The amount of upgrades that you can actually buy now is impressive. Nisus 3.0, which sports a full programming language for fancy text manipulation, is shipping. Paragon included most of the features I asked for, so if you have any suggestions, by all means, call them, they do listen. Ashton-Tate upgraded Full Impact to 2.0 and the program might have gotten its act together enough to seriously compete with Excel. About time.

The only impressive hardware upgrade I remember well was the new Bernoulli drives from Iomega. They are a bit more expensive than the Syquest mechanisms and are as reliable and crash-free as ever, but now they sport access times and transfer rates as fast as the Syquests. They look like a good backup medium if you can compress your hard disk into 44 megabytes.

Utility-wise, a number of popular programs hit the 2.0 and 3.0 mark. Salient Software's DiskDoubler is now at version 3.0, which marks its third upgrade since this spring. We're using it and like it a lot so far (in other words, it provided another 5 megabytes of space). After Dark 2.0 from Berkeley Systems is a significant upgrade and includes more modules (with Fish! from Tom and Ed's Bogus Software), sound capabilities, and the ability to show more than one module at once, either overlapping or in separate tiles. StuffIt Deluxe looks interesting, and although we didn't get a chance to look at it closely, it can do things like move files from archive to archive in a manner just like copying files in the Finder. Finally, Adobe's ATM 2.0 doesn't include any new features, unless you count doubled speed and better screen display quality.

Paragon Concepts -- 800/922-2993 -- 619/481-1477
Ashton-Tate -- 213/329-9989
Iomega -- 800/456-5522
Salient Software -- 800/326-0092 -- 415/852-9567
Berkeley Systems -- 415/540-5536
Aladdin Systems -- 408/685-9175
Adobe Systems -- 415/961-4400

Information from:
Adam C. Engst -- TidBITS Editor

Related articles:
MacWEEK -- 07-Aug-90, Vol. 4 #27, pg. 22
MacWEEK -- 14-Aug-90, Vol. 4 #28, pg. 5
MacWEEK -- 31-Jul-90, Vol. 4 #26, pg. 5