Lex Friedman
Lex Friedman's Internet career has included significant roles at Intermix and Demand Media. He co-founded The Daily Plate, a diet-tracking Web site, which is now part of Livestrong.com. Beyond his professional Internet work, Lex also writes. He publishes the Lex, Briefly blog, co-authored humor book The Snuggie Sutra and contributes frequently to Macworld. He lives in New Jersey with his wife Lauren, his two daughters, and too many iOS devices to count. He also tweets too much.
Resolves security holes and fixes form submission. (Free, 37.56 MB for Snow Leopard, 46.71 MB for Leopard, 29.46 MB for Tiger)
Fixes minor MobileMe-related issues. ($79 as part of iLife, free update, 177.14 MB)
Adds Google Storage support, a slew of S3-specific features, and oodles of bug fixes. (Free, 19.2 MB)
Adds support for AAC and AAC+ streams, and corrects various bugs. ($32 new, free update, 11.2 MB)
Corrects minor bugs and updates internal audio components. ($32 new, free update, 6.9 MB)
Reduces CPU utilization during playback and corrects a slew of small bugs. ($32 new, free update, 3.7 MB)
It has been nearly 20 years since Autodesk last made its AutoCAD design and engineering software available for the Mac. But now, The New York Times reports, CAD-craving Mac users with $4,000 to spend will once again be able to buy AutoCAD for the Mac. Thanks to the Mac's resurgence, Autodesk says more and more customers are asking for a Mac version, and now the company plans to deliver.
Improves synchronization speed, print layouts, and more. ($49.95 new, free update, 8.3 MB)
Apple Mail offers controls for parents to monitor their kids' email usage, including the capability to add specific senders to a whitelist. However, Jonathan Kamens has discovered a fairly simple means by which a nefarious individual can trick Mail into automatically adding any address to the whitelist. Kamens says he reported the flaw to Apple back in June, but adds that the company has neither fixed the problem nor treated it as a security vulnerability. Fortunately for concerned parents, Kamens lays out a pair of stopgap workarounds.
Updated with bug fixes, Facebook and SmugMug publishing support, and 120 new lens profiles. ($299 new, free update, 79.6 MB)
Improves filtering accuracy, fixes bugs with Apple Mail integration, and introduces support for MailForge and Microsoft Outlook 2011. ($30 new, free update, 7.1 MB)
Updates workflows from the HTML 5 Pack. ($399 new, free update, 14.1 MB)
One of Gmail's most ballyhooed features is its excellent spam filter. But having reduced spam annoyance to a dull roar, Google has moved on to another troubling inbox management issue: even "legitimate" e-mail contains plenty of both wheat and chaff. Google's latest Gmail feature, dubbed Priority Inbox, aims to make inbox management a bit easier. Through its own analysis and your manual training (much like you would train a spam filter), Priority Inbox learns which messages are more likely to require immediate attention, and which can wait. The feature splits your Inbox into "important and unread" messages, "starred" messages, and "everything else." Google says it will roll out the new option to users of Gmail and Google Apps alike over the coming days. We'll see how it works when it appears in our accounts.
Addresses a rare freezing issue affecting some mid-2010 MacBook Pros. (free, 2.16 MB)
Over at Macworld, Lex Friedman spends more than 1,000 words talking about video codecs. But it's not all nerd-speak. MPEG LA has announced that it will never charge royalties for free H.264 videos. That's important because HTML5 video, which lets you watch Web video without requiring plug-ins like Flash, is currently difficult for publishers and consumers alike, with different browsers providing limited support for different codecs. While H.264 - which Apple already supports in both Safari and Mobile Safari - already has buy-in from major media companies like CNN, Major League Baseball, and YouTube, this announcement could very well spark a unification of HTML5 video formats.