You just can’t knock a decent Dropbox update.

On Friday, Dropbox released a beta of version 1.5.1 of its cloud-based storage client for Mac OS X. The new version, a 22.4 megabyte download, adds the following fixes and changes:

- Fixed “lazy” install not working on 10.4.

- Fixed rare bug where Dropbox will notify you of your own changes.

- Performance improvements.

- Korean Language support.

Dropbox 1.5.1 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later to install and run.

If you’ve tried the new version and have any feedback to offer, please let us know in the comments.

You can’t knock the update of a useful chunk of software.

On Friday, Dropbox released version 1.4.7 of its cloud-based storage client for Mac OS X. The new version, a 20.8 megabyte download, adds the following fixes and changes:

- Added missing translations.

Dropbox 1.4.7 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later to install and run.

If you’ve tried the new version and have any feedback to offer, please let us know in the comments.

Updates: they’re a good thing.

Late Tuesday, Dropbox released version 1.4.2 of its cloud-based storage client for Mac OS X. The new version, a 20.8 megabyte download, adds the following fixes and changes:

- Fixed performance problem when syncing a lot of files.

Dropbox 1.4.2 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later to install and run.

If you’ve tried the new version and have any feedback to offer, please let us know in the comments.

VirtualBox, an open source x86 virtualization project available for free has just hit version 4.1.14. The new version, a 91.5 megabyte download, features the following fixes and changes:

- Network: fixed the problem with packets larger than MTU-4 when PCnet or PRO/1000 was bridged to certain types of adapters on OS X hosts (bug #3783).

- NAT: fixed a segfault under rare circumstances.

- 3D Support: fixed Windows WDDM video driver crash for SMP guests (bugs #10200, #10331).

- Windows Guest Additions, VRDP: fixed occasional text corruption (bug #3001).

VirtualBox 4.1.14 is available for free and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later and an Intel-based Mac to install and run.

If you’ve tried the new version and have any feedback, please let us know.

Michael Tsai’s must-have shareware program, SpamSieve, has just been updated to version 2.9. The new version, an 8.8 megabyte download, adds the following fixes and improvements:

- Added support for upcoming versions of Mac OS X.

- Made various changes to improve SpamSieve’s filtering accuracy.

- SpamSieve is now code-signed using a Developer ID certificate for Gatekeeper.
When training an Exchange message as good in Apple Mail, SpamSieve is better at moving it to the proper inbox.

- Processing incoming messages with Outlook is more efficient. To take advantage of this change, choose Install Outlook Scripts from the SpamSieve menu.

- If you’ve used the SpamSieve – Change Settings command in Apple Mail to tell SpamSieve not to use a local spam mailbox, training a message as spam will now try to move the message to a spam mailbox on the same server account, rather than always using the first account.

- Added support for training messages as spam via Herald (version 2.1.2 and later), a notification plug-in for Apple Mail.

- When sorting spam messages by color in Apple Mail, you can now use Grey as a synonym for Gray.

- The score script command has a new auto training parameter that can be used to override the setting in the preferences on a case-by-case basis. This might be useful, for example, if you’re writing an AppleScript to triage messages that have already been classified, and you just want to get SpamSieve’s opinion without having to make any corrections.

- Adjusted the drone AppleScripts so that they’re easier to troubleshoot.

- If Apple Mail gives SpamSieve empty data for a message, the plug-in now assumes the message is good and does not pass it on to SpamSieve for analysis.

- Added support for Growl notifications via GNTP (requires Mac OS X 10.7 or later).

- SpamSieve is better at handling file permission errors.

- SpamSieve is better at handling errors when running helper tools.

- Improved SpamSieve’s ability to still function when the application package is damaged.

- Added the AddStandardRules esoteric preference, which lets you prevent SpamSieve from creating its built-in blocklist and whitelist rules if you prefer to manage the rules yourself.

- Fixed a bug that could reduce SpamSieve’s filtering accuracy for some messages with attached files.

- Made various improvements to the documentation.

