The big news this week involves licensing: Apple gets Java from Sun Microsystems and announces plans to integrate it into the Mac OS, and IBM gets the Mac OS from Apple. Also in this issue, information on Power Computing’s new high-speed Macs, Tonya takes a look at the new HTML authoring tool PageSpinner, and Sean Peisert reviews a collection of tools almost everyone has to use: text editors.
Tonya and I are deep into working on the fourth edition of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh, which means that we're likely to be less responsive to email for a while.
If you're the author of a freely distributable freeware or shareware Internet program, I'd like to consider your program for inclusion on the CD that will come with the book
IBM Gets Wide-Ranging Mac OS License -- As noted in TidBITS-324, IBM today announced an agreement with Apple allowing it to sell PowerPC processors along with a Mac OS sub-license to any manufacturer
PowerTower & PowerCenter -- Power Computing announced two new lines of Mac clones last week, including a machine that qualifies as the fastest single-processor Mac available
WebHead Update -- No sooner do I write an article on recent Web browser updates (see TidBITS-326) than it's, well, out-of-date. Netscape released version 2.02 or Navigator last week (primarily fixing security problems); NCSA released 3.0b2 of Mosaic, and beta 4 of Apple's Cyberdog is now available (if you have a Power Mac and OpenDoc)
Quicken 6 R7 -- Intuit has release R7 of Quicken 6.0 for Macintosh, which is supposed to address limitations of Quicken's online banking features and "a few" other problems reported by customers
Apple announced last week it has licensed Sun's Java programming environment, joining the massive list of current Java licensees. Apple says it plans to integrate Java into its operating systems (including the Mac OS, the Newton, and Pippin) as well as in media and Internet technologies, including Cyberdog
The world of shareware Web authoring tools recently gained a new member in the form of PageSpinner, a $25 shareware program from Optima System in Sweden
Many Macintosh users are only vaguely familiar with text editors, since SimpleText opens our text documents and we configure our machines with control panels and thus rarely need to edit configuration files