Mac software

The 868,163 people who've installed Google's RSS-handling extension for Chrome can breathe a sigh of relief, because Google has resurrected it after its deletion last week.

"My RSS extension was removed by mistake, but it is now up again," said Finnur Thorarinsson, the extension's author, in a comment to a Chrome RSS-handling feature request. The extension detects RSS and Atom feeds on Web pages and lets people subscribe to them with feed-reading software; it's been updated so it no longer offers Google Reader as an option for subscribing.

Google's RSS extension for Chrome disappeared last week … Read more

In the latest set of security updates for OS X, Apple has included a new version of Safari for users still running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. The last official release of Safari for Snow Leopard was version 5.1.7, which addressed several bugs in the WebKit framework that could allow maliciously crafted Web sites to execute code locally on a system. Since then there had been no updates for Safari 5; however, if you are using Snow Leopard and have installed the latest update you will see Safari is now at version 5.1.8.

As noted … Read more

The shift by Adobe Systems toward its Creative Cloud subscription plan looks to be popular with customers, a Jefferies survey of some of them shows.

Adobe is making its entire Creative Suite of software available for an introductory price of $30 per month for annual commitments, with a regular $50 monthly price to kick in later. The subscription also includes services, software that's not part of the CS products, and early updates that traditional perpetual-license customers won't get until CS7.

Jefferies asked customers about their sentiments in a follow-up to a 2012 survey with CNET.

"The majority … Read more

Google's decision to kill its Google Reader service has caused some collateral damage: the end of a related Chrome extension that let the browser handle RSS feeds.

RSS and the similar Atom technology make it easier for people to subscribe to regular updates published on Web sites, and Google Reader was a popular way for people to read that content. Google announced that it's scrapping Google Reader on July 1, but it's already gone ahead and withdrawn the feed-finding Chrome extension.

The extension would detect Web sites' feeds then let people use a variety of RSS reader … Read more

It's no surprise to Google obsessives that the company announced yesterday that it will draw the curtains on its popular RSS-managing Reader service. So what are you supposed to do with your 60 bazillion feeds?

First off, you can export them using Google Takeout. That's an important step to take so you don't lose track of any of the sites you're following. It lets you download your feeds output, called OPML, as a ZIP. Then you extract it all to a folder, and upload them to your prefered Reader replacement service. But which one do you … Read more

Apple's XProtect system (aka File Quarantine) in OS X is a rudimentary anti-malware scanner that will perform a quick check on downloaded files to make sure they do not contain known malware, and will block any versions of Web plug-ins like Java and Flash that have known vulnerabilities.

XProtect runs in the background with no interaction with the user, which is convenient, but it does mean that when it gets updated, users may find themselves unexpectedly unable to access some Web content. Even though quickly updating plug-ins should get you around this inconvenience, it may be useful to know … Read more

We Dropbox users have gotten very accustomed to our boring yet reliable Dropbox desktop clients (download for Windows, Mac, Linux 32-bit, and Linux 64-bit) chugging along tirelessly, syncing files and folders between computers and devices with no muss or fuss, that it was with some trepidation yesterday that I updated to version 2.0, the brand-new release from the online-hosting service. The new update gives the system-tray-based app a slight cosmetic makeover--the utilitarian menu as been supplanted with a more modern UI that includes links to your Dropbox folder, the Dropbox Web site, three "recently changed" files, and … Read more

Google has begun putting flesh on the bones of a skeleton it's been building to add Google Now to Chrome and Chrome OS.

The latest raw builds of the browser have an option in the about:flags panel to enable the Google Now system. "Sadly, we still can't play with it yet because the Google Now server URL still remains secret," commented Chrome watcher Francois Beaufort, who spotted the change.

The infrastructure dovetails with a new rich notification system being built into Chrome and Chrome OS, a mechanism that will let developers use HTML-formatted pop-ups. That … Read more

An about-face in Internet Explorer 10 shows Microsoft is not merely backing off from its hostility toward Flash Player, but actually warming up to the Adobe Systems browser plug-in for competitive reasons.

In September 2011, Microsoft declared that browser plug-ins are a relic from the Internet's early days, calling them bad for battery life, security, reliability, and privacy, and said that it would ban them when IE10 was running with Windows 8's Metro user interface, now called the "immersive UI."

But Microsoft gave Flash a reprieve in May 2012 by building a special version of Adobe'… Read more