In the wake of Apple’s release of Aperture 3 on Tuesday comes a flurry of related image software updates: iLife Support 9.0.4, Digital Camera Raw Compatibility Update 3.0, and Aperture SlideShow Support Update 1.0. All are available now via your Mac's Software Update.

The 70 MB iLife ’09 update gives a boost to system software resources shared by iLife and other applications. It aims to increases stability for slideshows viewed in the Media Browser and iPhoto. You should also see improved compatibility between Aperture 3 and the Media Browser. Apple recommends the download for all users of iLife ’09, iWork ’09, and Aperture.

The Raw update does just what you'd imagine, extending iPhoto ’09 and Aperture 3's support for Raw image files to a number of additional cameras, including Canon PowerShot S90, Canon sRAW, Canon mRAW, Leica D-LUX 4, and three Panasonic Lumix cameras (DMC-G1, DMC-GH1, and DMC-LX3). The update weighs in at 6.4 MB and you’ll need to be running Mac OS X 10.6.2 or 10.5.8.

The Aperture update fixes playback of video clips used in Aperture 3 slideshows on Snow Leopard. This one is a 62.3 MB download and requires Mac OS X 10.6.2.

I guess you can’t get too excited about support updates, but what happens under the hood does indeed make all our lives easier.

You’ve got to hand it to Google: when they take on a project, they don’t do things by halves. On Tuesday, in an event at the company’s Mountain View campus the company announced Google Buzz, its newest entry into the social-networking arena.

In his introduction at Google’s press event, Vice President of Product Management Bradley Horowitz laid out the problem of social networking, which he likened to Google’s initial entry into the field of search: helping users find what’s relevant, isolating the signal from the noise.

Buzz attempts to solve that problem in a number of ways. For one thing, because it’s integrated into Google’s Gmail, the system automatically populates the list of users you’re following by pulling from the contacts that you converse with the most.

Using Buzz, you can share pictures, videos, and links, pulling in media from other sites like YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader, and even Twitter. Google put an emphasis on sharing media, with features like inline video playback and a custom photo viewer that lets you quickly skim through shared photos. Buzz can even automatically pull headlines and photos from links that you post.

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Papershow, a tool for interactive presentations from Canson, will soon be available for the Mac. The kit, which is making its debut at Macworld Expo this week, includes a Bluetooth-equipped pen, a USB key for your computer, and special paper that transmits your handwriting to a screen.

The kit allows for a flexible set up in a conference room; it’s designed to facilitate brainstorming and meetings. The idea behind Papershow is that your standard PowerPoint or Keynote presentation is awfully static; this tool lets you jazz things up, and keep your meeting attendees awake and engaged. 

The pen includes a tiny infrared camera that can transmit from up to 18 feet away from your USB key, computer, and projector. The paper itself is where the magic happens. The A4-size paper includes a large central grid for your notes and sketches; you can tap the pen on a toolbar on the right side to control color and stroke, to create shapes, and to make corrections. You can print PowerPoint presentations or other documents on Papershow’s standard-size printer paper, and then bring them up on your screen and annotate them. You can also tap on the paper to navigate through the slideshow.

The Mac software comes on the USB key and actually does the work of displaying your writing and slideshows; the applications lets you manage documents, import PowerPoint presentations, print pages, and email annotations. 

Papershow for Mac will be available following Macworld Expo. It requires Mac OS X 10.4 or better. The $200 starter kit comes with the pen, the USB key, 30 sheets of standard-size paper, a notepad with A4 paper, and a few other goodies (like a pen case). In case you’re wondering, that paper is 100-percent recycled. Additional packs of 200 sheets of 8.5x11 inch paper are $20. 

If you’re at Expo in San Francisco this week, Canson will host a demo of Papershow at Moscone Center’s Main Stage. The presentation kicks off at 1:30 p.m. on Friday.

For some time, Apple has given the Designated Family Tech Support Personnel among us a small reprieve with its “Find out how” selection of tutorial videos. While they don’t really tackle inevitable questions like “was deleting ~/Library/Keychains a bad idea?,” they serve as succinct primers for The Way of the Mac and Apple’s various apps and services. Now, if your tech-blossoming family and friends prefer to gobble their media in a subscription format, Apple has finally created iTunes Store podcast channels for its “Find out how” series.

