There are weeks with themes, and then there are weeks like this, where there’s no commonality between our articles. We start with the announcement of four more locations and dates for the MacTech Boot Camp conference for consultants. Then Jeff Carlson writes about gfxCardStatus, a must-have utility for MacBook Pro owners, and Glenn Fleishman looks at the QuickMark 2D code application for the Mac. Next, we recently released version 1.4 of the TidBITS News iOS app, and Matt Neuburg uses its primary new feature to explain why adding multitasking to an app is harder than it would seem. Then Adam shares an upcoming behind-the-scenes change (a new From address for TidBITS in email) and looks into the geeky technical details behind it. Finally, Jeff Porten anchors the issue with a report from the .nxt conference on new top-level domain names—the question is, does anyone still care? Notable software releases this week include Skitch 1.0.3, Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 3.6, Evernote 2.0.4, CopyPaste Pro 3.0, 1Password 3.5.7, iWeb 3.0.3, and Adobe Acrobat/Reader 10.0.1.
Consultants and support techs looking for a conference that’s aimed as much at the business of helping people as the knowledge necessary to do so will be pleased to hear that there are now additional locations and dates for the MacTech Boot Camp.
Those strange little boxes of pixels and squares you see in more and more places can now be decoded through an iSight or FaceTime camera in Mac OS X with QuickMark’s latest release.
For technical reasons related to bounce processing, we will be changing the From address used in TidBITS email issues starting with TidBITS #1065. So, if you have either whitelisted that address in your spam filter or if you rely on it a mail rule, read on for the new details.
Is your recent MacBook Pro burning more battery power than it should? gfxCardStatus tells you whether the laptop is using the power-saving integrated graphics chip or the processor-hungry discrete graphics card, and can force one or the other to be active.
We’ve released a new version of the TidBITS News app that allows background audio to continue playing, pausing it only if the user starts listening to one of our article podcasts. While this isn’t a major feature, it’s an indication of how hard multitasking is to do right in iOS.
Playing the press fly on the wall, Jeff Porten listens in on the .nxt conference, where there’s much discussion of the wonderful future where .com, .edu, .org, and the many country top-level domains are joined by hundreds of others. But who still cares?
Notable software releases this week include Skitch 1.0.3, Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 3.6, Evernote 2.0.4, CopyPaste Pro 3.0, 1Password 3.5.7, iWeb 3.0.3, and Adobe Acrobat/Reader 10.0.1.
Just a couple of quick links to check out this week: an article over at The Economist by Glenn about Readability, and Lex Friedman’s Macworld article about his backup strategy.