The Safe Sleep feature in more recent Apple laptops is a good idea in theory: every time the computer goes to sleep, the entire contents of its RAM are written to disk so that the machine's state can be quickly restored in case the computer runs out of juice while sleeping. No data loss, no waiting for the computer to reboot, and very handy for exchanging batteries without having to shut down the machine, too. In practice, though, this feature may not work quite as advertised, so you might just as well want to deactivate it, and you can.

Thanks to cross-platform GUI libraries, writing an application that can be deployed on more than just one computing platform is reasonably straight-forward. But there is more to making an application truly Mac-like than just compiling it for Mac OS X.

Commenting on my recent review of ScreenFlow, my esteemed colleague David Battino wondered if this screencast recording software could also serve as a replacement for Apple's iMovie for quickly editing videos. The short answer to that is, no, ScreenFlow can't replace iMovie, but -- it does have some tricks up its sleeve that you can use to create cool effects not found in iMovie.

Sometimes, new phenomena show up in Internetland that, at first sight, make you wonder about who would really need this. But keep an eye on them for a while, and you may notice a few things about them that make it well worthwhile to try them out yourself, after all. Twitter is one such phenomenon, and now that I'm finally ready to give it a try, I could use some help.

The Internet has revolutionized the distribution of software: search for what you need (or want), download it, install it -- instant digital gratification! And yet, some developers still manage to make this process a highly unpleasant experience. Here's one example of how _not_ to distribute your software. Plus a few ideas to consider when publishing your own software as a download.

Psystar, the company that caused a bit of a stir recently by announcing a Mac-clone called "Open Computer" have now posted a video which, they claim, shows that machine in operation.

To find out a Mac's serial number, don't bother hunting for the tag on the machine's enclosure, as it's right there in the "About This Mac" dialog box. But what about looking up this information without being logged in?

Macs have always been a favorite with musicians and audio engineers, and at this year's Musikmesse Frankfurt, the world's biggest trade show for musical instruments, studio technology, and accessories, you could literally see them everywhere.

At the "PWN 2 OWN" contest during last month's CanSecWest, which claims to be the "world's most advanced conference focusing on applied digital security," a MacBook Air was the first of three laptops to be "pwned," i.e., to be broken into. The other machines were running Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux, and only the latter managed to withstand all attacks until the contest's end. Is it time for Mac users to finally start panicing about malware on OS X?

With a sweet $18 billion of cash in the bank, it was just a matter of time until Apple would consider a major acquisition. Who would have thought that Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit would be their object of desire.