RAGE Software has released SERank 2.6 (http://www.ragesw.com/products/search-engine-rank.html), an update to the Mac OS X search engine rank checker. The upgrade adds support for over a dozen new search engines, including the Yandex search engine. It also fixes issues with entering CAPTCHA codes after performing too many searches in a short amount of time. SERank will monitor search engine rankings for any number of keywords and display changes to a website's search engine rankings over time. It allows Mac users to track where their websites appear in over 100 search engines worldwide. SERank 2.6 requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later. It costs US$99.95 for the standard edition and $14.95 for the professional version.

Maintain has released Cocktail 5.0.2, the latest version of Cocktail (http://www.maintain.se/c). It's compatible with Mac OS X 10.7.2 ("Lion"). Version 5.0.2 also addresses compatibility issues with the latest versions of Safari, Firefox and Google Chrome and contains miscellaneous bug fixes and overall improvements. Cocktail is a general purpose utility for Mac OS X that offers a variety of practical features designed to simplify the use of advanced UNIX function. Cocktail 5.0.2 (Lion Edition) requires Mac OS X/Mac OS X Server 10.7 or later and is tested for compatibility with Mac OS X/Mac OS X Server 10.7.1. Cocktail (Snow Leopard Edition) for Mac OS X 10.6 and Cocktail (Leopard Edition) for Mac OS X 10.5 are available for download from the Maintain website. Cocktail is US$19 for a single user license and available for purchase from the Maintain website. The license is valid for both Lion and Snow Leopard editions of Cocktail. Cocktail (Leopard Edition) is distributed as freeware...

The new "Your Mac Life" episode looks at the rumored Apple HDTV and "Bill Gates's vs. Steve Jobs." You can listen in this and every Wednesday evening from 5:30 to 8 pm (Pacific). Live video is on Your Mac Life! You can watch the show live at http://yml.macosg.com/ -- or you can listen in to the plain old audio feed at http://www.yourmaclifeshow.com/QT/stream.mov . You can join one of the two Chat Rooms that run during the live show -- on the live video site or on the dedicated IRC Server at irc.chat-solutions.org in the #yourmaclife Channel.

Canalys (http://www.canalys.com) says that third quarter (Q3 2011) worldwide computer shipment volumes showed healthy year-on-year growth of 18%. The proliferation of pads drove overall market expansion, though the form factor continued to disrupt traditional desktop, notebook and, in particular, netbook sales, according to the research group. Total pad shipments were almost three times as many as in the same period a year ago. Notebooks grew 9% and desktops increased 8%, but netbooks declined 28%. Apple’s tablet shipments were up 166%, as sales of the iPad 2 continued to gain momentum, though its share of the worldwide market fell from 96% in Q3 2010 to 67% in Q3 2011 as a result of increasing competition from vendors such as Samsung, Asus and Acer. Canalys predicts further market share erosion next quarter, despite strong holiday sales. Apple sold 11 million iPads in the last quarter and this strong performance kept it firmly in second place in the total computer market with a 15%...

Apple and Samsung’s US-based litigation is on track for a trial next July. Depositions of some of Apple’s key iPhone inventors will be taking place "relatively soon," notes "Edible Apple" (http://macte.ch/TOecY). The inventors on Samsung’s radar include Jonathan Ive, Douglas Satzger, Shin Nishibori, and Christopher Stringer. Originally, these depositions were supposed to be completed by November 1. Samsung in mid-October, however, filed a motion seeking an extension since the witnesses would be unavailable before then, notes "Edible Apple."

Southern Stars (http://www.southernstars.com/) is offering sale prices on all its products in conjunction with this week's MacTech Conference. Everything is 30% to 40% off for the three days of the conference (Nov. 2-3). Special prices will all be listed at point-of-sale -- the Apple App Stores and the SkyWire web site (http://www.southernstars.com/products/skyfi/index.html). Discounted products include: SkySafari 3, SkySafari 3 Plus and SkySafari 3 Pro for iOS; SkySafari, SkySafari Plus and SkySafari Pro for Mac OS X; and the SkyWire serial accessory, SkyFi-USB wireless adapter and the Telescope Serial Cable.

