New & Noteworthy: iSlideShow; Hailstorm announcement; MacInstruct tutorial; Internet coffee shops; more

iSlideShow 1.0b is a public beta release of this application that creates slide shows for multimedia projects and Web pages. It has 65 different transitional effects, can export files to Quicktime, supports drag & drop, and runs on Mac OS X or Mac OS 9.

Hailstorm forecast Microsoft intends to make a major announcement about its .NET strategy at 10 am PST today. The Industry Standard speculates on what is ahead in this article.

MacInstruct on Modem scripts This new tutorial explains how to optimize modem performance by writing a custom modem script.

More on wireless Internet coffee shops Several users wrote in response to our item Saturday about wireless Internet in the Bay area, suggesting we check out Surf and Sip, which has locations in a number of major U.S. cities and is offering free access to users who bring their own computer.

MacFixit updated We have updated Saturday's item on using MATLAB 6 Release 12 with Windows emulation.

New Palm devices Palm announced two new models today, the m500 and the m505. Both support USB out of the box, expansion cards, and come with PalmOS 4.0. The m500 has a monochrome screen, while the m505 has a color screen.