Brand: MacNews

BEST Software Design today announced a Beta Program for their forthcoming application PolyPhontics 1.0 — a SoundFont and DLS authoring tool for the Mac OS. PolyPhontics is compatible with Mac OS 8.6, 9.x and Mac OS X 10.1. In addition, registrants in the Beta Program receive a free license for their participation.

Black Magik Software has announced the release of Plunk! 1.5.1 and Pre-Lister 3.7.5 today. Plunk! 1.5.1 — a tile matching game — fixes a problem with the last used theme not being remembered between launches. In addition, a carbonized version of Plunk! is now available for users of Mac OS X. Pre-Lister 3.7.5 has been released to include all eBay category changes through September 26, 2001, and is available in both PPC and carbon builds.

Apple has started making available to catalog houses and retailers in the U.S. its low-end US$799 iMac system — which previously had only been available to the American education market and in many other parts of the world, including the U.K. The system is an Indigo-colored, 500MHz, G3-based system with 512K L2 cache at 200MHz, 64MB of memory, 20GB Ultra ATA Drive, CD-ROM, RAGE 128 Pro w/8MB and a 56K fax modem.

Interactive Week has published an article that recaps Apple’s announcements at Seybold, as well as other Mac-related announcements, and the significance of them. Bob LeVitus’ latest Dr. Mac column for the Houston Chronicle, meanwhile, dissects Apple’s latest Power Mac G4 offerings.

U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who is overseeing the government’s antitrust case against Microsoft, has told both parties that settlement talks should proceed “24 hours a day, seven days a week” until a Nov. 2 deadline. If no agreement is reached by that time, the judge expects hearings to begin in March on what remedies should be enacted to prevent Microsoft from violating antitrust law in the future.