Authors and publishers have agreed to settle with Google over its book search program. The surprising part is that the resulting agreement will likely make millions more books widely available, benefit the public, and increase revenues to Google, authors, and publishers.

The new MacBook no longer includes a FireWire port, which is bad news for owners for MiniDV and HDV camcorders that connect to a computer via FireWire (or i.Link). Here's a possible workaround for getting your footage onto Apple's consumer notebook.

Following its announcement late last month, the CS4 revision of Adobe's suite of creative tools is now shipping.

Want a copy of SmileOnMyMac's useful PDF manipulation software PDFpen 4, which now has OCR capabilities and can import Word documents? Enter this week's DealBITS drawing!

Adam compares the responses he gets when reporting serious bugs from a pair of companies that produce high-end PDF manipulation tools.

Extensis had way too much fun in producing this trailer for a spoof movie called Bravefont. It's really a teaser for Suitcase Fusion 2, but the video is a must-see for its combination of movie cliches and font jokes.

In October 2008, Adobe will ship Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4), the latest in a long line of releases of its professional application suite. CS4 includes Photoshop CS4, InDesign CS4, Illustrator CS4, Dreamweaver CS4, Flash CS4 Professional, and more.

Wish you could simultaneously record the audio from an iChat voice chat, a Skype call, and iTunes? WireTap Anywhere lets you mix and match your hardware and software audio inputs.

The second edition of Andy Affleck's "Take Control of Podcasting on the Mac" provides coverage of all the latest podcasting software, adds instructions on improving sound quality with audio plug-ins (complete with audible examples!), and offers advice on conducting successful interviews.

Bare Bones Software has tweaked and polished the venerable BBEdit text editor, adding productivity-enhancing features for Web developers, programmers, sysadmins, and writers alike.

Notable software releases so far this week include Final Cut Express 4.0.1, VMware Fusion 2.0 RC1, Apple ProRes QuickTime Decoder 1.0, Coda 1.5, and RapidWeaver 4.1.1.

While our fearless leader Adam Engst despises his Eye-Fi Share, I've grown to like, if not quite love, my Eye-Fi Explore, an SD storage and Wi-Fi card that tags photos with locations and uploads at some hotspots.

Sometimes a golden-haired poster child for advanced technology is really the devil in disguise. An SD memory card that can upload photos automatically via Wi-Fi sounds like a great idea, but for Adam, it has caused nothing but pain and suffering.

Although Adam's approach for backing up photos while traveling worked well for him, readers suggest some different approaches that might work well in other situations.

When you're on vacation, backing up your Mac probably isn't high on your list of things to do. But you should protect your vacation photos, which could easily disappear with a slip in the ocean or a lost piece of luggage. Here's how (complete with some pictures of our recent trip to Wales).