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Adam Engst

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.

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MailBITS/25-Mar-91

Apparently Sitka isn't quite as odd a name as I previously thought. I recently learned that there is a Sitka spruce and a Sitka black-tailed deer. I've also heard more information from a couple of readers. Scott Robert Anderson writes, "My understanding is that it was a "meeting place" for many different groups (Americans, Russians, Eskimos, etc.)

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Microsoft Calls Lotus’s Bet

A few weeks ago Lotus purchased cc:Mail to beef up its networking suite against Microsoft. I had mistakenly thought that Microsoft Mail ran on PCs and Macs (well it does, but only supports PC clients, much like CE's QuickMail), but it turns out that Microsoft Mail is not quite the complete solution

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Microsoft Treading Antitrust Waters?

Last week the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it will begin a non-public investigation of Microsoft for allegedly crippling Windows 2.1 in favor of OS/2

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Multiple Master

Adobe recently announced a new font technology called Multiple Master, which should make everyone who uses fonts happy. Current PostScript Type 1 fonts have a single outline file that allows you to scale a font's size

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MacInTax review

MacInTax Federal 1990 Softview 1721 Pacific Avenue Suite 100 Oxnard, CA 93033 805/385-5000 800/622-6829 76702,1174 at CompuServe SOFTVIEW at GEnie SOFTVIEW at AppleLink SOFTVIEW at MCI Mail [email protected] (Internet format) Rating: 9 Penguins out of a possible 10 Summary: -- MacInTax is the tax-preparation program of choice, with its intuitive interface, excellent screen display, and accurate printouts

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MacInTax Introduction

I first had to pay taxes years ago (OK, four years ago) when I was a junior in college. Before that time, students were more or less exempt from the annual ritual unless they were used as tax shelters by too-wealthy parents (i.e

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Installation

MacInTax comes on two disks and requires that you use its installation program to copy the files to your hard disk. The installer program is a special version of StuffIt (but not StuffIt Deluxe) and it isn't terribly capable - all it does is ask you which folder to copy the files to

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The Dirty Work

When you start up the program for the first time, it searches for all the forms (which it does on each startup - kind of irritating) and then displays a window explaining the difference between the various 1040 forms (1040, 1040A, 1040EZ, 1040X for amended tax returns, and 1040-ES for estimated taxes) so you can figure out which one to file

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Converting & Printing

So what's left? The numbers that you enter into your tax forms come from a number of different sources, and MacInTax doesn't help a great deal here, although it will let you import data from other applications (the manual doesn't say which ones are supported) and from text files

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Help!

This is probably the most common word associated with tax preparation, and although MacInTax does a good basic job at helping you fill out the forms, it doesn't do much more

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Documentation

The MacInTax manual is good, but not great. There is an introduction, eight chapters, seven appendixes, and an index. The introduction is just that, and the first two chapters walk you through installation and basic usage

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Conclusion

If you still do your taxes by hand with your Macintosh turned off on the desk in front of you, buy MacInTax. If you call MacConnection before 3:15 AM, you can go to sleep and they'll have it at your door the next day so you can save an incredible amount of time in preparing the stupid tax return

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MailBITS/18-Mar-91

Some people have suggested that we start a regular letters section, so we've decided that a quasi-sporadic, semi-edited section does make sense. Some mailfiles will come through complete; others we'll edit for space reasons

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Input Devices, Newer and Weirder

Cool new input devices are always a hard call - on the one hand you want companies to challenge the status quo and come out with the ultimate in control, but on the other hand, if an input device is too strange looking, no one will even think of buying it

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Apple Bargain Basement

A lot of people had to quiet down when Apple introduced the Classic, LC, and IIsi because those machines aren't priced to compete with workstations. They are quite affordable (though it's still easy to find PC users bellyaching about how expensive Macs are), and Apple has lowered prices on a number of other machines to spread the savings across the product line. New Suggested Retail Price Reduction Mac IIfx 4/floppy $7,369 $1,600 Mac IIfx 4/80HD $8,069 $1,800 Mac IIfx 4/160HD $8,669 $2,300 Mac IIci 4/floppy $5,269 $700 Mac IIci 4/80HD $5,969 $700 Mac SE/30 4/40HD $3,369 $1000 Mac SE/30 4/80HD $3,869 $1700 Personal LaserWriter NT $2,599 $700 LaserWriter II NT $3,999