The cover of the journal Science for 22-Sep-06 features a beautiful artwork titled "Still Life: Five Glass Surfaces on a Tabletop" by graphic artist Luc Benard and mathematician Richard Palais, but the image is neither a photograph nor a Photoshop illustrationRead more...
The news of recent times has me confused, so let me see if I have this straight. We'll soon be seeing video games based on reality TV shows - you know, the shows that employ script writers to make sure the reality sounds realRead more...
A few months ago in TidBITS I compared the various disk repair programs then available for Mac OS X: Norton Utilities 8.0 ($100), DiskWarrior 3.0 ($80), Drive 10 1.1.4 ($70), Disk Guardian 2.2 ($70), and Apple's Disk Utility (free)Read more...
Some things are inevitable. Death, taxes, and disk crashes. One day you will try to open an important file, only to receive a dire error message. Or perhaps you'll discover that an entire folder has vanishedRead more...
Optimizing disks is a waste of time. There, I said it. The horse is out of the bag, the cat is out of the barn. So why do so many people believe that an optimizer is an essential part of any Mac user's tool kit? And what does it mean to optimize a disk, anyway?
Background Fragments -- When you save a file to disk, the file system looks for an empty space to write the dataRead more...
Quark, Inc. continues to be an enigma in the Macintosh software world. Its flagship application, QuarkXPress, still dominates the desktop publishing market, despite inordinately long development cycles between revisions and a lack of direct support for the latest Mac technologiesRead more...
It is time to stop whining about Web porn sites and admit they make a valuable contribution to the Web. I'm not talking about the articles on playboy.com, but Internet payment schemes, streaming video, and authenticationRead more...
With the heated browser wars between Netscape's Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, you may find yourself switching from one to another to try out glitzy new features.
But switching browsers requires more than just downloading multi-megabyte files, running installers, and learning how to use the new featuresRead more...
Hotels and modems are like oil and water: nothing is worse than getting to your hotel after a long flight only to spend the next hour trying to configure your laptop to communicateRead more...
Perhaps it speaks to my Western-based culture that I was so surprised when a friend of mine [not our friend and colleague Cary Lu, who had no desire to build a Web site before he passed away, as mentioned in TidBITS-399Read more...
It took a long time, but I'm finally the proud owner of a slick MessagePad 2000 (MP2K). Getting it was a challenge. The original unit I purchased was stolen en route from NewtonSource to my office, but after a week or so (and thanks to a harried NewtonSource employee), a unit is in my handsRead more...
Quark finally released the Macintosh version of its long-awaited Immedia product, just as Seybold San Francisco got underway earlier this month. QuarkImmedia (long-ago code-named Orion) turns QuarkXPress into a multimedia authoring toolRead more...
The index is an essential ingredient in having a successful computer book, and the article in TidBITS-332, The Process of Publishing, completely omitted that topicRead more...
Holiday Lights -- David K. Dean writes:
I'd like to recommend Holiday Lights 3.0 from Robert Matthews of Tiger Technologies. It started out as Xmas Lights 1.0, then changed to Christmas Lights 1.0 (from the now-defunct Atticus Software), and has now become Holiday Lights 3.0Read more...
Apple EPCOT Showpieces -- David Goad writes:
I was visiting the Disney EPCOT Center in Orlando, Florida, the other day and saw a new exhibit called "Innovations!" Two displays really caught my eyeRead more...
David M. Palmer writes:
On the subject of DOS compatibility, Metrowerks, which in the past year has become THE Macintosh development system company, has announced CodeWarrior Platinum, which is the Metrowerks developer environment (Pascal, C, C++, etc.) that can compile for the 68x00, the PowerPC, and the Intel 80x86Read more...
Despite reports, we have been happily using the Japanese and Chinese Language Kits, as well as Arabic, Cyrillic, and Hebrew with System 7.5. To make them to work for you:
Install a clean version of 7.5Read more...
I've been using WordPerfect Mac since the infamous pre-1.0 beta sale. To paraphrase Victor Kiam, I liked WordPerfect Mac 2.0 so much I wrote a book about itRead more...
