Reprinted from TidBITS#810/19-Dec-05 with permission. Copyright (C) 2005, TidBITS. All rights reserved. http://www.tidbits.com/ MailBITS/19-Dec-05 ------------------ **TidBITS 2005 Holiday Hiatus** -- It has once again been a sprint to the finish this year, and speaking as someone who regularly runs track, cross-country, and road races, I'm not just turning a phrase - we're exhausted. So with this, the last TidBITS issue of 2005, we're looking forward to some serious holiday hibernation over the next few weeks. But as always, we could never have made it this far on our own, and I'd like to express my heartfelt thanks to everyone who helps Tonya and me keep TidBITS going: Geoff, Jeff, Glenn, Matt, and Mark; the good folks at digital.forest, our Internet host; our corporate sponsors; the generous authors who contributed excellent articles this year; all our Take Control authors and editors; our selfless volunteer translators; the participants of TidBITS Talk; and of course, all of you who devote your valuable time to reading our words. Thank you, one and all, and may all your wishes come true. Our next issue will appear 09-Jan-06, as we gather our strength for Macworld Expo in San Francisco. [ACE] **SmileOnMyMac Releases browseback** -- The Web is a vast place now, and even with search engines like Google, it can be difficult to find something you know you've seen before. SmileOnMyMac has a new take on browsing through the history of your Web surfing with browseback 1.0, which creates PDF thumbnails (they look like playing cards to me) of every page you visit and displays them in animated stacks. It's an elegant presentation, and if you're a visual person, being able to see pictures of pages you've visited may work better than looking at textual lists of page titles and URLs, as St. Clair Software's HistoryHound 1.8 provides. You can still perform full-text searches of the contents of visited pages in browseback, as you can in HistoryHound and OmniWeb 5, and you can also eliminate specific sites from the index to avoid cluttering it with Web-based applications that load numerous nearly identical pages. Once you've found the page you're looking for, you can view it in your Web browser, view the PDF of the page in Preview, save the PDF as a separate file, send the PDF to someone else via email, or print it. To use browseback, you do need Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, but browseback can track your surfing in all the major Web browsers. It costs $30 and is a 2.4 MB download. [ACE] **Now Up-to-Date & Contact 5.1 Released** -- Now Software has released Now Up-to-Date & Contact 5.1, adding a wide variety of minor enhancements and bug fixes to the calendaring and contact management suite. Improvements include new keyboard shortcuts, support for Unsanity's Smart Crash Reports reporting application (which you must install separately), more-complete scroll wheel support, enhanced printing, improved Web publishing, and more. Now Up-to-Date & Contact 5.1 is a free update for registered users, and the 17.5 MB download is definitely worthwhile. [ACE] **Discussing TV on MacNotables** -- Tonya and I spent an enjoyable evening on the MacNotables podcast recently with Andy Ihnatko and Chuck Joiner. A simple listener question about hooking a big screen digital TV to the Mac morphed into a wide-ranging discussion of television, movies, the "distribution revolution," and the logic and illogic of how we acquire and pay for video in today's Internet-enabled world. [ACE] **DealBITS Drawing: Classic Solitaire Winners** -- Congratulations to Alan Stearns of adobe.com, Bill Barstad of hotmail.com, Bruce Plummer of cox.net, Lowell Neudeck of earthlink.net, and Thomas Mansheim of comcast.net, whose entries were chosen randomly in last week's DealBITS drawing and who each received a copy of dogMelon's Classic Solitaire. Even if you didn't win, you can save 10 percent off Classic Solitaire by placing an order using the third link below; this offer is open to all TidBITS readers through 29-Dec-05 and drops the price to $26.95. Thanks to the 650 people who entered, and keep an eye out for future DealBITS drawings! [ACE] .