adds support for LaunchBar Actions implemented as Automator workflows, improves the Move to Trash action with undo capability, adds support for Tower 2 repository bookmark indexing and browsing, and changes the shortcuts for Info Browsing and Show Siblings for better consistency with Staging. ($29 new with a 20 percent discount for TidBITS members, free update, 10.0 MB, release notes, 10.9+)

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