New & Noteworthy: Apple wins Emmy!; Paris Keynote plans; Chicago retail stores; Nisus Writer; more

Apple wins an Emmy Award! From the New York Times: "Apple's Emmy is an engineering award for FireWire...Apple developed FireWire, but it is now an industry standard. In the television industry, FireWire has been an important technology that has allowed professionals to edit programs on desktop and even notebook computers, displacing very costly specialized film-editing equipment. In the last year, desktop editing using Apple's hardware and software has increasingly become the norm in the television industry. (Thanks, Casey Common) Margin note: After spending most of last weekend creating a short film with a FireWire camcorder and iMovie 2 for Mac OS X, we wholeheartedly agree that Apple deserves rave reviews for its film-editing technology, which is simply breathtaking in its elegance.

Apple confirms Paris Expo keynote plans Today Apple issued a press release quoting Steve Jobs discussing plans for the Paris keynote next month. The quote reads: "My keynote will focus on Mac OS X v10.1, the super-fast new version of Mac OS X, and our revolutionary new iDVD 2 software, which lets users create their own custom DVDs that can be played on consumer DVD players," said Steve Jobs. "This has been an incredible new product year for Apple, so we don't plan to launch any new hardware products in Paris this year." This item is a follow-up to our report yesterday on this subject.

New Apple retail stores scheduled to open soon This Chicago Sun-Times article takes a look at Apple's new retail presence in the Chicago area with a look at the two new stores, one of which is set to open this weekend.

Nisus Writer 6.0.2 is out. A partial list of the many changes in this release includes dropping 68K processor support, fixes for display bugs, the B option in Find All macro commands now works properly, several crashing bugs were fixed, and the serial number is no longer requested when rebooting between Mac OS X and Mac OS 9. See VersionTracker for the complete list.

Kaleidoscope enters semi-retirement Arlo Rose's Web site contains the following statement on the status of this very popular (and elegant) Mac OS interface modification utility: "The last version of Kaleidoscope we released was 2.3.1. While we still support it, and encourage people running pre-Mac OS X machines to download and register it, we are no longer actively working on a version for Mac OS X."

Apple history done right Steve Fishell takes issue with his own newspaper, the Tennessean, for its recent coverage of the twentieth anniversary of the PC. His column contains a brief review of Apple's history, where he reminds readers that "The personal computer revolution began four years before the IBM PC with the Apple II in 1977, and all of today's 'PCs' were originally inspired by this machine."