<div id="popup_box_thanks" style="display:none" onClick="close_popup_thanks('popup_box_thanks', 'ts')"><br>Thanks for submitting your tip! All submissions are moderated by an editor before appearing online. We've reset the form so you can enter another tip. Or you can close the tip submission box. <div class="x_close" id="thanks_upper_right"><a href="javascript:void(0)" onmousedown="close_popup_thanks('popup_box_thanks', 'ts'); return true;">Close</a></div></div>
<div class="tbf_row"><div class="tbf_wide_extra_top not_bold">Please submit only technical tips that will help other TidBITS readers better use their Macs, iPhones, and related software and hardware. All product announcements should be sent to <a href="mailto:releases@tidbits.com">releases@tidbits.com</a>.</div></div>
<div class="tbf_left">URL</div><div class="tbf_right"><input type="text" value="" name="tip_link_url" tabindex="3"><span class="tip_description"><br>Enter the URL to a Web page that supports your tip.</span></div>
</div>
<div class="spacer"></div>
<div class="tbf_row">
<div class="tbf_left">Linked text</div><div class="tbf_right"><input type="text" value="" name="tip_link_label" tabindex="4"><span class="tip_description"><br>Enter the name of the page linked above.</span></div>
<div class="tbf_wide"><input type="submit" value="Preview Your Tip" name="preview_tip" onClick="fill_preview('tipbits_enclosure_preview', 'ts', this.form); return false;" tabindex="7"> <input type="submit" value="Send Us Your Tip!" name="submit_this_tip" onClick="handle_tip_submission('ts', '', this.form, 'tip'); return false;" tabindex="8"></div>
</div>
<div class="spacer"></div>
<div class="tbf_row">
<div class="tbf_wide"><span class="fine_print">When you submit a tip, you give us permission to use it. Read <a href="javascript:void(0)" onClick="generic_show_hide('tip_terms')">our terms</a> for more details. All submissions are reviewed before publication.</span></div>
<div class="tbf_wide"><span class="fine_print">Our terms: By submitting a tip, you agree to assign TidBITS Publishing Inc., a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual license to reproduce, publish, and distribute your tip in connection with the TidBITS Web site and associated products in any media. You agree that you created the content you submitted, and that you have the right to assign us this license. You give us permission to use your name, but your email address won't be publicly displayed or shared. We review all submissions before publication, and reserve the right to select which submissions we feel are appropriate for our readers and to edit those we publish.</span></div>
<div id="comment_thanks" style="display:none" onClick="close_popup_thanks('comment_thanks', 'comm')"><br>Thanks for submitting a comment! Please check your email for a link that, when clicked, will verify that you're a real person and cause your comment to appear immediately. <div class="x_close" id="comment_upper_right"><a href="javascript:void(0)" onmousedown="close_popup_thanks('comment_thanks', 'comm'); return true;">Close</a></div></div>
<div class="tbf_wide"><span class="fine_print">Our terms: We reserve the right to edit or delete any comment, so please post thoughtfully. We use your email address <i>only</i> to send you a one-time verification message confirming that you posted this comment. We also store your address to allow you to verify using other Web browsers in the future. For more info, see our <a href="http://db.tidbits.com/privacy.html">privacy policy</a>.</span></div>
<li><a href="/feeds/tidbits.rss" title="Subscribe via RSS" class="gettb">RSS <img src="/images/feed-icon-12x12.gif" width="12" height="12" border="0" class="nav_img" alt="Subscribe via RSS"></a></li>
<li><a href="http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=276986548" title="Subscribe to the podcast" class="gettb">Podcast <img src="/images/feed-icon-12x12_podcast.gif" width="12" height="12" border="0" class="nav_img" alt="Subscribe to the postcast"></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.twitter.com/TidBITS" title="Get Article Updates via Twitter" class="gettb">Twitter <img src="/images/feed_icon_12x12_twitter.png" width="12" height="12" border="0" class="nav_img" alt="Get Article Updates via Twitter"></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/TidBITS/195314925519" title="Go to the TidBITS Page at Facebook" class="gettb">Facebook <img src="/images/feed_icon_12x12_facebook.gif" width="12" height="12" border="0" class="nav_img" alt="Go to the TidBITS Page at Facebook"></a></li>
<li><a href="javascript:void(0)" title="Sections" class="tabhead" onClick="return showhide('articleslist')">Sections <span id="articleslist_triangle"><img src="/images/nav_triangle_open.gif" width="9" height="9" border="0" class="navtriangle" id="articleslist_tri_image" alt="Click to show or hide the contents of this section."></span></a></li>
