The 99-cent GadgetTrak app now can provide regular updates of a device’s coordinates while the program isn’t frontmost. For theft recovery, and for finding an iPhone under a couch cushion, GadgetTrak is worth a look.

A discussion with Tech Night Owl host Gene Steinberg about Apple’s missteps in 2010 somehow segued into far-ranging speculation about how Apple could radically improve the Mac and iOS experience with cloud-based storage and syncing of common files.

This major update to the popular collaboration software lets you choose which folders to copy to a particular computer, improves performance, and enhances the overall user experience.

When you need to run Windows, it’s always a bit more comforting to do so via emulation on your Mac. The experts at MacTech have published a preview of their latest benchmarks comparing two popular virtualization options for the Mac: Parallels Desktop 6 and VMware Fusion 3.1. The short version is that Parallels bests VMware in most of MacTech’s general tests, but you’ll want to read the whole thing to understand the complete results.

Apple has announced that the Mac App Store will officially open for business on 6 January 2011. The Mac App Store, of course, will aim to recreate the magic of the App Store for iOS devices—making Apple and third-party developers a whole lot of money in the process. Of note is that in Apple’s press release, CEO Steve Jobs says that Apple hopes to make “finding and buying PC apps easy and fun.” Apparently, the company is aiming to take back the term “PC” from the world of Windows machines. As with the initial App Store, Apple will take a 30-percent cut of all software sales, with the rest of the money going to the developers themselves.

New firmware for the AirPort Extreme Base Station and Time Capsule is coupled with a minor update to the AirPort Utility.

The latest version of iBooks adds automatic hyphenation, more richly illustrated layouts, and user-specified collections among other improvements.

If you’re thinking about printing calendars, books, or cards from iPhoto for Christmas, Apple would like you to know that you’ll need to finish by December 18th (with standard shipping) or December 19th (with express shipping) to guarantee delivery by December 24th. And if you’ll excuse me now, I have some urgent iPhoto work to do…

To encourage use of the Google Chrome Web browser and raise money for charity, Google will be donating money to five charities based on the number of tabs Google Chrome users open each day from December 15th through 19th. Though Google doesn’t say how much will be donated, or what the value of a tab is, it’s a clever way to bring people to Chrome and help The Nature Conservancy, charity:water, Doctors Without Borders, Un Techo para mi País, and Room to Read. To participate, install the Chrome for a Cause extension, which counts tabs but does not record your browsing history. It’s probably also best to make Chrome your default browser for the four days via the button in the Basics view of Chrome’s Preferences window; you can reset the default browser setting in Safari’s preferences afterwards, if you wish.

The popular Xmarks bookmark synchronization service has been rescued from the abyss by LastPass, a password-management and form-filling service that uses a similar combination of online service and Web browser extension. Both are worth checking out.

This lengthy blog post from ex-Apple and ex-Palm exec Michael Mace provides a fascinating look at what BlackBerry maker RIM is doing wrong, and, more generally, how a computing platform dies. It’s a few months old, but well worth reading for an insider’s view of how large technology companies can succeed or fail.

See who won copies of cf/x alpha 1.0 in last week’s DealBITS drawing, and if you’re not among them, read on to save 20 percent on cf/x Software’s image processing software.

We’re taking the last two weeks of the year off, so look for the next email issue of TidBITS on 3 January 2011. But we’ll continue posting new articles to our Web site, and TidBITS Talk will also continue apace.

Lex Friedman writes at Macworld about how Apple has now modified the U.S. iTunes Store to play 90-second previews of songs longer than two-and-a-half minutes; that’s up from 30 seconds. According to Lex, not all songs have the new previews yet, and the longer previews are limited to the U.S. iTunes Store, presumably due to licensing restrictions in other countries. Still, 90 seconds is much better for getting a sense of a song. Oh, and look carefully at the screenshot; 90 seconds should be more than enough to get a sense of that piece!

Significantly improves the interface for selecting Twitter direct message recipients and fixes a bug that prevented the MySQL plug-in from loading. (New prices vary, free update, 15.6 MB)