Doug McLean
Doug McLean holds the position of Staff Writer at TidBITS, before which he did testing for the New York Times Web site and oversaw Mac support at the Montserrat College of Art. Doug has an art degree from Cornell University and remains a working artist.
Addresses 14 security vulnerabilities and fixes a bug related to custom dictionaries. (Free, 332.8 MB)
Addresses 14 security vulnerabilities. (Free, 9.7 MB)
Adds support for Google Docs and enhances Amazon S3 capabilities. (Free, 19.2 MB)
For those denied the pleasure of watching Steve Jobs unveil the iPhone 4 in person, Apple has posted a video of the 2010 WWDC keynote speech on its Web site. In addition to introducing the iPhone 4, Jobs and company also previewed iOS 4, an update to iBooks, the new video conferencing app FaceTime, and a hearty collection of app demos.
Princeton University recently investigated the effect of replacing traditional course printouts with individual student Kindles. The study results indicate widespread adoption of e-readers among students could significantly lower printing costs and waste for the university, though the iPad might be a better candidate for the job.
Adds integration with Address Book for birthdays and meeting invitations, expands drag-and-drop capabilities, and fixes a number of minor bugs. ($49 new, free update, 8.2 MB)
Updates the program to the latest version of Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine, fixes a number of bugs related to program stability, and improves ad-blocking capabilities. (Free, 15.8 MB)
Adds support for Foursquare, Google Buzz, Google Maps, TwitVid, and global filters. (Free, 2.3 MB)
Fixes several bugs related to scheduled tasks and improves overall usability. ($10 suggested donation, free update, 3.6 MB)
Enhances graphic performance, improves USB connectivity, and expands virtual hard disk support to 2 TB. ($79.99 new, free update, 432 MB)
Resolves issues with the Boot Camp Control Panel and headphone audio. (Free, 1.5 MB)
Walmart has halved the price of the 16 GB iPhone 3GS to a mere $97. That's the lowest price you're likely to find in the United States, though most retailers will almost certainly follow suit once the next update to the iPhone arrives, probably within the next month. (Or so we suspect; the iPhone 3G dropped to $99 once the iPhone 3GS came out last year.) We recommend waiting for the next iPhone to ship before deciding whether you'd rather have the latest and greatest, or last year's model for less.
Google has announced it is extending the availability of its Google Voice telephony service to anyone in possession of a .edu email address (previously, Google Voice was available only through elusive invitations). Google Voice offers features such perks as free text messaging, low international calling rates, SMS-to-email, and voicemail-to-text transcriptions, all of which could be particularly useful to peripatetic students. To sign up, simply send a request to Google from the linked page using your educational email address, and an invitation will be sent to you within 24 hours. Google Voice is currently available only to people in the United States.
Apple has announced a beta update to its Web-based mail service, MobileMe Mail. The beta offers widescreen and compact views, single-click archiving, a message formatting toolbar, increased security via SSL, server-based rules, and overall improved performance. The beta is open to all MobileMe users and you can switch back at any time. To sign up, log in to MobileMe and click the "Request An Invitation" link in the lower-left corner of the page.
Adds support for connecting to multiple networks at once and the capability to save login information to the Keychain, ($15 new per computer, free upgrade for users who have purchased in the past month, 9.3 MB)