Your friends turn to you to troubleshoot their Macs, but what if you aren’t nearby? Jeff Carlson looks at HouseCall, a utility for connecting to remote Macs and using them as if they were on your desk. Also, we revisit REALbasic and Internet grocery shopping, plus note the releases of ShrinkWrap 3.5, a battery fix for some PowerBook G3 Series owners, and MacHeadlines, which displays customizable new items from the Internet.
ShrinkWrap 3.5 Adds Features & Speed -- Aladdin Systems has released Chad Magendanz's ShrinkWrap 3.5, the latest version of the company's widely used utility for creating and managing disk images
Possible Fix for PowerBook G3 Series Battery Woes? Apple has released the PowerBook G3 Series Battery Reset Update 1.0, intended to alleviate problems with main batteries experienced by owners of some PowerBook G3 Series laptops
Trexar Releases MacHeadlines 1.7 -- Trexar Technologies today released MacHeadlines 1.7, an update to the product previously known as NewsTicker. Much like Trexar's MacTuner and WeatherTracker, MacHeadlines provides a dedicated interface to information from the Web, in this case scrolling headlines, stock prices, and other information in a highly customizable window
A year ago in "Yes, Virginia, There Is a REALbasic," in TidBITS-443, I praised REAL Software's REALbasic as being a powerful object-oriented development environment that encouraged rapid, improvisational creation of useful, well-behaved Macintosh applications with pleasing interfaces
How many times have you helped a friend or relative with a Macintosh problem over the phone, knowing you could fix the trouble in a fraction of the time if you could just get your hands on their machine? Although the trouble might be trivial, guiding someone verbally through a visual interface can be quite an exercise in patience - especially if they're beginning users who don't yet have a solid grasp of the terminology that describes what they're seeing
Last March, I wrote about how we had started using HomeGrocer.com, a local Internet grocery service, in place of trips to the supermarket. The article prompted much discussion on TidBITS Talk of issues surrounding the move of something as basic as food gathering from the real world to the virtual space of the Internet