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TidBITS#364/03-Feb-97

Is text dead? Not at all! In this issue, we look at Palimpsest, a tool for managing large volumes of text; CopyPaste, a multiple clipboard utility; and Natural Order, an extension that (finally!) sorts text and file names like a person would. Also in this issue, readers respond to the new crop of HTML editors, Speed Doubler gets an important update for Mac OS 7.6, Be stops making the BeBox, and Apple announces major internal changes, price cuts, and a Rhapsody kernel.

Geoff Duncan No comments

Apple Price Cuts

Apple Price Cuts -- Last week, Apple announced it had lowered dealer prices as much as 27 percent on a wide range of Macintoshes. The largest cuts appear in the mid-to-high end of Apple's desktop Power Macintosh line, with prices reduced as much as $1,000 on Power Mac 8500 and 9500 models; also, the high end of the Performa 6400-series has been discounted 15 to 18 percent, and Apple's Workgroup Server 7250 and 8550 series are discounted 7 to 13 percent

Geoff Duncan No comments

Apple Layoffs and Reorganization

Apple Layoffs and Reorganization -- It's been just over a year since Apple's last reorganization and major round of layoffs, but Apple is expected to announce another sweeping set of changes intended to further focus its business model and cut operating costs by 25 percent

Geoff Duncan No comments

Mach Speed

Mach Speed -- In a letter to developers last week, Apple's Chief Technology Officer Ellen Hancock announced that Apple has decided to use the Mach kernel as the foundation for Rhapsody, although no other details were given, including which version of Mach Apple plans to use

Geoff Duncan No comments

No More Be Hardware

No More Be Hardware -- Industry darling Be, Inc. announced last week it will stop making its own hardware line - the BeBox - and focus purely on developing the BeOS for PowerPC-based Macintosh computers

Adam Engst No comments

Rev Now Has Online Ordering

Rev Now Has Online Ordering -- The folks at 6prime wrote to say that they were inundated with orders for Rev after my review of their excellent revision control program in TidBITS-362

Tonya Engst No comments

HTMLbits: Following up on Free Placement

In TidBITS-362, I wrote about how several upcoming HTML editors use tables or Java to offer free placement of objects. Several readers responded with comments about problems with the Web pages those editors are likely to produce, and with thoughts about where this trend may take us. Bill Seitz noted: Lots of pages on the Web look stupid to me because I set my default font to Palatino 12 instead of the tiny and ugly Times 12

Adam Engst No comments

The Natural Order of Things

Here's a silly question. Are the digits between one and nine represented by a single character, or by a string of characters? In other words, when you type the number one in a filename, do you always prefix it with a zero? In all likelihood, a number of people are nodding their heads and thinking, "But of course I do that, otherwise files with numbers in the names don't sort right." We fought with this problem with TidBITS in our early years, because although I was clever enough to prefix my single digits with a zero to pad them into double-digit numbers, I never imagined that TidBITS would be around long enough to hit TidBITS-100, necessitating a mass renaming of the first 99 issues to include an additional leading zero to pad everything into triple-digit numbers

Matt Neuburg No comments

CopyPaste: A Scoffer No More

Today I found myself in one of those situations where I had to carry several separate pieces of information from one application to another. I was building (in Symantec Visual Page) a Web page composed of quotes extracted from Web pages (in Netscape Navigator)