Microsoft announced on its Office for Mac Blog today that it has made its Service Pack 2 for Office for Mac 2011 available for download. This update addresses a number of problems users have been having with Outlook, but also fixes some aspects of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

The update is available via Microsoft's included Autoupdate utility, but can also be downloaded from Microsoft's Web site. The update is about 110MB in size, and after installing the version of your Office installation will be 14.2.0.

With the release of Office 2011 Microsoft replaced its old Entourage e-mail client for OS X with a whole new program that brings many of the same features of Outlook for Windows to OS X. However, because it is a new program, Microsoft has received extensive feedback on desired features and bugs that it has been addressing.

You can download the update from Microsoft's Web site or the AutoUpdate utility.

This latest update fixes a number of these, including the following:

• Sync performance with Exchange server
• Performance improvements while deleting multiple items[Read more]

The Flashback-specific update issued today.

Apple this afternoon released an integrated tool to remove Flashback, malware designed to steal user information that was estimated to be present in more than half a million machines just last week.

The tool, which was made available as part of a security update to Java today, comes two days after Apple said it was working on an automated way for users to remove the infection.

Flashback is a form of malware designed to grab passwords and other information from users through their Web browser and other applications. A user typically mistakes it for a legitimate browser plug-in while visiting a malicious Web site. At that point, the software installs code designed to gather personal information and send it back to remote servers. In its most recent incarnations, the software can install itself without user interaction.

According to Apple, the new tool removes "the most common variants" of the malware, as well as turning off automatic execution of Java applets on Web pages.

After being discovered by Russian antivirus company Dr. Web earlier this month, several security firms -- including Kaspersky and Symantec -- verified its prevalence, while noting that infections have been in a decline. Yesterday Symantec estimated around ... [Read more]

Dropbox. It's the Apple of Web storage companies. It's got a clan of fanboys who swear by it. And for good reason: It's simple to use and has some strong features. It's also one of the least flexible products among its competitors.

LogMeIn's new Cubby app lets you sync any folders between computers. Cloud storage is optional.

Holdouts (like me) who want the capability to sync files outside of Dropbox's walled garden -- the Dropbox folder on your desktop -- have to look to other products. Likewise, people who want to store or sync more than 100GB of files.

Personally, I've been using SugarSync, which does two things right: It lets you synchronize any folder on your computer (Windows or OS X) to its storage cloud and to your other computers. And it has storage plans that go up to 500GB, although they are expensive.

There's another way to do file sync, and that's to have your computers connect to each other directly (peer to peer) and synchronize when they are both online. The big advantage of peer-to-peer sync is that the technology provider doesn't have to pay for cloud storage, so it can be a cheap, or even free product. The disadvantage is that users can't access P2P files from the Web, and that two computers set to sync with each other have to be on... [Read more]

Paper has proven quite popular.

Former Microsoft employees who worked on the ill-fated Courier dual-screen tablet and started their own mobile-development house have found some early success.

Developer FiftyThree announced on its blog yesterday that its sketchpad and ideas app Paper has hit 1.5 million downloads in its first two weeks of availability. In addition, the company said a total of 7 million pages have been created so far with the app.

"To say the response has been overwhelming would be an understatement," FiftyThree wrote on its blog. "For a tool that we made for ourselves, we're thrilled to find 1.5 million other like-minded creators out there."

FiftyThree was established in the wake of Microsoft shuttering Pioneer Studios, the company that was supposed to build "brand driven consumer experiences for Microsoft's entertainment business: Xbox, Zune, Mobile, and emerging areas." Among FiftyThree's leaders are Georg Petschnigg, co-founder of Pioneer studios, and Jon Harris, a designer who worked on Zune, Xbox, and other Microsoft products.

Paper is for free in Apple's App Store. The iPad application ... [Read more]

Just one day after Apple was charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with artificially inflating e-book prices, a report out of Australia says competition watchdogs in that country are considering doing the same.

The Australia Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has asked local retailers who are concerned about e-book pricing to formally file a complaint with its office, according to The Australian Financial Review. The move could prove to be a precursor to a full investigation of Apple's e-book practices.

"Competition concerns may arise where traders seek to restrict the discounting of products by way of restrictive arrangements with suppliers," the ACCC told the Financial Review. "Retailers with concerns should raise them with the ACCC."

Related stories

• DOJ is likely to loose e-book antitrust suit targeting Apple
• Justice Dept. files suit against Apple publishers over e-book pricing
• ... [Read more]

Premiere Pro CS6 strips away much of the widgetry that cluttered its predecessor's user interface. (Click to enlarge.)

Quick access to software features is nice, but there can be too much of a good thing. That's what Adobe concluded when designing Premiere Pro CS6, the upcoming version of its video-editing software.

Adobe was pleased with the current CS5's Mercury Playback Engine, which on computers with higher-end Nvidia graphics cards provides a major hardware acceleration boost for some tasks. But the user interface was too cluttered, said Premiere Pro Product Manager Al Mooney.

"The car on top of the beautiful, powerful engine was not as nice to drive as modern editors wanted it to be," Mooney said. Adobe is revealing the features -- but not pricing and availability -- ahead of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) meeting next week in Las Vegas.

Premiere Pro CS6 gets an overhauled project panel that shows variable-size thumbnails. Each thumbnail can be scrubbed with a mouse swipe, with video editors setting in points an... [Read more]