C Spire Wireless will begin offering the iPhone 4S in the U.S. starting on Friday, Nov. 11. Pre-registration go to http://www.cspire.com/iphone . C Spire Wireless is a wireless communications company that offers personalized wireless services designed just for them. The company claims to be the first provider in the U.S. wireless industry to personalize customers’ experience by "offering apps that fit who they are, services that anticipate their needs, and rewards for using their phone in new ways." The iPhone 4S will be available starting at US$199.99 for the 16GB model, $299.99 for the 32GB model and $399.99 for the 64GB model with a new two-year contract and data plan. In addition, the iPhone 4 8GB model is available for $99.99, also with a new two-year contract and data plan. iPhone 4S and iPhone 4 will be available at C Spire Wireless retail stores, online at http://www.cspire.com/iPhone and through the Telesales group at 1-855-CSPIRE4. C Spire customers can pre-register for...

The revamped MacBook Air and the iPad 2 are among the winners of the 100 Best Products of 2011, as awarded by "PC World" magazine (http://www.pcworld.com). Topping PCWorld’s list this year is the high-speed backbone for many of today’s hottest phones, tablets, and other connected devices: Verizon’s 4G LTE wireless network, which provides data speeds that rival wired broadband connections. The Top 10 also includes the MacBook Air at number two and the iPad 2 at number six. Intel’s powerful, energy-efficient Sandy Bridge CPUs, Samsung’s Galaxy S II Android smartphone, and Microsoft’s movement-controlled Kinect gaming system round out the top five. See the entire list at http://www.pcworld.com/100best . -- Dennis Sellers

Seagate (http://www.seagate.com)) is streamlining its flagship family of desktop drives under a single product. The new Barracuda family makes it easier for consumers to find the product they need and reduces costs for Seagate’s original equipment manufacturer and distribution channel customers by reducing the number of product qualifications and amount of inventory they need to manage, says Scott Horn, vice president of marketing at Seagate. The new Barracuda hard drive -- to be available first at online retailers Amazon, CDW, Newegg and TigerDirect -- is designed for desktop, tower or all-in-one personal computers; workstations, home and small business servers; network-attached storage devices; direct-attached storage expansion; and home and small-business RAID solutions. Capacities of the family range from 250GB to a 3TB. The simplification of the Barracuda family comes as Seagate begins volume shipments of its 1TB-per-disk Barracuda hard drive. Seagate plans to end production of...

Parallels has released an update to Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac that includes one-click ability to download and install the Windows 8 developer preview from the Parallels Wizard.    The new Parallels Desktop 7 build 7.0.15050 is available now by selecting the Parallels Desktop menu, then Check for Updates. The update also includes the following improvements: ° Install OS X Lion using Install Lion.app; ° Support for Ubuntu 11.10; ° Improved full screen experience with a new option allowing users to scale the virtual machine screen to fit the visible screen area while retaining the resolution; ° Improved support for non-English keyboard layouts; ° Improved migration of the recent Linux versions from a PC to a virtual machine on your Mac   More information is available at http://kb.parallels.com/112617 .

ABBYY (http://www.abbyy.com/cardholder_iphone) has released the ABBYY CardHolder for iPhone, an on-device digital "card case" for capture and archiving and using of business cards. The application allows iPhone users to work with information on business cards without the need of transferring all contacts directly into the iPhone address book. Users can capture and save contact data they encounter on a daily basis. With ABBYY’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and extended language support, CardHolder also enables customers to instantly use contact data from a business card when browsing the captured image on the iPhone screen. They can make a call, send an SMS message or an e-mail right away, according to Katya Solntseva, director of Mobile Products Department at ABBYY.   ABBYY CardHolder transfers images of business cards taken with the iPhone camera to an archive with search, sorting and grouping capabilities. The application recognizes contact information on a card (...

Sassafras Software has upgraded K2 -- KeyAuditor & KeyServer, to version 7.0, which adds purchase histories and product recognition to K2’s usage tracking, hardware and software auditing, and active license management. Now software licensing administrators can track license entitlements, proofs of purchase, and current entitlement position, then reconcile them against active management policies. K2’s new purchase tracking feature includes detailed information about software license entitlements along with storage for contracts and proof-of-purchase documentation. Elements include license term, license metric, product version upgrade rights, dependencies, entitlement allocations through the upgrade chain, support contracts, expiration dates, cost center reporting, and more. K2’s entitlement histories are automatically reconciled to provide a view of an organization’s current entitlement position, which is balanced against current license management policies. K2 7.0 is now...

