Are you bothered by how stupid telephones still are, after all these years? Adam is too, but thanks to Parliant’s PhoneValet, his telephone is more usable than ever before. Also this week, we note the cyclical nature of the industry and welcome two new sponsors, Aladdin and CS Odessa. In the news, we cover the releases of AirPort Extreme 5.1.3, Mailsmith 2.0.2, and PopChar X 2.1.2, along with the announcement of the Adobe Creative Suite and a few corrections.
AirPort Extreme 5.1.3 Firmware Update -- Apple has released a firmware update for AirPort Extreme Base Stations, boosting security and improving performance
Adobe Checks Into the Creative Suite -- Adobe today announced major upgrades of their professional print and Web publishing applications, together dubbed the Adobe Creative Suite
Panther-Prepared PopChar Published -- Ergonis Software has released PopChar X version 2.1.2, an update to Gunther Blaschek's well-known utility for easily entering non-ASCII characters
Mailsmith 2.0.2 Makes Minor Fixes -- Bare Bones Software has released Mailsmith 2.0.2, incorporating numerous minor feature enhancements and bug fixes into the company's industrial strength email program (see "True Confessions of a Mailsmith Switcher" in TidBITS-690 for a review of Mailsmith 2.0)
Avondale Photoshop DVD Giveaway -- Photoshop 7 won't be current much longer, but our friends at Avondale Media want to give TidBITS readers an early crack at free copies of their DVD "Secrets of the Photoshop Masters." The DVD contains 93 minutes of tips and techniques about Photoshop 7 from Photoshop experts Katrin Eismann, Martin Evening, Jeff Schewe, and Steve Broback (who is also a founder of Avondale, and with whom we worked when he helped run Thunder Lizard Productions)
Listen to Adam on Inside Mac Radio -- Want to listen to my informal take on what's going on in the Mac world every week? Scott Sheppard has started producing a daily Macintosh radio show you can listen to on the Internet or download in MP3 format for later listening in iTunes or on your iPod
Digital Photography Cruise in January, 2004 -- Arthur Bleich, who contributes to TidBITS on digital photography topics, tells us that he'll once again be leading an eight-day digital photography workshop cruise, this time to the Caribbean on 24-Jan-04
We live in a cyclical world, though it's sometimes hard to look past the quickly turning wheels of weeks and months to the slower yearly revolutions. A month ago, in writing about how we were trying some new revenue sources due to reduced revenues from our long-standing corporate sponsorship program, I noted that we might be seeing a rebound in the final quarter of the year
Sometimes we wish we could rewind life as easily as rewinding television programs recorded by TiVo. In last week's issue, Alex Hoffman's article "TiVo Series2 Improves on Original" discussed how the digital video recorder could organize recorded programs in groups when perusing the Now Playing list
Last Monday, as Geoff Duncan was preparing the TidBITS issue for distribution, Software Update notified me that I could install Mac OS X 10.2.8. It was late, I was tired, and I let it download and install without really thinking about the consequences
As a computer person, I find myself continually frustrated by the limitations of the hard-coded devices that surround us in the real world, and one of the most irritating areas for this is the telephone
TiVo Series2 improvements -- Readers report their experiences with TiVo's second-generation digital video recorder, including how it differs from DirecTV combination units