At the risk of treading into Produce territory, I note the arrival of an update for Final Cut Pro X.

Final Cut Pro X caused a stir when it arrived, mainly for the wrong reasons. One particular concern was the lack of compatibility with projects created in previous versions, and Apple eventually conceded by providing a mechanism for enterprise customers to buy additional Final Cut Pro 7 licences. A low-cost third-party conversion tool (7toX for Final Cut Pro) has just arrived, and plugins to extend Final Cut Pro X are appearing.

As expected, Apple has pressed on with Final Cut Pro X development. The just-released version 10.0.3 delivers some interesting features. It's unlikely that they'll result in anyone switching back to Final Cut Pro if they defected to another editing suite after Final Cut Pro X debuted, but they do reward those who stayed with the program.

Apple is highlighting the multicam feature, which automatically synchronises clips taken from different angles by matching the audio waveforms, time and date, or timecode - even if the source clips are in different formats, frame sizes or frame rates. It's then easy to watch multiple angles while editing and cut between them as required.

You can see how useful that would be even for amateur projects - for example, two or three parents could work together to shoot their kids' sports match or concert, and then combine the results for a much more professional look. I've shot my share of one-camera videos of such events, and the lack of cuts between angles leads to a boring result. It's not that it's been impossible to combine clips from multiple cameras, just that it has involved more work than most casual videographers could be bothered with.

It's a sign of the times that software costing $319.99 is considered expensive, but even so Final Cut Pro X is within reach of a moderately serious video enthusiast.

Chroma keying has been improved in version 10.0.3 to the point where Apple claims "You can tackle complex keying challenges right in Final Cut Pro X, without having to export to a motion graphics application, and view your results instantly with realtime playback."

The other good thing about Final Cut Pro X is that as it is sold via the Mac App Store, updates are free and the program can be used on all of the buyer's Macs. If you're not already sold, a 30-day free trial is available here.

In the week that Hydrapinion returns to your screen, Apple announced yet another record quarter in terms of revenue and profit.

Mac sales weren't too shabby: up 26% year-on-year to 5.2 million. That's at a time when total PC shipments fell by 1.4% according to Gartner.

Still, that wasn't enough to get Apple into the Top Five vendors on a worldwide basis - it would have taken another million or so units to displace Asus.

But Apple's already in the Top Five for US unit sales. The assumption is sometimes made that customers in 'emerging markets' are too price sensitive to buy Macs. Seeing how well iPhones are selling in China, that might not be completely true. And if the 'halo effect' kicks in there, we could see even more Macs sold in the coming quarters.

That said, I'm still not especially confident about the Mac's long-term future. We've seen iOS extend from phones to tablets, and several of the changes in Lion seem to be aimed at the iOSification of (Mac) OS X.

Talking of Lion, the summer break was more eventful than I expected, and so I didn't have time to install Lion on my iMac. But I did make a concerted effort to get used to using the Magic Trackpad instead of a mouse.

It was going well in most respects, but I found it very difficult to drag with the trackpad, whether that was to select a portion of text or graphics, move a window, or adjust the playhead of a video track.

Then my colleague Garry Barker pointed out that the Trackpad system preference gives you the choice of setting a three-finger gesture to dragging. I'm not sure if the alternative (Swipe to Navigate) is the default, but that's how mine was set.

That small change made a huge difference to my Magic Trackpad experience. It might be obvious to MacBook users, but I'm not one of that clan. The moral of the story is simple: if something's not comfortable, see if you can adjust it.

Microsoft's habit is to release security patches on the second Tuesday of the month, and December 2011 was no exception. What was relatively unusual was that updates for the Mac versions of Office were part of this month's crop.

Specifically, there's an Excel update for Office 2004, a PowerPoint update for Office 2008, and a Word update for Office 2011. Each of the vulnerabilities provides an opportunity for remote code execution when a malicious document is opened.

Microsoft classifies each of these issues as important. The 2011 update includes other improvements, such as a fix for an issue that caused Excel 2011 to crash or freeze when opening certain workbooks.

