Apple has been busy with System 7.0, TrueType negotiations, HyperCard's transfer to Claris, and the like, but they continue to do interesting things. First off, if you've ever watched a TV show that had a Mac with a color monitor on it, you probably noticed how terrible the monitor looked
Lately the market for appointment and reminder programs has offered a number of useful programs. In some ways, it's odd that it took so long on the Mac for alarm programs to appear, since they been around on the PC for a long time, dating at least from the introduction of Sidekick, an early do-it-all TSR (terminate stay resident program).
The shareware Calendar DA was perhaps the first of these programs, but it had no reminder capabilities, so it was easy to miss appointments
A few months back Mitch Kapor and others started the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help educate both government employees and the general public to the realities of computer use and abuse
We far prefer the pseudo-free (meaning "somebody pays for this but it's not usually me") electronic services such as Usenet or local BBS's to the pay-per-millisecond-of-access-time services like CompuServe