Organized by application, service, or topic, the nine “Find out how” podcasts that Apple has published so far cover MobileMe, iWork ’09, iWeb ’09, and of course, Mac Basics (search for “Apple find out how” to see them all). There are around ten to 20 episodes in each of these podcasts, though for some series it seems that not all episodes have made the transition from Apple’s site to their podcast counterpart. While the iMovie podcast has a few more episodes than Apple’s website, the Mac Basics podcast is short around ten or so episodes.

It’s nice to see Apple making these useful tutorials available in more ways, and hopefully future videos will continue to keep the attention of aspiring i-everything users. They may not make a dramatic dent in the number of family tech support hours that some of us clock, but every little bit certainly helps.

For Mac e-mail software, Apple Mail is good enough, but barely just. Microsoft Entourage has retail polish and bloat, while Mozilla Thunderbird is clearly a product of open source software.

There’s room for something in between, and Postbox might be it.

Version 1.1.1, which was released by Postbox Monday, feels a little more at home on Mac OS X. It features the ability to use Spotlight to search for messages and attachments in Postbox and full integration with Mac OS X’s very own Address Book. Setting Postbox as your default e-mail client will open the door for two-way communication with iCal for notifications and events, and allow you to easily transfer photos from iPhoto. Just like many other Mac apps, Postbox can now look up words in Dictionary with a right click, and allows you to create new messages by dragging and dropping files on its Dock icon.

Built by former Mozilla staff, Postbox runs on Mozilla’s Gecko engine, the same technology behind Firefox, Camino, Songbird, and Thunderbird. Apart from sharing the same foundation as other Mozilla-derived software, it has a few business-friendly features that should appeal to former Outlook users. E-mail can be filed into a variety of topics, like folders and filters in Outlook. For people on a tight schedule, Postbox can create brand new items for a to-do list or transform individual e-mails into to-do items.

Most impressively, Postbox picks out some of the most important bits out of your e-mail. On the right-hand side of every e-mail you view, you’ll see lists containing every address mentioned with links to Google Maps, attachments with image previews, links to every Website found, and a tiny card with the sender’s contact information pulled from your address book. In addition, there’s a wealth of search options, filters and organized lists featuring all the recent messages, files, images, and links you’ve sent and received, as demonstrated by this video.

Postbox has to spend a few minutes indexing all your mail before these helpful search options and lists become available, and the iPhoto, Facebook and Twitter integration features feel a bit superfluous to me. Nitpicking aside, the latest version of Postbox promises to be a great e-mail client that the folks behind Letters.app could learn a thing or two from.

Postbox costs $40 and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

The Great Amazon Delisting may be coming to an end, according to the New York Times. What no one can quite understand is why it happened at all, or took so long to resolve.

A little more than a week ago, Amazon removed all Macmillan books from its online store, both in Kindle versions and the dead-tree variety. This was in response to hardball negotiations between Macmillan and Amazon over pricing of Kindle e-books. Amazon, the market leader in the e-book market, wants to maintain pricing of new e-books at $9.99 to maintain the Kindle's dominance; Macmillan and other publishers, on the other hand, want to control the price of their electronic products.

It's unclear what effect a certain upstart in the iBooks... er, e-book market had on these negotiations, but few think it’s a coincidence that Amazon exercised the nuclear option only two days after Apple announced the iPad and its own online bookstore. Apple is offering publishers the right to set their own prices, and takes a 30 percent cut, much as it does for the App Store; in the book biz, this is called the “agency model,” and it’s what publishers have been pushing Amazon to adopt.

Two other major publishers are now on the agency model bandwagon, and Amazon has publicly capitulated to the new terms. But online Amazon sales continued merrily along for HarperCollins and Hachette all week, while it took five days for Amazon to flip the database switch for Macmillan.

Amazon has attempted to spin its actions as protecting the consumer interest in cheap e-books, but influential author and publisher blogs have generally ranged in calling the Amazon move something between ill-advised and stunningly boneheaded. Most readers, the reasoning goes, neither know nor care who publishes their favorite authors, or about the internecine negotiations between major players in the book market; all they see is that Amazon isn’t selling books they want to buy. Amazon’s move hurt Macmillan's bottom line for the last week, but if those customers bounced over to another online bookstore (or, heaven forfend, a brick-and-mortar store), the long term impact on sales will accrue far more to Amazon than anyone else.

Which seems an odd strategy, when Apple is perceived not as a new e-book startup, but rather the presumptive 800-pound gorilla. Apple has already crushed the competition in both the music and smartphone industries; Amazon may have a 12-length lead starting this race, but no one thinks the odds are 50-1 against Apple catching up. Five hundred dollars will buy you either a Kindle DX ebook reader, or (in two months) an iPad with many more features. Such as color. And 140,000 other applications.

