Apple News Weekly

Following the release of Office for Mac 2011 Service Pack 2 earlier this month, a number of users began reporting issues with corruption of Microsoft Outlook databases. In response, Microsoft early last week acknowledged the issue, providing a workaround for those who had yet to update their Office installations and a fix for those who had already updated and were experiencing problems with Outlook.


On Friday, Microsoft announced that it was taking an additional step and removing Office for 2011 SP2 from Microsoft AutoUpdate until the Outlook corruption is resolved. The update can, however, still be downloaded manually and installed once users follow the directions to rebuild their Outlook databases.

Our goal is provide the simplest update experience for everyone – so we have temporarily stopped pushing out the SP2 update through Microsoft AutoUpdate while we investigate the issue. Customers are still able to obtain the SP2 update via the Microsoft Downloads site by clicking here. We encourage you to either wait for the AutoUpdate, or follow the directions in the above blog post before manually updating to ensure you don’t experience issues. We will provide an update once we have more information to share.

Office for Mac SP2 is Microsoft's second major update to the company's flagship productivity suite for Mac. The release offers a number of security and usability improvements, with a heavy focus on Outlook, which was new in Office 2011 and replaced Entourage.

Ahead of its May 15th launch date, Blizzard is opening its Diablo III beta test to all comers as a stress test on the game's servers. The free open beta weekend runs from now through Monday morning.

We're pleased to announce the Diablo III open beta weekend, which offers open access to all players with a valid Battle.net account! Beginning this Friday everyone is invited to log in and help us put the game and servers through their paces in this three day stress test as we march toward the game's release on May 15. You can begin downloading the Diablo III client right now!

From Friday, April 20 at 12:01 p.m. PDT (noon), until Monday, April 23 at 10:00 a.m. PDT you'll be able to log in, team up with friends, and play each of the five heroic classes to level 13 as you fight to save the world from the impending demonic invasion.

Blizzard's website has more details about exactly how to join the open beta. Diablo III will be $59.99 when it launches on May 15th and will be available as a digital download from Blizzard, or via the more traditional boxed copy.

Quake 4, a game which originally shipped on the Mac in 2006, is now available on the Mac App Store for $19.99.

Earth is under siege by the Strogg, a barbaric alien race moving through the universe consuming, recycling and annihilating any civilization in their path. In a desperate attempt to survive, an armada of Earth’s finest warriors is sent to take the battle to the Strogg home planet.

More importantly, unlike some older games that have recently been released as a campaign edition, without the multiplayer component, Quake 4 has full cross-platform multiplayer support, including Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Tourney, Capture the Flag, Arena CTF and DeadZone.

The game requires an Intel processor but has a generous list of supported video cards.

Quake 4 is $19.99 on the Mac App Store. [Direct Link]

An Apple lawyer has said it wants a trial to defend itself in an antitrust lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice over the pricing of e-books. Apple's attorney said the company "would like the case to be decided on the merits".

Apple Inc wants to go to trial to defend itself against U.S. government allegations that it conspired with publishers to raise prices of electronic books, a lawyer for the Silicon Valley giant said in court on Wednesday.

Two publishers took a similar stance in the first hearing in Manhattan federal court since the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice last week accused Apple and five publishers of colluding to break up Amazon.com's low-cost dominance of the digital book market.

The next hearing in the case has been scheduled for June 22. Apple has previously come out strongly against the lawsuit, with a spokesperson saying the accusations against the company were "simply not true."

MacRumors has received a number of reports today from users who have been unable to access their iCloud mail accounts, and a growing thread in Apple's discussion forums is documenting the growing complaints.

According to user reports, iCloud mail went down around 9:30 AM Eastern Time this morning, and it remains out some seven hours later. Apple updated its iCloud System Status page at 10:08 AM Eastern Time to note that Mail and Notes were down for some users, but pegged the issue as affecting less than 1% of users.


iCloud services do go down from time to time, although the downtime is usually fairly brief, as evidenced by a short half-hour outage just yesterday. And while Apple's status update indicates that only a small number of users are being affected by this latest outage, for those who are unable to access their mail the extended seven-hour downtime may be a significant inconvenience.

Apple has provided no estimate of when affected users can expect iCloud mail services to return, noting only that they "will be restored ASAP".

