For those interested in running Windows on an Intel-based Mac, this week brought two interesting announcements. First, in the ongoing battle of one-upmanship between Parallels and VMware, Parallels announced a new initiative to help developers package and distribute virtual appliances - prepackaged virtual machines containing a full operating system and applications, configured to perform specific tasks and ready to run without any setup

In "Online Backup Options Expand" (2007-04-09), I mentioned two potentially promising online backup services - Mozy and Bandwagon - that were not quite ready for prime time

I spend a fair amount of time doing Web development, and although I have access to graphical tools such as Dreamweaver, I've long preferred to do all my coding by hand - yes, even for complex CSS layouts, tables, and forms; it's just the way I'm wired

A number of years ago, when the commercial Internet was still young and hard drive capacities were usually measured in megabytes rather than gigabytes or terabytes, I subscribed to an online backup service

Google has released the first public beta version of Google Desktop for the Mac, an application that rapidly searches files on your computer, messages in your Gmail account, and Google's existing index of Web pages, all in a single interface

Last week VMware released Beta 3 of its Fusion virtualization software for running Windows on an Intel-based Mac. Among several new features are two that are obvious attempts to overcome advantages offered by competitor Parallels Desktop: support for booting from a copy of Windows installed under Boot Camp and an Easy Install option to automate the process of running the Windows installer

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)

Parallels has now released the official update to the Parallels Desktop virtualization software that began public beta testing at the beginning of December 2006

In the course of writing two editions of "Take Control of Mac OS X Backups" and several magazine articles on the same subject, I've tried a lot of Mac backup applications

Microsoft last week released the Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.4 Update. In addition to providing improved spam detection in Entourage, this update "fixes vulnerabilities in Office 2004 that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code." This update requires that you have already installed the Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.3.3 Update, released last month

Last week VMware finally made good on its promise at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), releasing a public beta version (registration required) of its new virtualization software for Mac OS X, code-named Fusion

Last week, Parallels announced a new beta version of their Parallels Desktop virtualization software, which lets owners of Intel Macs run almost any version of Windows within Mac OS X

Last week Agile Web Solutions released 1Passwd 2.0, a major upgrade to the utility that helps manage passwords and uses a single set of data to fill forms in most Mac OS X Web browsers

Last week Apple rolled out a major overhaul to the email portion of the .Mac Web site. With the changes, the .Mac webmail interface looks and acts strikingly similar to Apple's Mail application

One of the most striking things I noticed when switching from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X years ago was how frequently the operating system asks me for a password