TurboTax 2003 Deluxe for Mac
Company: Intuit
Price: $50 (discounts are often available)
http://www.intuit.comIt’s that time of year again, friends. TurboTax Deluxe 2003 for Mac contains changes and improvements that will affect both how you enter your financial data and how you look ahead to potential tax savings for 2004 and beyond. Newcomers to TurboTax initially will be perplexed and annoyed at the powerful application’s way of proceeding through its Easy Step data entry process. They’ll agree with me that upon completion the labyrinthian journey was worthwhile.
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BT500 Bluetooth Mouse
Company: BlueTake Technology
Price: $89.00 (US)
http://www.bluetake.com
BlueTake Technology’s new BT500 Bluetooth Mouse is a zippy little portable 2-button optical mouse with scroll wheel. A perfect companion for those of us who use a laptop and need more precise cursor control than a trackpad allows – with cordless convenience!
The Bluetooth USB Receiver included with the mouse is about the size of a typical USB Flash Drive and is a multi-purpose receiver – it should work with most Bluetooth products including cell phones and Bluetooth enabled PDAs. Since some companies (starts with an M and has a dollar $ign in the middle) include proprietary receivers that only work with their mice, it’s nice to have just one receiver that will work with all your Bluetooth devices (the BT500 is also available (MSRP $59.00 US) without Bluetooth USB receiver).
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Rock Star
Company: Freshly Squeezed Software
Price: $9.00 (US)
http://freshlysqueezedsoftware.com
I have a love for music that goes beyond the average person. At least, I believe that is true. And I enjoy all kinds of different types of music, leaving off Opera and most Country Music. My eclectic tastes are reflected with a quick trip to my iTunes music library, where you will find, as of last count, 5,236 songs. And that is after weeding out a ton of songs I know I will probably never listen to.
While browsing the net the other day, I came across the Freshly Squeezed Software site, and found the program Rock Star. The caption reads “It’s you against the music” on the main page, and that was enough to intrigue me.
by John Nemerovski & David Weeks
F. A. Porsche Design External FireWire and USB Hard Drives
Company: LaCie Limited
Prices: From $129 (see reviews for details)
http://www.lacie.com
LaCie continues to support our favorite computers with a strong presence in Apple Stores, at Macworld Expos, and in the Macintosh print media. Recent advertising campaigns feature attractive young people in “lifestyle poses” (LaCie’s wording, not ours) promoting their stylish Porsche Design family of external drives.
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NoteRiser
Company: Conotour Design
Price: $129
http://www.contourdesign.com
When I first received this device, I had to ask myself “Why do I need this?” The idea seemed a bit strange to me. You buy a laptop computer, and then you use this device to basically turn it into a fancy desktop computer, which means I have to add an additional external keyboard and mouse? I did not get it, if I wanted a desktop computer, I would have bought one. And then I bought and started using my 17” PowerBook, and the benefits of such a device started to become more obvious.
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Learning Unix for Macintosh OS X Panther
Author(s): Dave Taylor and Brian Jepson
Publisher: O’Reillly and Associates
ISBN: 0596006179 Pages: 155
Reviewer: Tony Williams
Since the advent of OS X Mac users have had to get used to the idea that under their favourite GUI lurks a real operating system. While for some (such as myself) this has been a source of joy for others it has been like Central Africa for Victorian England — the great dark heart.
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Google in bed with Porn sites?
I was watching a TV magazine program, and one of the features was on the growing popularity of homemade pornography. I was not really interested in the segment, but I did leave it on as there was a segment coming up later that I did want to see. Usually when I am watching a program in the kitchen, as I was on this night, I will read a book during the commercial breaks, or in this case, during a segment of a program I don’t much care about.
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Macs at Work Interview
Russ Walkowich
Contributing Editor
Tim Robertson
Publisher
A funny thing happened on the way to the MyMac.com Garage Band Loops Contest. Tim Robertson, owner and publisher of MyMac.com, was monitoring the contest when he noticed that quite a few of the entries for the Garage Band Loops contest were coming from the same email address, and that this Kathy Lies was submitting quite a few entries. Upon closer examination, he noticed that she would put that this entry was from this person and the next email, from another person.
His interest aroused, he wondered what was going on with these different entries for different people but under one email address. Ms. Lies signature file also mentioned the Wayne Country Day School in Goldsboro, NC. Contacting Ms. Lies to make sure that everything was within the guidelines of the contest, Tim discovered that Ms. Kathy Lies is a teacher and that she had made our Garage Band Loops contest a class project!
Both Tim and I had the pleasure of interviewing Kathy Lies to get the story behind the Wayne Country Day School – My Mac Garage Band Loops contest class project. So sit back, relax and enjoy as we find out how Macs are being used in the school and a different way of involving students in class projects using a web-based contest came into being.
Mr. Bill Gates proposes “Stamps” for email.
Mr. Gates believes that since we pay to mail our regular mail, we should pay to email messages. This would serve as a deterrent to spammers because this would be cost prohibitive for them. Does he really believe that dribble? Of course all legal, normal folks would wind up paying.. and as par for the course, the spammers would/will find a way to circumvent the process. So just the normal everyday computer user gets shafted. (Yes, I know that we’re not even talking a penny an email, it’s the principle of the whole idea!!)
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Apple Confidential 2.0- The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company
by Owen W. Linzmayer
No Starch Press
ISBN 1-59327-010-0
$19.95 U.S., $29.95 CN
323 pages
Back in 2000, I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing Mr. Linzmayer’s first Apple Confidential book, and thought that he had done an outstanding job of presenting the visible and the behind-the-scenes story of Apple Computer. Mr. Linzmayer, a freelance writer and author, had taken his time to delve into the depths of the company that we all love to hate and produced a great book that worked to explain the mysteries of Apple.
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MyMac Podcast #385
MyMac Podcast #384