Skip to content
Thoughtful, detailed coverage of everything Apple for 34 years
and the TidBITS Content Network for Apple professionals
Adam Engst No comments

ANTI-B

Well, they're at it again, this time in France. Another virus has recently been discovered, though it isn't new. ANTI-B is a slightly different strain of the ANTI virus that despite being discovered almost two years later, appears to be the initial version of ANTI

Adam Engst No comments

Boomerang Makes Good

One of the most popular shareware utilities of all time has been Hiro Yamamoto's Boomerang. Initially free, Boomerang provides several important functions in the standard Open and Save dialog boxes

Adam Engst No comments

Canon Optical Card

Bored by that ho-hum magnetic storage? Yawning at the speed of the optical drives? Frustrated by the reliability of floppies? Well Canon has something for you

Adam Engst No comments

Portable Computer Clothing

Sure portable computers are nice. It's fun to just set up wherever you happen to be and work. Unfortunately wherever you happen to be is seldom a good place to set up a machine designed to be placed on a table in a relatively well-lit room while you are sitting on an ergonomically designed chair

Adam Engst No comments

More Apple Bits

Apple has been busy with System 7.0, TrueType negotiations, HyperCard's transfer to Claris, and the like, but they continue to do interesting things. First off, if you've ever watched a TV show that had a Mac with a color monitor on it, you probably noticed how terrible the monitor looked

Adam Engst No comments

Alarming Prospects

Lately the market for appointment and reminder programs has offered a number of useful programs. In some ways, it's odd that it took so long on the Mac for alarm programs to appear, since they been around on the PC for a long time, dating at least from the introduction of Sidekick, an early do-it-all TSR (terminate stay resident program). The shareware Calendar DA was perhaps the first of these programs, but it had no reminder capabilities, so it was easy to miss appointments

Adam Engst No comments

Telepolitics

A few months back Mitch Kapor and others started the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help educate both government employees and the general public to the realities of computer use and abuse

Adam Engst No comments

Online Service News

We far prefer the pseudo-free (meaning "somebody pays for this but it's not usually me") electronic services such as Usenet or local BBS's to the pay-per-millisecond-of-access-time services like CompuServe

Adam Engst No comments

System 7.0 in ’91

Vaporware has become all too prevalent in this day and age of knee-jerk competition. Announcements are made to get a jump on competitors or to steal competitors' thunder, but the products seldom follow the announcements as closely as we would like

Adam Engst No comments

Truth in PostScript

Well, the font wars aren't exactly over, but a major flag-waving went on recently when Apple and Adobe reconciled their differences. That's literally all anyone knows because Apple and Adobe announced that they would be working more closely

Adam Engst No comments

Removable Cartridge Flap

I somehow missed the very beginning of this discussion on Usenet, but the topic seemed clear and important enough nonetheless. Apparently several people have had instances in which they believe a SyQuest drive trashed their hard disk (so watch out for roaming SyQuest drives!)

Adam Engst No comments

Claris HyperCard 2.0

A reader recently commented that it would be great if we could provide short abstracts with the titles in the distribution files (for those of us who can't sight-read either Binhex or StuffIt format :-))

Adam Engst No comments

The next NeXTs

Last week, NeXT announced a new line-up of computers, all based on the Motorola 68040 chip. The computers range from the $4995 standard NeXTstation (monochrome display, 8 megabytes of RAM, 105 megabyte hard disk, 2.8 megabyte floppy that also reads and writes DOS disks) to the $29,295 Division Server (monochrome display, 64 megabytes of RAM, two 1.4 gigabyte hard disks)

Adam Engst No comments

ROMlib

Two connotations of the above title come to mind. ROM liberation and ROM libraries. Both are apt, because ROMlib is a Unix library that can simulate the Macintosh ROMs, but which might liberate (perhaps not the best choice of words, I suppose) them from Apple

Adam Engst No comments

IBM/Microsoft Rift

It's not exactly the San Andreas Fault, but IBM and Microsoft have been getting along poorly, with the latest spat concerning IBM's new version of OS/2 that runs in 2 megs of RAM