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.
Last week's article on Ostrakon, an application shell for THINK C, garnered a response that we feel worth mentioning this week. We said then that compiler packages often came with skeleton applications for people to flesh out, but that Ostrakon took this idea one step farther by providing extensive documentation and commented code
Some of you may remember reading about an ambitious and generous project to create an inexpensive sound digitizer from plans and software donated to the Mac community by a group calling themselves The SID Trio
Faced with the contradictory news of the new low-cost Mac (MacCheap?), a number of people on Usenet have started talking about the possibilities of reverse engineering the Mac ROMs along with the rest of the Mac hardware
This is yet another article inspired by discussions of the low-cost Mac and what it should be. We may even write an article on the low-cost Mac itself one of these days, although a few more facts and a bit less rumor will be necessary first
Compression is an excellent way to save space and is more elegant than using larger and larger hard disks or faster methods of data transmission. MIT's Media Lab does a great deal of work on newer and more efficient methods of compression for this very reason
We've stuck to software reviews so far in TidBITS, but a new book has recently come to our attention that may merit a review once we've found and read it
HyperCard may be a commercial failure, but it certainly hasn't failed to generate a myriad of add-ons. Although stacks are seldom sold outright, utilities for creating stacks are quite popular
Programming on the Mac has been long bemoaned as a hard task because of the difficulty involved in programming the interface itself. It is much harder to write a graphical interface than it is to work with a command line, something that many IBM-clone programmers are discovering with Windows 3.0
As the high end Macs approach the low end workstations (which in turn are dropping quickly in price), methods of connecting the two become more necessary
You've all heard of the Radius Pivot and the PCPC Flipper in previous issues of TidBITS. Well, another monitor has arrived on the scene for those of you interested in modifying your view on the computer's world
If you have ever had to upgrade an entire office full of software, you know what a pain it can be. Some offices don't upgrade as often as possible because of the trouble involved in upgrading each computer relatively often
The ultimate horror for a desktop publisher using PageMaker 3.0 is the end of the year index for a series of newsletters. In most cases, embedded graphics and the design of the newsletter make it impossible to use a word processor to generate the index (if the original word processor can generate indices at all)
[Editors' Note: This information comes to you verbatim from Mitch Hall & Associates, the organizers of Macworld Expo.]
SHOW DATES
Wednesday, August 8 - Saturday, August 11, 1990
LOCATIONS
Bayside Expo Center, 200 Mt
Higher education met the Mac several weeks ago at the fifth annual Apple-sponsored MacAdemia conference. Some 800 educators and Macintosh enthusiasts gathered in Rochester, New York (USA) to view a variety of Macintosh demonstrations with an emphasis on the Mac in education
Last summer, Hewlett-Packard made an aggressive entry into the Macintosh printer market with its DeskWriter, a 300 dpi inkjet printer. As a substitute for the ImageWriter or as a compromise between a dot matrix and a laser printer, the DeskWriter works well