I Sought the Serif -- In my Font Reserve review in TidBITS-400, I lamented its lack of a printing feature. A splendid shareware utility supplies it: even if your fonts aren't loaded into the system, Font Gander Pro can show you what they look like and can print a highly customizable "font book." The $20 shareware Font Gander Pro is available as a 386K download

They walk among us - the greppers. One might be sitting next to you at this very moment. In fact, you might be one yourself. Yes, you! You may never have grepped before; you may not even know what grepping is; yet chances are good that within you too, inchoate and amorphous, has stirred a secret need to grep. Now that I have your attention, what on earth am I talking about? The fact that GREP originates as a Unix acronym for "global regular expression and print" need neither detain nor deter us

The irony of fonts is this: they helped create the Macintosh revolution of 1984 and have been a pain in the ASCII ever since. Fonts lie at the heart of much of what we do on a Mac; yet, from the Font/DA Mover nightmare to System 7.1 and the Fonts folder, they have been persistently unmanageable. Fonts do need management

At a time when Apple and the Macintosh seem to be whirling in fragments around my head, the release of Spreadsheet 2000 from Casady & Greene has given my spirits a much needed lift

Myriad are the ways in which technological and economic experts propose to assist you with the Internet, as I discovered at the Spring Internet World convention held the week of 10-Mar-97 in Los Angeles

As a long-time user of Apple's HyperCard, I had never given SuperCard a glance. HyperCard, when it was free, had been my reason for first buying a Macintosh; with it, I've written language-lab courseware and distributed stacks on the net, and I still reach for it to contrive spontaneous solutions when information storage or task automation beckons

Although I'm no artist, I do need to make diagrams and pictures occasionally, and the early surprise and pleasure of MacPaint and MacDraw helped define the Macintosh for me

Today I found myself in one of those situations where I had to carry several separate pieces of information from one application to another. I was building (in Symantec Visual Page) a Web page composed of quotes extracted from Web pages (in Netscape Navigator)

Readers of TidBITS know of my unabashed obsession with the storage and retrieval of information, especially the free-form textual information an academic must track and manipulate in order to write lectures, books, and articles

Not the Final Frontier -- Frontier, from UserLand Software, has been updated to version 4.2. A powerful, fast Mac scripting environment, Frontier 4.2 features significantly refined Web site management tools (including NewsPage for constantly-updating pages), improved macro processing, live HTML editing in Frontier's built-in outliner, support for making MCF site maps (see TidBITS-355), a useful suite of Finder scripts for webmasters and authors (delivered via Leonard Rosenthol's OSA Menu), and tight integration with WebSTAR 2.0

Amid the frantic innovation, premature releases, and scrambling for profits spawned by today's Internet software market, it's remarkable that any software can be sufficiently solid, fundamental, and established to be a classic, let alone a necessity, and even more remarkable that it should be given away for free

TidBITS not long ago discussed three macro programs: QuicKeys (beginning in TidBITS-347), OneClick (in TidBITS-350), and KeyQuencer (in TidBITS-351.) Consideration of these has led me to some reflections on the state of the Mac

Those wishing to automate their Macs without spending the money or yielding the RAM required to run one of the big commercial macro programs may wish to consider KeyQuencer

Last week in TidBITS-347, the first part of this article described CE Software's QuicKeys (QK) and mentioned a new feature of the recent 3.5 release: toolbar triggers

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."     - Lewis Carroll Perfecting the relationship between form and function is no easy thing for a software developer