We range far and wide this week! Glenn Fleishman contributes two articles, one explaining how soft mounting went away in Mac OS X 10.3.3 and another examining Sender Policy Framework, a new anti-spoofing technology for email. Then, Tony Williams reviews the highly entertaining book Apple Confidential 2.0. We also tell you about the new headline site Macminer.com, Guy Kawasaki’s cover contest for his next book, the release of GraphicConverter 5, and Belkin’s new iPod voice recorder. Win PDFpen in this week’s DealBITS drawing!
Macminer.com: Better Mac Headlines -- As you know, we're highly selective about what news we publish in TidBITS, which makes for quite a job of culling through the press releases we receive and scanning other sites to see what else is happening that might warrant coverage
Belkin Offering External Microphone Adapter for iPod -- Belkin's latest iPod add-on lets you plug in an external microphone for recording audio to your iPod
GraphicConverter 5.0.1 Released -- TidBITS readers with long memories have probably already noted that we tend to mention Lemke Software's image processing utility GraphicConverter often in these issues (at least 21 times since 1997, in fact)
Guy Kawasaki's Cover Contest -- Guy Kawasaki, Apple's original evangelist and now CEO of the venture capital investment bank Garage Technology Ventures, is running a contest to come up with a cover for his upcoming book, The Art of the Start
Adobe's PDF format has become commonplace as a replacement for paper, but unless you own the full Adobe Acrobat package, you can't do much more than read and print PDF files
Part of the charm of last week's update to Mac OS X 10.3.3 is that Apple listened to the user confusion that the initial Panther release caused by creating two entirely different methods of mounting servers in the Finder
A number of books covering the history of Apple Computer have been released, but none have satisfied me. They were either too dry, or were self-serving autobiographies I found difficult to believe (one particular ex-Pepsi employee stands out in this category)
A fundamental reason for the proliferation of spam is that the underlying mechanisms for exchanging email over the Internet never check the identity of the sender
An iChat State Proposal -- Adam offers a new way of thinking about how iChat should handle availability states, and everyone else chimes in with their views