This issue is full of the latest and greatest software and hardware shown at Macworld SF and some unpleasant bugs in Word 5 that you should know about. Also check out why I think QuickTime will succeed where HyperCard failed and why the DeskWriter C driver can cause headaches in laboratory rats and Murph Sewall alike. Finally, the long-awaited announcement of our very own TidBITS mailing list. Have TidBITS delivered to your Internet door every week!
What a show! Going to a Macworld Expo always takes a great deal of effort because I want to see everything and talk to lots of people, and I usually spend the entire day on the floor
Hot PowerBooks -- Mark H. Anbinder, obviously hoping to add a Junior Woodchuck Crime Prevention Badge to his TidBITS Contributing Editor Badge, sent this note:
Late in December, three Macintosh PowerBook 140's (4/40 part #M1227LL/A) were stolen from the ComputerLand Mid-Atlantic warehouse in Clinton, MD
140 Floppy Solution -- While you're peering around for your PowerBook 140's serial number to see if it's hot, check to see if your machine has the shield that solves the intermittent disk recognition problems that have plagued 140 owners
Word 5.0 Addendum -- Dwight K. Lemke writes, "An addendum to your report on Word 5.0: I was informed by Niles & Associates that the latest version of EndNote Plus includes a Word 5.0 command application so that it can be accessed from the Insert menu
Finally! After 101 issues and almost two years, we're setting up a mailing list so that you can receive TidBITS in your electronic mailbox. Thanks to some great folks at Simon Fraser University in Canada, you can now receive TidBITS directly rather than waiting for it to come through in comp.sys.mac.digest or snagging it from an FTP site a few days later
A friend who went to San Francisco Macworld several years ago claimed that it was so crowded that you could only walk in the direction the crowd was flowing
This is by no means a definitive list of all the interesting software at Macworld, or even everything that I saw, but here are some of the products that caught my eye.
ThoughtPattern 2.0 -- Bananafish Software showed a beta of the next version of ThoughtPattern, a personal information manager (PIM)
The most interesting hardware was harder to find, squirreled off in the corners of Moscone and even in local hotels. I saw some products and regretfully missed others.
Same BAT channel -- I tried the full BAT keyboard at Infogrip's booth and came away wanting to really put it through its paces
John Sculley chortled slightly as he said, "Remember, I've been talking about multimedia for the last four years." This year he could afford to chortle as QuickTime stole the show
Someone goofed, folks. I know lots of people who only use Microsoft Word because it talks so well with PageMaker. Not too surprising, considering that Microsoft and Aldus are about ten miles apart
Santa kindly left a DeskWriter C under my tree so I'll be able to enlighten future undergraduates with color transparencies. But I found a few problems with the current DeskWriter C printer drivers