When MobileMe was launched, it sounded so good. It turned out to be a fiasco: a mess of unresponsive web apps, syncing issues, access to email being denied, confusion about when a MobileMe update was coming out and just what it would do anyway.

We’ve always found Safari frustrating, in that it’s full of potential, but always manages to fall short of being great. And so it goes with Safari 3.1, although this release at least continues the browser’s agonisingly slow crawl towards its superior contemporaries.

Despite some competition from Avid, the gap left by Adobe’s hiatus from video editing on the Mac platform has allowed Final Cut to flourish. Few would argue it is currently the dominant program for Mac-based video editing.

iTools has become a paid-for service (priced at £68.99 a year, or £120 per year for a five-user family pack) called .Mac, and Apple hasrecently released its latest upgrade to the package, a revamp of .Mac's webmail services.

Gone are the days when the iLife programs went under the clumsy collective term of iApps and had everyone confused as to whether they were free, cheap or expensive. Since iLife '04, the bundle has had a clearly defined position in the market

Upgrading software, setting preferences, running maintenance scripts - it all has to be done many times; companies with numerous Macs tend to buy a copy of Apple Remote Desktop. ARD, as it's known in the business, is a combination of tools

The latest version of Apple's Safari adds extensive support for RSS,enabling users to keep up to date with their favourite news sourceswithout visiting a ton of websites. But these facilities have not beenback-ported to versions...

For £899, Final Cut Studio may sound like a lot of cash, but for thesoftware you get, it's a worthwhile investment. By itself, Final CutPro 5 is £699 - so you may as well spend another 200 quid and get awhole lot more!