How much do Apple's customers love the company? Let us count the ways. Apple's consumers defend their Macs and the Mac OS as if they were family members. They erect millions of Web sites and blogs to talk in enthusiastic and laudatory terms about how wonderful Apple products are and to smack down anyone who says otherwise. Hollywood is in love with Apple laptops, and the world is drooling over iPods. Other technology companies can only dream about such...

As desktop LCD monitors become more prevalent, the idea of a massive display becomes more appealing. Although a 24-inch CRT display would overwhelm most desks, a 24-inch widescreen LCD monitor might fit in. The Dell UltraSharp 2405 ($1,199 direct) display is just such an animal. ¶ With its 1,920-by-1,200 (WUXGA) resolution, the 2405FPW is a productivity boon for graphics pros, spreadsheet jockeys, and knowledge workers who want to keep an e-mail...

Ulead DVD MovieFactory 4 Disc Creator has less in common with the latest Roxio and Nero releases (which began life as disc-mastering apps) and more with Sonic Solutions' MyDVD product line. Both the Sonic MyDVD and Ulead offerings focus more on users who want to author and burn DVD-Video, Video CD, and Super Video CD projects and put less emphasis on peripheral functions like photo retouching and audio editing. ¶ Disc Creator's task-oriented...

AUDIO ACCESSORIES ¶ Studio monitors ¶ TASCAM...

ColdFusion development is one of the few places with an undergoing IDE preference war (we'll ignore the war between VI and EMACS that has its roots in the last century). People like either CFStudio, or Homesite, of CFEclipse--but the best known player is Macromedia with its Dreamweaver platform. ¶ Still, some highly vocal CF developers don't like Dreamweaver, for three reasons. First, they are hardcore programmers, and Dreamweaver is a tool...

Sony is no longer the only one pushing the envelope on ultraportable notebook innovation. The Dell Latitude X1 ($1,650 direct) is the company's smallest notebook yet, and it's clearly made for business travel. ¶ The 2.8-pound system measures just 11.2 by 8.3 by 1.1 inches, and is an ideal portable for frequent travelers. The 12-inch widescreen display is crisp and clear, with very good viewing angles. The keyboard is not full size, but at 18 mm...

It's not hard to fill a DVD or CD with flawless digital copies of data, music, and video files, but it's not nearly as easy to create a picture-perfect label for that same disc. Scrawling song titles with a marker is a primitive solution, and printing directly onto the surface of a disc is expensive and requires specially designed printers and media. Adhesive ink jet labels have long been popular for CDs, but they're cumbersome to print and affix. They...

Apache Ant is a subproject being developed as part of the Jakarta project. Ant is a Java-based build tool which uses XML build files. Its main competitors are GNU Make, Jam, and NAnt. Many developers prefer Ant because it is environment-neutral, tightly integrated into Java, and faster than Make. XML build files are easier to create, read, and maintain than build files used with the Make utility (or other similar utilities). ¶ The last CFDJ Ant...

...But Madison Avenue wants tech help, not (always) spot cable. ¶ By Shirley Brady ¶ Cable made history in last year's annual national advertising upfront marketplace, with ad-supported cable networks closing upfront deals before broadcast networks for the first time. Comcast is looking to force that kind of tectonic shift in the spot television advertising...

Acquired by Sonic Solutions in December 2004, Roxio is slated to release an update to its popular Easy Media Creator suite that combines applications from both companies. The new version, dubbed Easy Media Creator 7.5, will include several components from version 7, including the PhotoSuite 7 Platinum image editor, VideoWave 7 Professional video editing software, DVD Builder authoring software, Disc Copier copying tool, and Creator Classic. New to the...