It’s hard to believe that it has been three years since the first Take Control ebook, but our current catalog of 44 titles doesn’t lie. Adam looks at how this grand experiment is going (well!) and marks the occasion with a 50 percent-off sale. Also in this issue, Glenn Fleishman details the facts and FUD about a new AirPort Card security vulnerability. On the software front, Charles Maurer returns with a look at some alternatives to Adobe Photoshop, and we note the releases of SpamSieve 2.5, DVD Studio Pro 4.1.1, Final Cut Express HD 3.5.1, iTunes 7.0.2, Aperture 1.5.1, and an 8 GB version of the (PRODUCT RED) iPod nano. Finally, we note Windows Secrets, which Glenn sees as the closest thing to TidBITS for Windows users, and announce a new DealBITS drawing for PDFpen.
Last week's treat from Microsoft of five copies of Microsoft Office 2004 turned out to be extremely popular, with a record 1,959 entrants, more than for any other DealBITS drawing
I do a lot of work with massaging PDF files these days, and while I can't escape using Adobe's Acrobat Professional for certain tasks, I find that I prefer SmileOnMyMac's PDFpen for many activities, such as moving pages around when preparing print-on-demand versions of our Take Control ebooks, deleting pages to make Take Control samples, adding text to pages to make class copies, and so on
Michael Tsai has released SpamSieve 2.5, the latest version of his popular spam-filtering tool for Apple Mail, Emailer, Entourage v.X and later, Eudora 5.2 and later in Sponsored or Paid mode, GyazMail, Mailsmith, Outlook Express 5, and PowerMail
We've now finished our third year of publishing electronic books in the Take Control series, and to celebrate that fact, we're having a 50 percent-off sale on every one of our ebooks through 13-Nov-06
Apple has posted a number of maintenance updates over the last couple of weeks, providing few details about some of them (as we've come to expect, unfortunately)
Mac OS X may be at risk via the original AirPort Card because of an attack methodology published last week as part of the Month of Kernel Bugs. The attack can corrupt some "internal kernel structures," and causes a kernel panic - a crash
We at TidBITS are sometimes queried, "Your list is great, but is there a version for Windows as well?" I've always told those people to sign up for fellow Seattlite Brian Livingston's Windows Secrets newsletter
Adobe Photoshop reminds me of a camel: a horse designed by a committee. It is ungainly and awkward to control. It is remarkably useful - no other photo editor will do so much - but it is not an easy beast to ride.
I personally find Photoshop indispensable, not so much because of what it can do itself as because it is necessary to run some plug-ins by Asiva, particularly Shift+Gain
Feed the Hungry While Cooking Thanksgiving Dinner -- Thanksgiving is all about family and food, and to help those who may not have either, we'll be donating $1 from the sale of each copy of Joe Kissell's "Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner" during the month of November to the San Francisco Food Bank, a non-profit organization (where Joe has volunteered) whose mission is to end hunger in San Francisco
MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo hard drive options -- Apple's new pro laptops offer three hard drive configurations. How do they stack up to what can be bought from third-party vendors? Plus, we revisit how much actual disk capacity you get from a hard drive, versus its advertised capacity