It's been a busy week or so as tar as software updates are concerned. Are you managing to keep up? More to the point, how's your download quota holding up?

Top of the list is the Mac OS X 10.5.4 update, which you should be installing just for the security fixes. If you're still on Tiger, get Security Update 2008-004 and Safari 3.1.2.

Updates may be free, but you can be talking about a lot of data to download. 10.5.4 is anything from around 60M via Software Update to 677M for the combo update for the server version. Tiger users are up for around 130 to 180M for the two updates I mentioned.

Then you can throw in another 4M for the Time Capsule and AirPort Base Station (802.11n) firmware update, 138M for Pro Applications Update 2008-002 (for Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Server and Logic Studio) and 50M for Final Cut Server Update 1.1.

It's not too hard to think of a scenario where you'd need a couple of gigabytes of updaters from Apple just in the last week. If you're responsible for multiple machines or if for some reason you often need to reinstall the OS, you'll almost certainly want the combo updaters so you can go straight from a 10.5 DVD to 10.5.4 with a single update.

Then there's Microsoft.

You've probably recovered from the May arrival of Service Pack 1 for Office 2008 (180M) and/or the 59M 11.5.0 update for Office 2004, but in just over a week Microsoft has pushed out the 45M Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0 (most useful for Office 2004, but you may want to convert Open XML documents for use by other programs), Messenger for Mac 7.0.1 (21M, and probably no big deal unless you use either Mac OS X's VoiceOver feature or European non-English languages), and most recently Remote Desktop Connection for Mac 2 (less than 8M).

RDC has been in beta for almost a year, so those of us who need remote control of Windows XP, Vista or Windows Server from a Mac heaved a sigh of relief when the software finally made it to release.

If you delayed downloading the Office updates, you could be looking at another quarter of a gig on top of Apple's updates.

Now you know why you didn't sign up for that 400M per month Internet plan!

But the size of these updates makes me wonder if we'll see a return to the days of friends and colleagues passing around CDs and other media containing updates, just as we did in the days before 'everyone' had an Internet connection.

At the very least, households and small offices should think in terms of manually downloading updaters so they can easily be applied to multiple Macs, rather than using Software Update on one system at a time.

Customers of the iTunes Store in Australia can now buy episodes of popular TV shows, but the price is significantly higher than in the US and series discounts are thin on the ground.

Episodes are priced at $2.99 - this converts to $US2.85. Reversing the conversion from $US1.99 and adding GST gives $2.29, which means a 30% uplift.

The curious thing is that one of the shows (McLeod's Daughters) is already being sold by Nine for $1.95, while Canal Road and Sea Partol episodes can be downloaded free of charge (see NineMSN).

$2.99 per episode also means it can be significantly cheaper to buy a DVD, but I suppose that lacks the immediacy of downloading.

You pays your money and you takes your choice - though you can save by stocking up on iTunes Store gift cards when they're being discounted. I believe Big W's $50 card for $30 offer finished yesterday, but it wasn't the first time cards have been sold below face value.

Anyway, here's what's initially on offer:

• Disney/ABC Studios: Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, Lost, and Scrubs
• ABC: Summer Heights High, We Can Be Heroes, Double the Fist, Foreign Correspondent Postcards, Sleek Geeks, and Surfing the Menu
• Disney Channel: Hannah Montana, The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, and Cory in the House
• Nine Network: Canal Road, McLeod's Daughters, Sea Patrol and Urban Magic
• MTV Networks: Blue's Clues, The Hills, Laguna Beach, My Super Sweet Sixteen, South Park, and Pimp My Ride

It seems Apple has used the open source SproutCore framework to build MobileMe, and it used the Worldwide Developers Conference to encourage its adoption by other web developers.

The advantage of SproutCore is that it allows the construction of web applications with a native look and feel without the need for plugins such as Flash or Silverlight.

Written in JavaScript, SproutCore is platform independent.

But combine this with the forthcoming version of Safari that promises significantly faster JavaScript execution, the aggressive distribution of Safari for Windows, and Apple's apparent reluctance to allow Flash onto the iPhone and the pieces start falling into place.

