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Overall customer satisfaction within the computer industry fell slightly for the second consecutive year, according to newly published data from the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). But while PC makers far and wide are struggling to improve, Apple seems to be moving in the opposite direction with a score of 85 on a scale from zero to 100. Not only is this a new all-time high for the industry, the roughly 8 percent year-on year leap puts 10 points between Apple and its nearest rival. The score is attributed to the success the company has had with its iPod, iPhone and Mac lines, but it is also pointed out that dissatisfaction with Windows Vista might have hurt the scores for Apple's rivals.

For many years Apple Computers has been pretty resilient and safe from viruses and security issues. But recently the folks at Apple have had to deal with the Kamainsky DNS flaw that also affects other types of computers, and in patching the DNS issue Apple has went ahead and proactively addressed a number of other possible security flaws.

Ever wished you had the fun of Comic Life handy at all times? Ever been out at a party, family gathering or on public transport and wished you could add your 'comic touch' to a photo? Now you can! We're giggling with glee to announce Comic Touch for iPhone and iPod Touch. Add various speech balloons and captions to your photos. Choose a fun special effect to warp and bend your family and friends, then email the results to them!

I've had my new 3G Apple iPhone for about a month now and I thought I'd take a few minutes to write some of my thoughts and reflections on the experience for people who might be considering upgrading to the new 3G iPhone. First a little background though.

As a Mac sysadmin, I've had the need to manipulate the dock on hundreds of systems at a time. I used to cobble together terrible shell scripts to do the job, but now thanks to plistlib and python, plist manipulation is really easy. I am releasing this utility free under the Apache 2.0 license. Hopefully some other sysadmins will find it useful. dockutil is a command line utility for managing Mac OS X dock items. It can add, replace, list, move, find, and delete dock items. It supports Applications, Folders, Stacks, and URLs. It can act on a specific dock plist or every dock plist in a folder of home directories. It is compatible with Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard.

When RBC Capital analyst Mike Abramsky downgraded his Apple rating on Monday - helping spark the sharpest selloff in the company's shares in eight years - he cited a survey that RBC conducted with ChangeWave that suggested that sales of Apple's hot-selling computers were cooling off. RBC's version of the survey showed that the percentage of technology consumers who plan to buy a Mac in the next 90 days had dropped from 34% in August to 29% in September, the biggest such decline in more than two years.

The MacHeist bundle was introduced in December 2006 to huge success within the Macintosh community. The software bundle offered 10 of the Mac indie development community's best offerings, and was available at the end of the MacHeist promotion for one week. The bundle was called the greatest Mac software deal in history, and has never been available since then. Customers snapped up over 16,000 copies, and donated 25% of their purchase to various charities. After over $190,000 was raised by customers by the end of the sale, MacHeist topped it off and $200,000 was raised in total. But we didn't stop there... in 2007 we held MacHeist II and it became the biggest Mac shareware event ever. Quite possibly the biggest software event ever on any platform. We had more of everything: more missions, more puzzles, more free Mac software, and more of you... and the community grew to become one of the largest Mac communities on the net! Then we topped it off with a truly amazing deal... 14 Top Mac apps worth right around $500 for the same low $49 price. How did it do? Well, we sold almost 44,000 bundles and $500,000 was raised for charity. Truly amazing! Now we're back in full-force with MacHeist 3, and we're here to bring you the most spectacular Mac software event in history.

We've had one of the new MacBooks for 24 hours and have discovered some interesting secrets hiding within...

In the "early" days we had to use third-party applications to maintain multiple iPhoto libraries. With iPhoto 08 Apple has given us the tools we need to do it in iPhoto. In this screencast, we'll show you how to manage multiple libraries

About a year ago, we bought an Intel-based Xserve with a pair of 80 GB SATA drives to act as our primary Web server. When the boot drive went flaky on us in October 2008, we were able to recover from the backup on the second drive and off-site backups, if a little shakily (see "TidBITS Outage Causes Editors Outrage", 2008-10-07). But although we were able to bring the machine back online, we didn't trust the drive that had failed. Since the Xserve has three drive bays, the obvious solution was to purchase another drive. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Not so much.

Now Microsoft is fighting back with its own advertising campaign. I've enjoyed some of its elements. The Seinfeld spots were weird. I was intrigued by some of the "I'm a PC" spots that aired last fall, depicting PC users engaged in a variety of jobs-teaching law, protecting endangered species, blogging for Barack Obama. The message: You can use a Windows PC and still do cool and interesting things. Not bad. Then came the adorable little girls: Kylie, age 4, and Alexa, age 7, e-mailing pictures of fish and stitching together pictures of a fort into one. Microsoft, it seemed, had finally found its advertising voice.

I've had a few instances where there was no way to setup round robin DNS or a load balancer and we were looking to alternate between a bunch of software update servers.  In order to do so, I've written a quick shell script to do so.  Here it is, in pieces, so it makes sense.

The European Mac OS X training camp, in conjunction with Amsys and Agnosys has had its most successful year to date with a large number of newly qualified Apple Certified Support Professionals.

If only I had enough disc space on my MacBook!

The latest computing survey results from the University of Virginia's freshman class show evidence of continued Apple marketshare growth in the higher education market (via Daring Fireball). The chart above shows that Apple has made steady gains since 2003 in the percentage of incoming UVA freshman who own a Mac. The latest year (2008) shows that 37% of incoming students owned a Mac while the percentage owning a Windows computer had shrunk to 62% from a peak of 96% in 2001. The growth tracks closely with the trend towards laptop ownership amongst the Virginia freshman. In 2008, 99% of the incoming students owned a laptop.

Upon becoming Principal of New Milford High School over three years ago, it was decided after a needs assessment that more resources and professional development had to go into the area of educational technology.  I was fortunate enough to participate in two television shows that resulted in funds that normally don't just fall into the hands of a high school administrator.

This is an approximately obvious invention and you have to wonder why no one else has had the idea yet. Researchers at the University of Michigan (UM) scale back the power that is necessary in idle listening and claim that they can extend Smartphone battery life by more than half.