Joe Kissell
Joe Kissell became a TidBITS contributing editor in 2006 and now lives in San Diego after more than five years in Paris. He has written more than four dozen Take Control books, including the best-selling Take Control of iCloud, and numerous print books about Mac OS X. He is also a Senior Contributor to Macworld and the creator of Interesting Thing of the Day. (December 2012)
What happens when a veteran of umpteen Macworld Expos visits Apple Expo in Paris? Are Mac vendors more exciting in French?
In case you were thinking I'm spending my days here in Paris doing nothing but drinking absinthe and eating baguettes, rest assured that I've also been working hard on a large number of Take Control projects.
Now that the iTunes Store will no longer carry content from NBC Universal, Mac users have to jump through some pretty extreme hoops to (legally) watch Battlestar Galactica on their computers.
You may call me a Luddite, but I simply can't figure out how I'd use an iPod - no matter how cool it is - in my daily life. You have no idea how much this depresses my inner geek.
Joe Kissell returns to the topic of Safe Sleep with a better script for managing it, corrections to his previous article, and reasons why you might still want to leave Safe Sleep enabled.
VMware Fusion 1.0 is out of beta and now available in final form with both some unique features and a few remaining limitations.
Does the Safe Sleep feature of modern Mac laptops protect you from data loss... or does it just cause unnecessary aggravation?
A recent thread on TidBITS Talk mentioned the wide array of hardware devices one can use with a Skype account, the fact that many of them have limited Mac compatibility, and the dearth of information available to help Mac users choose among them
Filemaker Inc. has released FileMaker Pro 9.0, a major update to its line of database applications. Among numerous new features are a Quick Start screen, which gives less-experienced users an easy way to open or create databases; Conditional Formatting, which dynamically alters the formatting of fields based on user-defined rules; and the capability to connect to external SQL databases such as MySQL, Oracle SQL, and Microsoft SQL Server
VMware last week posted the first release candidate for Fusion, their software for running Windows on Intel-based Macs. This version includes improvements to Unity, a mode in which Windows applications can run side-by-side with Mac applications, rather than in a separate Windows window
Nisus Software has released Nisus Writer Pro, a new word processor based on their earlier product, Nisus Writer Express (which remains available). Nisus Writer Pro adds numerous features that appeared in Nisus Writer Classic but hadn't yet been seen in a native Mac OS X version of the program
When I was writing "Take Control of Passwords in Mac OS X," I thought long and hard about what sorts of strategies I could recommend for creating strong yet memorable passwords
As I've been using, and recommending, Parallels Desktop more frequently as a way to run Windows on Intel-based Macs, the question of how to back up, move, delete, and otherwise manage Parallels virtual machines has come up regularly
Less than two weeks before the iPhone's much-anticipated release, Apple announced two noteworthy improvements to its previously published specifications
For almost a year, we've covered the ongoing rivalry between Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion, the two leading ways to run Windows on an Intel-based Mac without rebooting