So much news, so little time. MBDF authors indicted, Microsoft apologizes, ACE crumbles, disk utilities appear from the woodwork, QuicKeys extended, strange behavior from Apple Canada, and a French product that will let a 140 or 170 act like a hard disk. Where will it all end? In a review of Peachpit’s "The Little Mac Word Book," that’s where. PS: What happens when you hit Cmd-S in Disk First Aid? There will be a quiz.
Alberto Ricci writes, "Pressing command-S while (or right before you click Start) Disk First Aid is scanning a disk brings up a progress window that explains what it's doing
In the good news department, a Tompkins County grand jury indicted the two Cornell sophomores arrested in March on suspicion of releasing the MBDF virus
Laurel Lammers of Microsoft Word Marketing writes in regard to our article "CompuBigotry" in TidBITS-122:
To Gann Matsuda and all others concerned about the Microsoft Word Speller:
Microsoft values diversity in its workforce and its customer base
We've just heard from Pythaeus that Apple Canada is not yet selling the PowerBook 170 configuration with 4 MB of RAM and an 80 MB drive (with or without the internal fax/data modem), which is the highest end PowerBook available from Apple
Compaq Computer recently dropped out of the Advanced Computing Environment Consortium (ACE), claiming essentially that it could make do just fine with Intel's P5, or 80586 chip, in its high-end PC servers and workstations
Just as many of us received our long-awaited upgrades to Norton 2.0, Central Point Software upped the ante with a version 2.0 of its MacTools utility package, adding a number of new and cool features as well as a completely new virus-checking module
When Apple unveiled the PowerBook line six months ago, it appeared that they had made an odd and inconsistent mistake. The PowerBook 100 (which was designed by Sony, remember) has the ability to act as an external hard drive for a desktop Mac, but the otherwise more capable 140 and 170 lack this useful feature
CE Software has been in the press quite a bit lately, and deservedly so. The latest piece of news out of West Des Moines, Iowa, is that CE has announced two new pieces in the QuicKeys product line, one of which will ship later this month.
QuicKeys is CE's macro product for the Macintosh, allowing users to customize and largely automate their work environment by assigning frequently-used or "menial" operations to one-or-two-keystroke commands
Microsoft's Word has a ton of options buried in its menus, though it can take patience to make these options show their heads and perform their tricks