BrushStrokes, or What happened to MacPaint? Claris has announced the shipment of BrushStrokes, a $139, 32-bit color, painting and image editing package

Last week Apple laid off 2,100 employees, 1,100 in Santa Clara, 500 elsewhere in the U.S., and 500 in other countries. Another 400 layoffs in other counties are scheduled for the next 12 months

An alert reader notes in response to our article in TidBITS #182 that although the Centris 660av and Quadra 840av, and possibly the PowerPCs, will perform voice recognition, record and playback CD-quality audio, and work as a v.32bis modem, they most certainly will not be able to do all these tasks simultaneously

The first MessagePad details are trickling in from Pythaeus. "What is the MessagePad," you ask? Why the first of the Newtons from Apple, of course, and they're appearing soon, so pay attention. The first units will range in price from $800 to $950, and just like Barbie will have a bunch of nifty accessories that cost between $20 and $250

Technical Support Coordinator, BAKA Computers The authors of the Rival anti-virus utility for Macintosh announced last week that Microseeds, Inc

I attended PC-Expo in New York earlier this month on its first morning, since I wanted to hear Chairman Bill's oratory. Am I the only one who finds it embarrassing that kick-off presentations for major industry conventions are used for mere PR pimping? No grand visions, just "here's why my company is better than everyone else's company." Gates is hardly unique in this regard - it's a tedious invariant

About a week ago, system administrators at the Computer Center at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand, removed from the list of available Usenet newsgroups all those beginning with "alt.sex", and perhaps others believed to contain pornographic material

As the Internet grows and brings more people online, those of us online become curious about who is available on the Internet. Services for finding specific people have never impressed me, so public announcements and word of mouth are still the best way to get in touch with someone famous who has appeared on the nets

SCSI Confusions -- Don Norman of Apple writes: At the last Computer Bowl contest, the question of "how many SCSI IDs" was asked. One of the contestants said "eight," but this was ruled wrong by the judges who said "seven." The audience yelled

Communicate Lite may replace some of the abysmal programs currently bundled with modems. The communications program from Mark/Space Softworks uses a document-oriented approach along with support for Apple's Communications Toolbox, which allows users to add power by adding tools

ZipIt Wires -- Jacob Ahlqvist writes: In TidBITS #182, Jim Wheelis, in his review of ZipIt, failed to mention one great advantage of ZipIt - it is Apple event-aware and ties in completely with Kem Tekinay's Freddie 1.2.5 (and only 1.2.5) to provide automated decompression/opening/reading of PC .QWK files downloaded from a PC BBS for off-line reading

ClarisWorks has expanded to the Windows market, with Claris announcing that IBM and Toshiba will bundle ClarisWorks for Windows with certain computer models

Wolf Creek Technologies recently slashed the price on QM-PAGE, their alphanumeric pager gateway for QuickMail, dropping it to $995 for 20 users and adding 10 and 5 user packs for $595 and $325, respectively

A while back (November '92, in TidBITS #152, to be exact) I said some positive things and some negative things about Now Utilities 4.0.1. Now I'd like to take back a substantial portion of the negative things

Those of you who read TidBITS or other setext files on Unix boxes may wish to check out a prototype setext viewer now posted at for anonymous FTP as info-mac/text/setext-viewer-02-unix.txt This 13K program, sv-02, requires System 5 and the curses library