The Mac has always been considered a relatively good multimedia machine, although it couldn't quite stand up to the Atari ST's built-in MIDI and the Amiga's excellent video interface

Symantec's SUM disk utilities for the Mac has become pre-eminent, and Symantec recently solidified its hold on the Mac utility market by purchasing Peter Norton Computing

Although the Macintosh portable market has only begun to offer a few costly alternatives, the IBM portable market offers many choices with features rapidly increasing as prices rapidly decrease

Lotus won its three-year old suit against Paperback Software for copying the look and feel of 123. The decision said that Paperback Software had violated Lotus's copyright, although another suit Lotus has brought against Mosaic Software for their 123 clone, Twin, was not mentioned

Someone on Usenet recently asked what people thought about charging for technical support via a 900 number. The principle is that the call would not be free but the user would be guaranteed of getting through and getting an answer

Macworld devoted much of its July, 1990 issue to the health hazards of computers. Most of the articles actually focussed on the side-effects of working at video display terminals (i.e

After what seemed like forever to those of us who use HyperCard, Apple released version 2.0. We'll assume that if you are reading TidBITS, you understand more or less what HyperCard can do and how hard it is to pin down its abilities

Last week's article on Ostrakon, an application shell for THINK C, garnered a response that we feel worth mentioning this week. We said then that compiler packages often came with skeleton applications for people to flesh out, but that Ostrakon took this idea one step farther by providing extensive documentation and commented code

Some of you may remember reading about an ambitious and generous project to create an inexpensive sound digitizer from plans and software donated to the Mac community by a group calling themselves The SID Trio

Faced with the contradictory news of the new low-cost Mac (MacCheap?), a number of people on Usenet have started talking about the possibilities of reverse engineering the Mac ROMs along with the rest of the Mac hardware

This is yet another article inspired by discussions of the low-cost Mac and what it should be. We may even write an article on the low-cost Mac itself one of these days, although a few more facts and a bit less rumor will be necessary first

Compression is an excellent way to save space and is more elegant than using larger and larger hard disks or faster methods of data transmission. MIT's Media Lab does a great deal of work on newer and more efficient methods of compression for this very reason

We've stuck to software reviews so far in TidBITS, but a new book has recently come to our attention that may merit a review once we've found and read it

HyperCard may be a commercial failure, but it certainly hasn't failed to generate a myriad of add-ons. Although stacks are seldom sold outright, utilities for creating stacks are quite popular

Programming on the Mac has been long bemoaned as a hard task because of the difficulty involved in programming the interface itself. It is much harder to write a graphical interface than it is to work with a command line, something that many IBM-clone programmers are discovering with Windows 3.0