In keeping with our tradition, we’re going to take a few weeks off to spend time with family and friends over the holidays. You can expect the next email issue of TidBITS on 8 January 2024. Thanks for reading TidBITS, and we hope our articles enriched your year!

This week’s Do You Use It? poll asks how heavily you use widgets in various places on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. Have they become a core part of your Apple experience, or are they another feature you barely use?

We don’t have deep-pocketed corporate backers, nor do we harvest every last bit of your personal information to sell to advertisers, so would you kick in a few bucks to keep TidBITS vibrant in the next year?

We’re taking the next email issue of TidBITS off to celebrate Thanksgiving, although we’ll continue to publish articles on our website. You can look forward to the next email issue on 4 December 2023.

We’ve been dealing with some server-side issues of late, and Adam Engst takes you behind the curtains to apologize for an email delivery failure and explain how we blocked an onslaught of spambot-created accounts.

One of the longest-standing Mac apps is also one of the most popular to this day—Microsoft Word. It has been a fixture in the Mac world for 40 years now.

Time flies when you’re doing good work. After Joe Kissell took over Take Control Books from TidBITS Publishing in 2017, the ebook imprint has continued to thrive and is now marking its 20th anniversary with a free ebook, a big sale, and some thoughts about the impact it has on the Apple ecosystem.

This week's Do You Use It? poll asks how often you use Finder tags, which are marking their tenth year of being part of the Mac experience.

This week's Do You Use It? poll asks which Web browsers you use on your Mac. Safari may be a given for many Mac users, but there are a plethora of alternatives.

We’re taking a brief break from building an email issue of TidBITS next week for a combination of family time and the Labor Day holiday in the United States, so look for the next issue in your mailbox on 11 September 2023, likely right before Apple's big iPhone announcement.

After last week’s Do You Use It? poll asked if you use Apple's Weather app on your iPhone, this follow-up poll asks which third-party apps you prefer. We’ll report on the results of both polls and more in a future article.

This week's Do You Use It? poll asks how you check the weather on your iPhone, and if it’s not using Apple's Weather app, which app you prefer.

This week's Do You Use It? poll asks how often you use proxy icons? Not even sure what they are? We hope that once we report on the results, you'll become a convert.

This week's Do You Use It? poll asks if you use Spotlight on the Mac and—given the breadth of its capabilities—what you use it for.

To get a sense of how heavily TidBITS readers use particular features in Apple’s operating systems, TidBITS is starting to host polls where you can vote, explain why you voted as you did, and see what others think.