Karelia Software has updated (http://www.karelia.com/sandvox), its web development tool, to version 2.2. The update sports a new Map object, powered by Google, a new Text Inspector for handling bulleted and numbered lists, and much more. The new Map object makes adding a map as easy as selecting the object and entering the location address in the Object Inspector. A new Text Inspector lets you format a list either using numbers or bullets. Version 2.2 also introduces new Strikethrough formatting, plus the ability to customize the writing direction as "left to right" or as "right to left" for non-Roman languages. Advanced users who work with Raw HTML objects can now use a built-in Tidy HTML function and access a Develop menu. Sandvox 2.2 offers improved SFTP and WebDAV publishing, enhanced media handling tools, and other refinements and fixes. Sandvox lets you drag and drop content, add modern features in a few clicks, and see exactly what it looks like right on the screen before...

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) failed to persuade a U.S. judge to halt a patent dispute S3 Graphics has against Apple at the U.S. International Trade Commission, according to a filing with the trade agency, as reported by "Bloomberg" (http://macte.ch/JDGuw). AMD, a maker of chips for Apple computers, sued S3 last month, claiming it owned the patents that S3 has asserted against Apple. In an Oct. 28 filing with the ITC, S3 said the federal judge denied a request for an immediate halt to the ITC case. The commission is scheduled to release its final decision on Nov. 15. Mac OS X violates patents held by S3 Graphics, while the platform for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad tablet doesn’t, the U.S. International Trade Commission said in a July 1 ruling. The operating system on the Mac infringes two S3 patents related to graphics chips, Judge James Gildea said. S3 Graphics makes image compression technology. If Gildea’s decision is upheld in a review by the full six-member commission, the ITC...

MacTech Labs: Virtualization Benchmarks Head-to-Head: How do VMware Fusion 4 and Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac compare? By Neil Ticktin, Editor-in-Chief/Publisher Why Virtualization? In 2005, Apple announced the switch of the Mac platform from PowerPC to Intel processors (the first Intel-based models were available in early 2006). This introduced some interesting opportunities for the Mac, including the ability to run operating systems other than Mac OS X on a Mac. This includes not only your everyday Windows 7 or XP, but also other Windows OSes, including 64-bit versions and a wide variety of Linux and other OSes. You may already understand your options for running Windows on a Mac, but in case you don't, your first choice is to decide between Apple's Boot Camp, and a virtualization product like VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop for Mac. With Apple's Boot Camp, you can run Windows natively, but you have to reboot every time you want to switch between Mac OS and Windows. In...

In June it was announced that Ron Johnson, Apple's senior vice president of Apple retail and the mastermind behind Apple's wildly successful retail strategy, had been named J.C. Penney's new chief executive officer, and would be leaving Apple. And he's gone. Johnson has assumed assume the CEO position at J. C. Pennwill also join the J. C. Penney Board of Directors, effective Aug. 1. No replacement at Apple has been named. Johnson, 52, has served for the past 11 years as senior vice president of retail at Apple., where he led its retail strategy, which from its start in 2001 now numbers over 300 stores in the U.S. and abroad.  He joined Apple after 15 years at Target Corp., where he was a key merchandising executive. "I've always dreamed of leading a major retail company as CEO, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to help J. C. Penney re-imagine what I believe to be the single greatest opportunity in American retailing today, the department store," Johnson said in June. "I have...

Empoc has introduced Spy Lock 1.0, a Mac app that allows customers to lock and unlock their Mac. It requires Mac OS X 10.6.6 or higher, costs US$4.99 and is available worldwide through the Mac App Store in the Utilities category. Utilizing the built-in iSight on most Mac computers, Spy Lock lets you know who's tried to access your computer and when by taking a snapshot or video of the suspect at the same time that the unlock password was typed incorrectly. Spy Lock keeps a log that can be accessed so that you can see who all has been at your computer trying to log in while you were away. Among other features you can choose to take a snapshot when the wrong password is entered or choose to record video when the screen is locked.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR), a research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, has announced estimated graphics chip shipments and suppliers’ market share for the third quarter of 2011 (Q3’11). Shipments during the third quarter of 2011 did (finally) behave according to past years with regard to seasonality, and was higher on a year-to-year comparison for the quarter, says JPR (http://www.jonpeddie.com). 2011 is still an unusual year for the computer and graphics suppliers as businesses take their own path to recovery, the research group adds. The third quarter of the year is usually the growth quarter and was this yearm which is a positive sign looking forward. This quarter, Intel celebrated its seventh quarter of embedded processor graphics CPU (EPG, a multi-chip design that combined a graphics processor and CPU in the same package) shipments, and had a very strong double digit growth in desktops and notebooks. AMD lost in overall market share Intel gained more compared to...

