Motorola Announces Mac Clones -- Last week, Motorola officially announced its first line of Macintosh clones, dubbed StarMax. The StarMax line consists of eight machines (four each in the 3000-series and 4000-series) available in desktop and minitower enclosures, featuring 603e and 604e PowerPC processors at speeds ranging from 160 to 200 MHz, IDE drives, and an industry-leading, five-year warranty

Sun and Apple Eye Enterprise Market -- Apple and Sun announced last week that they intend to build a seamless bridge between Macintosh computers and Sun's high-end Solaris enterprise servers, in an effort to combine high-performance networking services with the Mac's multimedia and ease-of-use

Quark finally released the Macintosh version of its long-awaited Immedia product, just as Seybold San Francisco got underway earlier this month. QuarkImmedia (long-ago code-named Orion) turns QuarkXPress into a multimedia authoring tool

Comments in favor of appropriate use of graphics on Web sites continue to pour in, and two of them offer suggestions for reducing the problems caused by large image map graphics that prevent navigation of a site by users who can't or don't view graphics. Tony Grant passes on a tip from Bill Shackleton that involves some extra work, but ensures that access to an image map-based site is at least possible, if not elegant, without graphics. First, create a small, single-color GIF file (say, two pixels by two pixels)

A common refrain heard by anyone who writes regularly about software goes along the lines of, "Why didn't you mention X?" The implications are usually that the author doesn't know the topic well or is engaged in an active conspiracy to prevent the public from hearing about said product

After a delay of a few weeks, Apple has released the much-anticipated System 7.5.5 Update, billed as a collection of fixes and updates designed to improve the performance and reliability of Macs running System 7.5.3