MacFormat has just received a press release from Apple that starts:

"CUPERTINO, California—March 5, 2010—Apple® today announced that its magical and revolutionary iPad will be available in the US on Saturday, April 3, for Wi-Fi models and in late April for Wi-Fi + 3G models. In addition, all models of iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April."

We'd interpret that to mean that the iPad will not be available in the UK until "late April" when both the Wi-Fi and 3G versions will be available.

There's no more news about UK pricing expect to say that international pricing will be announced "in April".

So, it looks like the US will get the iPad a good month before other countries, which is bound to upset UK Apple fans. Or give them the perfect excuse for that US holiday they've been meaning to take for a while now.

These MacHeist bundles are a real bargain, aren't they? For a limited period, you can order a collection of Mac applications at a fraction of their combined value. The current MacHeist offer, dubbed the MacHeist nanoBundle 2, gives you seven top Mac apps for only $19.95 (just over £13). An amazing deal considering that bought individually, they would set you back $260 (around £172). What's more, 25% of your fee goes to a charity of your choice, selected from a list of participating organisations. Better hurry, though; the offer ends in under a week.

The seven applications offered as part of MacHeist nanoBundle 2, with their original prices in brackets, are:

• MacJournal ($40)

Create a personal journal to organise your important information. You can add any time of content, including PDFs, contacts, QuickTime movies, text and images. It even offers built-in blogging tools.

• RipIt ($20)

Rip a DVD to your hard drive for later viewing, or converting for playback on your iPhone. It's ideal if your Mac has a noisy optical drive, and it's a good way of saving battery power on your MacBook.

• Clips ($27)

Described as 'copy and paste reinvented', Clips lets you store more than one copied item on your clipboard for easy retrieval. It boasts an attractive, easy to use interface and live search features.

• CoverScout ($40)

Find the missing album cover art to complete your music collection. CoverScout helps you find missing covers, and even lets you take a photograph of the actual CD sleeve with your iSight.

• Flow ($25)

According to its developers, Flow makes FTP access through your Mac as easy and instinctive as managing local files through the Finder. For web developers, it also lets you preview your uploaded websites.

• Tales of Monkey Island ($35)

A five-episode adventure featuring Guybrush Threepwood, everyone's favourite adventurer. This app is locked until sales of nanoBundle 2 reach 50,000; at the time of writing, we're about half way there.

• Rapidweaver ($79)

A powerful yet straightforward web development tool built especially for Mac OS X 10.5: Leopard. This one's also initially locked, but we're not told what the conditions are for unlocking it.

For more information, take a trip to the MacHeist website, but once again, be quick.

Speculation continues to swirl around Apple’s latest creation. Is it a tablet computer? An ebook reader? Or something completely different? More intriguingly, what’s it like to actually use? This issue, we get hands-on with the future and the facts – look no further for a comprehensive guide to what the iPad is, what it isn’t, and what it could mean for you. Elsewhere this issue, we run through 40 different ways to improve your Mac without breaking the bank, explore how to cut the cost of buying Apple hardware, and also reveal how to avoid having to open incoming emails – all in good conscience!

In the shops now, or you can buy and subscribe online!

Every now and then, we interview someone for our ‘I use my Mac for…’ section whose story is so interesting that it's a particular pain having to edit what they say down into the finite space we have in the magazine. So it was with Mike Barrett, so we're happy to share his interview, which also appears in issue 219 of MacFormat, here in full.

What does ALIAS do?

ALIAS (Advanced balLIstics Analysis System) from Pyramidal Technologies Ltd represents the next generation in ballistics analysis. ALIAS enables firearms examiners and technicians to analyse cartridge data faster and with greater accuracy. The net result is that law enforcement agencies can identify, apprehend and convict more violent criminals more often than with existing systems.

ALIAS features Apple’s thoroughly modern Mac Pro computer architecture. ALIAS offers 3D imaging, correlation, visualisation and confirmation systems that deliver an exponential increase in cartridge data available for investigation.

The ALIAS interferometer scans the surface of expended cartridge cases at the incredibly high resolution of 2 microns (one fiftieth the diameter of the average human hair) and stores these ‘images’, along with associated demographic data, in a relational database on the Mac Pro. These scans are filtered based on characteristics, such as firing pin type and firearm type, and then a series of sophisticated correlation algorithms weed out all but the most likely matching cartridge case candidates within the database.

The ALIAS system is powerful enough to allow a ballistics expert to make high quality determinations based on correlating images using ALIAS’ innovative visualization techniques alone, without the need of a comparison microscope, a technology approaching its ninth decade of use.

Describe the process a forensic examiner would go through.

First, an examiner has to comply with typical evidence handling requirements, such as labelling and identifying the cartridge exhibit (via case number, exhibit number, signature and date) to enter into ALIAS. The examiner then inputs all specific demographic data of the exhibit – caliber, manufacturer, and more – into the ALIAS system, and places the expended cartridge case into one of six slots in the six-pac cartridge case holder, then loads the six-pac into the ALIAS interferometer.  Next, the examiner initiates a scan. The ALIAS interferometer, independent of examiner input and ambient lighting, scans the entire surface of the cartridge case head (the area where the firing pin strikes) and after a series of post-acquisition data filters, stores the resulting scan along with its associated demographic data in ALIAS’ relational database.

