We’re back with beefy issue anchored by Jeff Carlson’s discussion about choosing the Canon PowerShot S2 IS for going on safari. Before that, Tonya shares her experience with the innovative streaming music service Pandora, Adam points developers toward a better way to help users install applications, Matt Neuburg notes the open source Unicode font Gentium, and Glenn Fleishman reports on the demise of TaxCut for the Mac. News this week: the releases of Security Update 2005-009, BBEdit 8.2.4, TextWrangler 2.1.1, EyeTV 1.8.4 with iPod video support, Rhapsody for Web browsers, "Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger," "Take Control of Podcasting on the Mac," and the second edition of "Take Control of Buying a Digital Camera" (on sale through Christmas).
Last Call for Holiday 2005 Gift Ideas -- Submissions for our holiday gift issue have been a little light this year, particularly in the hardware and game categories, so if you've been holding off, drop us a note with your suggestions by 07-Dec-05
Security Update 2005-009 Released -- Apple has released Security Update 2005-009, preventing a diverse collection of possible exploits in both the desktop and server versions of Mac OS X 10.3.9 and Mac OS X 10.4.3
One for the Mac, Nineteen for Windows -- U.S. Mac owners have one less option to pay the taxman. For a few years, H&R Block developed TaxCut for Mac OS X, paralleling their fairly good online site for tax preparation and filing
Bare Bones Updates Text Editors -- Bare Bones Software has updated both of their text editors, the powerful BBEdit and the freeware TextWrangler. Both programs, which share the same text engine, benefit from a variety of bug fixes and the capability to turn off the Script menu
Gentium Goes Open Source -- Gentium is a lovely and free Unicode font designed by Victor Gualtney (at the University of Reading, in England) and now distributed by SIL International, a far-seeing organization that has long played an important and generous role in linguistic computing and related causes
EyeTV 1.8.4 Offers One-Step Export to iPod Video -- If the limited selection of TV shows available on the iTunes Music Store is preventing you from watching video on your new iPod, check out the latest version of EyeTV from Elgato Systems
A year ago, we did a DealBITS drawing for the program GarageSale, from iwascoding.com. GarageSale is a Mac OS X application that acts as a front-end for posting auctions on eBay
RealNetworks today announced Rhapsody.com, a beta launch of a browser-based version of its Rhapsody streaming music subscription service for broadband users in the United States
One nicety about Mac OS X packages (folders that look like files; they're how most applications are delivered these days) is that they make installation easy
The holiday season is upon us, and if you are the resident geek in your home, that probably means messing around with smart playlists in iTunes to wrangle your holiday music into likely compilations - quiet music, lively music, silly music, and so on
For an upcoming vacation, I wanted to buy a new digital camera that offered more features and flexibility than my existing point-and-shoot model. Although my aging Canon PowerShot S200 has served me well for a number of years, I knew it wouldn't be up to the task of photographing animals on safari
PayPal Now Accepted for Take Control Orders -- Thanks to an upgrade to our shopping cart functionality from our friends at eSellerate, we can now accept PayPal payments for Take Control ebooks
The first link for each thread description points to the traditional TidBITS Talk interface; the second link points to the same discussion on our Web Crossing server, which provides a different look and which may be faster.
Is anti-virus protection necessary? Macs don't suffer from the virus problems seen in the PC world; should Mac users even bother with anti-virus software? (21 messages)
Keyboard application switching -- The gift suggestion of LiteSwitch generates discussion of keyboard application switching tips