MacEdition Pro News : February 13, 2003
by MacEdition Staff (feedback)
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A mishmash of hot hash
Find it better
Devon Technologies has issued Devonthink 1.5, a major revision of its enhanced Finder service for Mac OS X.
Devonthink is a Finder-level search engine that allows the user to locate, manage and display information on a system or handle content stored anywhere on a network without the need to index all the available material.
Devonthink Personal Edition 1.5 is a major leap towards a complete personal knowledge management solution. The new version further improves reliability and the overall user experience, introduces a german localization, speeds up the whole application performance, adds simple AppleScript support and fixes some minor and major bugs.
The key element of the upgrade is a new database engine which speeds up the process of data acquisition. The new version of Devonthink also features better PDF handling, better parsing and display of HTML pages, a new column view, drag-and-drop support for better interaction with other Carbon and Cocoa applications and an improved user interface.
The software carries a US$44.95 registration fee and is available for download from Devon’s download page. The download has a two-week trial period to allow users to evaluate the software.
Dynamic communication
Veteran Mac sysadmins have long known of Stalker Software’s CommuniGate Pro. The well-known reliability of that product has landed the California-based company a rather handsome contract with Telkom Indonesia.
Facing an explosive growth in Internet usage in the South Pacific archipelago, Indonesia’s national phone company ditched its email sever solution for one based on Stalker’s software to handle the nation’s million-plus email accounts because of the company’s Dynamic Cluster architecture.
The award-winning CommuniGate Pro integrated-messaging software, combined with Dynamic Cluster architecture provides 99.999 percent reliability, high performance and the support for virtually unlimited growth. The solution operates as a group of front-end and back-end servers, accessing domain and account data on a shared file system. This multilevel architecture enables load balancing and server redundancy, providing fast performance and availability with no single point of failure. Intelligent traffic routing and automatic fail-over assures that even if multiple servers stop working, all users can access their email as long as one server is operational on the front and back end.
The CommuniGate Pro product line runs on 30 different operating systems including Mac OS X, Darwin and Rhapsody.
Mark that spot
Alexander Wilson Studios released a new browsing utility that allows users to bookmark their favorite links using the company’s toolbar icons. The icon set was formerly only compatible with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
IndieToolbar works in either OS 9 or OS X and is available for free from the company’s download page.
Alexander Wilson Studios also released AWS Guitar Tuner, which uses nylon- and steel-stringed acoustic and electric guitar samples to provide OS X pickers the perfect pitch with which to tune their instruments. AWS Guitar Tuner can also be downloaded for free from the aforementioned download page.
Mini drive dock for smaller drives
WiebeTech released a smaller version of its Forensic DriveDock, a write-blocked FireWire bridge that can be clipped to a hard drive to access the mechanism.
The release of the Forensic Notebook DriveDock follows on the heels of a similar product released last year for standard 3.5-inch drives. The bridging device is popular with law enforcement agencies since it allows drives to be mounted and accessed without the use of additional software to mount the mechanism and eliminates the possibility of tampering with the evidence on the drive.
“Customers have applauded our Forensic DriveDock, and it is only natural that we would introduce a smaller version for support of notebook (2.5-inch) drives,” said James Wiebe, CEO of WiebeTech. “Forensic Notebook DriveDock is perfect for analysis of smaller hard drives, such as those typically used in notebook and laptop computers.”
WiebeTech also recently announced price reductions on a wide range of its FireWire drives while adding 80GB and 120GB models to its bus-powered UltraGB line.
Programming 4 dinner
24U Software is releasing a programming template for building FileMaker plug-ins in Metrowerks’ CodeWarrior.
The template offers developers the ability to build plug-ins that work on all platforms with tightly written and easily readable code. Using the template will also reduce the chances of error and save developers time in creating their FileMaker based projects.
Creating your own custom plug-ins is now nothing more than just configuring a few constants in a single header file and writing your functions’ code. Thanks to intuitive lucidity and efficiency this template is appropriate for both beginners and experts.
The template is available as donationware from 24U Software after filling out a download form.
G’day, mate
Residents of Australia and New Zealand will find it a little easier to get their hands on a copy of MacSpeech’s iListen dictation software now that the company has inked a distribution deal with MacSense, a large distributor in both nations.
“We wanted a strong presence in Australia and New Zealand,” said MacSpeech’s Donald MacCormick. “The enthusiasm and experience of the MacSense team in Australia and New Zealand will provide an excellent launching pad for iListen. We look forward to bringing our world-class speech recognition to a new market for MacSpeech.”
Your news update
Zik Software has updated its beta release of iLink, a bookmarking utility that can be used by any Mac OS X browser. The update addresses some user interface issues, adds support for special characters and does some routine bug squashing.
Parker Software updated Archer, the company’s multimedia viewing software to allow users change the background color of the application and fine tune their color selection by toggling the period and comma keys. The update also addresses an issue where the images would be off-center when the user toggled between full-screen and normal modes.
Dog Park Software has updated MacLogger DX, a HAM radio logging software, adding multiple log files for user-selected locations. The update also adds a driver for the AOR 5000 and improves driver support for the Ten-Tec Jupiter and Argonaut V radio sets. The updated program can be downloaded from Dog Park’s Web site.
Publicspace.net has updated MacBreakZ, its software which times computer use and suggests breaks to help users avoid RSI and other nasties brought on by excessive computer use. The update makes it easier for uses to get into healthy computing cycles by gradually introducing break cycles over a period of time. The updated version of the program can be obtained from the MacBreakZ Web site.
OpenOSX updated its OpenWeb suite of open-source server software, adding PHP 4.3, some additional enhancements and eliminating several potential issues with software contained in the previous version. A free update for owners of the v2.5 CD is available from the OpenOSX support page.
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