Steve writes "The Mac fellows at iThings.de have posted an entertaining read about what could happen on Tuesday at Macworld in San Francisco." That's pretty good. Also at the top of the reading list for such Apple rumor satire is Crazy Apple Rumors.

xombo writes "iPoding and Mac Rumors as well as eWeek newsletter and Reuters seem to think that Apple will be introducing either a video-capable iPod -or- even better a Tablet Mac which may run into direct competition with Microsoft's similar product. "The one thing you can say for sure is that they do have a lot of product out there right now and they're going to be hesitant to draw too much attention away from their existing products" by introducing new ones now, said Roger Kay, an analyst at market research firm International Data Corp. Instead, Apple may unveil the long-anticipated video-enabled iPod, which will likely work initially only on Macintosh computers, Enderle said. Apple's existing inkwell and Newton technologies seem to make them in the perfect position to take on Microsoft in what could be the biggest battle for the most worthless market sector (Tablet PCs), however as a Newton owner I think that the some-what-larger-than-Palm device size that the Newton line sported is much more user friendly and usable. Read the Reuters article at reuters.." It'd be nice, but I'm skeptical on it actually being that.

Craigtay writes "Some Apple fans are opening their wallets to buy an old magazine, but not just any old magazine. This first edition of Macworld, which was released in 1984 (and apparently contains an interview with Bill Gates), is signed by Steve Jobs. The bidding is currently above the $2,000 mark. News.com has done a news story here and click here for the eBay page." Thats ummm.... special? It amuses me that the reserve isn't met yet either. ;)

Chris Coleman writes "Move over Microsoft, OpenOffice.org is starting to take hold on Mac OS X. To facilitate this, we at Daemon News have put together a CD set that makes it really easy to install and use. We are also donating part of our booth space at Mac World Expo to the OpenOffice.org group to help spread awareness."

brotherash writes "Here's an image that describes the new Address Book feature to be added to .Mac on Jan 7th. It is simply a screen shot of the upcoming web-based address book feature with 'coming Jan 7th stamped on it'." I can't tell what's going on in this image. It looks like a new UI for Address Book, but it also might have a .Mac icon in it. We'll find out next week, I guess.

randomErr writes "News.com has this story that according to sources familiar with the plans, Apple is expected to announce at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco Tuesday that consumers will have to pay for new versions of iDVD, iPhoto and iMovie. Previously, Apple had offered upgrades to its digital media, or 'i' applications, for free."

Stéphane Thiell writes, "I just released an update of Whamb, a little shareware CD/MP3/OGG player for Mac OS X 10.2. It's not as advanced as iTunes, though it now has playlists sharing using Rendezvous. A friend even wrote a tool in Perl which allows to run playlists server on POSIX systems." Nifty. It's still in development, but works pretty well. I've got the Perl daemon running too, with some local modifications. The Rendezvous support has some scalability issues with my 25GB of MP3s, which maybe why iTunes still doesn't have it ...

EnlightenmentFan writes "Apple plans to stop production in June of the iMac with flat-panel 17-inch display, according to this article at Asian tech-news site Digitimes. As with the now-history 15" flat-panel iMac, sales started strong but stalled once the early-adopter crowd had bought in. Probably-not-unrelated story (also posted today): Chungwha Picture Tubes is boosting the price of its 17-inch LCD monitor panels."

ahknight writes "Apple released the final version of iSync and iCal today. iSync was significantly changed and works a lot better with Palms and gets rid of all those nasty errors with the .Mac servers. Works great!" I never had many problems with iSync, except for initially setting it up. iCal I've had major performance and other problems with, so hopefully this fixes many of them.

IrateSurf writes "PC Magazine has completed a First Look review of the new Apple PowerBook, which is the first notebook from Apple with a 1-GHz G4 processor. The notebook also has a nice price cut, running $2,999 -- that's $200 less than the last high-end PowerBook model."

quakeslut writes "Want to access your iPods hidden debug menu with 16 developer tools, including a 'HDD Scan' and various system tests? Just 'restart' your iPod (press and hold the 'menu' and 'play/pause') and when the Apple comes up, press and hold the 'back', 'select' and 'next' buttons (all 3 buttons in the center row). Cool nerd stuff."

Jon writes "For those lucky readers who received an iPod for Christmas I've put up an article on LinuxLookup.com on how I got my iPod working under Linux. I've given a little overview on the different options available, and which one worked best for my needs. All in all, I'm extremely happy with the outcome. I can transfer my music, create playlists, and add all of my contacts. The only thing missing is a nice GUI."

Scott Sheppard writes "GTK+OSX has released a native Mac OS X Aqua port of the Linux-based GTK+ open source graphical user interface library. GTK+ (GIMP Toolkit) is a popular widget library supporting graphical applications for Linux. GTK+OSX version 0.1 is an alpha release intended for developers." This could make The Gimp cozy for MacHeads without installing XDarwin and OroborOSX. Looking good!

phyxeld writes "RubyCocoa 0.4.0 is out. From the sf.net page: 'RubyCocoa is a Mac OS X framework that allows Cocoa programming in the Object-Oriented Scripting Language Ruby. RubyCocoa allows writing a Cocoa application in Ruby. It allows creating and using a Cocoa object in a Ruby script. In Cocoa application, mixture of program written by both Ruby and Objective-C is possible.' It's always nice to see more GPL software in the Mac OS X world."

Secret300 writes "Apple is applying for a patent to release "devices capable of dynamically changing their ornamental or decorative appearance." If this is a success, it would considerably boost Apple's presence in the technology world." So, perhaps we can not only theme our desktop on the machine - but our *literal* desktop.

elohim writes "The kind souls at QT Components have released an ogg vorbis component that allows playback of oggs in quicktime 6.0.2 and itunes. Hopefully we'll see ogg encoding integrated in itunes soon. This is a big step forward for vorbis fans! I can hardly wait to pick up a shiny, new powerbook and start blasting my oggs!" CT Yeah, this is a dupe. Whatever. It's the holidays- nothing else is happening ;)

jnetsurfer writes "A friend of mine challenged me to see if I could place a user's home directory on a device image (DMG) under Mac OS X. Well, I decided to post my solution to the problem on the web and here, in case anyone is interested. This can be useful if you want to encrypt a user's home directory, or if you wanted to limit a user's home directory to a certain size."

rael9real writes "Jeff Raskin, developer of the MacOS and author of The Humane Interface [ed.: which was reviewed last year], has been hard at work with several others coding The Humane Environment. They have a developers edition out for Christmas. It runs on Mac OS 9/X. Reading the manual, it is basically a text editor/Python IDE, but it does seem to incorporate some neat ideas in the field. I can't wait to get home and try it out!"

yummyporkproducts asks: "After spotting this story on MacSlash, I was wondering if anyone had actually written or ported any software for Mac OS X that allows the use of off-the shelf biometric hardware, like this pc card."

GodotJr writes "Early Christmas morning I downloaded some digital pictures into iPhoto on OS X 10.2.3. My trusty iBook began playing what sounded like a repeating Irish jig. I thought I had accidentally started iTunes, but no, only iPhoto was running. The 'jig' continued until I quit the application at which point a childs voice said something I didn't quite catch (!) and then a choir belted out 'Hallelujah!', once, and was silent. A restart of iPhoto did not get me an encore performance. Has anyone else experienced this?"