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.
Do you like menus? Menus tend to be overlooked in the desire to show every possible option at once in a toolbar or palette, but the nice thing about a menu is that its there when you need it and out of the way - but not gone entirely - when you don't
New Ebook Helps Readers Customize Microsoft Office -- I've been working with author Kirk McElhearn for nearly a year on this title, and neither of us can believe how long it's taken to explain clearly how to customize the toolbars, menus, and keyboard shortcuts in Microsoft Office
Pop quiz: can you think of a round, computer-driven device that has four buttons, is not made by Apple, and ought to be in every household by the end of the decade? In case you don't pay much attention to the domestic scene - and by domestic, I mean the low-down world of dust bunnies, dog hair, and cookie crumbs - the answer is Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner from iRobot.
Roomba is about the size of a medium pizza, and about as thick as a pizza box
Interarchy 7.2 Sports Useful New Features -- Stairways Software's Interarchy is a venerable file transfer utility, but two new features in the recently released Interarchy 7.2 are sure to be helpful to many users
It's been the better part of a decade since Boston hosted Macworld Expo, and those of us who haven't been back since the early East Coast expos in Boston were interested to see the massive changes to the city: a huge freeway had been torn down and stuffed underground in tunnels, the area around the World Trade Center looks far less like an industrial wasteland (and more like a city), and the huge new Boston Convention & Exhibition Center is so new that the carpet squeaked in places.
Past -- Macworld Expo on the East Coast - whether in Boston or New York City - has been characterized by heat and humidity, a loud and dynamic show floor, and a large and broad representation of all that is Macintosh.
The recent Macworld Expo in Boston failed to deliver on any of those items, but as Expo Conference Chair Paul Kent described it, comparing this year's Expo to those in the past would be comparing apples to oranges
I've never been musically inclined. In my grade school, singing in music class marked one as being uncool, and although I eventually had a few piano lessons and a small singing part in a ninth-grade production of Fiddler on the Roof, by high school, it was clear that I lacked much in the way of musical talent
SpamSieve Coupon Reduces Effective Price of Ebook to $0 -- Our recently released 1.0.1 revision to Joe Kissell's $5 "Take Control of Spam in Apple Mail" ebook now includes a coupon for $5 off the purchase of Michael Tsai's highly regarded SpamSieve, which can replace the Junk Mail filter in Apple Mail
Take Control of Upgrading to Panther in German -- Thanks to the hard work of German translator Hartmut Greiser, the German translation of Joe Kissell's best-selling "Take Control of Upgrading to Panther" ebook is now available for sale
Although I normally use Eudora as my email client, I recently had a chance to spend quite some time in Microsoft's new Entourage 2004, because I just finished editing our latest Take Control ebook, Tom Negrino's "Take Control of What's New in Entourage 2004." Editing the book gave me the opportunity to experiment with the software and reflect on its new features, and, of course, I had the benefit of Tom's excellent advice for rapidly finding and learning about Entourage's new features
Microsoft Office 2004 Ships -- Microsoft has officially released Office 2004 for Mac OS X, a significant revision to the near-ubiquitous suite of productivity tools
Blue World Releases Lasso Professional 7 -- Blue World Communications has released Lasso Professional 7, the latest version of its powerful Web-and-database serving middleware for Mac OS X and Windows
Business Card Composer 2 Offers Online Ordering -- BeLight Software has updated Business Card Composer, their elegant application for creating attractive business cards
With fanfare at some Apple retail stores last weekend, Apple released Final Cut Pro 4, the latest version of its high-end, nonlinear, digital video editing software
I haven't written much for TidBITS lately, in part because I've been busy helping some old friends at Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit (MacBU) with an upcoming release of Microsoft Word 5.1 for OS X, a carbonized version of Word 5.1a that preserves most of the features and all the look and feel of the highly popular Word 5.1
In 1999, when my son Tristan was born, I began having trouble with to-do lists. The problem was twofold: on one hand, there were so many things to remember to do, or that I might want to do someday; on the other hand, even though I often made to-do lists, I often lost them beneath piles of papers or - worse - forgot about them altogether.
As the years went by, I tried to organize my piles of papers and to-do lists, but I was continually confounded by the many ways information arrives, both physical and virtual, and the necessity of sharing contact and calendar databases with Adam and our array of Macs (we use Now Software's Now Up-to-Date & Contact)