kylea writes "Office 2004 for Mac OS X has finally been released. From the Apple page: The latest improvements to the Office productivity suite promise new approaches to create, manage and distribute your projects. New features and tools in the programs help you get work done more efficiently. And now you can extend your reach beyond Office with greatly improved AppleScript support."

mpk writes "It seems Sony Online Entertainment has finally officially admitted (albeit only by an mail response to a user query which got posted into a web forum) that the Macintosh EverQuest server is to receive no further bug-fixing or development support, although the game is still available and playable online. The kicker is that this has actually been the case for eight months, following the Mac version's release in June 2003, yet SOE chose not to tell their customers about it. Inside Mac Games also has the story, and I've posted my thoughts as well. There's no mention of this policy on the EQ Mac home page and the game still appears to be being sold in the shops."

keyblob8K writes "Amit Singh takes a look at fragmentation in HFS+. The author provides numbers from his experiments on several HFS+ disks, and more interestingly he also provides the program he developed for this purpose. From his own limited testing, Apple's filesystem seems pretty solid in the fragmentation avoidance department. I gave hfsdebug a whirl on my 8-month-old iMac and the disk seems to be in good shape. I don't have much idea about ext2/3 or reiser, but I know that my NTFS disks are way more fragmented than this after similar amount of use."

TheChocolatay writes "Two guys in Germany have worked to create a Macintosh System 7 simulation in Flash. You can watch the Happy Mac face as the system boots and it even has a working Control Pannel, After Dark screen saver, and games. Wired news has an article on the developers and the simulation can be viewed on-line."

amichalo writes "Apple's recent release of an iTunes SDK for Windows provides the ability for third party programs, such as WinAmp and Windows Media Player, to support the AAC file format. Ars Technica has additional commentary. The SDK uses the COM interface and supports iTunes 4.5 only."

fmorgan writes "O'Reilly has now posted the second part on an article about Mac OS X Mail.app spam filtering with more details on what this technology is (and isn't): 'Many myths have emerged about Mail's junk mail filter. No, it's not an extremely complex set of rules, no it doesn't look for keywords, and no, it doesn't use white magic ... Interestingly enough, the technology that underlies the Junk Mail filter began its life as an information retrieval system.'"

ptorrone writes "Engadget has a step-by-step for the non-uber geek on how to play your purchased music from iTunes on other systems. To be clear, this isn't a way to take music you bought and give it to someone else, this is so you can listen to your own purchased music on other systems or devices. In fact, your personal info is still in the file."

rocketjam writes "OS News has an article by a user who successfully installed Mac OS X using the 0.1 version of PearPC, the PPC emulator for x86 machines. He said it took 5 hours to run the first install CD but he did get it up and running on an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ with 512MB of RAM. The article has several screenshots of the Mac OS X install and new user set up running on his machine." See our previous story.

joelhayhurst writes "GarageBand 1.1 addresses isolated performance and stability issues, allows per-track Echo settings similar to other effects, supports loop libraries in other disk locations, supports importing unprotected AAC audio files in addition to AIF and MP3 files, and addresses issues with ReWire support, moving GarageBand songs between different computers, Help support, fixing the timing of individual notes (as well as entire regions), and dragging entire tracks in the timeline." I hope it well let me select what MIDI channel to listen on, too. Here's hoping ...

A user writes, "A new vulnerability has been found in Mac OS X's Safari, which will launch Help.app and run an arbitrary script with a URL like 'help:runscript=...', assuming a known path (which is possible when Safari is set to automount disk images (which is the default)). A nice working demonstration is available on insecure.ws while the incident has been reported on Full-Disclosure."

jpkunst writes "John Kheit at Mac Observer reports on US Patent Application No. 20040090467, published on May 13, 2004, in which Apple filed a patent application for 'Graduated visual and manipulative translucency for windows.'" Begin the hunt for prior art! It's a challenge to find a non-Apple translucent window that isn't just a snippet of desktop wallpaper pasted in the background.

babbage writes "I recently bought a Power Mac G5, and when I registered it with Apple, I was offered a free subscription to MacWorld. When signing up for the subscription, one of the questions you're asked is which Apple product you purchased most recently, and one of the items on the list was 'iMac G5.' Does the MacWorld marketing department know something that the rest of us don't?" Maybe they had seen the page that incognito writes about: "Over at AppleFritter, there's an awesome mod that changes an ordinary iMac into a mini version of the aluminum G5 tower. There were lots of details in the creator's work that leads to a very polished final product."

Graff writes "Apple is giving away five Apple Workgroup Clusters for Bioinformatics (each worth approximately $40,000) to four higher education researchers and one non-education researcher. A panel of independent scientists and Apple will choose the lucky researchers."

Espectr0 writes "Macworld is alerting of a malware program for the Mac. A Macworld reader alerted the magazine to the malware after he downloaded the file from Limewire. The reader told Macworld: 'I downloaded the file in the hope that perhaps Microsoft had released some sort of public beta. The file unzipped, and to my delight the Microsoft icon looked genuine and trustworthy.' However, he added: 'I clicked on the installer file, and to my horror in 10 seconds the attachment had wiped my entire Home folder!'" This sounds similar to the recent trojan horse proof-of-concept. There are many ways to make one file look like another, on any platform. This is 2004, you should know by now not to open a file from an untrusted source.

phalse phace writes "There aren't too many details, but C|Net's news.com.com is reporting that Apple was issued a patent for its iTunes software interface on May 4. If you remember, Apple recently applied for a patent for its iPod interface as well."

Good news for those of you who've went through the pain of trying to get Mono installed on Mac OS X: the team has quietly added a Mac OS X package. If you previously installed to /usr/local, however, be aware that the packaged version installs to /opt/local and adjust any paths accordingly. The Beta-1 Windows installer has also been fixed; download it here.

An anonymous reader writes "Two weeks ago Apple released iTunes 4.5. The minor changes Apple made to their Music Sharing Protocol (daap) were reverse engineered after just one day. According to a post in the Doom9 forums FairPlay version 2 has also been reverse engineered. playfair has already been patched with the new code and is back online with FSF India providing legal support. How will Apple respond?"

kwiens writes "We've been slaving away for months to create the FixIt Guide Series-- a set of Free-As-In-Beer step by step PowerBook disassembly instructions. Maybe waiting another 6-18 months for those PowerBook G5's will be easier if you fix your old PowerBook now (or just use the Guides as a starting point for that killer PowerBook case mod). Guides are up now for the PowerBook G3 Wallstreet, Lombard, Pismo and Titanium PowerBook G4 Mercury, Onyx, DVI."

Sebastian Biallas writes "We have finally released version 0.1 of our PowerPC architecture emulator: PearPC. The emulator itself is (prepared to be) architecture independent but only tested on x86s (here you go porters...). It also features a must faster just-in-time compilation unit for x86 hosts. This means that you can now run your favourite PowerPC-OS on x86: Mandrake Linux (9.1), Darwin (6 + 7) and Mac OS X (10.3)! And the best things is: it's GPL'd. But be warned: it's experimental.."

ElDuderino44137 points out this "Fully functional retrofitted prop computer." Chocolate / peanut butter, Mac SE / Underwood. This is no spray-paint job.