It has been many years since we've done a reader survey, but since we're in the middle of some major infrastructure and site redesign work, I'd like to learn more about who you are, what you do, how you acquire technology information, what you think of our content, and most important, what you would like to see more of in TidBITS. So I would greatly appreciate it if you could spare 5 minutes to fill out our TidBITS 2007 Reader Survey

Last week's Final Cut Pro 5.1.3 Update barely had time to cool before Final Cut users discovered that it broke a number of third party plug-ins such as Conduit, Automatic Duck, and Magic Bullet Colorista

One of the most entertaining Macintosh radio shows/podcasts is Shawn King's Your Mac Life, which had to change its domain name last week. So if you're looking for Your Mac Life on Wednesday evenings at its normally scheduled time of 5:30 PM Pacific/8:30 PM Eastern, head over to www.yourmaclifeshow.com instead of www.yourmaclife.com

Congratulations to John O'Reilly of potomacadvisors.com, Dave Harvey of mac.com, and Cheryll Shubert of sbcglobal.net, whose entries were chosen randomly in last week's DealBITS drawing and who received a copy of A Sharp's Opal, worth $32

Microsoft has promised that they'll release converters that will enable earlier versions of Microsoft Word on the Macintosh to open XML-based .docx files created with the new Word 2007 in Windows

Apple and Cisco have reached an agreement on the use of the iPhone name. Cisco surprised the Mac world when their Linksys division released and rebranded a variety of Internet Protocol (IP) phones under the name iPhone in December 2006

Thanks to Bryan Phelan for alerting us to a potentially useful feature in Apple's Preview application. Bryan was noticing that other applications on his Mac were constantly distracting him from reading his Take Control ebooks until he stumbled on the Slideshow feature in Preview

The day after I wrote it up in TidBITS (see "Early Help Desk Video," 2007-02-19), ZrednaZ, the user who posted the Early Help Desk Video with English subtitles removed the video, generating a flurry of squawks from TidBITS readers who wanted to see it

Apple's WWAN (Wireless Wide Area Network) Support Update v1.0, released last week via Software Update, adds support for five cellular data modems from Novatel, which are variously offered by three U.S

Ever spend a non-trivial amount of time working on something, only to find that you've almost completely wasted your time? That's what happened last week, when I spent about an hour testing a variety of old and new URLs to articles at the New York Times, attempting to find a reproducible method of linking to them in a way that provided free, permanent access

In the course of writing two editions of "Take Control of Mac OS X Backups" and several magazine articles on the same subject, I've tried a lot of Mac backup applications

Month of Apple Sales #4: The Switcher's Kit -- We all know at least one malware-harried Windows user who's on the fence about switching to the Mac. But as much as Mac OS X is simple, secure, and pleasant to use, changing operating systems is still a big step

Volume control for family Mac -- The iPod contains a volume limiting option, but what about the Mac? Is there a way to prevent a 7-year-old from cranking up the sound? (1 message) Apple TV play DVD from laptop? As we wait for the Apple TV to ship, a reader wonders if it will be possible to watch a movie on television from a DVD in a Mac elsewhere in the house