This is an issue of the small and the large. First come short notes about Super Boomerang, pop-up menus, and three of the most popular word processors, Word, Nisus, and WriteNow. Then comes the meat of the issue with a preview article on FileMaker Pro 2.0 for the Mac and Windows, some in-depth analysis of Apple’s Newton announcements, and a look at works programs by Matthew Wall that leads into a special issue on ClarisWorks later this week.
Early apologies if you see this a little late - we've been married exactly one year now and the champagne might get in the way of uploading this issue everywhere
QuicKeys ElectroOops -- I completely forgot to mention in TidBITS-127 what CE Software included in the QuicKeys upgrade, and I can't expect everyone to remember TidBITS-123, which talked about what would be in the upgrade
Super Boomerang Tip -- Alberto Ricci writes, "Wow - here is an incredibly useful feature that Hiroaki Yamamoto put in Super Boomerang. If you are using any application, and you have the Open or Save standard file dialog in front, and you've got Super Boomerang installed, clicking on a window that belongs to the Finder (one of the windows in the background - just click a part of it if it's partially covered by other windows) will bring you to that level of the hierarchy in the standard file dialog
New Apple Campaign -- We've heard from the estimable Pythaeus that Apple has begun a completely new advertising campaign that may address some of the complaints Mac users have had with Apple's advertising
In Howard Hansen's EXCELlent review of Excel 4 in TidBITS-127, he makes the following comment about the pop-up menus feature:
When you hold down the command and option keys and click the mouse, Excel brings up a pop-up shortcut menu right next to your mouse pointer
Much has happened recently in the word processing world, so much in fact, that it's starting to become hard to track. For those of you who haven't been watching as closely as we have (we're word processor junkies, and word processing is probably the most common task for which people use computers), here's the news, labeled for your convenience by weasels (apologies to Dave Barry).
New PIMs for Word -- Very good news: Word 5.0's modularity has started to pay off, and Microsoft has made new Grammar and Spelling plug-in modules (PIMs - and you thought PIM stood for personal information manager)
Claris has given notice that it intends to pull no punches in the Windows market. At PC Expo in a few weeks, Claris will show a pre-release version of FileMaker Pro 2.0 for Windows, along with its almost identical twin for the Mac
Last week I talked briefly about what the Newton technology entails, setting myself up for this week's analysis. If you haven't seen last week's issue, I recommend you take a look.
Underneath all of Apple's hurrah over Newton being a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), I see Apple attempting a paradigm shift
[This is an introduction to Matthew's full review of ClarisWorks, which will be a special issue immediately following this weekly issue. Keep an eye out for it! -Adam]
The works program - a single application combining several functions - has long been a strange and orphaned beast