It’s a grab bag week here at TidBITS, starting with Jeff Carlson passing on iChat AV tips and examining PalmSource’s elimination of future Macintosh support. Adam announces our first Japanese Take Control title and reviews Konfabulator, a neat Mac OS X program reminiscent of HyperCard. Then Glenn Fleishman chimes in with a pointer to where you can pick up a refurbished Power Mac G5 from the Virginia Tech supercomputer cluster, and in the news, Apple starts shipping iPod minis and updates GarageBand slightly.
iPod mini Begins to Ship -- The iPod mini, which Apple announced last month at Macworld Expo San Francisco 2004, is starting to trickle into consumer's hands
GarageBand 1.0.1 Released -- Apple has a nearly inscrutable minor update to its music-creation application GarageBand, saying it "clarifies specific alert dialogs regarding system performance." We can only imagine that Apple rolled a few unspecified bug fixes into the update, which weighs in as a hefty 21.5 MB download
Last week, we released yet another Take Control title, but this one's a bit different. It's Joe Kissell's "Take Control of Upgrading to Panther," translated into Japanese for the many Macintosh users in Japan and elsewhere who prefer to read in Japanese
You can purchase a refurbished piece of Macintosh history; MacMall is selling some quantity of the Power Mac G5 computers that comprised Virginia Tech's top-ranked supercomputer
At the PalmSource Developer Conference last week, PalmSource, the company that develops and licenses the Palm OS, revealed details about its forthcoming handheld operating system and also dropped some disappointing news: the company will stop supporting the Macintosh
Several weeks went by last December before I told anyone, especially my fellow authors, about the latest book contract I'd signed with Peachpit Press. It's not that I was being ultra-competitive or feared that someone else would steal my idea and get to it before I did
Some programs defy categorization. Bill Atkinson described HyperCard as a "software erector set," which was actually quite accurate, even if Apple's marketing department kept trying to sell it as a presentation program, a personal information manager, and a combination floor wax/dessert topping.
If I were handing out Software Erector Set awards today, Konfabulator would top my list
Apple Releases Safari 1.2 -- When a Web page doesn't load correctly in Safari, is it the fault of the browser or the page's HTML coders? The ongoing discussion of the latest version of Apple's Web browser turns to how browsers are forced to deal with sloppy page design