Our topics span the gamut this week, as Jeff Carlson leads off with news of Adam’s #3 ranking in the latest MDJ Power 25 survey. Mark Anbinder looks at the new education-only iMac, Matt Neuburg examines how Dashboard phones home to Apple and covers the release of Style Master 4.5, and Adam looks at how Google has become a verb and lists some recent Take Control author and staff interviews. In the news, we welcome Mark/Space as a sponsor, cover the release of Opera 9 and SOHO Notes 5.5 (replacing StickyBrain), and point you toward a particularly hilarious week of posts at Crazy Apple Rumors.
Mark/Space Sponsoring TidBITS -- We're pleased to welcome our latest long-term sponsor, the synchronization experts at Mark/Space, Inc. Mark/Space has been around as long as TidBITS, both having been founded in 1990, and for as long as I can remember, I've made a point of stopping by their trade show booths to say hello to Brian Hall, Mark/Space's president and CEO, and to see the latest cool handheld device he had managed to connect to the Mac
Opera 9 Released -- Opera Software has released Opera 9, the latest version of its traditionally quirky Web browser. In a world where browsers are included with the operating system (Internet Explorer under Windows, and Safari on Mac OS X) or available for free (the open-source Firefox), you might think it's crazy for a third-party company to develop a competing Web browser
StickyBrain Replaced with SOHO Notes -- Chronos LLC announced today that its highly regarded snippet keeper, StickyBrain, is being discontinued in favor of SOHO Notes, a product with a nearly identical interface but more features
Crazy Apple Rumors Site Skewers Week's News -- John Moltz's Crazy Apple Rumors site is one of my must-reads every day, and while I find the site funny most of the time, not many weeks have as many news stories so ripe for skewering
We're pleased to note that TidBITS publisher Adam C. Engst achieved his sixth consecutive top five ranking in the MDJ Power 25, moving up two places this year to rank behind only Apple's CEO Steve Jobs and COO Tim Cook
Yet another PowerPC-based Macintosh is consigned to the history books. Apple last week introduced a new, low-end, stripped-down version of its Intel-based 17-inch iMac computer, replacing the eMac for the education market
Anyone who has ever run Activity Monitor (in the Utilities folder) and chosen Administrator Processes from the pop-up menu is aware that a Mac OS X computer is actually a hotbed of little programs that start automatically and whose purposes are probably unclear to most users
Western Civilization has released version 4.5 (quickly updated to 4.5.1) of its flagship CSS editor, Style Master, making the creation of good-looking Web pages easier than ever
Trademark lawyers everywhere are shaking their heads in dismay, as the Oxford English Dictionary has now added Google's company name to the dictionary as a verb
Take Control Authors Speak... at Length -- When we aren't busy writing and editing, we can often be found talking about Take Control and the topics we cover in our ebooks
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.
The Mystery of the Burnt Thighs -- Readers suggest alternatives for keeping a hot laptop cool