In any case, some news outlets have jumped to the wrong conclusions regarding some aspects of this story (and noblesse oblige prevents me from including any links in this sentence). I don’t have any insider information, but I’ll put on my prognosticator hat and make a few predictions:

1. This isn’t the “death of the $9.99 e-book.” It’s the death of the $9.99 bestseller... but that particular product has been on life support, thanks to Amazon’s willingness to lose money on most of those sales. That would have lasted only so long as Amazon felt the need to establish a monopoly position; losing money and making it up on volume hasn’t been a viable long-term strategy since 1999.
2. This is potentially the beginning, however, of the cheaper non-bestseller. Book publishing is a classic example of a long tail industry; for every bestseller, there are literally tens of thousands of other books which aren’t. Publishers can’t tinker with the prices of the rest of their products, since the prices are inconveniently permanently printed on the back cover, but they can easily do so with e-books. Every other media industry which has migrated onto the Internet has seen pricing wars and deep discounting—witness the ubiquity of the 99-cent iPhone app. It’ll be a long while before you see e-books for a buck, but publishers will be quick to recognize the difference between selling 100 copies of a 2005 e-book for $14.95, or 1,000 copies for $5.95. The floor for an ebook’s price will likely be set by the cost of its equivalent paperback; once a book goes out of print, though, that floor drops out.
3. It remains to be seen how competition between online booksellers will affect pricing; it is notably paradoxical that the entry of Apple into the market will raise the price of some books. Most likely, publishers will keep pricing at parity between the Kindle and iBooks versions, but future strategies may include platform competition and wholesale discounting.
4. What hasn’t changed: you still don’t really own the e-books you buy. Thanks to e-book DRM, they’re more like semi-permanent rentals. Unless Apple has something up its sleeve with its use of the ePub industry standard, your e-books will continue to be locked in to a particular platform. I personally expect to see iBooks available on iPhones (much as Kindle e-books are), but good luck getting your encrypted e-books running on your laptop or next year’s gadget from another manufacturer. If you want to buy a book which you can lend to a friend, or which you’re guaranteed to be able to read in 2020 regardless of technological change, paper is still your best friend.

This week, Macworld Expo opens in San Francisco. And, as everyone likely knows, it’s a particularly significant episode of Expo because Apple will not be counted among the participants. You know what this means: No Apple announcements or booth, no Steve-led keynote, fewer vendors, and little front-page coverage.

Yet when I put my selfish desires aside, I care very little about Apple’s absence. Because, for me, what Apple does and doesn’t do at Expo makes up a small portion of the value I derive from it.

At last year’s keynote presentation, Phil Schiller repeated Apple’s line regarding trade shows—“Every week, 3.4 million customers visit an Apple store around the world…. That’s 100 Macworlds each and every week.”

And, from Apple’s perspective, he’s right. For Apple, Macworld Expo was a marketing event. It was a way to create buzz about new products and the company and give attendees a chance for some hands-on time (even though the extent of that hands-on time might be staring at an iPhone suspended in a glass case). While the Apple Stores certainly serve to sell products, they also provide some of the same experience as meandering through the Apple booth—you have a chance to gawk at Apple’s product line and ask questions.

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Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from Macworld UK. Visit Macworld UK’s blog page for the latest Mac news from across the Atlantic.

This is not an iPad, despite the sound-alike name X2 chose for its Windows 7 device.

With perfect timing, a company called X2 has announced the iTablet, a name once rumored for Apple’s iPad prior to Steve Jobs unveiling the tablet late last month.

Expected to be available from April, the iTablet runs Windows 7 on a 1.6GHz Intel chip. The iTablet will have space for a 250GB hard drive, 802.11b/g Wi-fi and optional 3G mobile broadband. The device will support Flash, unlike Apple's iPad, and will have 3 USB ports and a 1.3Mp webcam.

HDMI output is offered as an optional extra.

For the fashion conscious, the 10.2-inch or 12.1-inch, 252x192x35mm tablet will be offered in a choice of black, white, blue, pink, yellow, red or grey.

Pricing has yet to be confirmed.

PC Advisor notes X2 is an industrial product design company whose technical director, Robin Daunter, was formerly the head of R&D at Evesham Technology.

However, with the exception of Windows 7, the device may not be as new as some reports suggest. “Pretty sure the X2 iTablet suddenly making the UK tech rounds is the same AMtek iTablet T200 that’s been out for years now... 2007 in fact,” notes Engadget editor Thomas Ricker on his Twitter feed.

