PLANET mac

While bowing to studio pressure to offer variable pricing on iTunes tracks, Apple has also finally convinced all the big labels to release their music as DRM-free 'iTunes Plus' tracks at the same 99 cents.

Apple has re-encoded its iTunes Store catalog to offer 8 million songs without DRM; the remaining 2 million are expected to follow by the end of March.

Interface and General

• Printing to a specified scale now scales the printed page correctly.

• STEP files containing assemblies are now imported at correct scale when using the option to Preserve Assembly Hierarchy.
• STEP files containing assemblies now work properly on Windows and Mac Intel.

• The Render Client and Render Server no longer prevents the screen saver and monitor sleep on Macintosh
• Network render jobs no longer incorrectly error out.

Shut down, sleep or restart your Mac or pause/quit iTunes, if a given number of songs are played or repeated. Performs the actions after a given time (duration in minutes) has elapsed (=timer). Fade-Out the volume of iTunes automatically. And tell iTunesShut, if it should quit automatically after it has done its job, or not.

Ian Beck's screencast is a great introduction. Learn from our users why Things is different ? either on i use this or Newsvine.

MailCM is a contextual menu item for copying Apple Mail message properties of multiple messages to the clipboard.

Our MacRumorsLive keynote coverage was hacked today, inserting inappropriate content into the text and photo feeds. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to restore our services. The hack appears to be limited to the MacRumorsLive serv...

Yet another variation on the OpenOffice codebase available now in beta. Final code expected later this month...

Apple updated iWork, adding new features to Numbers, Keynote, and Pages.

A worldwide wifi access deal with Boingo and the beginnings of screen sharing...

Users of Apple's updated iWork office productivity suite will find new location features in their desktop applications and a new online document sharing service at iWork.com, the company announced Tuesday.

Mt. St. Helens VolcanoCam Widget is more than just a simple webcam, this widget displays a half-size static image from the Mount St. Helens Volcanocam, as well as the current volcano Alert Level as assigned by the US Geological Survey. The Alert Level is not available on the volcanocam site, but the widget displays both the image and the Alert Level in a single, easy to access place.

VideoDrive makes it easy to add videos to iTunes without converting them or losing quality. VideoDrive supports all current formats, including mpg, mpeg, mp4, avi, wmv, swf, m4v, m2v, flv, wma, mkv, asf, divx, xvid, dv and YouTube video formats.

Apple has introduced a new version of its iLife application suite, including iPhoto '09.

Joins AT&T; in gouging for product that doesn't carry a full warranty, but still requires a full two-year contract...

Apple on Tuesday used its final Macworld keynote address to announce a new version of its iLife digital media suite. Some live notes follow ahead of a formal overview