Certain components of Now Software's collection of utilities in Now Utilities are absolutely integral to my Mac experience. I am quite incapable of productive work without Super Boomerang, which compensates for the clumsiness of the Standard File dialog by causing it to come up at the most recently used item and by giving it menus that let you navigate to other recently used items

Recently, an amazing program I'd never heard of rescued me from a quicksand of information I couldn't store and retrieve effectively, and from a quagmire of outliners, databases, contact managers, and calendars that couldn't help me

This past August, Pictorius, a company based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, announced plans to release a freeware version of its flagship product, Prograph. The version appeared in the Info-Mac archive in early November

More than ten weeks after U.S. customers began receiving the Word 6.0.1 update, it became available in New Zealand. Anyone calling Microsoft from New Zealand was told they had to deal with Microsoft NZ, and then - airplanes be damned - it was popped on the slow boat to save a buck

Back in October (TidBITS-248) I reviewed Now Utilities 5.0 favorably, both as software in itself (I wouldn't live without it) and as an update. Now a maintenance update release (5.0.1) has appeared on the nets which fixes a number of bugs and conflicts, plus adds new features

Movies arrive in tiny, faraway New Zealand well after they've opened elsewhere (if they arrive at all), so it was only the other day, and quite by chance, that I caught Disclosure - and was hopelessly confused, thanks to the filmmaker's ignorance of the Internet. The film's plot and details of action depend almost totally upon the current state of computer and networking technology, with such things as fast CD-ROM drives, CU-SeeMe conferencing, and virtual reality figuring heavily

The previous upgrade, from Now Utilities 3.0 to 4.0, was torture. Many users experienced crashes; most felt anger over the upgrade charge coming so soon

Journalism Rule #1 is not to write a story about how you didn't get the story. Yet here's a review about how I couldn't write the review. Of course I'll tell you my opinion (don't I always?); I think In Control 2.0, which I raved about thirteen months ago back in TidBITS-191, is better than the new version 3.0. Can a new version of a great program, which loses none of its predecessor's functionality, nevertheless be less great? I feel it can be less great if it imposes new features that impede its original excellence

You may recall my article "The User Over Your Shoulder: The New Technologies Treadmill" in TidBITS-207 pointed out that Apple has recently been churning out new hardware and software technologies at a great rate, and trying to whip developers into a frenzy to adopt them

[Note: this review was greatly improved thanks to corrections and insights from Kevin Calhoun, HyperCard 2.2 team leader. Other sources: Danny Goodman, "The Complete HyperCard 2.0 Handbook;" Doug Clapp (ed.), "The Macintosh Reader;" Frank Rose, "West of Eden."] HyperCard 2.2 is here! HyperCard was what chiefly convinced me to buy my first Mac; I still regard it as the neatest, most useful, most generous program ever conceived

For a mere $250 plus shipping, you can order from APDA (Apple's developer-support wing) a year's subscription to the Developer Mailing. Each month you receive a newsletter and a CD. The CDs are filled with stuff that Apple wants to put into the hands of software authors

While reviewing Inspiration 4.0 for TidBITS #180, I meant to compare it as an outliner with Acta, but the winner kept turning out to be MORE, which I had never meant to consider seriously, and of which I had only an outmoded version (2.0) to examine

Veteran readers of my contributions to TidBITS know that I am unabashedly obsessed with computer tools for the storage and retrieval of information. They also know that an almost unqualified rave review from me is a rare thing

About a week ago, system administrators at the Computer Center at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand, removed from the list of available Usenet newsgroups all those beginning with "alt.sex", and perhaps others believed to contain pornographic material

A while back (November '92, in TidBITS #152, to be exact) I said some positive things and some negative things about Now Utilities 4.0.1. Now I'd like to take back a substantial portion of the negative things