AKVIS has announced a new frame pack for AKVIS ArtSuite: the Spring Pack with 50 hand painted designs. These frames are designed to "make you feel nature's great awakening, warm rays of the sun, exciting scent of the spring, and love in the air, and hear songs of birds."

ArtSuite lets you frame your photos, make personalized greeting cards and posters, decorate your family album. The program contains templates and texture samples.
Now eight themed packs are available: Baby Pack, Wedding Pack, Travel Pack, St.Valentine Pack, Sports Pack, Christmas Pack, Winter Pack, and the new Spring Pack. AKVIS also offers a free set of frames.

The additional frame packs can only be used in the standalone version of AKVIS ArtSuite, not in the plug-in version. On the Mac platform, it requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher. A 10-day demo of ArtSuite is available for download at www.akvis.com . Registration is US$69. The Spring...

E-Book Systems has announced FlipViewer Xpress Creator 1.0 (http://www.flipviewer.com/en/index_en), a wizard-based software solution for Mac OS X. It's being offered an an introductory price of US$750. You can request a trial version at www.flipviewer.com/contact .

FlipViewer Xpress Creator enables publishers and corporations to create and publish page-flipping digital publications. It conveys the FlipBook in a 3-D page flipping interface, where pages are displayed like those in a real book. The created FlipBook can then be hosted on any web server for online viewing or distributed through any media for offline viewing.

Once the FlipBook is created, it can be easily viewed by the FlipViewer Xpress viewer. This is a viewer which can run on many different operating system platforms including...

Equinux has updated Mail Designer for Mac OS X (10.5.8 and higher) to version 1.3. The upgrade sports an interface to send and distribute mail designs and newsletters with Campaign Monitor.

Mail Designer allows users to create individual mail designs for newsletters, offers, invitations or personal emails that can be sent to customers, colleagues or any larger group of recipients. Each design can be saved as a template and sent through Apple Mail. To keep things simple, a variety of predefined layout blocks including headlines, text objects and multicolumn layouts can be dragged, dropped and rearranged, says equinux CEO Till Schadde. Numerous textures and background patterns are also included.

Artists, agents and businesses can integrate their own cooperate designs into Mail templates and integrate dynamic content. Mail Designer includes graphics, text-objects and dynamic and customizable text and image placeholders. With tools, rulers and guides, users can create...

Stellar Data Recovery has revved Stellar Phoenix JPEG Repair, an app for repairing damaged JPEG/JPG image files, to version 2.0. The new version sports a faster scanning and recovery engine.

A free version of the software can be downloaded from www.stellarinfo.com/ .A full version of Phoenix JPEG Repair is available for US$39.

Sprint Nextel Corp. has reported operating income of $29 million for its first fiscal quarter. The company's adjusted OIBDA [operating income before depreciation and amortization] of US$1.5 billion was the highest in nearly four years.

Sprint (www.sprint.com) reported smartphone sales of five million. Of that number, 1.5 were iPhones with 43% being sold to new Sprint customers. Eighty-six percent of quarterly Sprint platform postpaid handset sales were smartphones.

"This is a transformative year for Sprint and we’ve gotten off to a good start," says CEO Dan Hesse. "Record Sprint platform service revenue and subscriber levels fueled our performance."

Move over, road warriors, and enter the new era of productivity warriors. Many businesses are now using mobile devices to automate inside their building or company campus, according to a recent survey by FileMaker, Inc. (www.filemaker.com). Further, businesses are building custom solutions to automate and “mobilize” processes in nearly every department.

Database software maker FileMaker -- with millions of deployments, including more than 500,000 downloads of FileMaker Go, a free app for accessing FileMaker databases from iPad and iPhone -- polled customers on their use of mobile devices to boost business productivity. The research included a survey of 499 customers who have deployed FileMaker solutions on iOS devices as well as an analysis of 102 mobility case studies.

"The next wave of business mobility, fueled by iPad and iPhone-equipped 'productivity warriors,' is delivering real ROI [return on...