Once in memory, the examiner can initiate a correlation, whereby the expended cartridge case in question is compared to all expended cartridge cases of similar class in the database. When the correlation is complete, the examiner is presented with a series of likely matching candidates, each of which has an absolute score showing the indication and likelihood of a match. The examiner can select any one of the proposed candidates for a high-resolution side-by side comparison, using an advanced set of ALIAS visualization tools and the superior graphics capabilities of the Mac Pro and Apple’s 30-inch Cinema HD Display.

How does ALIAS help law enforcement agencies?

Any solution that more rapidly places relevant information in the hands of an investigator is likely to result in a higher crime conviction rate. Because ‘career criminals’ commit a large proportion of murders and vicious assaults, increasing gun violence continues if these criminals are not apprehended. Apprehending criminals who commit gun crimes faster – before more crimes are committed – saves more lives.

Why build this system to run on the Mac?

Only the best available combination of computing and operating system architecture can offer what is needed for ALIAS to perform as expected.

Through the experience of bringing ALIAS to market, I’ve learned from my Chief Technology Officer, Ardavan Tajbakhsh, that Unix is an extremely capable, scalable, efficient, and secure operating system providing remarkable availability and reliability on an enterprise scale for decades. Apple Unix, in particular, is engineered to enable plug-n-play operations (important for ALIAS R&D efforts to create a bespoke interferometer and integrate it with the computing architecture). Also, using Apple Unix did not require ‘Unix skills’ to manage one or many systems, which is important as ALIAS clients are offered tiered service options.

The file system for OS X is flexible, supporting both local storage and external Storage Area Network connectivity, which may be an important future consideration as ALIAS deals with larger data sets (tens of millions, or more, of 3D coordinates defining each cartridge case scanned by the interferometer). The Mac Pro’s memory management model is also high performance.

Before the Pyramidal Technologies team even wrote the first line of code, the plan was to ensure that all of the heavy computation of ALIAS would run on Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) using OpenCL and Apple’s high performance multi-core Central Processing Units.  Early in ALIAS’ conception, Ardavan had the opportunity to liaise with researchers at an Apple World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) who were working on animation, genetics as well as high energy particle physics, all requiring heavy computation. The latter especially as it deals with petabytes of data. These researchers had all selected the Mac Pro as their platform of choice.

Since portability, integration and flexibility are part of what will future-proof ALIAS, Snow Leopard was chosen as it can not only compile and run existing Unix code (which might be needed during future R&D) but it can also be deployed in environments that demand full conformance, along with hooks to maintain compatibility with existing software. Also, PostgreSQL, the world’s most advanced, fully open source database, made the Mac’s OS X foundation a compelling choice, compared to the proprietary nature of Windows.

Finally, in addition to the Mac Pro’s superior ability to handle the technicalities detailed above, the Pyramidal team also wanted a computing platform that is quite simply beautiful in both its visual and internal design. Up until the creation of ALIAS, forensics firearms examiners and technicians envied the equipment used in other forensics disciplines. ALIAS is visually pleasing – the user interface, fonts, themes, colours, and icons have all been carefully crafted and are a joy to use. Every detail in this visionary system was executed to provide forensics ballistics personnel the best and most accessible analysis system out there and to enable law enforcement agencies worldwide to achieve more convictions, faster, and to save more lives.

Mike Barrett is a former Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer and expert forensics examiner with over 25 years’ experience in forensic firearms identification. He is President and CEO of Pyramidal Technologies, creator of ALIAS. www.pyramidaltechnologies.com

I’ve turned into a Guardian reader, something I thought I’d never be, so I guess the old saying is right: one day you’ll turn into your parents, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Growing up, trying to grapple with pull out sections, oversized pages that won’t fold properly and the inability to find the story mentioned on the cover anywhere within the pages of the several different magazines and sub-papers that make up the Guardian had convinced me that it wasn’t really for me. Especially when you can get all the same content from a UK newspaper’s website for free.

Then I discovered the Guardian iPhone app for my iPhone.Logically, it makes no sense – it’s just the same content that you get from the Guardian website for free, but in a paid for app. But like most things Apple-related, you have to try it to really ‘get it’. The Guardian iPhone app does that rare thing of making content so accessible you come back time and time again. While you certainly can navigate the Guardian website through the iPhone using the Safari browser, it’s so much easier to get Guardian content using the app. For one thing, there are no adverts. Also, it’s all nicely sectionalised, so you can find exactly what you’re interested in. For me that’s usually the Technology section. You can see trending topics, and best of all, Favourite different sections, so you can find them in an instant. This works especially well for me because two of my favourite writers – Ben Goldacre and Charlie Brooker – are both Guardian columnists. Now I don’t need to sift through the paper puzzle that is the printed edition, or the digital labyrinth of the Guardian website to find their latest columns. And it fits in my pocket.

So, it turns out I am a Guardian reader after all, but I’m going to draw the line at the bright red sweaters my Dad wears.