Joe Kissell

The night before the iPhone 3G launched here in France, I was at a get-together for North American expats in Paris, and I happened to mention that I was planning to get an iPhone the next morning. A woman sitting near me said that she’d heard about the iPhone, but didn’t understand what the big […]

ALSO SEE: The Best Mac Security Software (June 2009) So far, Mac OS X users have been largely unaffected by the global plague of viruses, spyware, and other malware. Conventional wisdom holds that this relatively blissful state won’t last forever; as the Mac’s market share increases, it becomes a potentially more interesting target for the […]

Conventional wisdom once held that it made more sense for the average person to buy a Windows PC rather than a Mac because there was so much more software available on Windows. Today, although the sheer number of Windows apps is still higher (of which, to be fair, quite a few are viruses!), Macs have […]

Apple proudly advertises the fact that Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has more than 300 new features. That’s marvelous, but after reading the list and playing with as many of those features as I could since Leopard’s release, I’ve got to say that a lot of them are sort of unexciting. (I know, it’s really […]

As part of my job, I download and test boatloads of Mac applications. Most of them go into the Trash after five minutes. A few of them stick around on my hard disk for a week or two before I realize I can live without them. But some have turned out to be indispensable. In […]

Perhaps, like many people, you were enticed to buy a Mac by the legendary friendliness and ease of use that Apple prides itself on. And then, having loaded it up with Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop and all the other stuff you need to actually get your work done, you started noticing that there’s often […]

Judging by the marketing campaigns of leading ISPs and email providers, that whole spam problem is history. Advanced defense mechanisms built into modern mail servers have supposedly made junk mail a thing of the past. What little spam the servers might not catch, your desktop email client should; most such programs on the Mac, including […]