The first half of each year is a slow time for Apple retail store openings, but the company does continue to schedule sporadic additions to its network of stores as new locations come online. For its latest addition, Apple will be holding a grand opening for its second store in Rome, Italy this Saturday, April 21 at 10:00 AM. The new Porta di Roma store is located in the shopping center of the same name, a major mall with over 220 shops that opened five years ago.


Just yesterday, iApp-Mac posted a few photos [Google translation] of the new store, which remains hidden behind a black construction barrier typical of Apple's projects.

The new Porta di Roma store will be Apple's tenth Italian location and will join the existing RomaEst store in serving the city's customers.

AllThingsD reports that Zane Rowe, executive VP and Chief Financial Officer for United Continental -- the company behind the merged United and Continental airlines -- has joined Apple as one of the vice presidents of sales at Apple.

“We are thrilled that Zane Rowe will be joining us as one of our vice presidents of sales,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling told AllThingsD. “He built a great team at United and we think he is going to do a fantastic job at Apple.”

United Continental Holdings President and CEO Jeff Smisek said the company was "sorry Zane has decided to leave." Mr. Zane had worked for Continental Airlines since 1993.

Microsoft today released Service Pack 2 for Office for Mac 2011, the most recent edition of Microsoft's hugely popular productivity suite. Outlook was the priority for the Mac Office team, with a number of enhancements and performance upgrades included for the other applications as well:

As the newest member of the Office for Mac family, Outlook 2011 continues to get the most requests from consumers and businesses alike; therefore, our top priority for this release was Outlook, and this service pack resolves many of the most common requests. The more notable Outlook enhancements include:

- Sync performance with Exchange server,
- Performance improvements while deleting multiple items,
- Displaying email message content, and sending email.

Outlook performance is also improved in IMAP account sync and the database rebuild utility. New capabilities include:
- Scheduling resources in the calendar,
- Distribution list expansion,
- Day number display in the calendar.

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint have improved performance with additional modest improvements. For example, we updated PowerPoint to take advantage of full screen view in Lion, and we improved grammar checkers for Italian and German languages. We also made it easier to work with Office documents on SkyDrive and addressed several smaller issues in response to your feedback.

The complete list of fixes and updates is also available. The Office 14.2.0 update is available via Microsoft's download page or through the updater built into Office.

BBEdit, a text and code editor for thousands of Mac users for years, turns 20 today. Macworld Editorial Director Jason Snell published a long commemorative about his love for the software -- written in BBEdit, of course:

All of this would be an insane nostalgia trip were it not for this amazing fact: BBEdit’s still around. And not just as a relic of the old times, but as a modern, relevant text editor. Almost none of the other apps I used in 1997 are on my hard drive today. (I count two others: DragThing and Default Folder). BBEdit has grown and adapted over time, going from free to commercial, spawning a free “Lite” version that eventually became the free text editor TextWrangler. Now at version 10.1.1, BBEdit is sold in the Mac App Store for $50, much cheaper than it was during the early commercial era.

[...]

So on the occasion of BBEdit’s 20th birthday, here’s a toast to the distinguished old gentleman text-editor. I’d raise a glass, but since BBEdit’s still a year shy of legal drinking age in most states, I’ll say only this: I wrote this article in BBEdit, and I’ll be writing the next one in BBEdit, too. Nostalgia is great, but this app doesn’t belong in a museum—it belongs in my Dock. That’s the biggest endorsement I can give.

The software can be used for editing, searching, and manipulating text, code, and HTML/XML markup, among many other features. BBEdit launched at 2:19AM on Sunday, April 12, 1992 and is currently at version 10.1.1.

It is available via the Mac App Store for $49.99 [Direct Link] or via the Bare Bones Software website for the same price, with an option for a free trial as well.

Professional video editors around the world have moved to Final Cut Pro X to create faster and more flexible workflows. New York-based production house @radical.media is flipping its entire facility to Final Cut Pro X to tackle high-profile client projects. Hollywood’s Electric Entertainment is using Final Cut Pro X to cut episodes for the new season of its hit TV show “Leverage.” And accomplished editor Knut Hake used the software to edit new episodes of “Danni Lowinski,” one of Germany’s most popular and critically acclaimed TV shows.