Brand: MacNews

Yesterday’s announcement regarding the change in Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ Macworld Expo San Francisco keynote—which was pushed ahead a day—was a decision made solely by Apple and Jobs himself, with little input from IDG World Expo, MacMinute has learned. The change has left many showgoers frustrated and scrambling to change their travel arrangements to accommodate the change in date, while IDG is working to reorganize and reschedule many of the Power Tool conferences planned for Monday so attendees can attend the keynote and not miss workshops they paid US$600 to $800 for.

Alias/Wavefront today released Maya Complete 3.5.1 for Mac OS X, a free update to its 3D animation software that improves Mac OS X 10.1.1 compatibility and adds support for ATI’s Mobility Radeon and NVIDIA’s GeForce2 MX and GeForce3 video cards. The update will shipped on CD to existing customers; Maya sells for US$7,500.

Alco Blom has released the final version of Web Confidential 3.0, his password manager that now offers Mac OS X compatibility. The software features 448-bit encryption, HTTP and Web Form automation, Palm synchronization, and more. Web Confidential 3.0 is US$20 shareware.

REAL Software today announced that REALbasic 4, the next version of its cross-platform development solution for Mac OS 8/9, Mac OS X, and Windows, will ship in January 2002 for US$149.95. New features in version 4 include an improved interactive shell for better access to the command line, improved build and build settings, an all new ListBox, a new RbScript compiler, support for Mac OS X file name extensions, and more. All copies of REALbasic 3.5 purchased since December 1, 2001 are eligible for a free upgrade.

Intuit has released Quicken 2002 Deluxe Release 2, a new version of its popular finance management software for OS 8/9 and Mac OS X. The new version fixes a number of bugs with the previous release, including those in the security detail window, investment actions, reports, budgets, graphs and printing, as well as problems with downloading transactions and specific problems in Mac OS X. The software is available for US$59.95.