With TidBITS turning 20, we asked many friends and colleagues about their history with our little newsletter. The number and quality of replies has been overwhelming, and we're thrilled to share them.

Mac OS X 10.0.3 Released -- Just days after the release of Mac OS X 10.0.2 (see "TenBITS/07-May-01" in TidBITS-579), Apple has offered an update to version 10.0.3

Those of you who have been around for a decade or so probably remember Easy View, Akif Eyler's free text browsing utility. Easy View understood a number of text formats, including the setext format that we use for the text edition of TidBITS, and provided a three-pane view into TidBITS

Easy View 2.6.1 -- Akif Eyler has released version 2.6.1 of his popular text viewing and cataloging application Easy View. In addition to being the pre-eminent application for viewing many digest and text file formats (including setext, the format in which TidBITS is distributed), Akif has added full AppleScript support and recordability, background searching, and command-click URLs (using Akif's Get URL BBEdit extension). ftp://mirror.aol.com/pub/info-mac/text/easy- view-261.hqx Using Easy View 2.6.1 with the Get URL extension, you can command-click URLs appearing in TidBITS or other files, including ftp, http, and gopher links, as well as the standardized file references appearing in the Info-Mac digest

I'm astonished. Two hundred issues is a lot, and I had no idea we would reach this mark, not because I ever planned to stop publishing TidBITS, but because I seldom think about the future in that respect

At Macworld Boston this past month, Akif Eyler's text-file browser Easy View won the 1993 MacUser Shareware Award for Text Tools, beating out Rich Siegel's excellent editor BBEdit and Mark Wall's DOCMaker

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

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

At first I thought of titling this "Info-Mac CD-ROM II: Economy Size," or even "Family Size" but I realized that those terms don't mean anything, and you only know that "Economy Size" is bigger if the bottle of ketchup so labeled is bigger than the one labeled merely "Super Big Bottle O' Ketchup." One way or another, the latest issue of the Info-Mac CD-ROM from Pacific HiTech is big, really big, and a lot bigger than the previous edition

With the help of several users, Akif Eyler tracked down and eradicated a bug with styles in Easy View 2.32 that had escaped detection throughout the beta test process

I recently uploaded Easy View 2.32, the latest version of Akif Eyler's free structured text file browser. Easy View recognizes the following formats: setext, including TidBITS Info-Mac, comp.sys.mac.programmer, or similar digests Mail collections: Internet, Navigator, Notebook, etc. Text with "simple" format Dictionaries Plain text However, there's nothing new in that list - I just wanted to grab the interest of people who haven't yet come out from under their rocks to try Easy View

Easy View response time -- Akif Eyler recently mentioned that email to his address in Turkey can take up to ten days to deliver, so if you have questions or comments about Easy View, don't worry if he doesn't reply immediately. Information from: Akif Eyler -- [email protected]

Akif Eyler recently released Easy View 2.22, a nice upgrade from version 2.1. Easy View 2.22 is a free program that indexes text files located in the same folder as the index document, and then allows you to browse and search through the set of files

Forget all the product introductions at Macworld Expo. Akif Eyler of Turkey has made my summer. Akif recently put the finishing touches on a program called Easy View 2.1 that can, among other things, facilitate the reading of setext files

The first issue of TidBITS is dated 16-Apr-90. I sit here, four years later, working on our 222nd issue, and think about all that has changed and all that has remained the same