- Updated the German localization.

SpamSieve is available for a US$30 registration fee and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later to run. The new version can either be downloaded directly from the web site or brought up to the current version via the program’s built-in update feature.

If you’ve tried the new version and have any feedback to offer, let us know in the comments.

VirtualBox, an open source x86 virtualization project available for free has just hit version 4.1.12. The new version, a 89.5 megabyte download, features the following fixes and changes:

- VMM: fixed VERR_NOT_SUPPORTED and VERR_RAW_MODE_INVALID_SMP guru meditation due to an invalid reschedule to raw mode (bug #10370).

- VMM: fixed PDMCritSectLeave guru meditation under rare circumstances with SMP guests.

- VMM: proper Math Fault handling with certain legacy guests (bug #9042).

- NAT: fixed a socket leak under certain conditions.

- Storage: better sanity check against reading beyond end-of-file.

- Audio: fixed a crash in the NUL audio backend (bug #10374; 4.1.10 regression).

- HGCM: fixed a crash during savestate under rare circumstances.

- VBoxSVC: several locking fixes.

- VBoxManage: return the correct error code if controlvm savestate failed (bug #10134).

- Guest Additions: VBoxService should not crash on exit (bug #10326; 4.1.10 regression).

- Windows Additions: set the correct time stamp when a file is closed (bug #6473).

- Windows Additions: better help if the DirectX backups are not properly installed.

- Linux Additions: Linux 3.4-rc1 compile fixes.

VirtualBox 4.1.12 is available for free and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later and an Intel-based Mac to install and run.

If you’ve tried the new version and have any feedback, please let us know.

VirtualBox, an open source x86 virtualization project available for free has just hit version 4.1.10. The new version, a 89.5 megabyte download, sports an extensive list of changes that can be found here.

VirtualBox 4.1.10 is available for free and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later and an Intel-based Mac to install and run.

If you’ve tried the new version and have any feedback, please let us know.

Late Wednesday, the Camino Project released version 2.1.1 of Camino, its free, open source web browser.

The new version, an 18.5 megabyte download, adds the following fixes and changes:

- Upgraded to version 1.9.2.27 of the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine, which includes several critical security and stability fixes.

- Blocked versions of Adobe Flash Player 10 older than 10.3.183.15 and Flash Player 11 older than 11.1.102.62 on Intel Macs due to severe security issues.

- Tweaked the autocomplete algorithm to reduce the weight of visit count.
Added a hidden preference to allow turning off autocomplete’s use of page titles in matches.

- The location sheet once again shows an autocomplete window.

- It is now possible to clear the “Recently Closed Pages” menu with the “Clear History…” menu item even when history is disabled.

- Improved the appearance of the bookmark toolbar in background windows on Mac OS X 10.7.

- On Mac OS X 10.7, Camino now appears in the “Productivity” category when sorting Finder windows by category.

- Camino now correctly checks for the presence of a Java plug-in on Mac OS X 10.7.

- The “open location” AppleScript command now supports optional “referrer” and “loading in background” parameters.

- Camino will now display an error message when the “open location” command’s direct parameter is empty or missing.

- A new “reload” command allows AppleScripts to reload browser windows and tabs.

- The status of Camino’s offline mode is now available to AppleScript, and scripts can toggle offline mode on and off using the application object’s “online” property.

- The AppleScript “visit count” bookmark property once again works correctly.

- Pressing Escape will now cancel Tab Overview.

- “Fill Form” no longer fills disabled hidden form controls.

- The “Block Flash animations” checkbox is no longer enabled if Flash is not installed.

- Camino now correctly resolves Bonjour services that do not include an initial forward slash in their “path” information.

Camino 2.1.1 requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later to run.

If you’ve tried the new version of Camino and have any kind of feedback about it, let us know.

Late Tuesday, Carbon Copy Cloner, the shareware favorite for drive cloning operations by Mike Bombich, reached version 3.4.4. The new version, a 6 megabyte download, adds the following fixes and changes:

- Made several changes to the preset configurations. Both the wording and some of the settings have been changed in response to user feedback and typical usage scenarios.

