We realize that most people won't be able to attend this show, and in fact, we were invited to speak but couldn't make the trip (dratted public school schedule!). But if you're in New Zealand on September 10th and 11th, the Creative Tech conference is the country's largest Apple-focused trade show ever, and this preview in The New Zealand Herald makes it sound as though it will be a great time.

Thanks to Ted Landau for pointing out the story behind the shutdown of VersionTracker, which readers had started to ask us about. CNET, which acquired VersionTracker several years ago, is merging VersionTracker into CNET Downloads. It doesn't look like the overall functionality will change much, but the VersionTracker name will go away.

A month after shuttering Google Wave, the company has announced that it will be fleshing out the Google Wave code to turn the current example Web server and client into a complete application called Wave in a Box. Although Wave in a Box won't have the full functionality of Google Wave, it will be made available as open source, and Google's hope is that a vibrant developer community will help Wave move forward and fulfill its initial promise. We're not holding our collective breath, but it could happen.

It has been nearly 20 years since Autodesk last made its AutoCAD design and engineering software available for the Mac. But now, The New York Times reports, CAD-craving Mac users with $4,000 to spend will once again be able to buy AutoCAD for the Mac. Thanks to the Mac's resurgence, Autodesk says more and more customers are asking for a Mac version, and now the company plans to deliver.

Apple Mail offers controls for parents to monitor their kids' email usage, including the capability to add specific senders to a whitelist. However, Jonathan Kamens has discovered a fairly simple means by which a nefarious individual can trick Mail into automatically adding any address to the whitelist. Kamens says he reported the flaw to Apple back in June, but adds that the company has neither fixed the problem nor treated it as a security vulnerability. Fortunately for concerned parents, Kamens lays out a pair of stopgap workarounds.

It's a topic that many of us are struggling with these days - where and how should we acquire the books that entertain, educate, and enliven our worlds? In this MacNotables podcast, Andy Ihnatko and Adam range widely across the pros and cons of the many possibilities, bemoaning the loss of small bookstores and library budgets while simultaneously acknowledging the many advantages of ebooks. No hard and fast answers, sorry, but we think you'll enjoy the conversation.

In this MacNotables podcast, what started as a discussion between Adam and host Chuck Joiner about the Matias Tactile Pro 3 keyboard morphed into a look at some of the trials and tribulations we go through to keep publishing TidBITS with a small staff and equivalently small budget. A hint - it's all about having good technology behind the scenes. But it's still not easy.

Not to be left out of the price war between Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, Borders has dropped the prices of a number of ebook reading devices that work with the Borders online store. Their E-Ink-based Kobo eReader is now only $129, the Sony Pocket and Sony Touch (also using E-Ink screens) are $119 and $139 respectively, and Aluratek Libre - which has an LCD screen - is on sale for only $99 through 14 September 2010. Borders also has a pair of Android-based tablets with color touch screens coming in a month or so, the Velocity Micro Cruz Reader for $199 and the Velocity Micro Cruz Tablet for $299. The question is, are they enough cheaper than an iPad?

One of Gmail's most ballyhooed features is its excellent spam filter. But having reduced spam annoyance to a dull roar, Google has moved on to another troubling inbox management issue: even "legitimate" e-mail contains plenty of both wheat and chaff. Google's latest Gmail feature, dubbed Priority Inbox, aims to make inbox management a bit easier. Through its own analysis and your manual training (much like you would train a spam filter), Priority Inbox learns which messages are more likely to require immediate attention, and which can wait. The feature splits your Inbox into "important and unread" messages, "starred" messages, and "everything else." Google says it will roll out the new option to users of Gmail and Google Apps alike over the coming days. We'll see how it works when it appears in our accounts.

Apple has announced that iTunes U content downloads have rolled past the 300 million mark. iTunes U doesn't get much press, but the division of the iTunes Store brings together audio and video educational content from hundreds of universities; it now contains over 350,000 lectures and other content from institutions of higher learning around the globe. Apple deserves kudos for providing iTunes U content for free, and if you haven't yet checked out the iTunes U section of the iTunes Store, we encourage you to do so.

Over at Macworld, Lex Friedman spends more than 1,000 words talking about video codecs. But it's not all nerd-speak. MPEG LA has announced that it will never charge royalties for free H.264 videos. That's important because HTML5 video, which lets you watch Web video without requiring plug-ins like Flash, is currently difficult for publishers and consumers alike, with different browsers providing limited support for different codecs. While H.264 - which Apple already supports in both Safari and Mobile Safari - already has buy-in from major media companies like CNN, Major League Baseball, and YouTube, this announcement could very well spark a unification of HTML5 video formats.