As Snow Leopard and the iPhone OS 3.1 settle in, we have a practical issue for you this week, thanks to guest writers Michael E. Cohen and Lewis Butler. Michael explains how changes in the iPhone OS could cause duplication when syncing calendar events, and Lewis figures out how to improve Snow Leopard’s autocorrection capabilities. In other news, Adam explains how to watch Apple events online; and Glenn Fleishman covers Google’s acquisition of reCAPTCHA, the introduction of the AT&T 3G MicroCell home cellular base station, and the 802.11n chip buried in the new iPod touch. Doug McLean also contributes a pair of features: a look at widespread SuperDrive problems and an article about the plight of real snow leopards (and what you can do to help!). Notable software releases this week include Sandvox 1.6.4, Mellel 2.7, MercuryMover 2.0.6, Camera Raw 5.5, Lightroom 2.5, and Things 1.2.2.
If you aren't invited to Apple's special events and want to see the real thing rather than reading liveblog transcripts, subscribe to the Apple Keynotes podcast or check the QuickTime Guide.
AT&T finally provides public details of its home base station for 3G phones, the 3G MicroCell, which provides strong signal strength and routes calls over your broadband Internet connection.
Google acquires reCAPTCHA, a project started at Carnegie Mellon University to bring robust tools to fight robot ticket purchasers, comment spamming, and other malicious or forbidden automated behavior.
Apple slips a single-stream 802.11n chip into the latest iPod touch, iFixit discovers. Faster networking? More likely, a better networked media player.
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard offers automatic spelling correction, but all too often, it recognizes your typos as words other than what you meant, causing even more work. To ensure accurate replacements, try using the TidBITS AutoCorrect Dictionary of over 2,700 corrections. TidBITS contributor Lewis Butler explains how to do it.
The details of how iTunes and MobileMe syncing work keep changing through successive versions of the iPhone OS. "Take Control of Syncing Data in Leopard" author Michael E. Cohen explains how each version has worked, and how to prevent duplicate calendar events from appearing on your iPhone or iPod touch.
Apple's release of Snow Leopard is for many people the first time they've heard of the big cat, and many more don't know that the actual snow leopard is an extremely endangered species. Here's a look at current efforts to protect the animal, and how you can get involved.
An attempt to track down reports of widespread defective SuperDrives via Apple discussion forums reveals the difficulty in assessing these sorts of large-scale issues, yet also confirms the existence of some kind of significant problem at play.
Notable software releases this week include Sandvox 1.6.4, Mellel 2.7, MercuryMover 2.0.6, Camera Raw 5.5, Lightroom 2.5, and Things 1.2.2.
Read on for a collection of links to a few of the most interesting articles and resources that the TidBITS staff discovered on the Web this week.
This week's discussions cover a broad range of topics: the severity of the recent malware intrusion at the New York Times Web site; using a wireless keyboard and mouse on an older iMac; tracking down an age-old bug in Microsoft Word; problems starting a Power Mac G5; disabling the system-wide spelling checker in Mac OS X, and running Dragon Naturally Speaking in a virtual Windows environment on the Mac.