O'Reilly has released "Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual" by David Pogue. The 928-page book is the "manual that should have been in the box." The book is designed to show you how use key new features of Mac OS X 10.7 ("Lion") such as full-screen apps, Mission Control, the new Mac App Store, Launchpad, Resume, Auto Save, Versions, AirDrop, and more. Are you even more of a power user? You can earn to set up a network, make a Lion flash drive, and even learn the basics of Lion's underlying Unix. Pogue also looks at iCloud, Apple's wireless, free syncing service for Macs, PCs, iPhones, and iPads. "Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual" costs US$38,9 for a print and ebook version, $34.99 for a print-only version and $27.99 for an ebook edition. Pogue is the weekly personal-technology columnist for the "New York Times" and an Emmy award-winning tech correspondent for "CBS News." With three million books in print, he is also one of the world's bestselling how- to authors. In 1999, he launched...

Amped Wireless (http://www.ampedwireless.com) has introduced the R10000 High Power Wireless-N 600mW Smart Router and the SR10000 High Power Wireless-N 600mW Smart Repeate The products -- which each have a retail price of US$129.99 -- purportedly deliver up to 10,000 square feet of Wi-Fi coverage. The R10000 is a high-power router that shares an existing broadband Internet connection and provides four wired ports for connecting additional wired network devices. It includes "smart features" such as guest networks, adjustable Wi-Fi coverage controls, parental controls, website blocking and support for the latest Wi-Fi security. The SR1000 repeats the signal from any wireless router, amplifies it and rebroadcasts the signal in a new "extended" location. It's equipped with high-power amplifiers and antennas, according to the folks at Amped.

Brett Terpstra has released Marked 1.3.1 for Mac OS X (10.6 or higher), an update of his viewer for Markdown and MultiMarkdown files. It costs US$3.99 and is available worldwide through the Mac App Store in the Productivity category. Version 1.3 allowed the use multiple custom styles for the preview, preview improvements (smooth scrolling, automatic Table of Contents, MathJax) and the ability to open and text file regardless of its extension. Version 1.3.1 handles larger files, provides more precise error messages, adds more keyboard shortcuts and preserves metadata when rendering the preview. As of version 1.3, Marked can also watch the active CSS file for changes in addition to the Markdown or HTML file and update the Preview when style changes are detected. Marked turns any text editor into a Markdown editor, allowing you to edit when you like, where you like. It can track changes in the file and update the preview automatically on every save. Marked allows for HTML export,...

ONYX Graphics has introduced the SmartApps PitStop Pro plug-in for Adobe Acrobat software, which gives users the ability to optimize their productivity by eliminating the time-consuming steps typically taken when client PDF files contain color or font issues, says Danielle Mattiussi, director of product marketing. "The new SmartApps PitStop Pro plug-in gives them the ability to move to a dependable PDF workflow, regardless of the file source," she adds. "SmartApps PitStop Pro plug-in is a wide format PDF preflighting solution that catches many specific trouble areas and problems and provides quick solutions, so print shops will no longer have to waste valuable prepress and production time managing this lack of predictability around issues such as transparencies, color or other print related issues." The SmartApps PitStop Pro plug-in helps fix troublesome client PDF files without ever leaving Adobe Acrobat software. The plug-in checks all aspects of wide format PDF files to create...

Alien Skin Software has released Blow Up 3, the new version of its photo enlargement plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Photoshop Lightroom®. Blow Up enlarges photos while keeping them clear, even at huge sizes, according to Terence Tay, designer of the software. Version 3 boast a new user interface and support for Lightroom, Blow Up is easy to use in any workflow. Blow Up 3 is available through http://www.alienskin.com for US$199. That's a price drop of $50 from version 2. Owners of Blow Up 1 or 2 can upgrade for $99.

Intego (http://www.intego.com) says it's discovered a new malware called DevilRobber.A. This malware, which has been found in several applications distributed via BitTorrent trackers, steals data and Bitcoin virtual money, and uses CPU and GPU time on infected Macs to perform "Bitcoin mining." This malware is complex, and performs many operations, according to Intego. The security software company says it's a combination of several types of malware: it is a Trojan horse, since it is hidden inside other applications; it is a backdoor, as it opens ports and can accept commands from command and control servers; it is a stealer, as it steals data and Bitcoin virtual money; and it is a spyware, as it sends personal data to remote servers. DevilRobber has been found in a small number of Mac applications that are distributed via BitTorrent trackers, including a popular graphic program, according to Intego. When the doctored application is launched, a preflight script looks for Little Snitch...