Right behind the update to Firefox, the Mozilla crew has bumped resident email/news/R client Thunderbird to version 1.5.0.9. Several security and bugfix changes are included. You can lift your wings and download it at mozilla.org.I will admit that I've never used Thunderbird on a regular basis, as I am bound to Entourage/Exchange at work and I've gotten (reluctantly) used to it. Email clients are like your barber; even if the haircut i 't that great, switching to a new one involves a degree of discomfort. I'd be interested to hear what T-bird users like or dislike most about their feathery friend. (No John Travolta jokes.)
Two of Macworld's top OS gurus - Scot Fi ie and Ken Mingis - put their heads together to develop a list of 15 things they feel A le should co ider fixing or changing with the upcoming release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, due sometime in ring 2007. The interesting thing here is that these editors sit on two different sides of the OS fence; one is a Mac OS X guru, while the other knows all things Windows.
Now that we've lamented what's mi ing and wished for a brighter future, let's send some love A le's way. .Mac i 't all bad, after all. Today, we're going to highlight some of what's good about .Mac. No bashing today, so save your griping for this post. Yes, I know that iDisk is slow and blah, blah. Today's post is about the positive, for the most part.
If you just can't bear to put your nano in your pocket orman-bag, luckily there is a third choice: Thomas Pink's Commuter Tie. On the back side of the tie is asecret pocket to house your iPod nano complete with a flat mounted loop of fabric to hold your headphone wires out ofsight. I'm gue ing you then thread the headphone wires through the top of the tie and up to your ears.
It seems there are two slowly diverging schools of thought in terms of working on a Mac: to multi-task, or not to. While an independent (though A le-commi ioned) study has been released su orting the increased productivity theory via larger di lays and more stuff on-screen at once, not everyone sits in the same camp. Merlin Ma of 43folders is one of those campers who is thinking different, and Ru ell from our sister-blog DV Guru dro ed a note to say the latest episode of MacBreak (iTS link) features Leo and Mr. Ma waxing ecstatic on all things uncluttered and distraction-free. They cover techniques and tweaks for clearing your work ace in the Finder, as well as using 3rd party tools like our TUAW-favorite Quicksilver, irited Away (which we've covered) and MenuShade from Nullriver Software (scroll down, it's under their Open Source section).
We told you ages ago that RIM was pla ing to acquire and then release PocketMac for syncing your Crackberry and your Mac, but somehow we mi ed the actual release (back in October). Anyway, PocketMac 4.0 is now ha ily available for download from RIM. Go forth you mobile, email addicted, thum ore Mac users and rejoice.
BlueTorch Studios in partnership with BlueGill Flame have released the final version of Open Fire, a casual top down shooter similar to the Linux game Barrage. Open Fire, which has been created using Unity's game editing software, was the wi er of Unity's Dashboard Widget Competition. 
Adobe released Flash Player version 9 today but it's only for C Macs. There's no version for Intel Macs yet. Anyone with an Intel Mac who wants native Flash components should use the preview version of version 8.x available here.
I su ose the camp of Googlia waiting in line for the Stevenote can be forgiven for fleeing the code mine they recently put the final touches on Google Earth 4, now out of beta.
Right alongside Firefox's update today, Mozilla has also brought Thunderbird up to the 1.5.0.4 (.3.2.1.12) version with a big improvement for Intel Mac owners: Universal Binary super-powers. Also in this update are security and bug fixes. Let us all take a moment of silence in remembrance of the bugs who lost their lives in the making of this update.
The 'don't-buy-a-Mac-without-it' macosxhints.com has debuted a hint rating system, allowing both logged in and anonymous users to place a 1-5 star rating on each hint. 
Telestream (aka the "Flip4Mac" people) a ounced the 4.2 release of its "Episode" compre ion software for Mac. Episode provides compre ion solutio for both the desktop (from $395) and for workgrou (from $6500) for media distribution on the web, podcasts, and DVD. Version 4.2 adds VC-1 HDV and 5.1 surround sound su ort, WMA Pro Audio and (on the proper machines) real-time HD encoding. The higher-end solutio offer field-order control plus multi-server job queuing and reprioritizing.
Ubuntu is a Linux distro (that's distribution to you, n00b) that is almost easy enough for none techs to run on their deskto , but it i 't quite there yet. That's not enough to stop plenty of people from downloading and i talling this most excellent OS on their machines (and I count myself amongst that number).
