June 26 - 05:00pm EDT   PlumChoice, a remote technical-support service for home, home/office and small business customers, has announced support for Apple products, including Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 and above, and iPods and iPhones. They will also support AirPort wireless routers, firewalls and printers. The company has previously supported Windows products and consumer electronics for eight years, and is looking to expand to Mac customers. It provides full-service, monitored, enterprise-style support for technology problems, including equipment set up, training, ongoing support, monitoring, and repair on PCs andMacs. [full story]

June 05 - 11:00am EDT   Redstone Software, makers of Eggplant, announced the general availability of the Redstone integrated Test Appliance (RiTA) on the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system. By supporting Leopard, Redstone is able to exploit Apple's latest Xserve hardware to create powerful platforms from which Eggplant can be deployed to Windows desktops. RiTA provides a centralized facility for Macintosh users to build, store, manage and execute Eggplant Functional Tester (FT) and Eggplant Load Tester (LT) automated test cases. [full story]

May 19 - 10:00am EDT   Utility maker Code by Kevin has released a new tool for Mac owners running a Unix shell, Manpower. The program assists with the "man" command, which describes the purpose and usage of various built-in Unix tools; this however is limited to a fixed font size, and a single pane of text at a time. Manpower claims to improve on this by expanding to a three-pane interface, similar to an e-mail client. [full story]

May 05 - 11:50pm EDT   Volitans software on Monday released SMART Utility 1.2, a significant update to the hard drive diagnostic scanning application. The new features include more readable attribute names, displaying the model family, sending additional information to the smartctl engine, and French localization. The SMART Utility scans the internal hardware diagnostics system of hard drives SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology), a system built into hard drives by their manufacturers to report on various measurements. The information detail can be used to detect when a hard drive is having mechanical or electrical problems, and can indicate when the hard drive is failing. ... [full story]

April 14 - 05:10pm EDT   The iPhone's WiFi positioning system can be fooled into providing false results, a report claims from researchers at ETH Zurich. According to TG Daily, researchers were able to circumvent the Skyhook-owned service in a "fairly simple manner". The technology traditionally relies on detected MAC addresses that relay information to the central server, and by spoofing a real access point, users can generate any number of false points, as well as jam up real ones. [full story]

April 09 - 12:45am EDT   FM::Nexus today unveiled Inspector 2.0, a new version to its FileMaker database inspection tool, adding support for FileMaker Pro 9, scripting, calculations, and ESS tables. FM::Nexus says that users are able to use Inspector to provide extensive reports and optimizations to FileMaker databases in real time, as well as adding an "instant search" for layout objects. Inspector 2.0 is currently shipping for $400 for a single user, with special upgrade pricing available for v1.x users. [full story]

April 04 - 07:50pm EDT   DEVONtechnologies has released Desktop Transporter 2.6 a new version of its remote maintenance and management solution for users who administrate multiple Macs across a network. The new release shows constantly updated thumbnails of all shared desktops on the local network. The update frequency can be adjusted and the list of shared desktops filtered. Desktop Transporter 2.6 also uses server-side scaling and clipping for reducing network load and for increasing responsiveness. Keychain support makes it unnecessary to remember all the passwords for the shared machines. Desktop Transporter 2.6 requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 later and a fast LAN and/or Internet connection is ... [full story]

March 20 - 11:50am EDT   German developer Ruotger Skupin today unveiled Chipmunk 1.0, an application designed to find, compare, and delete exact duplicate files. The application performs a byte-by-byte comparison of the suspected duplicates to verify whether it is a true duplicate. Skupin claims that Chipmunk is quickly able to process hundreds of megabytes worth of information quickly. Chipmunk is currently available at an Easter discount of $20, and is normally $25. [full story]

March 13 - 07:05pm EDT  In brief: Rush Limbaugh gets his Mac troubleshooting issues resolved, Adobe Font Folio Essentials debuts, the Easter mEgg Hunt" hunt for Mac software has been announced, nova media cuts prices for US media residents, and an Easter icon pack for the iPhone has been released ... Rush Limbaugh's IT professional, in conjunction with an unnamed Apple Engineer has fixed Rush's recent complaints about problems in Mac OS X 10.5. Limbaugh said "Apple engineers to look at, and they found the problem. Basically, what we had to do was delete the null mail folder (that's the folder that processes all e-mail) and then we told the mail app to rebuild its internal director via terminal command, and now it is ... [full story]

February 29 - 10:55am EST   A Firefox developer who goes by the name Vladimir said on his blog that Mac OS X could potentially have code that enhance Safari's performance. In his blog, Vladimir says that while collecting feedback from Mac beta testers for Firefox 3, several have indicated that the new iteration seems to be anywhere from 50- to 500-percent slower than v2.x. After some troubleshooting, Vladimir reveals that the screen drawing synchronicity engine causes the issue. [full story]