Do you remember the good old days, when there was virtually no Mac software at any local computer shop? Well, you’d think, what with Mac sales going through the roof, you’d find a rich selection at such dealers these days.

But expectations and realities are far, far apart these days.

Consider those hundreds of Best Buy electronics stores, where there are special areas for Apple products. You go there and you’ll be lucky if you find a few dozen common titles, such as Adobe’s Creative Suite, Office for the Mac and, of course, Apple’s own applications.

But what about an Apple Store, you may ask?

Well, visit any of them, even the flagship stores, such as the ones in New York City, and you’d expect to see hundreds of products from which to select. True, the variety is much greater, but it doesn’t even begin to reflect the wide scope of Mac applications that are now available.

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You just know that, in the 1980s, several Mac applications set the standard for the industry for decades to come. How soon we forget that Adobe PageMaker made it possible to do typography and layout on a personal computer — your Mac of course. Combine that with Apple’s LaserWriter and Adobe’s PostScript, and you were able to output essentially what you saw on your monitor.

Between my two radio careers (broadcast and online), I worked in traditional typesetting, and these developments basically put most of the companies I worked for out of work — if they failed to adapt of course. And I imagine a lot fewer layout tables and hot wax machines were sold as well.

Certainly musicians found ways to use a relatively low-cost personal computer to perform the same chores that would formerly require expensive studios to accomplish, and photo retouchers no longer had to take tiny brushes and remove blemishes and red eyes from photo negatives as Adobe Photoshop brought those tasks to the digital realm as well.

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After reports that Apple was readying a major update to its Safari browser, it finally made its debut on Tuesday morning. Version 3.1 promises greatly improved performance and compatibility plus support for video and audio tags in HTML 5, CSS animations, and CSS Web fonts.

On the surface, I suspect your eyes will glaze over when it comes to the arcane labels identifying various Internet standards. What you’re most likely concerned with is how fast and accurately it renders pages. Here, Apple claims “Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers.”

Notice they don’t mention Firefox 3, which promises improved JavaScript rendering speeds, but even if they’re close, you’ll probably never notice a difference of any significance.

You can get the download direct from Apple’s site, or just check your Software Update preference panel on your Mac. In fact, it should even appear in the Windows version of Software Update if you have a prior version installed on that platform.

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The other day, from out of nowhere, comes the first beta of the new open source version of that famed email application, Eudora. In case you tuned in late, the publisher, Qualcomm, best known for for building cell phone chips these days, has given up on this venerable application. The project has been handed off to Mozilla, as part of their Thunderbird project.

Code-named, Penelope, the first beta of Eudora, version 8.0b1, has shipped, and all I can say is that it may be lots of things, but Eudora doesn’t seem to be a part of that list. That is, unless they expect us to believe that substituting a few toolbar icons and perhaps changing a few features somehow amounts to something significant.

My initial exposure to the beta was uneventful. I barely read the release notes, preferring to experience everything at first hand, then see where it has been and where it’s going.

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