I'm a pretty good typist, but my thoughts still race ahead of my fingers, so it's nice to have a utility for entering frequently used words and phrases by typing just an abbreviation

I imagine that for all of us, there are things we'd really like to do, but somehow have never found the opportunity. For me, one of those things is to create a 3D model of rooms in our house for the purpose of playing with furniture placement, remodeling plans, or honestly, just the fun of having a digital model of a real-world house

Thanks to Jim Dewitt, who alerted me that DataViz's venerable MacLinkPlus Deluxe, now at version 16, also includes read-only support for the file formats used by Word 2007 and Excel 2007 under Windows

Congratulations to Angus Davol of mac.com, whose entry was chosen randomly in last week's DealBITS drawing and who received a copy of Parallels Desktop on a 512 MB Kingston USB drive, worth $69.99

In an article in Fortune, several high-level Microsoft executives talked about the company's plans to take on the open source world - notably Linux - on patent infringement grounds

In what may be the first (and last?) press release datelined simultaneously "Glasgow, Scotland" and "Tel Aviv, Israel," TLA Systems and Sig Software have announced that, henceforward, the upgrade path of the latter's Drop Drawers is now the former's DragThing 5.8

If you find yourself needing to access Office Open XML documents created by Windows users in Word 2007, Microsoft now has a free beta converter that may help

Fax technology, as I mentioned in "PageSender 4.0 Shows Fax Isn't Dead" (2007-05-14), is alive and kicking, and a comment in TidBITS Talk also suggests that it's even healthier outside the United States

Microsoft has issued an update to Office 2004 for Mac, which the company says includes "fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code." The update is 58.5 MB, largely because it also includes all previous Office 2004 updates, and is available as a stand-alone download or via the Microsoft AutoUpdate application

Along with fixing a variety of bugs, Ergonis Software's recently released PopChar X 3.2 font utility adds an option to hide the application's corner "P" unless the cursor is nearby, something regular users might appreciate, whereas less frequent users may prefer the constant reminder of PopChar's presence

Fax is dead, right? After all, you don't see ultra-hip Web 2.0 sites trumpeting their fax services, and the Internet in general has surely supplanted the lowly fax machine, hasn't it? And if you do need to fax a document, Mac OS X has fax capabilities built in

A year ago, I might have needed to explain this week's DealBITS drawing in more detail. But a year ago, virtualization - the capability to run Windows and other PC operating systems on an Intel-based Mac - was just getting started, and Parallels Desktop hadn't yet become the must-have application for anyone who needs to use Windows applications on a Mac

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

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

I'm a fan of Mark/Space's syncing products. The Missing Sync for Palm OS, for example, has made my wife's digital life much more pleasant now that she no longer has to deal with the not-always-reliable collaboration between Apple's iSync and Palm's HotSync conduit to get her Palm TX and her PowerBook G4 on the same page