New & Noteworthy: iBooks at Sears; PowerLogix G4 and AltiVec; more

iBooks at Sears Several readers have noticed that Sears has iBooks for sale (often in surprisingly high quantities), while many of those who pre-ordered their iBook have not yet received it.

G4 upgrades with AltiVec compatibility PowerLogix has announced the completion of development of full AltiVec compatibility under PhotoShop 5.5 when using a G4 upgrade card. The compatibility software will ship with all models of the PowerForce G4 which will begin shipments this month.

Game bug-fixes Quake II 1.0.2b and Realmz 7.0.2 have been released.

Eudora Pro 4.22b7 is now available.

Instrumental ABC's 1.1, music software, makes the interface more user friendly, and fixes a bug that would cause the application to crash when used with OS systems earlier than 8.1.

Modem Puppet Show is a collection of modem scripts tuned for the highest speed possible.

Internet Explorer 5 chews up HTML An MSNBC article notes: "Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 (IE5) and Microsoft's underlying MSHTML editing and rendering engine can corrupt some HTML tags."

QuickTime interface critique Salon Technology has an article discussing criticism of QuickTime 4's user interface.

ListenDo! beta testers wanted MacSpeech, Inc. is recruiting beta testers for ListenDo!, a speech recognition program. ListenDo! allows users to control their Macintosh using voice commands. It is compatible with Mac OS 9. Prospective beta testers need to have a Power Macintosh computer, Mac OS 8.0 or later, PlainTalk 1.5.3 or later, a PlainTalk compatible microphone, and a little time on their hands. Interested? If so, email them.

Don't forget the Apple Special Event tomorrow New iMacs, Mac OS 9 and possibly other news are expected to be announced.