Matt Neuburg returns to rescind some of the negative points he made about the Now Utilities 4.0.1 when it came out last year, and Rick Sutcliffe editorializes on the future of distribution in the Information Age. In the practical world, James Brigman offers tips and information about refilling DeskWriter cartridges, we announce a prototype setext viewer for Unix, and lots of other bits about SCSI, ZipIt, Communicate Lite, ClarisWorks, and QM-PAGE.
SCSI Confusions -- Don Norman of Apple writes:
At the last Computer Bowl contest, the question of "how many SCSI IDs" was asked. One of the contestants said "eight," but this was ruled wrong by the judges who said "seven." The audience yelled
Communicate Lite may replace some of the abysmal programs currently bundled with modems. The communications program from Mark/Space Softworks uses a document-oriented approach along with support for Apple's Communications Toolbox, which allows users to add power by adding tools
ZipIt Wires -- Jacob Ahlqvist writes:
In TidBITS #182, Jim Wheelis, in his review of ZipIt, failed to mention one great advantage of ZipIt - it is Apple event-aware and ties in completely with Kem Tekinay's Freddie 1.2.5 (and only 1.2.5) to provide automated decompression/opening/reading of PC .QWK files downloaded from a PC BBS for off-line reading
ClarisWorks has expanded to the Windows market, with Claris announcing that IBM and Toshiba will bundle ClarisWorks for Windows with certain computer models
Wolf Creek Technologies recently slashed the price on QM-PAGE, their alphanumeric pager gateway for QuickMail, dropping it to $995 for 20 users and adding 10 and 5 user packs for $595 and $325, respectively
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
Those of you who read TidBITS or other setext files on Unix boxes may wish to check out a prototype setext viewer now posted at for anonymous FTP as
info-mac/text/setext-viewer-02-unix.txt
This 13K program, sv-02, requires System 5 and the curses library
Although Hewlett-Packard does not recommend refilling their disposable DeskJet/DeskWriter cartridges, there is little risk and much profit in refilling your own model 51608A or 51626A print cartridges
When the seller of goods is no longer a village craftsman dealing with friends and neighbours on a one-to-one basis, but a multinational company with hundreds of products and millions of end users, it is impossible to deal with each customer individually