Also new this week is iTunes 10.5.2, which "includes several improvements for iTunes Match and fixes an audio distortion problem when playing or importing certain CDs."

I haven't tried iTunes Match (there's no current indication of when it will be offered in Australia, though it accompanied the rollout of the iTunes Store in Brazil this week), but I have seen very mixed reports saying how well or how badly it works, including cases where all but one of the tracks in an album was matched. So any improvements will doubtless be welcomed.

You'd have thought that the basic function of playing or importing a CD would have been down pat by now, so who knows what's going on there?

I made a point of installing the Safari 5.1.2 update during the week, but was disappointed to find the 'white flash' problem was still present. If the delay was always so short that it deserved the term 'flash' I wouldn't be so bothered, but it often lasts several seconds.

If you have multiple pages open in tabs in a browser, the content should appear instantly when you click on a different tab. But that's not how recent versions of Safari have behaved. Instead, the tab content sometimes disappears leaving an all-white window, and then the content reloads either from the cache or in some circumstances from the server.

Safari 5.1.2 was supposed to fix that - or at least the "issues that could cause webpages to flash white" - but it doesn't make a reliable difference on my Mac. After emptying the cache, I did see some improvement, but when I opened 13 tabs from a bookmark folder and then used another program while they loaded, I found that clicking on any of the tabs gave a white window with a spinning progress indicator showing the content was being reloaded. Sometimes merely making Safari the frontmost application is enough to trigger a white window.

So Safari 5.1.2 is better in that I don't see white flashes quite as often, but it still happens to an irritating extent, especially as it didn't happen at all in Safari 4.x (or 5.0, as best I can remember). I haven't carried out methodical tests, but it appears to be worse when there's little free memory.

I'll close with an item from the 'it's never too late to learn' department. I read this week that control-K acts as 'delete to end of line' in many (most?) Mac programs, and has done so since Mac OS X 10.0. Apparently this and some other Emacs commands (eg control-D for delete) usually work while typing, whether that's in a browser's address bar, a TextEdit document, an Outlook email, or while changing a file name in the Finder. Not surprisingly, Word is an exception.

It looks like ultrabooks - essentially the Windows world's answer to the MacBook Air - are taking off, and the arrival of Acer's $999 configuration of the Aspire S3 will likely help things along, even if it does mix magnetic and solid-state storage. Announcements of dozens of new ultrabooks from a variety of vendors are expected in January, and reports are circulating that Apple is preparing to respond by refreshing the MacBook Air family with new 11.6in, 13.3in and 15in models during the first quarter of 2012.

A price reduction for the existing 11in and 13in models (which currently start at $1099 and $1449) is tipped ahead of the introduction of the new-look Airs.

There are also reports that 2012 will see a revamped and slimmer MacBook Pro.

Returning to the present and switching to the software front, Apple has updated Safari to version 5.1.2. Available for Lion, Snow Leopard and Windows (XP or later), changes include stability improvements, fixes for hangs and excessive memory usage, and the display of PDFs within web content. The update is also supposed to "Address issues that could cause webpages to flash white", which could be the problem that led me to stop using Safari as my everyday browser.

I've downloaded the update, but as it requires a restart I haven't yet had time to install it.

And on the subject of updates, Apple has been slow to update the XProtect malware definitions (used by Mac OS X to block malware downloads via Safari, Mail and iChat) for the Flashback Trojan. And it reportedly does not detect current Flashback variants.

Arguing that people should be able to avoid malware through sensible practices isn't completely unreasonable, but Apple clearly believes some form of automated defence is warranted, so XProtect wouldn't exist at all. Since it is part of Mac OS X and it is being updated, is it too much to ask for those updates to be released promptly? After all, as time passes more and more users become aware of any particular threat and how they can avoid it, so it's more important to have protection in place as soon as the malware is detected.

Third-party vendors such as Symantec and Sophos are much quicker off the mark, and Sophos even makes its software available free of charge to home users.