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.
I started by purchasing FlexiGraphs, TreeStar's business graphics application, not for generating graphs, but for a crude, yet effective, data digitizing feature
FlexiTrace is an application for digitizing data. In scientific/engineering work one often needs to digitize line plots, something versus time is typical, that were generated by others, or the original x-y data points are otherwise not available, e.g
After launching FlexiTrace use the OPEN... option under the FILE menu to open your scanned image or one of the sample images that accompany FlexiTrace
Easy to use!
Does the job at hand with a few features that make the result impressive, rather than acceptable.
The $249 list price is a bit high. I paid (me, not my company) $149 for FlexiGraphs and did not blink an eye because FlexiGraphs did what I needed to have done, and there was no more cost-effective solution
I would like to be able to edit the digitized data, i.e. delete, add, or modify points and see where the modified data appears relative to the scanned image
Overall, what I like best about FlexiTrace is that it does the job just the way I want to have it done, simple yet effective. As a user I have the impression that the developers actually USED this software
I've used Salient Software's Disk Doubler since Macworld Boston last summer. It has worked completely as advertised, transparently compressing files to save precious hard disk space, and I suspect I've compressed over half of the files on my hard disk
A friend of mine and I once shared file space on a network. We each had our own folder and there were no space restrictions so long as everyone had a decent amount of working room
We didn't exactly say nice things about Lotus MarketPlace:Households the last time we wrote about it several weeks ago. It seems now that even more dirt has surfaced
The Usenet rumor mill is slowly gearing up for the introduction of a new Macintosh. This isn't the long awaited Portable or anything on the low-end; this will be the Mac to humble existing Macs from the specs that are being bandied around
Mark H. Anbinder wrote about some network management packages at Macworld Expo last week, but didn't see GraceLAN (through no fault of his, Technology Works may not have shown up)
Once again I have a few interesting items that don't quite merit their own articles. Since San Francisco's Macworld Expo just ended, I figured you would wish to read about what was there and what was not
The evening before Macworld Expo opened, MacUser announced this year's winners of its series of coveted industry awards. 1990 was, the editors' introduction tells us, "a year of great beginnings in areas such as 24-bit color, cross-platform connectivity, virtual reality, 3-D modeling, and video." Each category has a winner and two honorable mention recipients; we will only provide a list of the winners themselves
What better time to look back at the fun-filled events of 1990 than now. You were having fun, weren't you? Actually, a few people suggested an article like this in their survey responses, and hey, we respond to feedback (well at least most of the time :-))