I just received my shipment notification from Alsoft that DiskWarrior 4 is on its way.

Welcome to 2007! The January issue issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available. With this issue, ATPM enters its thirteenth year of publication! I am very proud to be a part of this staff, and would like to thank all of the staffers for a great 2006. I'm looking forward to the next twelve months of celebrating "the personal computing experience" with all of you! Our thanks to Charles Anthony for this month's cover art. We're always looking for artwork, so if you're interested, please let the editors know. Recently, Michael and I had a discussion regarding sponsorships for the publication. ATPM has always been a free, volunteer-staffed magazine. We don't make a profit, and any monies generated by sponsorships or ad revenue is pumped back in to the publication's hosting costs. With twelve years of issues hosted online, the potential of high bandwidth costs is always hanging over us, and our parents taught us the value of being prepared for a rainy day. The result of our discussion is that ATPM will no longer accept direct sponsorships or advertising or advertising. The revenue generated by the Google and Yahoo ads you see on the site, coupled with those of our affiliate shopping links, is currently sustaining us. For those former sponsors and direct advertisers, we thank you for your sponsorship and enjoyed the many relationships they enabled. Our best wishes to your respective companies in 2007. If you enjoy reading ATPM, please help us cover our costs by clicking on the ads which may be of interest to you, and using the affiliate shopping links. As the new year dawns, we welcome two new staffers. Linus Ly will be assisting on the editorial side of the fence, helping lay down the grammatical law in the copy-editing trenches. Chris Dudar is very much in to 3D graphics, and will be covering applications in that realm. We're glad to have you guys on board! Mike kicks the new year off by exploring his hopes and dreams in the Macintosh realm for 2007. Lee continues the Photoshop for the Curious tutorial, with Palettemania! He also provides some outstanding fireworks photos for this month's desktop pictures section. Speaking of outstanding, er, out-stepping, er, stepping out--yeah, that's it, stepping out--Cortland learns that some times you have to swing in the right direction for the one you love. Wes reviews Audio Hijack Pro, a tool I've found quite useful in making my own MP3 ringtones. (You're not actually paying three bucks for a ringtone, are you?) I found coconutBattery, examined for the ATPM readership by David Thompson, fit the bill last year (wow, it really was last year) in diagnosing my PowerBook's failing battery. As noted above, Chris Dudar opens up the 3D realm to the ATPM readership, this month with a review of DAZ/Studio, better known as D/S, and this one's not from Nintendo. Finally, Lee's not as impressed with the iTalk Pro as he was with the original iPod recording unit from Griffin. You can always find ATPM in a flavor of your liking, and we hope we can serve many more appetizing morsels in the coming year.

How would you like 20% off the best spam-killing app for the Mac? Or maybe 20% off the easiest disk image creator? Perhaps 20% off a professional text editor is more to your liking. Now that you've done all of your gift shopping for everyone else, treat yourself to discount savings on numerous Mac applications from top-notch developers with MacSanta.

The December issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure. We debut a new column this month, with Lee's Photoshop for the Curious. As he notes, this is not a "Photoshop for Beginners"-type tutorial, but rather a look at various elements of Photoshop that occasional users would benefit from. If you're a Photoshop Elements user like myself, you will find that many of the tips translate well. Mike Chamberlain offers his personal tour of the Macintosh blogosphere in this month's Mac of All Trades, while Miraz puts SeakMonkey through the web-accessibility wringer. Sylvester continues looking at Activity Monitor, this time using it to plug memory leaks. (Those would be leaks in the Mac's memory, not Sylvester's. His memory is just fine. At least it appears that way to the rest of the staff.) This month's desktop pictures are brought to us by our Mr. Chamberlain, taken on his European sojourn this past summer. We continue to see the genesis of Cortland's employment at Wieser Graphics, while dark forces prep their move to the Midwest. Lee has a double-dose of reviews this month, looking at Rogue Amoeba's Fission and the media device, iRecord. Matthew pokes around with OpenMenu X, while David notes one of my favorite iTunes utilities, Synergy. Finally, for all you gamers, Andrew rocks on some first-person shooters as he puts the Tankstick through its paces. As always, this issue of ATPM is available in a variety of reading formats for your enjoyment.

There are three new "Get a Mac" commercials: "Gift Exchange", "Sales Pitch", and "Meant for Work". The worst of the three, and probably the worst of all the "Get a Mac" ads, has to be "Sales Pitch". I really like "Meant for Work", especially the end when PC wanders off in disgust, saying, "I have got to go...listen to some emo." I'd probably feel the same way.

I just tried to mark as read all messages in a Mailsmith mailbox by hitting the K key, which is what you use to mark all messages as read in NetNewsWire. (For what it's worth, marking a message as read in Mailsmith is accomplished by Cmd-M.)

The November issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure. Mike Chamberlain notes some of the odds and ends one might take with them for their mobile computing needs, based on his five-week European trip this past summer. Mark Tennent manages to weave together Keats, the MyBook Pro (yes, MyBook, not MacBook), the Honda Civic, and Mac OS X, as he looks at function versus form. Ted delves in to writing environments and their relation to outliners in this month's ATPO, including the one I'm currently using for NaNoWriMo. PageSpinner is the latest web development app to go under Miraz's web accessibility microscope, and Sylvester has a tour of an app on your Mac you may not even realize is there, Activity Monitor. Lee got some great shots at a butterfly garden, which he shares in this month's Desktop Pictures section. The misery of Cortland's search for work continues, leading him to Wieser Graphics and his first--and second--embarrassing moments with Angie. It's been four years since Lee first reviewed EarthDesk, and a lot has changed in that time, so he took the opportunity to look at this intriguing app again. He also looks at RouteBuddy, a mapping application for your Mac that can work with supported GPS devices that have USB. Finally, while the Spaces virtual desktops feature of Mac OS X is still on the horizon, David Thompson sees if one can get similar functionality now from VirtueDesktops. We're still looking for help in the editorial, writing, and art departments. If you would like to contribute cover art to an upcoming issue, have a keen eye for grammar and spelling to edit copy, or have an itch to write about the Mac world, drop us a line. As always, at ATPM we are proud to offer our readers choices in how they consume our product. Enjoy!

