We hope you've enjoyed this year's suggestions, and we'd like to close with a few that would make great gifts and would help support TidBITS at the same time.
TidBITS Staff -- Frankly, the main reason we can put out TidBITS each week is because the people we have working on TidBITS are truly exceptional. You can get by with a tiny staff only if each and every one of them is great, and I'd like to thank Geoff Duncan, Jeff Carlson, Matt Neuburg, and Mark Anbinder for all they've done for us over the years. Despite all of our hard work on TidBITS, some of us find the time to write books as well, and if those books sell well, it helps us devote more time to TidBITS.
Managing Editor Jeff Carlson has written a number of books for Peachpit Press, including the critically acclaimed "Palm III and PalmPilot Visual QuickStart Guide," which Jeff is in the process of revising right now. Jeff's most recent book, written with longtime TidBITS friend and contributor Glenn Fleishman with help from Neil Robertson and Agen Schmitz, is "Real World Adobe GoLive 4" - a seriously beefy book about Adobe's well-regarded Web authoring program. Jeff and Glenn are also running a moderated mailing list about Adobe GoLive.
<http://www.necoffee.com/palmpilot/>
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ ISBN=0201353903/tidbitselectro00A/>
<http://www.realworldgolive.com/>
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ ISBN=0201354748/tidbitselectro00A/>
Contributing Editor Matt Neuburg also has several books to his name, written for O'Reilly. Matt's book topics are oriented toward explaining programming tools and environments, and when Matt covers a subject, he covers it completely. If you use either Frontier or REALbasic, you should check out Matt's "Frontier: The Definitive Guide" or "REALbasic: The Definitive Guide."
<http://www.tidbits.com/matt/>
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ ISBN=1565923839/tidbitselectro00A/>
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ ISBN=1565926579/tidbitselectro00A/>
Technical Editor Geoff Duncan doesn't write computer books - something he points out gleefully whenever the rest of us face pressures from book deadlines. Instead, he's busy invading your living rooms. "Whenever you hear an obnoxious guitar line on television blatantly ripping off some music trend," he notes, "there's a greater-than-zero chance I played it - albeit not much greater than zero." He's also on a one-man crusade to eliminate every instance of the word "that" in TidBITS issues. "It's extraneous. Really."
Finally, although I've written numerous books over the years, my two current books are "Eudora 4.2 for Windows & Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide" for Peachpit Press, and the just-released "Crossing Platforms: A Macintosh/Windows Phrasebook," which I wrote with David Pogue for O'Reilly. The first is the most complete reference available for Eudora, and the second is a ground-breaking approach to learning to get around in Windows if you're a Macintosh user or learning to navigate the Mac OS if you're a Windows user.
<http://www.tidbits.com/eudora/>
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ ISBN=020135389X/tidbitselectro00A/>
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ ISBN=1565925394/tidbitselectro00A/>
TidBITS Contributors -- Words almost fail me when I look at the list of TidBITS contributors - people who have contributed directly to TidBITS. We're just over 400 contributors right now, 300 of whom are listed on the page, and you all have our sincere thanks for your support. If you've been thinking about contributing, that's great - everything remains as it was when we announced the program back in TidBITS-498, with the small exception that we added some details about contributions to our official privacy policy and linked it to the TidBITS Contributions page. As always, contributions are completely voluntary, and you can contribute as much or as little as you like.
<http://www.tidbits.com/about/support/ contributors.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/05565>
<http://www.tidbits.com/about/privacy.html>
TidBITS Sponsors -- Lastly, I'd like to thank our corporate sponsors, without whom TidBITS wouldn't be financially feasible. A few companies have come and gone, including Maxum Development, well known for Internet server software; Dantz Development, makers of Retrospect Express and Retrospect backup software (which has saved our bacon more times than we care to count); Microsoft, whose Internet Explorer is our Web browser of choice at the moment; Digital River, the company that runs the electronic software distribution for many of the Mac industry's well-known software firms; Trexar Technologies, a young company making a big splash in the Macintosh Internet software world; and 999software.com, retailers of lots of great Macintosh software (along with Windows software and videos) for $9.99.
<http://www.maxum.com/>
<http://www.dantz.com/>
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/>
<http://www.digitalriver.com/>
<http://www.macalive.com/>
<http://www.999mac.com/>
Equally as important are our current sponsors, some of whom have supported TidBITS for many years. APS has been with us for longer than we can remember, and has continued to sell storage devices and support TidBITS in their new role as a division of LaCie. Our friends at WinStar Northwest Nexus provide us with some Internet connectivity and host ftp.tidbits.com, which will soon move to a faster machine with a much larger hard disk. Small Dog Electronics continues to offer some of the best prices on new, demo, and refurbished hardware, and they now have iMacs, iBooks, and AirPort hardware in stock. As a retailer of almost all things Macintosh, Outpost.com has also been great to have in TidBITS, and we've taken advantage of their free shipping on more than one occasion. MacAcademy has been with us for most of 1999, offering numerous training courses, videos, and CD-ROMs for Macintosh software. Also appearing for almost all of 1999 was Farallon, which spun out of Netopia in 1998 to concentrate entirely on innovative Macintosh networking products like the in-home telephone wire network via HomeLINE and AirPort-compatible wireless networking via SkyLINE. Aladdin Systems, makers of the StuffIt family of compression programs, rejoins us as a sponsor after a several year hiatus, and until the next issue, we have the Mac Professional's Book Club offering a special membership deal to TidBITS readers.
<http://www.apstech.com/>
<http://www.nwnexus.com/>
<http://www.smalldog.com/>
<http://www.outpost.com/>
<http://www.macacademy.com/tidbits.html>
<http://www.farallon.com/tidbits/>
<http://www.aladdinsys.com/deluxe/ tidbitsoffer.html>
<http://www.enlist.com/cgi-bin/re/www_ BOOKSONLINE_com5>
We hope you've been happy with the products and services you've received from our sponsors, and if you haven't tried them, we'd encourage you to think of them the next time it's appropriate, whether for yourself or for a gift.