Happy Birthday to us. TidBITS is officially one year old and what better way to celebrate (OK, so we can think of a few) than by reporting the results of our TidBITS Survey

This issue is a special issue released in honor of TidBITS' First Anniversary and/or Birthday. Because of this I became curious about what we've really done, so here's some numbers

I've written the majority of the articles that appear in TidBITS with Tonya's help, but six other people have written articles for us as well (if we've missed anyone, please accept our heartfelt apologies)

We consulted with a friend who actually knows some statistics to arrive at some of these values, and while they aren't necessarily as large as we'd like, our friend is now thinking of getting a Masters degree in Applied Statistics at Cornell

We try to avoid this sort of self-congratulation most of the time since it doesn't do much for readers (you know for yourself whether or not you like TidBITS - you don't need to hear us patting ourselves on the back all the time, like other publications are wont to do on occasion

Of course, if we're going to print all those nice things people said about us, we have to print the negative comments as well. The majority of the complaints had to do with HyperCard itself and our HyperCard-based reader, which by our own admission is simple at best, if you're being kind

When we ran the survey in December we were curious about area we might be completely missing, partly because the news had dried up a bit at that time. With the new year and Macworld Expo in San Francisco, though, the news picked up and we had no trouble thinking of things to write about

As much as we like to pretend that everything in the electronic world is easy, there are a number of things we could do to make TidBITS easier to get each week

I should have known. The most common answer was blue. My pseudo-statistics claim that it comprised about 41% of the total, followed distantly by red (13%), green (9%), and black (8%), yellow (7%), grey (6%), and purple (5%)

We thought we had made the survey easy to answer, but some people still had trouble, such as this response to "What is your name?" "Sam Potts...um, no! it's Wayne Pollock (Damn these are tough questions :-)" A few people have really caught on to the idea of electronic communication replacing paper communication, such as the people who made these concise comments. "Responding electronically-want to save trees" "Timeliness and electronic format

When it comes right down to it, the world is weird, and I hope we're all having a good time. Thanks for your support. Adam C. Engst & Tonya Byard, TidBITS Editors