Here's a good deal for those of you who have been waiting for an excuse to pick up StuffIt Deluxe. Aladdin Systems and Raymond Lau have a special Valentine's Day offer only for users of online services, including the Internet

Desktop Construction -- Dale Southard writes: As a longtime TidBITS reader: THANKS! To the point, you mentioned rebuilding the desktop as a fix for the "lost folder bug." I don't know about the bug, but there is an easier way to rebuild the desktop: Quit all apps but the Finder. Hit command-option-esc to force quit the Finder. Click on the "Force Quit" button and then immediately depress and hold command-option. When the Finder restarts, it will give you the option of rebuilding all mounted disks

SoftAT Mistake -- Mark H. Anbinder corrects our mistake in our recent article about SoftPC. "SoftAT is not an add-on product that's to be added to Universal SoftPC, the way the EGA/AT Option Module needed to be added to an existing copy of SoftPC

Mark H. Anbinder writes, "The System 7 coupon program, which allowed Mac purchasers to send in a special coupon to receive a free System 7 kit, expired on 31-Dec-91, but Apple has extended it to cover Macs purchased through 02-Feb-92 (presumably because that's when the Right Now Rebate promotion ended)

I appear to have opened an intellectual can of worms in TidBITS-102 with my comparison of HyperCard and QuickTime and my statement that HyperCard was, in some respects, a commercial failure

The latest tempest-in-a-teacup of hurricane proportions on Usenet is raging quite nicely in the news.misc group. This time the subject matter should be of interest to many, so here comes the nitty-gritty. A company in the USA recently began offering Usenet-on-CD-ROM monthly disks for a fee (approximately US$35 per disk, if memory serves me right; $25 per issue if one subscribes to it)

You may wonder why I'm reviewing a book for PC clones here in TidBITS. First, I'm not blind to happenings elsewhere in the computer world; I just prefer to focus on the Mac, and second, I think everyone who has a friend learning publishing on a PC should give them this book to cut down on the egregious errors that show up in desktop published documents. "The PC is not a typewriter" is a direct descendent from Robin Williams's (yes, she of "The Little Mac Book" fame) previous book, "The Mac is not a typewriter." The heredity shows - this latest anti-typewriter book checks in at under 100 pages and is written in the same concise, friendly style

Even with the article we did on the IIsi and IIci video memory oddities, the issue remains murky to many people. Glenn Austin was kind enough to provide more detailed information which may further illuminate the matter, although for those of you who don't speak hex, I recommend just ignoring the address information - I did and still got the basic idea. Here's the memory map under System 6 and 7 on the IIsi and IIci, assuming (for the sake of discussion) that there is 8 MB of RAM in the machine, 2 banks of 4 MB RAM each, and the machine is 256-color capable: Where Description Size Logical address Bank A Video RAM $50000 $FBB00000 Bank A Main RAM $3B0000 $00400000 Bank B Main RAM $400000 $00000000 So the memory map looks something like this (in 24-bit mode, 32-bit is similar): ----------------- | Bank B | $00000000 (low) | RAM | |

Glenn Fleishman writes to expand on some points about the snazzy keynote presentation at Macworld Expo: Just some points of clarification. The photographer who assisted in John Sculley's presentation was Greg Heisler, a leading photojournalist, who recently did the Time Man of the Year (Ted Turner/CNN) cover (more on that below). The camera he used was a Kodak Professional Digital Camera System (DCS)

On February 3rd, Apple announced price cuts, free deals for potentially irate customers, new PowerBooks, and the shipping of the Quadra 700 upgrade board. Price Cuts -- Those who have watched the Macintosh market over the past several years will not be surprised to learn that Apple has announced yet another round of list price reductions

This is not a review but a rave. It takes a lot to impress me these days, but I've been impressed by ClarisWorks. I'm not even all that likely to use it since I mostly do a ton of writing in Nisus and uAccess, but I suspect that if I need to do a compound document I'll use ClarisWorks

I've been a serious slug on this one, and I'd like to apologize to Insignia Solutions for taking so long. Some time ago they sent me SoftPC to review and I checked it out fairly thoroughly..

I can see wanting to run the occasional PC program on your Mac, after all, I just spent 45 minutes writing about just that topic above. But I'm less sure about wanting to run the occasional Mac program on your PC

Word is starting to sound like Old MacDonald's Farm: "E I E I O." As promised, Microsoft released version 4.00E of Word to resolve problems with Word and the 68040 caches

Perfect timing once again. Just after we send out our issue on System 7 with information about a couple of problems it has, another pops up. Apparently a few people, not a lot, have been having files and folders disappear mysteriously from their hard drives