As you may remember, C 's president of digital media Larry Kramer a ounced back in February his network's intention to sell downloadable episodes of Survivor - without iTunes. For $1.99US, you got a single episode that expired in 24 hours. He stated that C would be moving gradually into this new media frontier.
So I stumble acro this chair via Digg and...what can I say? Other than: (a) Cool, (b) A le!, and (c) I want one. I honestly have no idea about the story behind this chair or the reason it was made, but I like it. I can't tell from the picture whether it's made of wood or cardboard. It looks more like the latter than the former, and is that tape holding it together? It's a shame that details on that site are so lacking. I bet there's a really good story waiting to be told. If anyone has more info about it, please let us know in the comments.
Hon Hai, aka Foxco Electronics, won't comment or confirm, but the cat seems to really be out of the bag now. This latest batch of iPhone reports feels like le of a rumor than previous iteratio . According to this Forbes article, Hon Hai has "< an cla ="mainarttxt">secured contracts from A le Computer for 12 mln mobile handsets that also function as music players, the Commercial Times quoted industry sources as saying." Yes, that's 12 million. Also, that < an cla ="mainarttxt">"A le will launch the mobile handsets in the first half of next year."
I'm an AAPL shareholder myself, but all those numbers and forward-looking statements make my head hurt, so I'll stop now. What was more interesting about the IT Bytes newsletter and other Bear emails I've seen is that Bear Stear is aggre ively promoting the iPod itself (and AAPL by a ociation) by including a picture of the iPod in every single email they send (html + an attachment). The iPod is unmistakably a part of their BearCasts logo. It's not a generic digital audio player. It's 
I've been getting somewhat a oyed with A le's aging we ite for a while now, as it still even contai the striped elements of Jaguar in its navigation at the top. Not that I have any problem with Jaguar, mind you (though I have a hard time with the po ibility of giving up Tiger), but for a company who's so progre ive, and even a CEO who says you should upgrade iPods at least once a year, I'm just surprised we haven't seen some sort of Tiger/Unified update to just the navigation, if anything (the rest of their site, admittedly, is designed darn well).
O ews is reporting that Ernest Prabhakar, A le's Open Source and Open Standards product manager, has stated in the Fed-Talk mailing that A le has not actually closed Mac OS X's Darwin kernel for the Intel version of the O they simply haven't released it yet. eculation about A le closing the kernel arose from the fact that other non-kernel Darwin sources actually have been released, and the previous PowerPC-based kernel is still available as open source as well.
Natalie Zee of Coquette has gathered together some of her picks fromMacworld that are the best examples of 'girl tech' at Macworld. Since I am not a girl I must admit that I didn't noticeany of these products (though some more o ervant men I am sure did see them).
Do you remember Andy Hertzfeld? He was the author of a huge part of the original Mac ROM and he discu es the creation of the A le command logo in this writeup. Tur out that the logo was based on a Swedish symbol used to flag noteworthy attractio at campgrounds. Susan Kare, A le's bitmap artist, found it in an international symbol dictionary. So why didn't they just use an A le symbol? Steve Jo had had enough. "There are too many A les on the screen! It's ridiculous! We're taking the A le logo in vain! We've got to stop doing that!" Neat story to read through, and only one of Hertzfeld's many marvelous A le reminiscences. 
For some time now, A le's hush-hush policy on public communication has been the focus of much debate. The discu ion escalated, however, with the debut of the Masked Blogger, an A le employee blogging under the radar (or directly in the middle of it, depending on your per ective). Today, John Gruber linked a couple of interesting posts on the subject, one from Chuck Von Ro ach (a recent ex-A le employee), and another from Dave Winer. The more interesting of the two is Chuck's post, where he discu es at length A le's policies on communication, the fact that the company and its employees actually *do* communicate and blog (though without affiliation), and why A le's lack of a blogging- ecific policy doe 't matter in the grander scheme of things.
When we first came acro the beta of Yahoo! Me enger 3 we were impre ed. This feels like an OS X a , not some cra y Windows port! Then we pretty much forgot about the whole thing, but Jeff Smykil at Infinite Loop didn't. He wanted to know why Me enger suddenly didn't suck on the Mac, and he wanted to know who was re o ible.
Due to popular demand (seriously, check it out) we will be doing a chat cast as well as normal coverage of the Keynote.