[Via Electricpig]

Everyone’s got it! It’s the next big thing, computing reinvented, or it’s a piece of junk! Nothing more than a sized-up iPod touch!

The Macalope is pointedly pro-iPad and this week he waxes poetic again, so if that’s not your cup of tea, just close the lid of your laptop now. If you’re using a desktop computer, just angrily shove your monitor off your desk.

Corporate IT shops, of course, won’t much care for the iPad. And what about that name? Apple doesn’t even fully own it yet! Oh, the nerve! The cheek! The audacity! The other words in the thesaurus! It’s enough to give a noted technology pundit a bad case of the vapors!

Shameless boosterism

You’re going to have to forgive the Macalope. He fully admits he’s got pro-iPad derangement syndrome. Sorry, but have you seen his head? What did you expect when Apple came out with something that’s his diminutive but precocious relative?

The problem the horny one has with the detractors is they are almost exclusively arguing about specific features the iPad lacks—Flash, a camera, an SD card slot, bladdity, bladdity. “A netbook has all these things! And costs less!” It’s true! Guess what? This isn’t a netbook replacement! It’s something completely different.

Mike Monteiro sees it.

The iPad isn’t the future of computing; it’s a replacement for computing.

It’s the payoff to all the work done by multiple industries over the last 20–30 years. It’s the subtraction of 20lbs of textbooks in my son’s backpack, and the device I finally feel comfortable buying my parents.

Andy Ihnatko had a terrific analogy on the latest edition of MacBreak Weekly to a story the Macalope had heard before. Back in the 1960s, designers of the lunar lander were having terrible trouble getting the thing to pencil out within the constraints they had. The astronauts needed a clear field of view, but a sitting astronaut requires a large swath of glass in order to gain peripheral vision.

So they took out the seats. Not only did that solve the sight problem, it also solved the weight problem and the problem of mobility within the lander.

Nobody wants to give anything up, but sometimes that’s exactly what you need to do to get something back—something a netbook or a tablet running Windows 7 will never have.

And that is freedom. Freedom to work outside the constraints of everything that came before. If that sounds like Apple-booster double talk for “STEVE JOBS HAS COMMANDED ME TO PROMOTE THE IPAD AT ALL COSTS,” well, sorry. It’s a vision of technology you can either buy into or not. The Macalope’s laid down the (metaphorical) cash, but he recognizes there are those who haven’t. For you people, here’s a mouse you might like.

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According to a survey published by online shopping comparison site Retrevo, users have lost interest in the iPad since Apple announced the new device last month. However, as Retrevo's past surveys have shown, statistics can be massaged to say pretty much anything

The company ran a survey of more than 1,000 randomly-selected users from its Website the week before the announcement, followed by the same survey (over a different population sample, which might raise eyebrows) a week later.

Survey participants were asked a series of questions revolving around their interest in Apple's new product, ranging from whether they were aware of it to whether they thought they would need one and whether they would want to pay extra for optional 3G data functionality.

The results seem to indicate a definite decline in the level of interest among respondents once details about the iPad were revealed on January 27: the number of people aware of the device's existence but not interested in buying it doubled from 26 percent all the way to 52 percent, while 61 percent of the respondents didn't think that they would need an iPad after finding out about it, compared to 49 percent before. Retrevo also claims that 59 percent of the people it interviewed do not want to pay the extra $130 required to purchase a 3G-enabled iPad.

This data, however, needs to be taken with the proverbial grain of salt (or two). The first survey was essentially asking respondents for their interest in a product that didn't event exist at the time—remember that Apple had not made any formal announcements about what they were going to present until Steve Jobs pulled his trademark black cloth from the iPad's surface at its unveiling.

By the time the second survey was conducted, the bubble of expectation that had built over the tablet had burst, leaving users answering questions about an unfinished product that nobody outside Apple (with the possible exception of Stephen Colbert) has had an opportunity to use for more than thirty minutes.

From this point of view, therefore, Retrevo's survey is more likely to measure the effect that anticipation and rumours have had on the market's expectations when it comes to the iPad than its actual sales potential.

One interesting fact, however, emerges from the report: a whopping 82 percent of the survey respondents were aware of the iPad after its announcement. Considering that the device is still weeks away from its actual launch, this clearly indicates that Apple's ability to raise awareness about its products is still second to none. Whether awareness will translate into sales is likely to remain difficult to gauge until the iPads is finally shipping and the consumers have had an opportunity to form their opinions.