It’s a big week for news, with Apple and EMI announcing DRM-free music to be sold in the iTunes Store and Adobe announcing the final details surrounding the upcoming release of Creative Suite 3. Of course, we can’t resist passing along other, less-serious developments, such as Gmail Paper and other examples of April Foolishness. Returning to real news, Glenn worries about the acquisition of the national ISP Speakeasy by retail chain Best Buy, Adam ponders the recent uproar around death threats made against a prominent woman blogger, Jeff examines the new Complete My Album option in iTunes, and Robert Movin returns with the story of how he switched his mother to the Mac.
Whew! We want to thank everyone who came together yesterday for what was truly our most inspired April Fools issue ever. Joe Kissell's remote-controlled, animatronic monkey was definitely the highlight, and we hope that his landlord will be understanding about all the damage - who would have suspected that the folks at MacUser.com were so adept at remote AppleScript programming?
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Apple last week released Boot Camp 1.2 beta, the latest version of its software for enabling Intel-based Macs to boot into Microsoft Windows. This is likely to be the final update to Boot Camp before the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, which according to Apple will include a release version of Boot Camp (though there's still much speculation about what form Boot Camp will take in Leopard)
One of the great things about the iTunes Store has been the way it lets you buy single songs without having to purchase an entire album. I own too many CDs that contain only one or two songs I like; the rest of the selections just don't hold my interest
There's a line between abusive comments and criminal speech.
I read very few blogs on a regular basis, and I've never become enmeshed in the "blogosphere," the entire collection of blogs and bloggers that link to and quote one another
Congratulations to Dan Kerkman of appns.com, John Allan of mac.com, Neal Pann of mac.com, and Ron Gillmore of victoria.tc.ca, whose entries were chosen randomly in last week's DealBITS drawing and who received a copy of BeLight Software's Art Text, worth $29.95
In a press conference today in London, Apple and EMI Music announced that starting in May 2007, EMI Music's entire digital catalog of music will be available for purchase in DRM-free versions from the iTunes Store worldwide
Ladies and gentleman, start your rendering engines! Adobe has at last announced shipping dates, product details, and pricing for its massive collection of updates to existing products under the rubric Creative Suite 3 (CS3)
My Internet service provider (ISP) Speakeasy Networks was just purchased by Best Buy. I was hoping the press release carried an April 1st dateline, but no such luck
It was the call we all dread.
"Hi Mom."
"Hi," she replied tersely.
"Is something wrong?"
"It's my email. It won't work. And the Internet is really slow."
"Crud."
I may be an executive in the world of information technology, one who works with some of the largest technology companies in the business, but to my extended family I just "work in computers." Which means, of course, that I, like many of you, am expected to keep their email running and figure out where those pesky digital photos are hiding after being deleted accidentally
Increasing font sizes everywhere -- A reader points out that you can change the text size in Finder windows easily. (1 message)
UK versus United Kingdom -- A copyediting question leads to a spirited discussion of how people in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland refer to themselves: United Kingdom, Great Britain, just Britain? And that, in turn, brings up questions of American versus British English usage