On the eve of iPhone version 2.0

If anything is possible then it’s possible that Apple will not introduce a new iPhone at the World Wide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco on Monday. And George W. Bush will go down in history as one of America’s greatest Presidents. So, I’m predicting a new iPhone at WWDC.

Adobe Acrobat 9 gets embedded Flash

Somehow, someday there’ll be collaboration using PDF files—according to Adobe, which released Acrobat 9. The latest release features native support for Flash. Rob Tarkoff, Adobe’s senior VP of business productivity:

The ability to break through and communicate a message in a compelling way has never been at a greater premium.

Is it the message or the medium which is most important? Isn’t Acrobat the medium? Acrobat 9, according to Tarkoff, will:

fundamentally change how professionals communicate and collaborate using electronic documents.

Somehow Adobe Acrobat, Flash, and Buzzword have become a Google Docs killer. Pundit Robert Scoble:

Soon people just won’t put up with a word processor that costs hundreds of dollars and isn’t collaborative. They won’t put up with a presentation program that can’t deal with photos from Flickr. They won’t handle a sales database that doesn’t run in the Web browser.

Collaborative documents are good and all but I’d be happier without Scoble.

Not a good name for a Mac utility

I like Leopard Cache Cleaner. It’s a great Mac utility that is far more than the sum of its parts. The only real problem is the name. It needs a new name because it does more, far more, than clean Leopard’s caches.

Leopard 10.5.3

Latest update for Mac OS X Leopard. 10.5.3 fixes plenty of bugs and weighs in at a whopping 536 megabytes for the Combo download (recommended).

The 10.5.3 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility and security of your Mac

Bug fixes nearly everywhere including Mail, iCal, Airport, Address Book, Spaces, Time Machine, and Parental Controls. MacUpdate has a nice list.

Times: The RSS newspaper for your Mac

Detailed ArsTechnica review of Times, an attractive RSS newsreader that displays headlines and summary in a newspaper print-like layout.

Times’ main window… is easily one of the app’s greatest strengths. Eschewing the current standard of a left sidebar containing feeds with a central content area for browsing articles, Times separates itself from the pack by donning the physical appearance of a newspaper (other pages popping out from behind the main window is an appreciated touch of polish).

Clearly, Times is a unique RSS reader, probably less for the power RSS user, and more for the typical Mac user who finds NetNewsWire to be daunting. It’s yet another way to gather, store, retrieve yet more information.

Too much information, however, is perhaps Times’ greatest achilles’ heel. Times’ layout for each Page essentially contains three main sections for feeds, the most prominent area being the top left section which can hold a single feed, with the other two areas tacking on extra feeds in the order that you add or manually arrange them.

What we want is quick, elegant access to information that we control. That’s the beauty of RSS, often lost in the typical RSS reader which provides a ‘more is less’ interface.

Times excels at bringing some great ideas to the RSS table, wrapped up in a refreshing UI that offers a bird’s-eye view of what’s going on.

My NoodleMac review when Times was released.

Use this tool and say goodbye to spam

There are two kinds of plagues that haunt email users. Spam and phishing. If you’re smart, you can avoid phishing scams. If you have multiple email accounts then how do you avoid spam? Both are a blight on humanity, but spam can be avoided, managed, and almost eliminated. Here’s how…