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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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Lasers in the Jungle…

Apple's low-end printers have never been much to write home about, but that may change soon. MacWEEK quotes sources at Apple saying that the company plans to introduce two new laser printers, the Personal LaserWriter SC and the Personal LaserWriter NT by mid-summer

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Flipper Color Monitor

Not content to let Radius pivot on its laurels, Personal Computer Peripherals Corp. announced the Flipper, a 17" color monitor that can change from portrait to landscape orientation

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Double Your Pleasure

Raymond Lau's StuffIt rules supreme, but the new version of DiskDoubler from Salient may advance into StuffIt's domain. DiskDoubler 2.0 costs $79 (up $20 from the price of the previous version), but registered users will be rewarded with free upgrades

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Radio Free Macintosh

You've heard of MicroTV, which provides a small TV screen in the corner of a Mac II display. Well, not to be left behind again, radio is coming to the Mac too

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PageBrush Hand Scanner

Scanners have recently become less expensive, but a good one will still set you back $1500 or so. Smaller hand-held scanners may be an affordable alternative, but they have suffered from a number of problems, most notably the difficulty of scanning straight (otherwise the straight lines in an image come out crooked)

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A Hardware Triple

File compression programs are fine (see Double Your Pleasure in this issue), but they suffer from slow speed and non-transparent (opaque?) operation. A new board for PC-clones will solve that problem by providing hardware data compression that can reduce file size an average of three times

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J-Key Mouse

At the Special Interest Group for Computers and Human Interaction (SIGCHI), Home Row Inc. demonstrated the technology for a replacement for the standard mouse or trackball

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Moving Up in the World

Apple kindly provides an upgrade path from the Macintosh SE to the Mac SE/30, which uses the same case. However, as people on Usenet have recently discovered, the upgrade is not as straightforward as one might hope

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TidBITS Changes

In response to a number of suggestions, several small changes have been made in the TidBITS stack. They will not transfer to the previous stacks already in your TidBITS Archive, but they will be present from now on. First, there is an invisible button at the top of the screen which shows the menu bar when you move into it and hides the menu bar when you move out of it

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White Knight Blackened

A number of people on Usenet have complained about Freesoft's White Knight's inability to display more than 24 lines in VT100 emulation mode. The White Knight window itself can be sized to display more lines, but doing so produces unexpected results

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SuperDrives Stumble

Since the introduction of the SuperDrive (officially known as the FDHD for a while), users have had mixed feelings. On the one hand, no one minds having 1.4 megabytes of storage on a single floppy

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Ashton-Tate Tries Again

Ashton-Tate's new versions of dBASE for the Mac and PC will share the look and feel of the DOS command line environment and will be 100% data and program compatible with each other

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Shacking Up With Tandy?

The Usenet rumor mill has been grinding the low-cost Mac into a fine flour. Evidently, some people have heard that Apple is striking a deal with Tandy, the computer name behind Radio Shack, either to build and market or just to build a low cost Mac

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Speed Dreams

With all the hullabaloo about the Mac IIfx, there has been much discussion from jealous Plus and SE owners on how to bring their Macs up to speed and snuff

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Cheap IBM Home Computer

Although IBM has not made an official announcement, a front page article in PC WEEK reveals IBM's plans for an August-release, low-cost home computer. This system, if released promptly, could steer potential buyers toward IBM if Apple cannot come through with its promise of a low-cost Macintosh