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

As the high end Macs approach the low end workstations (which in turn are dropping quickly in price), methods of connecting the two become more necessary

You've all heard of the Radius Pivot and the PCPC Flipper in previous issues of TidBITS. Well, another monitor has arrived on the scene for those of you interested in modifying your view on the computer's world

If you have ever had to upgrade an entire office full of software, you know what a pain it can be. Some offices don't upgrade as often as possible because of the trouble involved in upgrading each computer relatively often

The ultimate horror for a desktop publisher using PageMaker 3.0 is the end of the year index for a series of newsletters. In most cases, embedded graphics and the design of the newsletter make it impossible to use a word processor to generate the index (if the original word processor can generate indices at all)

[Editors' Note: This information comes to you verbatim from Mitch Hall & Associates, the organizers of Macworld Expo.] SHOW DATES Wednesday, August 8 - Saturday, August 11, 1990 LOCATIONS Bayside Expo Center, 200 Mt

Higher education met the Mac several weeks ago at the fifth annual Apple-sponsored MacAdemia conference. Some 800 educators and Macintosh enthusiasts gathered in Rochester, New York (USA) to view a variety of Macintosh demonstrations with an emphasis on the Mac in education