- New feature: CCC now provides support for archiving and cloning the Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Recovery HD partition. Choose “Disk Center” from CCC’s Window menu to find this functionality.
New feature: Scheduled tasks can now be configured to wake or boot the system when the task is scheduled to run.

- New feature: For users with a Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Installer application in /Applications, CCC’s Source menu now includes a handy “Create a Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Installer…” choice that will clone the Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Installation disk image onto a physical volume.

- Window positioning of the scheduled task helper application is now retained on a per-task basis, so you can move these windows around on your screen and multiple tasks won’t be stacked on top of each other.

- CCC will now mention the lack of a Recovery HD partition in the Cloning Coach prior to running the initial backup task.

- The table of scheduled tasks in the Scheduler window are now sorted alphabetically by default.

- Fixed a scheduler issue in which tasks scheduled to run on the first (any weekday) of the current month would be scheduled to run in the following month.

- Fixed an issue in which CCC was not “remembering” the last preset that had been selected upon relaunching CCC.

- Fixed an issue with the German localization related to the application of a particular setting in custom presets.

- Fixed an issue in which a scheduled task had trouble mounting a disk image when uncommon permissions conditions were present (such as when a system is bound to an Active Directory directory service).

- The “This volume will be bootable” message is back, though with a caveat that I have to insist upon from a support perspective. Many external hard drive enclosures still manage to screw up the boot process, and it’s impossible for me to determine if that is going to happen for any particular user from within CCC.

- When backing up to a subfolder, CCC now overlays an icon of the underlying volume on the folder icon in the task status panel.

- Scheduled tasks that specify a network volume as the destination are now aborted when CCC receives a sleep notification.

- Growl notifications should now work properly on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion with Growl 1.3.

- Email notifications now include the sender’s full name.

- Fixed a couple minor bugs associated with email notifications.

- Fixed an issue in which the scheduled task window would be unresponsive while CCC waited for a response from an email server.

- Added support for sending email to servers that use a self-signed certificate. This support is disabled by default, see the documentation for details on enabling this functionality.

- Resolved a problem in which an errant filter would protect items in folders that were to be deleted, resulting in CCC reporting that it couldn’t replace a particular folder or application.

- Fixed a minor 5-second shutdown hang associated with CCC scheduled tasks.

- Numerous tweaks to the advice that CCC offers for various error conditions.

- Fixed some Mac OS X 10.7 Lion-specific problems with the mounting of sparsebundle disk image files that are hosted on a network volume.

- If you’re running an ad hoc task in CCC (e.g. click “Clone” in the main window), CCC will ask before deleting anything from the _CCC Archives folder. To avoid problems that would affect automation, this warning is not provided for scheduled tasks.

- CCC is more proactive about dealing with the 4GB file size limitation of FAT32 volumes. Files larger than 4GB will now be excluded by default, and you’ll get a warning of this exclusion before running the task.

- Fixed a hang that would occur at the end of a scheduled task while CCC tried to unmount the destination volume (network volumes only, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion only).

- Made some cosmetic changes concerning ZFS support.

- Mail account settings on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion are now properly imported and populated into the email notifications tab of the scheduled tasks window.

- The path to a disk image file is now properly provided as the fourth argument to postflight scripts.

- Fixed a 30 second hang that would occur while saving changes to scheduled tasks on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. For every OS, though, saving scheduled tasks should be considerably faster.

Carbon Copy Cloner 3.4.4 retails for a US$10 shareware registration fee. The application requires Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later to run.

If you’ve tried the new version and have any feedback to offer, let us know in the comments.

VirtualBox, an open source x86 virtualization project available for free has just hit version 4.1.8. The new version, a 88.9 megabyte download, sports an extensive list of changes that can be found here.

VirtualBox 4.1.8 is available for free and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later and an Intel-based Mac to install and run.

If you’ve tried the new version and have any feedback, please let us know.