Tired of your Web browser? Microsoft hopes you’ll try the just-released Internet Explorer 5.0; read on for Adam’s in-depth look at what’s new and improved. Also this week, we report on the Washington State anti-spam law being found unconstitutional, Aladdin’s acquisition of Trexar Technologies, updates to Canvas 7.0.1 and FileMaker 5.0v3, and the release of AvantGo Connect for Macintosh, which makes reading TidBITS on a Palm device easier.
AvantGo Releases Palm Conduit for Mac -- AvantGo, Inc. has released a Macintosh version of its AvantGo Connect software for downloading and displaying Web pages on Palm OS handheld devices
Canvas 7.0.1 Fixes Bugs, Improves HTML Export -- Deneba Software has released Canvas 7.0.1, a free update to the company's Swiss Army knife graphics program (see Matt Neuburg's "Canvas 7 - Not Quite Heaven" in TidBITS-517 for a full review)
FileMaker 5.0v3 Update Available -- After an earlier abortive release, FileMaker, Inc. has released Macintosh updaters for FileMaker Pro 5.0v3 that can be applied to Worldwide English or Japanese versions of either FileMaker Pro 5.0v1 or 5.0v2 (See "FileMaker Pro 5 Released to Controversy" in TidBITS-499 for an overview of FileMaker Pro 5's features and functionality.) A new feature in FileMaker 5.0v3 enables a user to open the Define Fields dialog box for a database hosted on FileMaker Pro Server so long as no other guests are connected
Aladdin Acquires Trexar -- Aladdin Systems has announced its acquisition of Trexar Technologies, makers of specialized Mac OS Internet utilities MacTuner (for finding and connecting to Internet-enabled radio and television stations around the world), MacHeadlines (a desktop news ticker), and the long-popular WeatherTracker (which presents weather and forecast information for cities around the world)
Poll Results: Clear as Mud -- The 1,600 responses to our poll asking about your common responses to Web pages that display badly offer some valuable lessons.
If you're a Web page designer, you have a large vested interest in making your pages display correctly, since 71 percent of the people participating in the poll said that going to another page or site was a common response, whereas only 32 percent said they'd try to ignore the problem and 4 percent said they would futz with the HTML to make the page display
Poll Preview: Browser Brouhaha -- This week's release of Internet Explorer 5.0 for the Mac (see review below) and Netscape's recent announcement that the Netscape 6 (possibly not for the Mac, to judge from comments on TidBITS Talk) would be available in beta within a month raises that perennial question: Which Macintosh Web browsers do you use on a regular basis? We'll be especially curious to compare the results of this poll to our Web logs
On 14-Mar-2000, King County Superior Court Judge Palmer Robinson ruled Washington State's 1998 anti-spam legislation unconstitutional under the interstate commerce clause of the U.S
Evaluating the desirability of an upgrade to a major piece of software is tricky. As we've seen in a recent TidBITS poll, many people stick with older software because it meets their needs, works better on older Macs, doesn't require learning new ways of working, and doesn't cost anything