In the comments to last week's post on the caveats of using invitations with iCal, a reader pointed out John Maisey's iCal Reply Checker. As it turns out, that little utility delivers a set of useful options that should have been built into iCal all along.

Making travel reservations online has come a long way, and some airlines now even include standard vCalendar files in their confirmation emails, so it takes just a few mouse clicks to add all flight-related information to your digital calendar. One such airlines is Lufthansa, who include vCalendar _invitations_. And that, I daresay, is a bad idea.

Courtesy of my MacBook and a Lufthansa ticket, I am typing away at this blog post en route from London to Munich, cruising along at some 30,000 feet. Which is just the right environment for writing about what to bring along when traveling with your geek equipment.

One member of the "Trio of Album Artwork Utilities for iTunes" that I wrote about three weeks ago was CoverScout. Because there were some minor "misunderstandings" between this software and iTunes 8, I was expecting an update that would fix these issues, and that update came out last Friday. Little did I know, however, that the developers were working on a new major release of the software, as well!

Indev Software's Mail Act-On extension for Apple Mail has been updated to version 2 last week. Among the new features are an improved user interface, support for undo, and applying rules to outgoing email messages.

Renaming multiple files at once in the Mac's Finder can be a pain, unless you use a renaming utility. While there is a wide range of such utilities available as third-party offerings, Mac OS X has a flexible renaming tool built right in.

Whether it's List view, Grid view, or Cover Flow -- finally, with iTunes 8, album cover art is available in whichever way you view your digital music collection. High time to fill the remaining cover art gaps in your library, if you haven't done so yet. There are numerous software tools available to help you with this task, and this blog post will present three rather different, yet equally noteworthy representatives of that software genre.

AApple's handheld devices are an example for miniaturization at work: with every new release, iPods have gotten a little smaller, and "incredibly thin" is the new "insanely great." Unfortunately, Apple has also miniaturized some of their software user guides

Two weeks ago, I was still searching for the "perfect" Twitter client for the Macintosh. In the meantime, I've been testing yet another client called Syrinx, and I am so impressed with it that it is now the only remaining Twitter client on my Mac's hard drive.

When browsing your media library by genre in the new Grid View that debuted with the recently released iTunes 8, each genre folder is adorned by gorgeous genre artwork -- as long as you stick to iTunes's default genre names. When using custom genres, or if you're unhappy with the Apple-designed artwork, however, there's a way to add your own custom artwork to iTunes 8.