DEVONtechnologies has released maintenance updates for all their commercial products from DEVONthink over DEVONsphere to DEVONagent, as well as their freeware products EasyFind, PhotoStickies, and XMenu.

The updates are free and recommended for all users. The overall reliability and performance of all apps have been enhanced, according to the folks at DEVONtechnologies. Other improvements include various minor changes to the user interface that make the workflow with DEVONthink and DEVONnote smoother. Go to http://www.devontechnologies.com for more info.

Ergonis Software (http://www.ergonis.com) has released Typinator 5.5, the latest version of its tool for auto-typing text and auto-correcting typos systemwide across all Mac OS X applications. The upgrade introduces calculation fields, which provides text expansions for users without any programming skills.

With a simple inclusion mechanism, text expansions can execute external scripts and include their results in the expansion. Typinator supports scripts written in in many different languages like AppleScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and arbitrary shell scripting languages.

Typinator requires Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later. Mac OS X 10.6 or higher is recommended.

Typinator can be purchased on the Ergonis Software web site for approximately US$32 for a single user license. A family pack for installation on up to five computers is $49. The upgrade to Typinator 5.5 is free for anyone who owns a...

Apple has announced that its Board of Directors has authorized a significant increase to the company’s program to return capital to shareholders. The company expects to utilize a total of $100 billion of cash under the expanded program by the end of calendar 2015.

This represents a $55 billion increase to the program announced last year and translates to an average rate of US$30 billion per year from the time of the first dividend payment in August 2012 through December 2015.

As part of this program, the Board has increased its share repurchase authorization to $60 billion from the $10 billion level announced last year. This is the largest single share repurchase authorization in history and is expected to be executed by the end of calendar 2015. Apple also expects to utilize about $1 billion annually to net-share-settle vesting restricted stock units.

Additionally, the Board has approved a 15% increase in the company’s quarterly dividend and today has...

The US International Trade Commission (ITC) has dismissed a complaint by Google-owned Motorola Mobility accusing Apple of infringing on patented technology that makes touchscreens ignore fingers when people are holding smartphones to their ears for calls, reports "ZDNet" (http://tinyurl.com/brycsyv).

The filing by acting ITC secretary Lisa Barton indicated that the investigation into the Motorola complaint filed in late 2010 has been terminated. The ITC reasoned that the technology at issue in the patents wasn't original enough to support the accusation.

This is part of an ongoing battle. Apple has alleged that Motorola infringes 24 of its patents (21 of them with Android-based phones, the remaining three with set-top boxes and DVRs), while Motorola previously asserted 18 patents against a variety of Apple products (mostly but not exclusively iPhone, iPad and iPod). Litigation between the two...

WD is shipping what it says is the world's first ultra-slim 2.5-inch, 5 mm hard drives and solid state hybrid drives (SSHD), which are designed for integration into the slimmest devices and space-constrained computing environments.

With 500GB of storage capacity and models with high performance-enabling solid state hybrid drive technology, this slim product line helps to address the tradeoffs system designers often make between capacity, physical size and performance, says Matt Rutledge, vice president of WD's client computing business unit.

The new drives are aimed to increase internal storage capacity while enabling it to fit into smaller device slots, he adds. Shipping today to select industrial distributors and OEM [original equipment manufacturer' customers in 500GB capacities, WD Blue 2.5-inch 5 mm hard drives have a manufacturer's suggested retail price of US $89. For more info go to http...

Akitio has released a new 256GB, one-bay, bus-powered Thunderbolt storage solution. It's a follow-up to the company’s 120GB SSD solution, which was previously launched in 2012.

Akitio has upgraded the 120GB SSD to meet the demand of consumers by rising up to the challenge and offering an upgraded 256 GB SSD version of the Neutrino Thunderbolt, says Richard Wright, director of Global Distribution, Akitio. In addition, the 256 GB version is the fastest one bay bus powered external storage device on the market today with 464 MB/s data transfer speeds, he adds.

Akitio’s 256 GB Neutrino Thunderbolt Edition is available for purchase at an manufacturer's suggested retail starting price of US$339.99. It can be found at Akitio.com, as well as Amazon.com and other various Akitio retailers and distributors.