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TidBITS#402/27-Oct-97

Is Apple "betting the farm" by shaking up the familiar six-colored tree? Although the long-range implications of Steve Jobs’s decisions are anyone’s guess, Adam looks at why replanting Apple’s orchard might save the farm. Also in this issue, we look at a new crop of HTML utilities, note the Newton MessagePad 2100 and new versions of Quicken, Speed Doubler, and FileMaker, and see how the RSA Data Security Challenge was cracked.

Adam Engst No comments

Apple Stock Rises as Tech Stocks Tank

Apple Stock Rises as Tech Stocks Tank -- In today's stock market crash that resulted trading being halted on the New York Stock Exchange, it was interesting to note that Apple stock rose +3/16, whereas many other technology stocks fell sharply, including Intel's -5 1.4 drop, Motorola's -4 3/4 drop, and Microsoft's -6 1/2 drop

Tonya Engst No comments

Claris Reports Record Quarter

Claris Reports Record Quarter -- Despite Apple's recently reported quarterly loss, other financial news relating to Apple is cheerful. Claris, a wholly owned software subsidiary of Apple, last week reported record gains for its fourth quarter and its fiscal year

Tonya Engst No comments

Apple Announces New MessagePad

Apple Announces New MessagePad -- Apple has announced the Newton MessagePad 2100, due to ship in November. The 2100 resembles its predecessor, the MessagePad 2000 (reviewed in TidBITS-379), but comes with an additional 3 MB of DRAM for a total of 4 MB, helping users keep multiple programs launched

Tonya Engst No comments

New Version of Quicken Released

New Version of Quicken Released -- Last week, Intuit announced the availability of Quicken Deluxe '98 and Quicken Basic '98 for Macintosh and Windows. New features include easier account reconciliation and QuickEntry, a separate component of Quicken Deluxe, that streamlines entering routine daily expenses

Geoff Duncan No comments

FileMaker Pro 4.0

FileMaker Pro 4.0 -- Claris has released FileMaker Pro 4.0, an update to their popular database that adds a Web server and technology acquired from Blue World Communications's Lasso to an established mix of easy-to-use relational database capabilities

Geoff Duncan No comments

Speed Doubler 8

Speed Doubler 8 -- Connectix has shipped Speed Doubler 8, which adds Mac OS 8 compatibility and a few new features. Speed Doubler's goal is to enhance performance (see the full review of Speed Doubler 1.0 in TidBITS-292), and Speed Doubler 8 speeds up local and network file copies, disk caching, and (on PowerPC systems only) includes a dynamic recompilation 68K emulator that can be almost twice as fast as Apple's - handy when using 68K programs and system components, like AppleScript and the still widely used Microsoft Word 5.1

Adam Engst No comments

Dutch Mailing List Available

Dutch Mailing List Available -- For those of you who like to read TidBITS in Dutch, you can now either read the issues on the Web or subscribe to a mailing list to receive issues automatically

Matt Neuburg No comments

Sour Greps

Sour Greps -- With reference to my Text Machine review in TidBITS-401, several readers asked why I thought "grep" didn't stand for "global regular expression parser"

Matt Neuburg No comments

I Sought the Serif

I Sought the Serif -- In my Font Reserve review in TidBITS-400, I lamented its lack of a printing feature. A splendid shareware utility supplies it: even if your fonts aren't loaded into the system, Font Gander Pro can show you what they look like and can print a highly customizable "font book." The $20 shareware Font Gander Pro is available as a 386K download

Tonya Engst No comments

Subscribe Your Browser to TidBITS

If you use a recent Web browser and like to try new features, you've probably "subscribed" to a few Web pages. By subscribing, you receive a notification when the page changes, and in some browsers (such as the preview release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 4), the updated page can be downloaded for later offline reading

Tonya Engst No comments

Moving on to a New Challenge

In 250 days and with the combined efforts of some 4,000 teams of computers, distributed.net has completed the RSA Data Security Challenge to break a 56-bit RC5 encryption algorithm, demonstrating that groups of networked computers can break such encryption

Adam Engst No comments

Betting the Orchard

Apple has released little strategy information to the public after its widely derided efforts to eliminate the Macintosh clone market. That doesn't mean that we've ceased to talk with a variety of friends within Apple and the Macintosh industry in an attempt to piece together a coherent view of what Steve Jobs is attempting to do with Apple