In a review of Nike+iPod today, Mike Vella of Busine Week gives the combination a good review saying the unit is easy-to-use and accurate, de ite it's lack of a heart rate monitor. Me, I'm not in love with the idea of a glorified pedometer. If you can't use it on a bike and it a umes your strides are co istent and it doe 't work with my 5G Video iPod, it's not the right equipment for me. I'm still waiting for something more along the lines of an iPod+Garmin combo with real ma , real G , and all. With a nice virtual personal trainer and customizable workouts. That's not too much to ask for, is it? E ecially with, say, an iPhone with built-in G so that there's nothing to stick into or onto your shoes. Besides, I prefer New Balance which I could use with the optional Marware shoe adapter.
So that's what an Expo looks like when A le participates (I'm not used to that type of thing). A le has posted a small gallery of images from this week's MacExpo in London, which it calls "...the UK's premier a ual event for Mac and iPod users". The Expo began this past Thursday, October 27th and ru until October 29th at Olympia in London.
MacHeist, the next software marketing brainchild of Phill Ryu (you might know him from such events as My Dream A ), has begun. As you'll remember, it's an invite-only event (though you can try signing up to ag your own), and I have just received the first mi ion. Due to its top secret nature, my life - or at least my membership - would be in danger if I disclosed any details, but I can tell you that it looks to be an interesting ride so far, filled with unique adventure and great deals on software.
One of the least-used but quite powerful tools in Mac OS X is the ability to run contextual menu plug-i . Contextual menu items are those little programs or acce ories that can be i talled in /Library/Contextual Menu Items or ~/Library/Contextual Menu Items to extend the capabilities of your operating system by providing a quick way to launch a tool based on some selected text for a selected item in the Finder.
Ambrosia Software, those crazy kids with the apz Pro X and WireTap Pro, have unveiled the latest trick up their sleeve in the form of Dragster, an interesting a roach to drag and drop file management and tra fer. This utility, as you can see, lives in the Dock and is more or le like a drag and drop command center, allowing you to ecify a number of locatio you frequently need to move or send files to, such as remove servers, ecific folders and more. These locatio pop up when you drag items over Dragster's dock icon, allowing you to take care of your busine right then and there, i tead of rooting around in the Finder or tediously co ecting and reco ecting servers. One feature I find a bit more interesting than its Dock icon abilities is the Contextual Menu that offers the same functionality. To me, this seems a bit easier to use and more efficient than dragging ico all around the di lay.
One of the a eals of MacHeist that a few participating developers cited for their participation is residual sales. Things like upgrade lice es, extra plugi and add-o can all be big boosts to a 3rd party developer's revenue, and some of MacHeist's participating devs have certainly hit the ground ru ing. Yesterday I received my confirmation emails and lice es from RealMac Software (RapidWeaver) and Dave Watanabe (NewsFire), both with exclusive offers for MacHeist customers. First, RealMac Software is offering a 10% discount on theme packs, and Dave is offering a 'lifetime upgrade' add-on for NewsFire for a mere $11. We've also known from early on that John Casasanta has had a version 4.0 upgrade just around the corner for iClip, and MacroMates had an offer on the table since day 1 of at least 60% off an upgrade lice e to an upcoming version 2 release of TextMate.
I know Adium can i ert links from some browsers by itself, but I just found a script at the Adium Xtras site which offers much more fine-grained control over i erting a link from any browser, with the page name's descriptive title linked nice and clean, i tead of the long ugly URL you get from copy/pasting. As you can see, ecific commands are included for all the major browsers (and even some not-so-major ones), as well as a catch-all Default Browser command. The ones I can test seem to work pretty well, though I'll admit I don't have any copies of iCab or Netscape lying around. Enjoy.
Macitt, a social Mac news site from A le Matters a l%26aacute; digg and Netscape, has a ounced a year of monthly o ored contests for 2007. For January, they're kicking off strong with a Mac mini. The only thing you need to do to enter the contest is participate in 3's each day: either 3 macitt votes, 3 comments, or 3 story submi io per day. Users are allowed to enter each day, but amming and gaming the system are of course not allowed: no one-word a wers, and no links to your mother's blog about knitting (though it might fly if she knit, say, an afghan with an A le logo).
One of my favorite things about the web is how it enables anyone, with even the slightest bit of effort, to become an educated co umer. Whenever I make a significant purchase (new camera, phone, etc), my first sto are sites like PriceGra er, which allow you to search for things using ecific criteria such as megapixels for cameras, carrier availability for phones, or eed for computers. This hel me get an idea of what my optio are. The added benefit of these sites is the fact that they provide pricing quotes from hundreds of stores around the web, as well as ratings and customer reviews for those stores.