Apple’s Final Cut Pro X software finally got its much-needed update from the company. It adds features which many argue should have been available on launch, but continues to lack many that professionals who bought the software are missing. Still, it’s good to see Apple is keeping its word on slowly restoring all of Final Cut Pro X’s missing features.

We all know that Betas are buggy. We all know that Betas crash. This one is no different. If you put that aside, then I have to say that 3.0 is pretty sweet. A lot of new features, and most of them are nicely designed and very functional.

One really powerful feature in Mac OS X that many users don’t know about or know how to use is Automator and its easy integration with the Finder. In the Automator, you can create custom workflows that you can then add to the Finder’s contextual menu. The flaw with this integration is that these commands are hidden within a submenu of a submenu in the contextual menu.

Face recognition. Wow. We have the same—if not better—technology as the local police station. How freakin’ cool is that? iPhoto is groundbreaking in the fact that you can train it to recognize someone’s face and know where you took the picture. Let me introduce you to Faces and Places.

iWeb, iMovie, Garageband and iPhoto have all been upgraded. These are the applications that comprise the iLife suite. If you own a Mac, chances are you use one or more of these applications just about every day. Apple seems to be updating the software with new features about once a year, and this year everything gets a major improvement or two. Some of these new features are very powerful tools that are actually used by law enforcement (Faces). Kinda cool that we can use face recognition at home now. So, lets get to it.

If you’re like me and are curious about the announcements that Apple will make, you have probably read all the rumors that are floating around the internet. Well, let me throw my two cents in the hat.

Kevin Rose’s spy shots turned out to be correct! The 4th generation iPod Nano is exactly like the spy shots we’ve seen in the last week or two — it has an aluminum oval design, with a longer screen. Jobs claims it’s the “Thinnest iPod we’ve ever made”, and “You’ll be blown away by how thin it is”. As for new features, the 4th-gen Nano will have an enhanced UI, accelerometer from the iPhone and iPod Touch for CoverFlow — and, support for the new iTunes 8 Genius function.

Details after the break.

With Mac OS X 10.5.5 (9F9) seeded to developers, it’s only natural you’re wondering what fixes it puts in place. There are many, many fixes so far, but none appear to be that big, as there aren’t any huge issues with 10.5.4 as it stands. Currently the only known issue is Aperture related: Aperture is more »

Apimac has just released new versions of its Compress Files utility, which allows compressing, archiving, and encryption of files. Along with some of the other features, a notable addition is support for AES-256 encryption for zip files. Compress Files allows users to create a compressed file in any of the following formats: Zip, TAR, Gzip, more »

Mac users have always been a step behind in Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger service software; I was hoping Messenger 7 would bring us up-to-date with the Windows users, but it seems this is just a minor update. Users are presented with the familiar Microsoft Messenger interface, which now has a new icon and a search more »