<li><a href="javascript:void(0)" onClick="return showhide('stafflist')" title="Staff" class="tabhead">Staff <span id="stafflist_triangle"><img src="/images/nav_triangle_closed.gif" width="9" height="9" border="0" class="navtriangle" id="stafflist_tri_image" alt="Click to show or hide the contents of this section."></span></a></li>
<li><a href="javascript:void(0)" title="Issues" class="tabhead" onClick="return showhide('issuelist')">Weekly Issues <span id="issuelist_triangle"><img src="/images/nav_triangle_closed.gif" width="9" height="9" border="0" class="navtriangle" id="issuelist_tri_image" alt="Click to show or hide the contents of this section."></span></a></li>
<li><a href="javascript:void(0)" onClick="return showhide('abouttidbits')" title="About TidBITS" class="tabhead">About TidBITS <span id="abouttidbits_triangle"><img src="/images/nav_triangle_closed.gif" width="9" height="9" border="0" class="navtriangle" id="abouttidbits_tri_image" alt="Click to show or hide the contents of this section."></span></a></li>
<div class="center_top">Thoughtful, detailed coverage of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, plus the best-selling <a href="http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/?pt=TB-TAGLINE" style="color:yellow">Take Control</a> ebooks.</div>
<!-- begin centercolumn -->
<div id="centercolumn">
<!-- begin rightcolumn_container -->
<div id="rightcolumn_container">
<!-- begin rightcolumn -->
<!-- rightcolumn is embedded within centercolumn so featured text wraps around it -->
</div><!-- end tearoffbox_wide_container for watchlist items -->
<!-- begin tearoff box wide -->
<div class="tearoffbox_wide_container">
<div class="tearoffbox_wide_tips">
<div class="tip_display">
<div class="tips_sponsor_logo">
</div>
<h6>Sleep (and Lock) Your Screen</h6>
<p><p>When you are walking away from your computer, it's fairly common practice to start your screen saver and lock your screen. But did you know that there is a built-in keyboard shortcut in Mac OS X to sleep the screen?</p><p>Press Control-Shift-Eject and your monitor sleeps without engaging the screen saver.</p></p>
<p>Visit <a href="http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10350660&tstart=0">Apple Support Discussions</a></p>
</div>
<div class="tearoffbox_wide_bottom_tips">
<div style="padding-bottom:35px"><div class="tip_display" style="float:left"><p><br><a href="/tipbits/169">Link to this tip</a></p></div><div class="tip_display" style="float:right; width:150px">
<div class="tbf_wide_80" id="hc_rc_4260">To help us avoid automated posts and misuse of our site, please enter the words below.</div><div class="x_close_row" id="hc_upper_right2_4260"><a href="javascript:void(0)" onmousedown="HidePopupContent('hc_4260', 'hc', '4260'); return true;">Close</a></div>
<div class="featured_meta"><div class="meta_article">04 Oct 1999 | <a href="/article/5588?print_version=1">Print <span class="shift_up"><img src="/images/printer_icon.gif" alt="Printer-Friendly Version of This Article" border="0" width="9" height="10"></span></a></div></div>
<div id="article_box_4260"><P>I'm shocked that we've published 500 consecutive issues of TidBITS. Back when we started, I would never have predicted that TidBITS would have enjoyed such longevity. It's a testament to the Macintosh, Apple, and the Internet that we can still find sufficiently interesting topics to cover. Plus, the support you have all provided over the years and the positive response from hundreds of individuals to our TidBITS Contributions program has kept us enthused about continuing. This week, we're pleased to unveil a redesign of our home page aimed at exposing more of our content and adding a few cool new features like a weekly poll. Visit the new home page and follow along to learn what we did and why.</P><P><<A HREF="http://www.tidbits.com/">http://www.tidbits.com/</A>><BR><<A HREF="http://www.tidbits.com/about/support/contributors.html">http://www.tidbits.com/about/support/ contributors.html</A>></P><P><STRONG>Looking Back</STRONG> -- Although we haven't kept old versions of our Web site around after redesigns (even we're not that retentive), I decided to go back and read about our previous redesigns. In September of 1996, I wrote about our first redesign in "Rethinking a Web" and "Rethinking More of a Web" in <A HREF="http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-344.html">TidBITS-344</A> and <A HREF="http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-345.html">TidBITS-345</A>. That effort was also the first time we put conscious thought into how we wanted the site to work. Some of those initial design ideas remain to this day, although modified and updated for modern HTML capabilities like tables.