Prodigy/Internet email details are still fuzzy, but Jeff Needleman said that the software for Macs to receive Internet email works fine, but the software for sending only works for DOS machines

In TidBITS #183, I gave a brief account of a simple solution to a common Duo problem - poor contact between the battery and the Duo, resulting in frequent shutdowns

Thankfully for Aldus and the many users of its PageMaker page layout software, one of the most eagerly awaited upgrades of the year is here. PageMaker was once the premiere package for creating publications, but years of stagnation on the feature front and cut-throat competition from arch-rival Quark XPress has steadily eroded Aldus's user base

[This is the first of a several part series that we plan to run about the Newton. We'll have a look at the hardware, the operating system, some devil's advocacy, and third-party add-on information

Macworld Boston is over, and only two of the four days were utterly hot and uncomfortable. Boston drivers were, well, indescribable, and the city itself continues to bears less and less resemblance to the published maps

Newton Rollout -- One caveat to all the Newton comments you hear in TidBITS and other publications. It appears that although the Newton was introduced at Macworld Boston, the official rollout will take place in about two weeks

Working full-tilt on products like QuickAccess for Newton and a Casper-friendly version of QuicKeys, not to mention continuing development on QuickMail, means that CE Software has much less time to work on its other products, time which the company feels these products deserve

Turnabout is Fair Play -- There have been several products to let Mac users read DOS-formatted disks over the years, from the DaynaFile drives to the collection of software taking advantage of the SuperDrive

At every good Macworld Expo, people talk about the one hot arrival, an arrival that overshadows everything else, no matter how cool. This year the debutante was Apple's Newton MessagePad

I'll be making the semi-annual pilgrimage to Macworld Boston as you read this. Although I will be ably accompanied by Sally, our PowerBook 100, I won't read email except on CompuServe until 11-Aug-93

Header Quibble - I've noticed a bunch of failures from the fileserver recently, and in most cases, the failure stems from a strange header, most commonly the information in the From: line

Subscribing to TidBITS -- Recently more personal subscription requests have come in as well, so I guess it's time to publish the instructions for subscribing automatically again

Legal Queries -- TidBITS is in the process of researching an article on software licensing with a view toward the actual law, standard agreements, nonstandard agreements, what happens if you break the agreement, and how it all applies to shareware/freeware

We received a number of well thought-out comments abut Roy McDonald's article on software acceleration in TidBITS #186. Although we don't have room for all of them, here are a few notes: Larry Rosenstein and several others disagreed with Roy's statement that "OOP is an obvious formula for inefficient code." Larry felt that this is a myth, pointing at the fact that the System 7 Finder is a new program that hasn't been optimized, in contrast to the System 6 Finder, which had gone through several iterations that would help speed it up

This information will end up in my book, but it's worth mentioning, since it may be of use to you now. AOL now splits long Internet email messages. In the past the America Online gateway software truncated incoming files at 27K, which put a damper on receiving long text files like TidBITS and BinHexed programs