Year: 2001

Addonics today introduced a new USB 2.0 interface cable that attaches to all of its external CD, DVD, combo drive, and hard drive kits. The cable will be included with all such drives from now on, while current Addonics customers can purchase it separately for US$59. The products include its 16x Mobile CD-RW, 12x Mobile DVD/CD-RW, and Pocket ExDrive. The company also announced a $59 USB 2.0 PCI card and a $99 PCMCIA card.

Extensis today began shipping Suitcase 10, an upgrade its font management utility. The new version boasts several new features, including: auto activation, which allows users to define application-specific font sets; activate on demand, for enabling defined fonts only when needed; a new control strip module for managing font sets; contextual menus; and a free copy of FontBook, from LemkeSoft, which previews and prints font families.

Macworld UK reports that Epson has released the Stylus C40UX, a four-color inkjet printer that prints at resolutions up to 1440×720 dpi. Print speeds are up to 8 pages per minute for black, and 3.9 pages per minute for color. Additional details, including pricing and availability, are not yet available.

Thomson Multimedia SA and the Fraunhofer Institute, originally developers of the MP3 file format and encoder, have released the first MP3pro codec. While not compatible with Macs as of yet, the MP3pro format allows users to achieve quality equal to current MP3s at half the bit-rate, or half the file-size. Whereas 128-192Kbps is generally regarded as CD-quality for MP3, CD-quality for MP3pro is just 64-96Kbps.

Opera 5.0 for Mac Carbon Technology Preview 1 is the first public release of the Carbonized version of the alternative Web browser. Opera for Mac OS 8/9, currently at beta 3, has already been awarded much praise for being the fastest browser for the platform.