New & Noteworthy: Apple retail store opens this month; Apple back from the brink; FastTrack Schedule; more

Apple retail store opens May 19th Apple has confirmed that it will open the first of what is expected to be a chain of nationwide retail stores in the Tysons Corner Center in McLean Virginia, a suburb of Washington D.C.. See this Washington Post story for details. The New York Times also has coverage of Apple's retail plans.

Steve Jobs is pulling the company back from the brink again Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Henry Norr provides an excellent in-depth look at Apple's most recent history. He notes that the company "Has seemingly turned itself around just by getting its own act together, without waiting for renewed growth in the overall economy and any sharp upturn in demand for PCs -- and without huge job cuts or eliminating major projects."

FastTrack Schedule 7.02 is out. This is a maintenance release, focused on addressing some unexpected behavior, fixing minor bugs and making minor enhancements to existing features. Improvements include: bars in the Calendar View print and display correctly in the Calendar View's Print Preview layer and the graphic export setting no longer reverts to the Macintosh Picture format.

Mozilla 0.9, a preview version of mozilla.org's next generation browser, is available.

Onmivision opens the door to Mac cams Omnivision, a leading image sensor developer, has announced availability of software drivers for OEMs developing cameras for the iMac market.

Keyspan USB 2.0 PCI ships The card, which is available now from distributors, has 5 USB 2.0 ports that operate at up to 480 Mbps, is backwards compatible with USB 1.1, and will sell for $59. This press release has details.

Update: R. Lynn Rardin points out that the card is only for use with a subset of PCI Macs. According to Keyspan's Web site, the card works "With Rev. B Beige G3, Blue and White G3, or G4 PowerMac with an available PCI slot; Supports USB 1.1 under Mac OS 8.6 (or later); Ready to support USB 2.0 as Apple adds support to Mac OS."

OrangeUSB 2.0 CardBus PC Card also available More details can be found here.

Blackout dims Yahoo Yesterday California's power problems reached Yahoo, blacking out some of its servers. Yahoo messenger was one of the services affected for several hours Monday afternoon. Today's weather almost certainly means more blackouts.

Authoring Support and DVD Player follow-up updated We added several brief new items to our previous coverage, including a new standalone installer and an update on the DVD Player installation.