Nicholas Bonsack

Postbox is a solid, $40 e-mail client that offers a wide range of search and organization options on top of a Mozilla-Thunderbird-derived foundation. The app offers a 30-day trial to take it out for a spin, but it'd be nice to have something that gave a feel for it without the pressure of a time-limited trial breathing down your wallet. That's what its new, blue cousin is for.

Postbox Express is a lightweight, free application with all the basics of Postbox. It has the very same conversation view to get a better look at an e-mail chain without the baggage of redundant timestamps and indentation. Granular search options allow you to search before and after specific times and dates. Postbox Express also searches each link in every email you receive for phishing scams, checking against a directory of suspicious sites that it updates every thirty minutes. The app also boasts the tight Mac OS X integration and tabbed e-mail features that put Postbox on the map.

If you're already the proud owner of one of the brand new 15- or 17-inch MacBook Pros that were released on Tuesday, we've got some news for you. Fire up Software Update, and you'll be greeted with your very first patch. Talk about efficient.

MacBook Pro Software Update 1.3 is an update for all mid 2010 15-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pros that addresses issues with the graphics hardware. In the support documentation's own words, this patch "contains improvements for graphics stability for high-performance video and gaming applications" and fixes a few bugs.

Now that a beta version of iPhone OS 4.0 and the corresponding developer tools have been released to iPhone developers, there's a new developer license agreement to go along with them. John Gruber of Daring Fireball noticed a drastic change to section 3.3.1 of that agreement, which originally forbid the use of private frameworks--or application programming interfaces (APIs)--and discouraged developers from using documented, public APIs in manner not approved by Apple. Now, it reads as follows.

3.3.1 -- Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

The iPad is a whole new platform, but it's not completely immune from what ails traditional computing. While there's no evidence to date that a stock iPad can be infected by malware, it's still capable of carrying around malformed files--like PDFs, Office documents, videos, images and music--that could do harm on Windows PCs and unpatched Macs. And now that the iPad has been jailbroken, it's potentially open to the same worms and malware issues that jailbroken iPhones have to contend with.

No worries: the 10.6.5 update for Intego's VirusBarrier X6 adds the ability to scan iPads to its existing functionality for scanning iPhones and iPod Touches. Just connect your iPad to the Mac via USB, and run a manual scan: VirusBarrier will copy all the music, videos, and photos from your iPad to your Mac to scan them and check to see if there's anything amiss. If your iPad happens to be jailbroken, VirusBarrier will copy every single file from your iPad to your Mac--from e-mails to personal files--and do its scanning magic to ensure that everything's okay.

You're in a coffee bar, minding your own business until some stranger walks up to you and shouts "What is the derivative of tangent x when x is equal to 0.72?"

You could stare at him blankly for a few minutes. You could also try to remember what you learned in that high school calculus class--which never really seemed to come in handy until now. Or, you could whip out your brand, spanking new iPad to reveal... wait! The iPad doesn't have a calculator. Oh, no! What do you do now? Save face and make haste to the App Store, where you can download your very own copy of PCalc.

With all the new screen real estate that the iPad affords, it's a great candidate for an all-purpose reader device. While iBooks offers a lovely interface for e-books, there's also all those other files that clutter our desktops: PDFs, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, HTML pages, high-resolution images, and more. Luckily, Good Reader, one of the best all-purpose readers for the iPhone and the iPad Touch, is ready for the iPad's debut.

GoodReader Tablet Edition is identical to its iPhone counterpart, best known for its ability to open and cruise through large files--especially PDF files--that would bring other apps to their knees. Exclusive to the iPad version is a brand new preview control panel, giving you a whole new column to take a quick peek at the contents of all the files uploaded to GoodReader.

The iPad won't make its official debut until this weekend, but the apps that will run on Apple's new tablet have already started popping up on the App Store-provided you're using the latest version of iTunes, that is.

As of this writing, iPad apps don't have a section in the App Store to call their own. But the iPad-friendly software is certainly there-if you're running the newly iTunes 9.1 update and you do a search for "iPad," you'll get pages of results showing iPad-optimized offerings from third-party developers.

There's another Apple software update coming down the pipe, and this one's for an old favorite. QuickTime 7.6.6 is for users of Mac OS X Leopard, Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.

This update offers two tiny fixes for Leopard and Windows users, respectively. iMovie users can rest easy with the knowledge that QuickTime 7.6.6 offers "general reliability improvements", while Windows users should see fewer issues involving playback of h.264 content on multi-core PCs.

Remember college? The newfound independence, the long hours of studying, the parties, the expensive textbooks...the iPads? That's the experience one small, Catholic liberal arts college hopes to give to every single one of its full-time students, beginning in fall 2010.

Greensburg, Pennsylvania-based Seton Hill University announced on Tuesday that as part of its Griffin Technology Advantage program, every full-time student will receive a brand new iPad, while every first year undergraduate student starting that semester will receive both a 13-inch MacBook laptop and an iPad.

Many people seem to agree that the iPhone should continue to make a big dent in the mobile gaming market. Just how big a dent, however, is in dispute, particularly when it comes to the potential impact of free-to-play games.

Free-to-play games--also known as freemium games--let you download them for no cost. But if you want to progress further in the game, you've got to pay to unlock new levels and features.

Still running into trouble with Aperture 3, even after the recent Aperture 3.0.1 update? Not to worry, Apple has just posted yet another update for Aperture 3 users.

Aperture 3.0.2 does add one very significant new feature, buried at the very bottom of the release notes: iPad compatibility. This will allow users to import photos from the iPad into Aperture, and to sync photos in their Aperture library with the iPad. There are also a few new minor features, like the return of the ability to navigate through images in the viewer using scrolling, and a display for how much disk space you need to import an existing iPhoto or Aperture library.

Want an Ivy League education but don't want to pay Ivy League prices? That's not exactly what you'll get from Harvard's offerings at iTunes U, but you're sure to find plenty of quality, Harvard-produced content at no cost to you.

Following in the footsteps of universities like Yale, Stanford, Brown and San Jose State, Harvard has just uploaded a series of courses, classes, interviews, and performances taped right from its very own campus onto iTunes University. From the Harvard iTunes U index, most material under "Life at Harvard" is sorted by department, which makes it a bit difficult to separate the short tours and preview clips from the more substantial content. Beneath that is "Learning at Harvard," which features complete courses and ongoing Harvard podcasts.