Apple's low-end printers have never been much to write home about, but that may change soon. MacWEEK quotes sources at Apple saying that the company plans to introduce two new laser printers, the Personal LaserWriter SC and the Personal LaserWriter NT by mid-summer
Not content to let Radius pivot on its laurels, Personal Computer Peripherals Corp. announced the Flipper, a 17" color monitor that can change from portrait to landscape orientation
Raymond Lau's StuffIt rules supreme, but the new version of DiskDoubler from Salient may advance into StuffIt's domain. DiskDoubler 2.0 costs $79 (up $20 from the price of the previous version), but registered users will be rewarded with free upgrades
You've heard of MicroTV, which provides a small TV screen in the corner of a Mac II display. Well, not to be left behind again, radio is coming to the Mac too
Scanners have recently become less expensive, but a good one will still set you back $1500 or so. Smaller hand-held scanners may be an affordable alternative, but they have suffered from a number of problems, most notably the difficulty of scanning straight (otherwise the straight lines in an image come out crooked)
File compression programs are fine (see Double Your Pleasure in this issue), but they suffer from slow speed and non-transparent (opaque?) operation. A new board for PC-clones will solve that problem by providing hardware data compression that can reduce file size an average of three times
At the Special Interest Group for Computers and Human Interaction (SIGCHI), Home Row Inc. demonstrated the technology for a replacement for the standard mouse or trackball
Apple kindly provides an upgrade path from the Macintosh SE to the Mac SE/30, which uses the same case. However, as people on Usenet have recently discovered, the upgrade is not as straightforward as one might hope
In response to a number of suggestions, several small changes have been made in the TidBITS stack. They will not transfer to the previous stacks already in your TidBITS Archive, but they will be present from now on.
First, there is an invisible button at the top of the screen which shows the menu bar when you move into it and hides the menu bar when you move out of it
A number of people on Usenet have complained about Freesoft's White Knight's inability to display more than 24 lines in VT100 emulation mode. The White Knight window itself can be sized to display more lines, but doing so produces unexpected results
Since the introduction of the SuperDrive (officially known as the FDHD for a while), users have had mixed feelings. On the one hand, no one minds having 1.4 megabytes of storage on a single floppy
Ashton-Tate's new versions of dBASE for the Mac and PC will share the look and feel of the DOS command line environment and will be 100% data and program compatible with each other
The Usenet rumor mill has been grinding the low-cost Mac into a fine flour. Evidently, some people have heard that Apple is striking a deal with Tandy, the computer name behind Radio Shack, either to build and market or just to build a low cost Mac
With all the hullabaloo about the Mac IIfx, there has been much discussion from jealous Plus and SE owners on how to bring their Macs up to speed and snuff
Although IBM has not made an official announcement, a front page article in PC WEEK reveals IBM's plans for an August-release, low-cost home computer. This system, if released promptly, could steer potential buyers toward IBM if Apple cannot come through with its promise of a low-cost Macintosh