John Norstad announced Wednesday that his free Disinfectant anti-virus utility has been retired. Norstad considered updating the utility to combat the recently discovered Autostart-9805 worm (see "Autostart Worm Breaks Malware Silence" in TidBITS-428) but decided to direct his software's loyal users to the various commercial utilities that are available, such as Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit, Virex, or Symantec AntiVirus for Macintosh. Norstad's announcement said, "I made this decision not because of the new Autostart-9805 worm, but rather because of the widespread and dangerous Microsoft macro virus problem." (See TidBITS's article series on macro viruses.) He felt that Disinfectant had been inadequate protection for some time, and continuing to update it would unfairly give users a false sense of security. Norstad began work on Disinfectant in the spring of 1988, and Northwestern University released the first version to the public in March of 1989.
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Springy Dock Tricks
If you drag a file and hover over Dock icons, various useful things happen which are similar to Finder springing. If it's a window, the window un-minimizes from the Dock. If it's a stack, the corresponding folder in the Finder opens. If it's the Finder, it brings the Finder to the foreground and opens a window if one doesn't exist already. But the coolest (and most hidden) springing trick is if you hover over an application and press the Space bar, the application comes to the foreground. This is great for things like grabbing a file from somewhere to drop into a Mail composition window that's otherwise hidden. Grab the file you want, hover over the Mail icon, press the Space bar, and Mail comes to the front for you to drop the file into the compose window. Be sure that Spring-Loaded Folders and Windows is enabled in the Finder Preferences window.
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John Norstad Retires Disinfectant
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