</P><P><<A HREF="http://db.tidbits.com/article/00884">http://db.tidbits.com/article/00884</A>><BR><<A HREF="http://db.tidbits.com/article/00873">http://db.tidbits.com/article/00873</A>></P><P>October of 1997 brought another significant redesign, and in "Four Hundred Issues and a Dynamic Web Site" in <A HREF="http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-400.html">TidBITS-400</A>, we unveiled major changes to our entire site, including a new graphical logo, the GetBITS CGI that enabled us to provide permanent URLs to individual articles in our database, and a persistent left-side navigation bar. Our home page has retained that basic look for two years now, an eternity on the Web.</P><P><<A HREF="http://db.tidbits.com/article/04179">http://db.tidbits.com/article/04179</A>></P><P>We weren't sitting still during those two years, which brought the release of TidBITS Talk and its Web-based archive that I apparently suckered Geoff into creating (see "TidBITS Talk & the TidBITS Talk Archive" in <A HREF="http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-440.html">TidBITS-440</A>) along with a database overhaul that enabled articles to know about related articles and TidBITS Talk threads (see "Adding Context to TidBITS Searches" in <A HREF="http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-477.html">TidBITS-477</A>).</P><P><<A HREF="http://db.tidbits.com/article/05012">http://db.tidbits.com/article/05012</A>><BR><<A HREF="http://db.tidbits.com/article/05363">http://db.tidbits.com/article/05363</A>></P><P>Seems like a lot of Web work for an email publication, no? It's true that most people still read TidBITS in email, but we've always been open to alternate methods of distribution. It's not our business to dictate how you should read TidBITS, which is why we publish TidBITS via email, the Web, FTP, and an active channel using Microsoft's now-ignored Channel Definition Format. For those of you using Palm handheld devices, David Charlesworth <<A HREF="mailto:davec@additional.com">davec@additional.com</A>> has recently begun converting issues of TidBITS into the Palm DOC format, which you can read with the free AportisDoc Reader. David also has a page designed for users of AvantGo's HTML display service for the Palm devices - if you're interested in reading TidBITS instead of that 1982 issue of TIME Magazine at the doctor's office, check out David's welcome conversions.</P><P><<A HREF="http://db.tidbits.com/article/05051">http://db.tidbits.com/article/05051</A>><BR><<A HREF="http://www.additional.com/community/palm/">http://www.additional.com/community/palm/</A>><BR><<A HREF="http://www.aportis.com/">http://www.aportis.com/</A>><BR><<A HREF="http://www.avantgo.com/">http://www.avantgo.com/</A>></P><P><STRONG>Expose Yourself to Content</STRONG> -- Our primary design goal with this year's redesign was to increase the amount of timely content on our home page by leveraging the Web in ways that make sense for a publication. The Web works well for browsing and searching through archives, collecting bits of information into sets, and for dynamic data. On our new home page, we focus on these uses in several ways.</P><P>The new page design devotes a fair amount of space to the most important piece of work we do - the current issue of TidBITS. The new approach reorganizes information relating to each issue, starting at the top with the issue title, which links to the full issue in HTML format for those who wish to read our traditional "just the text" view of the issue on the Web. Below the issue title come the MailBITS and Articles headlines. You can scan them quickly and follow their links to the individual articles in our article database. We wanted to make it easy for people to read just the articles that interest them without paging through the rest of the issue. And if you prefer reading text to scanning headlines, the abstract of the issue appears next, describing what's inside in a more verbose fashion.</P><P>Throughout the week after an issue comes out, we publish short news bits that we've been calling "TidBITS Updates" on our Web site. We did this initially to bring some changing content to our home page to encourage people to visit more frequently. It's proven even more valuable to us as an encouragement to cover the most important events and product releases as they occur, rather than putting everything off until just before the full issue comes out. The new page design includes these updates on the top of the right-hand column in a section titled "Breaking News." Each news headline links to the appropriate section of another Web page that contains the full text of active new reports.</P><P>New to the home page is the bottom half of the right-hand column, titled "Dig Deeper in TidBITS Talk." TidBITS Talk is our moderated discussion list that raises additional details about topics raised in TidBITS. TidBITS Talk has proven itself one of the most useful Macintosh mailing lists, thanks to the knowledge, experience, and insight of the TidBITS Talk members, combined with the work we put in keeping discussions on topic and editing messages for relevant content. By displaying some active TidBITS Talk threads from our Web archive on our new home page, we hope that people who don't want to subscribe to yet another mailing list can still benefit from TidBITS Talk or jump into discussions that immediately interest them.