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TidBITS#801/17-Oct-05

Last week brought an abundance of announcements, including Apple’s record financial results and release of a video-enabled iPod, a new iMac with an iSight camera built-in, and iTunes 6 with TV shows for sale in the iTMS. Not entirely overshadowed was Palm’s release of a pair of Palm handhelds, the Z22 and TX. Microsoft was also busy, settling a lawsuit with RealNetworks and announcing plans to make its instant messaging network interoperable with Yahoo’s. Last, though not least, James Thomson shipped the slick calculator utility PCalc 3, and we published "Take Control of Permissions in Mac OS X."

Matt Neuburg No comments

PCalc Adds! (A New Version, That Is)

PCalc Adds! (A New Version, That Is) -- PCalc is a calculator utility by James Thomson (who also writes DragThing, my favorite launcher). Developing a calculator is something of a thankless task, because users feel that arithmetic is something computers should just know how to do, and because a free calculator utility is always included by default

Adam Engst No comments

DealBITS Drawing: Swift Publisher Winners

DealBITS Drawing: Swift Publisher Winners -- Congratulations to Kevin Savetz of savetz.com, Ole Andreas Kongsgaarden of c2i.net, and Marijn van der Waa of xs4all.nl, whose entries were chosen randomly in last week's DealBITS drawing and who each received an electronic copy of BeLight Software's Swift Publisher, worth $34.95

Geoff Duncan No comments

Apple Quadruples Q4 Profit

Apple Computer has published the financial results for its fourth fiscal quarter of 2005, and... well, there's no other way to put this. Somewhere in Cupertino, someone is rolling around in a big pile of money and laughing like a comic book villain on nitrous oxide

Geoff Duncan No comments

Apple Unveils Video iPod & New Media-centric iMac

In one of its trademark media events in San Jose on 12-Oct-05, Apple Computer took the wraps off its new fifth-generation video-capable iPod and a new, slimmer iMac with an integrated iSight video camera and new Front Row media software. First, Apple's fifth-generation iPod sports a 2.5-inch LCD screen which, like previous color iPods, can display album art and photographs, but can also play video, including music videos, television episodes, video podcasts, and home movies

Adam Engst No comments

iTunes 6 Gets Video

In the much-anticipated "One More Thing..." special event last week, Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced iTunes 6, just five weeks after the release of iTunes 5

Glenn Fleishman No comments

RealNetworks and Microsoft Settle, Present New Unified Front

The moral of last week's settlement agreement between RealNetworks and Microsoft is apparently that if you continue a lawsuit long enough against the Redmond software giant, they pay you off - in this case, to the (pun-intended) tune of $761 million. That's not to say that ex-Microsoftie and RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser's complaints about Microsoft's past predatory practices were invalid

Glenn Fleishman No comments

Instant Messaging World Coalesces, a Little

For a technology that enables people the world over to communicate easily, the current instant messaging (IM) networks are surprisingly close-mouthed. Currently, users of the three major IM networks - MSN, Yahoo, and AOL (which Apple uses for iChat) - cannot chat between different services

Glenn Fleishman No comments

Cheap Palm, Connected Palm

Before Apple started teasing the press last Wednesday in a cell phone-unfriendly auditorium, Palm announced their two latest handheld organizers, both of which come with Mac OS X support out of the box. Palm, Inc

Tonya Engst No comments

Take Control News/17-Oct-05

"Take Control of Permissions in Mac OS X" Released -- When Adam and I conceived of the Take Control series back in 2003, we imagined multiple ebooks, each functioning like a chapter in a huge volume about the Mac - readers could buy only those chapters that were of interest, and we could provide deeper and more current coverage than a print book could offer. In our initial brainstorming sessions with authors, a number of people suggested writing about permissions, those sometimes-pesky settings that control who can do what to which files, folders, and disks on a Mac

TidBITS Staff No comments

Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/17-Oct-05

The first link for each thread description points to the traditional TidBITS Talk interface; the second link points to the same discussion on our Web Crossing server, which provides a different look and which may be faster. iDisk Performance -- Slow performance when accessing files on an iDisk prompts discussion of alternatives