Want to learn more about SproutCore? Visit the project's web site.

The WWDC keynote concentrated on the iPhone 3G and related developments, but Apple also took the opportunity to provide a few hints about Mac OS X 10.6 and confirmed MobileMe as the successor to the .Mac online service.

Don't get too excited about Snow Leopard, as Mac OS X 10.6 is codenamed - it's not expected for "about a year", and I'm guessing it'll be late rather than early. And there's been no official public confirmation of rumours that 10.6 will be an Intel-only release.

There aren't going to be the hundreds of new features trumpeted in 10.5, but Exchange support in Mail, iCal and Address Book is a very significant new feature for practically anyone working in an organisation that uses Microsoft-based servers.

And the promised performance improvements aren't simply being achieved by tightening up the operating system's code. Instead, a pair of new features will provide developers with facilities that can make their applications run significantly faster.

One is 'Grand Central' - Apple's technology to make it easier to create software that takes full advantage of multi-core CPUs. The other is OpenCL, a C-based programming language for exploiting the power of modern graphics chips to perform certain types of calculations.

There's also a new version of QuickTime - QuickTime X - ahead. Little has been revealed other than that it will provide "extremely efficient" audio and video playback. I'd suspect there's much more to be said.

What about MobileMe?

.Mac's webmail service and associated Address Book are each getting a facelift, and are being augmented with a proper 'in the cloud' calendar application where .Mac was limited to publishing calendars created in iCal.

An important new feature is that contacts, calendar items and bookmarks are synchronised by being pushed to your computers and devices (iPhone, iPod touch) rather than being pulled by the previous synchronisation facility.

We'll also see a doubling of storage space from 10G to 20G, which is good for keeping all those emails on the server so they can be accessed via IMAP or webmail. It also helps with MobileMe hosted websites, transferring large files via the iDisk instead of attaching them to emails, online backups (no change to the existing Backup application, though) and for large online photo and video albums.

The arrival of MobileMe will mark the end of iCards greeting cards, .Mac slides, and synchronisation with Mac OS X 10.3. No great loss, I'd suggest.

But I will be sorry to see the end of the web interface to .Mac bookmarks. MobileMe will synchronise bookmarks between Safari 2 and Firefox 2 (Mac OS X and Windows) as well as Internet Explorer 7 (Windows only), but that's not much use when you're using a borrowed computer.

The .Mac to MobileMe transition will begin in early July, will come into being "soon" though it may take up to 10 days before all existing .Mac accounts see the benefit of the extra storage allocation.

MobileMe will cost $A119 per year for a normal subscription or $A179 for a family pack (one master account with 20G of storage and four family member accounts each with 5G of storage). As with .Mac, a free 60-day trial will be available.

Reports that Mac OS X 10.5.3 triggered a problem that led to Photoshop files being corrupted by the process of saving to a network volume triggered a furore.

Some people were blaming Apple, some Adobe. Some said the issue had been around since Mac OS X 10.4.6. Others pointed out that a similar problem could strike when using Word and other applications.

When it was pointed out that Adobe didn't recommend reading and writing directly to networked volumes, incredulity was expressed.

So there was lots of heat and not much light being cast on the matter.

Subsequently, Adobe's John Nack has revealed that Adobe and Apple have identified the cause of the problem, and Apple is working on a fix that's expected to become part of the next system update.

That does suggest to me that either the problem really was in Apple's code, or that it makes more sense to apply a fix to the OS because other software developers have fallen into the same trap.

Other remarks in Nack's blog entry suggest that 'not recommended' in the context of saving files to servers doesn't mean 'won't work', just 'might not work'.

It's tempting to suggest this is like an ISP saying it doesn't support Mac OS X or Linux. That doesn't mean you can't use those operating systems - they're just saying "don't come crying to us if you can't get it to work."

But the trouble with the Photoshop scenario is that once you save a modified file and it becomes corrupted in the process, the previous version is gone.

If you can't bring yourself to Save As each time (thus preserving the previous version), I'd be inclined to invest in additional local disk space coupled with an automated mechanism for copying the local files to the server where they are accessible to other users.