Do you find dialing the phone to be an unnecessary hassle, considering that all your phone numbers are stored somewhere on your Mac? Matt Neuburg does too, so read on for his review of the slick new phone dialing tool Dialectic. Also this week, Tonya makes the difficult (and not entirely successful) jump from Eudora to Apple Mail, Jeff explains how to configure Mail to avoid iCal spam, and Adam looks at the new Apple Enthusiast site and VMware Fusion video contest. We also note that the audio edition of TidBITS is now available in the iTunes Store’s podcast directory for easy subscriptions. On the release front, we point to a slew of firmware updates from Apple, a major upgrade for the macro utility Keyboard Maestro, the long-promised Final Cut Server, and the “Macworld Mac OS X Hints Superguide.” Lastly, in the TidBITS Watchlist, we note the releases of Airfoil Speakers for Linux, Apple’s Aluminum Keyboard Firmware Update and Pro Applications Update 2008-01, iGlasses 2.1, OmniWeb 5.7, and Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom 1.4.1 and Camera Raw 4.4.1.
If you have a MacBook Air, or a recent MacBook, MacBook Pro, or iMac, Apple has a firmware update for you that supposedly improves stability. But that's all Apple's saying.
If you're looking for a new keyboard macro utility, Stairways Software has just released a significant update to the elegant Keyboard Maestro, with which you can make macros that utilize numerous triggers and actions.
Final Cut Server is now shipping after a year's delay, giving video professionals the capability to manage video and audio assets.
It's now easier than ever to subscribe to the audio version of TidBITS - just click the Podcast link in our nav bar to pop over to the iTunes Store, where you can click Subscribe to get new audio versions of articles as soon as we read them.
The "Hello Dear" event in Jeff Carlson's iCal calendar wasn't a sweet message from his wife - it was spam automatically added thanks to a setting in Mail that automatically (and invisibly) creates iCal events from .ics file attachments.
If you've switched to VMware Fusion from Parallels Desktop or Virtual PC, you can make a 60-second video about it and have a chance to win a MacBook Air.
Faced with hours of empty time that could be spent reading Mac news? At the new Apple Enthusiast site, you can find TidBITS headlines along with oodles of others, all automatically categorized.
In this ebook, Macworld's Rob Griffiths, editor of MacOSXHints.com, presents a cornucopia of over 200 tips to help you maximize your mileage from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. The book covers a wide range of topics and experience levels, from basic tips anyone can implement to power user tweaks employing Terminal, AppleScript, and Automator.
Plato, Hegel, and Marx, move over! Jon Nathan's Dialectic beats the pants off of yours - it looks up phone numbers in your Address Book and then dials the phone (any kind of phone, from zippy new software to old-fashioned hardware).
How Tonya upgraded over 10 years of email from Eudora to Apple Mail, but not without mistakes and troubles, and what she learned along the way.
Notable software releases so far this week include Airfoil Speakers for Linux 1.0, Apple's Aluminum Keyboard Firmware Update 1.0, iGlasses 2.1, OmniWeb 5.7, Pro Applications Update 2008-01, Photoshop Lightroom 1.4.1, and Camera Raw 4.4.1.
This week's discussions focus on using Eudora under Leopard, the perceived health dangers of blogging (according to a New York Times article), the presence (or lack of ) Mac OS X viruses in the wild, using Time Machine via AirPort Disk, audio-processing software, and more.