This week brings a wide variety of articles, ranging from Sharon Zardetto Aker’s explanation of the most common mistake Mac OS X users make with fonts to Matt Neuburg’s look at the Web searching utility DEVONagent 2.0. Adam mourns MacHack by passing on some thoroughly useless Sudden Motion Sensor hacks, and Mark Anbinder reports on the upcoming Nike+iPod Sport Kit that turns an iPod nano into a training aid for runners. In the news, Apple loses its lawsuit against Mac news sites on appeal, iWeb 1.1.1 fixes some minor bugs, and Folklore.org’s written stories return to the oral tradition.
Appeals Court Sides with Mac News Sites over Apple -- In a major victory for online news sources, an appeals court ruled last week that Apple could not subpoena email in order to trace the source of leaked trade secrets
iWeb 1.1.1 Improves Comments, Searching, Publishing -- Apple released iWeb 1.1.1 last week, noting that the update "refines comment and search support for blogs and podcasts published to .Mac," two features that were recently introduced in iWeb 1.1
Oral Folk Tales of Mac History -- Stories of famous Mac people, the reality distortion field, and years of sleeplessness are now available in oral form from Derek Warren
Apple and Nike last week jointly announced the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, a two-piece wireless gadget available in late June that pairs Nike sneakers and an iPod nano to help runners track their performance
The MacHack developers conference always used to roll around about this time of year, and even though the conference is no more, the itch to create utterly cool but completely useless hacks is back in season
It's over a year since I raved about DEVONagent here in TidBITS, and my enthusiasm for what the program does has not waned. DEVONagent uses existing search engines to perform an Internet search, but then goes further, filtering out unwanted hits in response to the details of your query, and loading the text of the found pages into its own database, where they are word-indexed and ranked to improve your chances of finding the information you're seeking.
DEVONagent 2.0 offers many small tweaks to make it an even more exacting seeker of knowledge than before
The Mac OS X approach to fonts is something that can leave users baffled, and no wonder: many different types are supported, they can be stored in a multitude of places, and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger installs some duplicate fonts as a default..
The Advice You Need to Run Windows on Your Mac -- Macintosh users have been able to run (or at least walk) Windows on their Macs for a long time now, thanks to products like Virtual PC
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.
Apple Reminds Us of Trusting, Verifying -- Glenn Fleishman's article about Apple's security measures for software updates brings up questions about other ways of verifying identity and revoking public encryption keys