Apple reported another strong financial quarter last week, with a net profit of $770 million. At the same time, the company’s stock option backdating scandal advanced as the SEC brought charges against two former Apple employees (neither of whom is named Steve Jobs). Also this week, Web design is on our minds due to the releases of MacRabbit’s CSSEdit 2.5 and Panic’s Coda, which Joe Kissell runs through its paces. Joe also notes public betas for two online backup services, a new initiative from Parallels, and the first Mac beta version of yet another virtualization environment. In other news, Apple releases Battery Update 1.2 for MacBooks and MacBook Pros, and Rogue Amoeba updates its Fission audio manipulation tool.
Apple has released Battery Update 1.2 for MacBook and MacBook Pro models, and batteries for them, sold between February 2006 and April 2007. The update fixes some unspecified performance issues
Thanks to the holiday sales that boost Q1 profits, there's no way Apple's second quarter results could have competed with Q1 2007's record-setting numbers (see "Apple Posts $1 Billion Profit for Q1 2007," 2007-01-22), but they're still awfully strong
Congratulations to Michael Weyman of sympatico.ca and Stuart Munro of assumption.edu, whose entries were chosen randomly in last week's DealBITS drawing and who received a copy of Open Door Networks' DoorStop X Security Suite, worth $79
Last quarter Apple saw strong Mac sales growth in Europe, which (among oodles of other things, I'm sure) means that there are more Dutch-speaking Mac users than ever before
In "Online Backup Options Expand" (2007-04-09), I mentioned two potentially promising online backup services - Mozy and Bandwagon - that were not quite ready for prime time
Rogue Amoeba has released an update to Fission, the company's simple audio manipulation program aimed at providing the most commonly needed subset of audio editing features (for more details, see "Fission Manipulates Audio Tracks of All Stripes," 2006-09-25, along with Andy Williams Affleck's "Take Control of Podcasting on the Mac")
For those interested in running Windows on an Intel-based Mac, this week brought two interesting announcements. First, in the ongoing battle of one-upmanship between Parallels and VMware, Parallels announced a new initiative to help developers package and distribute virtual appliances - prepackaged virtual machines containing a full operating system and applications, configured to perform specific tasks and ready to run without any setup
It's not Peter Cottontail hopping down the bunny trail, but MacRabbit Software, delivering a significant update to CSSEdit, their sleek and powerful tool for making, editing, and understanding Cascading Style Sheets
I spend a fair amount of time doing Web development, and although I have access to graphical tools such as Dreamweaver, I've long preferred to do all my coding by hand - yes, even for complex CSS layouts, tables, and forms; it's just the way I'm wired
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has accused two former Apple executives in two instances of illegal stock option backdating that Apple had previously disclosed after an internal investigation (see "Apple Releases Stock Option Backdating Report," 2007-01-08)
Extend the iPod's Capabilities with Advice in New Book -- Much has happened in the iPod world of late, so if you haven't been keeping up on the many things you can do with your iPod other than play music, check out the second edition of "Take Control of Your iPod: Beyond the Music," by Steve Sande
Everybody Sync now -- Michael E. Cohen's article about SyncTogether brings up a question: is it possible to sync two computers completely (or one user account on multiple computers)? (3 messages)
Problems after Security Update 2007-004 -- A reader runs into AirPort connection problems after running the latest security update, and others are there to help