</P><P>The contents of the right-hand column on the new page shift to accommodate different numbers of breaking news headlines and TidBITS Talk "threadlines." That column has eight slots, up to five of which can be filled by breaking news items. If there are fewer news headlines, you'll see more TidBITS Talk threadlines. And if there are more than five news headlines or more active TidBITS Talk threadlines than will fit in the remaining slots, you'll see "more..." links that display all current items.</P><P><STRONG>Polls and Quizzes</STRONG> -- Beneath our main content area, you can see the main addition to our home page - a weekly poll or quiz. Polls and quizzes are another example of appropriate use of the Web - managing them via email is at best messy. We decided to build poll functionality initially because it can be fun and because we occasionally wanted a way to poll our readership about some hot topic. (TidBITS Talk works well for lengthier opinions and discussions but isn't appropriate for simple opinion surveys.) Once we'd worked out the basics of a poll, we realized that the only difference between a poll question and a quiz question is that a quiz has a correct answer. Building in that addition was easy, and it lets us provide quizzes you can use to test your Macintosh or Internet knowledge.</P><P>Asking a poll or quiz question is the easy part. More interesting is the results page you see when you respond to the poll or quiz. The results page restates the question, provides a graph of the responses with both graphical bars, numeric percentages, and raw numbers for each answer, and provides links to TidBITS articles and TidBITS Talk threads that tell you more about the topic in question. We'll also have links to previous poll and quiz results.</P><P>I can barely wait to see the responses to some of the polls we have planned, and we're working on a wide range of quiz questions appropriate for Mac beginners all the way up to those who consider themselves Macintosh alpha geeks. We plan to announce each new question in TidBITS and report on the results of the previous week's question, but the only way to participate will be on our home page.</P><P><STRONG>Text Banners</STRONG> -- Although we've never included graphical ad banners on our home page (we did have them within NetBITS issues), we've long had what we informally call "the purple box" at the top of the home page, below the main logo. We use the purple box to alert visitors to interesting projects, events, or books by staff members, including things like our voluntary contribution program and SETI@home team. Our main frustration with the purple box has been that it's difficult to update, and as a result, we don't change it as often as we'd like.</P><P>We've come up with a slightly new use for the purple box that fits in with the difference between our sponsorship program and straight Web-based advertising. With the sponsorship program, we're careful about just who we work with because a sponsorship is associative - our reputation rubs off somewhat on our sponsors, and theirs on us. The new design for the purple box helps clarify that relationship by displaying a small icon from the sponsor next to their sponsorship text from the most recent issue. Since we encourage sponsors to offer special deals to TidBITS readers, we hope this redesign will also increase the utility of the sponsorship text for readers without the overhead (and annoyance) of traditional advertising banners.</P><P><STRONG>Looking Forward</STRONG> -- As is often the case with a large project, we came up with additional ideas and possibilities for the redesign that we ended up setting aside for lack of time. Since we're always looking for ways to improve TidBITS, that means we have more ideas to implement in the future. As always, if you have comments or suggestions, send them along. Who knows what we might end up with when <A HREF="http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-600.html">TidBITS-600</A> appears in another two years?</P><!-- Five Hundred Issues and a New Home Page Adam C. Engst --></div>
<!-- end article text -->
<!-- PayBITS -->
<p> </p><div class="sponsorbox">
<div class="sponsortext"><A HREF="http://www.smithmicro.com/tidbits"><IMG SRC="http://db.tidbits.com/images/badges/StuffItDeluxe2010.gif" ALT="" HEIGHT="50" WIDTH="50" BORDER="0" ALIGN="left"></A>StuffIt Deluxe 2011 has everything you need to backup, encrypt,<br />share, and compress all of your photos, audio and documents.<br />Compress it. Secure it. Send it. Try StuffIt Deluxe 2011 today!<br />Click here for a free 30-day trial: <<a href="http://stuffIt.com/tidbits/">http://stuffIt.com/tidbits/</a>></div>
