Adam Engst
Adam C. Engst is the publisher of TidBITS. He has written numerous books, including the best-selling Internet Starter Kit series, and many magazine articles thanks to Contributing Editor positions at MacUser, MacWEEK, and now Macworld. His innovations include the creation of the first advertising program to support an Internet publication in 1992, the first flat-rate accounts for graphical Internet access in 1993, and the Take Control electronic book series now owned and operated by alt concepts. His awards include the MDJ Power 25 ranking as the most influential person in the Macintosh industry outside of Apple every year since 2000, inclusion on the MacTech 25 list of influential people in the Macintosh technical community, and being named one of MacDirectory's top ten visionaries. And yes, he has been turned into an action figure.
Billionaire Elon Musk has purchased Twitter for $44 billion and will take the social media company private.
Apple’s networkQuality command-line tool in Monterey provides a new metric—“responsiveness”—that measures latency in a more realistic manner to better reflect your real-world experience with interactive Internet services like videoconference and gaming.
For many people, the word-guessing game Wordle has become a small daily treat. But it has also inspired numerous other games that tweak Wordle’s dictionary, gameplay, or overall concept. Adam Engst started out thinking he could put together a complete collection but eventually stumbled on a site that caused his head to explode.
Powers of 2 resonate throughout the world of technology, so on our 32nd anniversary, it’s impossible not to think of the long-ago limitation that kept Mac apps and Internet gateways from being able to deal with more than 32K of text.
It’s a good news/bad news week. On the plus side, Apple finally fixed the bug that prevented Mail from following links to named anchors, making our table of contents links clickable again. Sadly, however, we mourn a steadfast friend of TidBITS who was responsible for ensuring that all TidBITS staffers could cover the just-released iPad.
A recent update to Slack alerted Adam Engst that the app had an option to restore a much-missed feature to open the last message for editing with a single keystroke. If you’ve been pining for that feature, read on.
Happy April Fools Day! We have no jokes or pranks this year, but here’s a look back through our April Fools efforts in past years that proved prescient.
Adam Engst stumbled across an Accessibility setting that ensures that window proxy icons—those little icons that appear next to window titles—show at all times, rather than after a 1-second hover. This setting returns proxy icons to their former utility, and if you’re not clear what that was, Adam explains that too.
If you want to avoid confusion surrounding USB-C cable compatibility with USB and Thunderbolt, get a Thunderbolt 4 cable, which supports all the protocol, data throughput, and power delivery possibilities. OWC now sells three Thunderbolt 4 cable lengths for $24, $34, and $57—far less than Apple’s $129 entry.
The Luna Display dongle, when connected to a 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina display using Thunderbolt, turns the iMac into a full-fledged 5K display. However, Adam Engst found that it comes with a fair number of tradeoffs.
When Apple unveiled the new Mac Studio and Studio Display, it also quietly dropped the venerable 27-inch iMac from the product line. Those who have been waiting for an Apple silicon 27-inch iMac are disappointed, but as Adam Engst shows (with lots of charts), there are plenty of other good options in the Mac lineup.
Apple has introduced a new Mac model—the Mac Studio—powered by its most powerful chips yet, the M1 Max and new M1 Ultra. But for Adam Engst, the most exciting announcement of the day is the new 27-inch Studio Display, which pairs well with any of Apple’s M1-based Macs.
Do you feel like Apple’s “pro” Macs aren’t designed for your particular profession? You’re not alone. TidBITS publisher Adam Engst has been using Macs for over three decades, and he has some ideas for how Apple could better support professionals who don’t work with audio, video, or photos all day.
Is it really TidBITS#1600 already? The weeks just keep slipping by as we write and edit TidBITS and keep up with all that’s necessary for a modern-day Internet presence.
We live in a global, interconnected world, so the Russian invasion of Ukraine isn’t just news reports from far away. Between impacted Ukrainian Apple developers, efforts by other Apple-adjacent firms, and calls for Apple to block the App Store in Russia, we’re all in this together.