News & Rumours

Optek Music Systems released a Mac-compatible version of its Lesson Player for the company's Fretlight guitars, which have LED lights in the fretboard and a USB connection to a Mac or PC.

The global spelling checker and writer's tool adds DirectCorrect, a major upgrade to the Proximity Linguistic System, and much more.

The video recording software adds auto-focus, H.264 encoding, metadata for iTunes 8 import, support for audio-only recording (when camera is set to none), Dreamsync audio compression, and some bug fixes.

Rogue Amoeba's radio recording software adds a Recording Status indicator in the menubar, a streamlined interface for subscription viewing and editing, an update to LAME v3.98b8 for MP3 recordings, and other changes.

The VPN server control utility adds support for multiple user accounts, improved security, a source code cleanup, and other changes.

The open source set of printer drivers fixes a problem introduced in 5.2.0-beta4 in which PCL printers could not print to page sizes larger than letter, adds a fix for CD position on the Epson R1900, corrects printing on the Epson Stylus DX8400/DX8450, and makes other changes.

This beta release of Dejal's information manager adds an option to view an entry temporarily decrypted and read-only without decrypting it on disk, an option to save the encryption password in the keychain, and a Security preference page.

The visual programming tool for digital art adds friendlier messages in plain English throughout, plus a new Light block with 12 parameters and up to 4 inputs for fine-grained control of ambient, diffuse, and specular light.

"Apple immediately denied the report, and CNNi removed the article."

Version 8.0.1 improves stability and performance and fixes a number of bugs, including problems syncing Genius results to iPods.

The Apple TV update brings fixes for three security issues.

For Windows users, the update "provides better support for syncing a large number of contacts (more than 2,000) and prevents syncing of data between Microsoft Exchange Server and MobileMe, a configuration that is not supported."

"We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software. [...] Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter."

"Apple could close iTunes, the world's largest online music store, if a decision to award higher royalties to music producers goes against it..."

"The most serious vulnerability by far was in the website of global financial services company ING Direct."

New from Google Code are Update Engine, a Mac OS X framework developers can use to update products, and Top Draw, an image generation program that uses simple text scripts.

This release addresses some security issues, one of which is classed as a critical vulnerability that could be used to run attacker code and install software, requiring no user interaction beyond normal browsing.

This release of the open source office suite fixes several bugs, including a problem where the Java update for Mac OS X 10.5.5 caused fonts to display much too large.

fixes "a problem where users were unable to retrieve saved passwords or save new passwords"

gapless tips, update issues