While starting work on the next edition of his book about iMovie, Jeff Carlson reveals 10 tips and new features in iMovie '09 that until now have escaped attention.

If you use Gmail, you may have noticed that the main toolbar has changed, adding a pair of menus and tweaking the button style. The changes don't add new features, but are instead aimed at making common actions easier to perform.

David Weintraub takes a look at Dropbox, a file syncing and sharing utility ideally suited for people who need to collaborate on documents.

Want to know what's going on with the many programs running on your Mac without having to check in on each one individually? The system-wide notification manager Growl provides a centralized way of displaying notifications from a wide range of apps.

Even if you can download trial versions of most programs from the Web, sometimes a live demo from an expert is just what you need to grasp the point of a program. Here are a few applications that grabbed our attention as we walked the show floor.

Members of the BECU credit union can once again download transactions with Quicken 2007 for Mac and earlier.

iWork '09 brings welcome improvements to the productivity suite, but they're mostly limited to eye candy for Keynote and things that bring Pages and Numbers closer to parity with Microsoft Word and Excel.

Want to switch from Now Up-to-Date to iCal but scared about the amount of work in transferring all your existing events? Help is now at hand from the free NUD to iCal utility from BusyMac.

Circus Ponies NoteBook 3.0 builds on the previous version's outlining features with free-form text pages and the addition of shapes, lines, tablet-based drawing and handwriting recognition, and much more.

When an unexpected error prevents streaming music to his AirPort Express, Jeff Carlson eschews hours of troubleshooting and throws his Apple TV into the breach.

If you're trying to use Quicken for the Mac with some banking and finance sites, a security certificate may trip you up. It turns out that Quicken doesn't support Extended Validation SSL/TLS certificates, which renders it non-functional for downloading transactions from banks that rely on these more-secure certificates. A fix is in the works.

Apple said that Steve Jobs won't be presenting the keynote address at the 2009 Macworld Expo trade show - and that Apple won't be an exhibitor at future shows. Goodness. We're a bit shaken, but the word is that Macworld Expo is still on for 2010.

CrashPlan has endeared itself to us with its capability to perform backups over the Internet to other copies of CrashPlan. But Internet connections are slow, and hard disks are fast, so the latest version of CrashPlan also lets you back up to a directly connected hard disk.

You'd think Apple's Address Book application would be the easy choice for making mailing labels, but after fighting the program's bugs and shortcomings, Jeff Carlson turns to BeLight Software's Labels & Addresses to get his holiday cards in the mail.

After many years of relying on Now Up-to-Date, Adam and Tonya make the jump to using iCal, bolstered by the syncing capabilities of BusySync. The process is not a simple one, though, and although the new capabilities are welcome, iCal presents some annoyances as well.