Tonya Engst
Tonya Engst co-founded TidBITS with Adam Engst back in 1990 when publishing on the Internet was either strange or revolutionary, depending on your viewpoint. Since then, along with performing nearly every imaginable role involved in running TidBITS, she has worked at Cornell University's academic computer store (selling Macs, PCs, and NeXTs), worked at Microsoft as a technical support person, written and co-written several books, written oodles of articles for the likes of MacWEEK and Macworld, become a parent, edited various books, and worked as editor-in-chief for the Take Control series of electronic books through 2017.
The Microsoft elves are busy packaging Microsoft Word 6 for the Mac, and beta testers were just given official permission to discuss the program. I spent the last four months immersed in the beta, writing a "Microsoft Word Starter Kit" for Hayden Books.
Also, in a former life, I spent about thirty months doing phone support for Microsoft, fielding calls about Word
When Adam and I moved to Seattle from upstate New York, we discovered the delights of Thai food. After some experimentation with fish sauce, lime leaves, and curry pastes we learned how to make a few dishes at home, but our cultural background makes it difficult to locate and prepare the correct ingredients
FullWrite Upgrade -- The FullWrite list hasn't had much traffic lately, but news about the upcoming version came through the list a few days ago. FullWrite 2.0 sounds promising, with features such as tables, two-page editing, indexing, table of contents, text wrap around graphics, watermarks, drag & drop, and a glossary that stores chunks of pre-typed text
Adam and I are living examples of the difficulties in getting rid of old computers. We keep our aging SE/30 because we love it and may use it as a server someday and the Classic because nobody will buy it and because we occasionally use it to test programs
Aldus ChartMaker may not print, but that doesn't make it an applet. Jason Stephenson wrote in response to the TidBITS-230 mention of ChartMaker: "How can anyone call a program that requires 8 MB of hard disk space and wants 4 MB of RAM an 'applet?' Everyone complains about Word's disk requirements but it is less bloated than this thing from Aldus
PowerPC Native -- We received two corrections to the list of PowerPC native applications in TidBITS-230. First, Hard Disk Toolkit 1.5.1 runs only in emulation mode on Power Macs, but FWB is working on a native version
Our articles about the situation for small Macintosh developers in TidBITS-230 provoked a flurry of additional comments and ideas, ranging from the viability of OpenDoc to why innovative software developers require innovation from Apple to the belief that Apple's becoming 'big business" (complete with dress codes and an unseemly emphasis on greed) is an inevitable result of doing business in a capitalist system
Mark Anbinder sent in a correction from last week: "After we wrote in TidBITS-229 that Maxima owners could order upgrades to the new 3.0 version with Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or Discover credit cards, a reader told us Connectix doesn't currently accept Discover
Pythaeus suggests that Scitex may buy Altsys and attempt to settle some litigation in the process. Apparently, Altsys, the original developer of FreeHand, is suing Aldus over Aldus's recent merger with Adobe, since Altsys either wants FreeHand to stay alive or to come back to Altsys
Connectix recently released version 1.0.4 of CDU (Connectix Desktop Utilities), which offers the ability to gracefully shutdown after a user-specified period of inactivity, and to re-open all previously open applications and documents when you turn on the Mac
Aldus is shipping ChartMaker, an applet that provides sophisticated charting capabilities at a list price of $149. ChartMaker works via OLE 1.0, Publish and Subscribe, or the clipboard to add charts to documents created in other programs (you can't print directly from ChartMaker)
More and more companies have shipped products that run in PowerPC native mode, and to assist you in keeping the score card up-to-date, here's Apple's list of all commercial shipping products
A few months ago, my mother called to complain about not being able to find computer humor books. Mom doesn't have the advantage of living near bookstores made from (and completely filling) remodeled bowling alleys, but even so, people who write computer books don't often branch out into the humor department
Source Code on CD -- Celestin Company recently released Apprentice, a $35 CD that offers an assortment of programmers' utilities and approximately 450 MB of source code
Many people wrote in about our brief mention last week in TidBITS #227 of some kind of video on demand (VOD) service in Britain related to Apple's rumored set-top boxes