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Filed under: Software Update, Security

Apple releases iLife Support update to patch security issues

Apple today released a security update for iLife '08, called iLife Support 8.3.1. The update "improves overall stability and addresses a number of other minor issues," according to Apple. They recommend the update for all users of iLife '08 who are still using Tiger (up to Mac OS X 10.4.11). Leopard users are unaffected.

According to the Apple Knowledge Base, the update addresses three issues with ImageIO, a system component that allows applications to read and write popular image formats. Two of the issues were discovered by Apple, and concerned the way the component handled specially-created TIFF and JPEG images. Google found a third problem also related to meticulously-crafted TIFF images. All three issues, unpatched, could "lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution."

The update can be downloaded via Software Update, or directly from Apple.

Filed under: Software, How-tos, Odds and ends, Developer

The latest on Acorn

Just about a week after its release, Acorn (Gus Mueller's sparkling little image editor) is looking a 1.0.1 release dead in the face. Mueller hasn't updated it officially yet, but he has released development builds of both VoodooPad and Acorn over on his site.

The newest Acorn release will include a JPEG compression/quality slider when saving, as well as a number of bug fixes (everyone loves those, right?). If you want to try it out now, you can hit the dev build, but the rest of us will be happy waiting for an official release I'm sure.

Mueller has also created a wiki just for Acorn, and it's got a few nice tips and tricks, a plugin section, and a writeup on the Acorn file format. It's pretty barebones at the moment. but hey, it's a wiki, and it just started. Give it some time (or some contributions of your own), and it'll likely soon be an invaluable guide to all the Acorn users out there.

Filed under: Software, Beta Beat

Get your Microsoft HD Photo plug-in for Photoshop

With the speed of evolution in computing, standards and the web, have you ever wondered why we've been stuck with JPG as an image format for so long? Microsoft sure did, and after about 5 years of mulling the question, the company has produced what sounds like a very promising replacement: HD Photo. Offering greater support for new digital imaging trends like HDR (High Dynamic Range), HD Photo boasts the same or better image quality than JPG in half the file size. While Microsoft has patents on some of the technology in HD Photo, they are surprisingly allowing anyone to license it for free for use in apps and devices like photo editing software and digital cameras. To learn more than you might ever want to know about HD Photo, check out its Wikipedia entry or episode #51 of TWiM (This Week in Media), one of my favorite podcasts in which the crew sits down with Bill Crow, Microsoft's Program Manager for HD Photo. Be careful with that one though - TWiM's cast is composed of some incredibly knowledgeable, hard-core media geeks, and they eventually get their geek on with Crow as they delve into the discussion.

Long story short: excitement is steadily building for HD Photo, as it is shaping up to be quite the revolutionary image format that could (hopefully) knock JPG off its pedestal some day. Fortunately, the HD Photo team have taken another step in spreading the format by releasing a Photoshop CS2/CS3 plug-in for PowerPC and Intel Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. The plug-in can be downloaded from Microsoft, and it for some odd reason expires on December 31, 2007. If you know your stuff when it comes to image formats and you give this plug-in a spin, let us know what you think in the comments.

[via Macworld]

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