Once again, I've had the pleasure of being "present at the creation" of one of Michael's software endeavors. EagleFiler is an information collection and management application that's super easy to use. Dump whatever you want to in to this thing: plain text, rich text, PDFs, web archives, emails, images; pretty much any digital document you can create. EagleFiler differs from a lot of its competition in that it stores its library in Finder format, so your documents are not locked in to a database or someone's proprietary storage system. Did you dump a rich text file in to EagleFiler, but you want to do some heavy editing to it? No problem: you can open it in Word, TextEdit, or the word processor of your choice, make your changes, save it, and you'll see the changes in EagleFiler. As has been the case with pretty much all of Michael's software initiatives, this one was born out of his own desire for an app to do something that no other app was currently doing. He and I have talked about an application like EagleFiler for a few years now, mostly because nothing out there satisfied us when it came to email archiving. (Here's a secret about both Michael and myself: we're digital pack rats, and he's worse than I am. He saves every email he sends and receives. Every one.) We're both Mailsmith users, but the larger the app's database gets, the more of a performance drag it incurs. Offloading either individual emails, or entire mail boxes, helps, and EagleFiler is the first application I've felt safe with to do just that. I've been using EagleFiler full time since mid-August, when the first alpha version was released to the merry little band of testers of which I'm honored to be a part. It's been rock-solid for me every step of the way, even as the testers suggested, and Michael added, new features through the app's development. Go download EagleFiler and try it for thirty days, gratis. Then, show your appreciation for Michael's hard work by registering the app, and support a developer of quality Mac software.

Maury notes that Apple has posted three new "Get a Mac" ads: "Counselor"; "Better Results"--which will likely get a lot of buzz; and "Self Pity", my favorite, and the source of this post's title.

The October issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available. Wes runs down the blogosphere traffic on the is-it-or-isn't-it AirPort hack in this month's Bloggable. Mike Chamberlain is one of two new staffers joining the ATPM ranks this month, and the first of his "Mac of all Trades" is a trip down memory lane. Mark Tennent comes to the realization that size really does matter. (Get your mind out of the gutter; we're talking about displays.) Miraz Jordan's look at web-accessibility capabilities in web development apps continues, and she's impressed with Nvu. Angus Wong muses on the effect of Microsoft's Zune on the Apple ecosystem, while Sylvester Roque offers a helpful look at that oh-so-mystifying document, the crash log. This month's Desktop Pictures are again courtesy of Robert Reis, and his trip to Germany earlier this year for the World Cup. Speaking of trips down memory lane, Cortland returns with a nostalgic journey from college to employment. Lee looks at A Better Finder Rename, a utility I'd use if I had a lot of stuff to rename, which I very rarely do. Chris wants to like the iWoofer, really he does, but...well, you've have to read the whole review. If you're thinking of doing music on your Mac, you may want to start with Making Music on the Apple Mac, which is what Sylvester did. Finally, our other new staffer, David Thompson, shows off the darling of PC emulation for the Mac, Parallels Desktop. As always, you can get your kicks on Route 66, but if you want to read this month's issue, you'd be better served other ways.

Rich Siegel, CEO of Bare Bones, confirmed earlier this evening on the Mailsmith-Talk email list that Mailsmith will not be seeing IMAP support. In an attempt to lay to rest much oft-repeated rumors about the company's email client, Siegel said:

Since we released 2.1.5, an enormous amount of work has gone into Mailsmith. Much of that work is underneath the hood, toward supporting new features and improving performance & stability. The version of Mailsmith in which I am typing this message implements a great deal of what has in the past been discussed on this list.

Most of the rework that we've completed was started with IMAP support in mind. After several false starts on the whiteboard, however, we put down the pens and carefully backed away. Despite our best desires and intentions and efforts, Mailsmith is not going to support IMAP. (The FAQ has been updated accordingly.) So if you're one of those holdouts waiting for the next rev of Mailsmith to support IMAP, so you can switch over, you can stop waiting. I have never had much need for IMAP, so this is no big loss for me. Mailsmith remains my email client of choice, and despite temptation to switch to Apple Mail, especially with the new Leopard version on the horizon, I look forward to Mailsmith's next release with enthusiasm.

Recall the various pokes of fun Jobs and company took at Microsoft last month during Apple's World Wide Developers Conference? They're fresh in my mind, because yesterday I listened to Jobs' keynote; it was included in Engadget's podcast line-up, I'm a few episodes behind, and I figured, even though I knew all of the contained info from reading reports on the web, what the hell. A thought which hit me out of the blue a few moments ago, while I was cleaning dishes, of all things, is this: More than once, Jobs and company would say something to the effect of "We have other really cool new features coming in Leopard, but we don't want to share them here because Microsoft may try to copy them in to Vista." (Vista is, in case you've been in a cave with Osama, the next, long-delayed version of Windows. Leopard is the next version of Mac OS X.) Problem: Who is the largest developer for the Mac OS outside of Apple? Problem #2: Do you think Microsoft, being the largest developer outside of Apple, didn't send programmers to WWWDC? Problem #3: Did not all developers attending WWDC receive the Leopard Developer Preview? So I guess the jokes are just for those still trapped inside the RDF.

The whole downside to Apple switching to Intel-based processors is that my brand-new-this-past-February 20-inch Core Duo iMac now becomes outdated much faster than it previously would have.