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<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>
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<h5>Author Biography</h5>
<p class="tearoffbox_text">Contributing Editor <a href="http://www.tidbits.com/matt/">Matt Neuburg</a> has been writing for TidBITS since 1991, concentrating on issues surrounding word processing, databases and text organization programs, scripting and innovative programming systems, and a variety of utilities. He has written some popular freeware programs, such as <a href="http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13636">MemoryStick</a> and <a href="http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/29015">NotLight</a>. He has created the online documentation for a number of applications, such as <a href="http://latenightsw.com/sd4/index.html">Script Debugger</a> and <a href="http://a-sharp.com/opal/">Opal</a>. He has written books about programming <a href="http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/frontier/">Frontier</a>, <a href="http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/realbasic2/">REALbasic</a>, and <a href="http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/applescpttdg2/">AppleScript</a>, and is the author of various <a href="http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/">Take Control</a> ebooks.</p><p class="tearoffbox_text_email"><span class="shift_down"><img src="/images/gettb_button_email.gif" height="12" width="12" border="0" alt="Send Email to Author"></span> <a href="javascript:void(0)" onClick="document.check_human_7.submit_type.value='email'; document.check_human_7.author_id.value='7'; ShowTipBox('hc_7', 'hc_recaptcha_7', 'cb_item_add')">Email the author</a></p>
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<h6>Avoid Long Hierarchical Menus</h6>
<p><p>If you right-click (or Control-click) on some item, such as a file in the Finder, and one of the sub-menus has <i>many</i> options (Open With is a frequent culprit), it may take several seconds to open, even on a fast machine, which is annoying if you did not actually want that sub-menu.</p><p>The trick is to not pull the cursor <i>through</i> the menu, but in a curve <i>around</i> it, so the cursor does not touch any menu items until lower on the list where you wanted to go.</p></p>
<a href="/article/6258"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('6258', 'show')">Speak the MacSpeech, I Pray You</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_6258" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_6258">With the release of its much-anticipated iListen dictation software, MacSpeech, Inc. has at long last fired a real salvo in its hitherto mostly verbal rivalry with IBM's ViaVoice</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 01 Jan 2001</div></div>
<a href="/article/6200"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('6200', 'show')">Tools We Use: TypeTamer Returns</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_6200" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_6200">Back in 1995, Tonya wrote about Impossible Software's font utility TypeTamer 1.0; the following year I bought a copy at Macworld Expo, and loved it. In 1998 I began to encounter some application conflicts, and as machines, systems, and applications advanced still further, I had to abandon it entirely</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 13 Nov 2000</div></div>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_6194" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_6194">It feels odd to start a review by referring to a past article, but quite simply, what I said in my review of Excel 98 still goes: Microsoft Excel, the mighty and venerable spreadsheet program, is completely mature, so it isn't surprising that, in the Office 2001 version, Microsoft has meddled with it very little</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Adam%20C.%20Engst">Adam C. Engst</a> and <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 06 Nov 2000</div></div>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_6173" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_6173">Entourage Followup -- A postscript to my review of Microsoft Entourage in TidBITS-550: Despite the congeniality of its organizational structure to my working style, I eventually found that, as I had feared, Entourage's speed was a show-stopper</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 30 Oct 2000</div></div>
<a href="/article/6179"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('6179', 'show')">Make the Connection with ConceptDraw</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_6179" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_6179">Sooner or later, you're going to want to draw a diagram. Of course, you may already know the importance of diagrams - perhaps because you have to chart team organization or workflow at the office</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 30 Oct 2000</div></div>
<a href="/article/6161"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('6161', 'show')">Microsoft Word 2001 Lumbers On</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_6161" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_6161">Microsoft Word is the cornerstone of Microsoft's Office suite, and the single Office application one is most likely to obtain separately. Spreadsheets are important, presentations are nice, but word processing remains the most common personal and business productivity task on computers, and Microsoft Word has established itself as the industry benchmark in word processing.Those of us who remember Word 4 or Word 5.1 know that Word was once straightforward, intuitive, and compact</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 23 Oct 2000</div></div>
<a href="/article/6139"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('6139', 'show')">Entourage: The Grand Tour</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_6139" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_6139">The name suggests you're a traveling nabob surrounded by fawning minions who smooth your path, handle details, wait upon you hand and foot, and keep adoring crowds at bay</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 09 Oct 2000</div></div>
<a href="/article/6090"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('6090', 'show')">Bossing Your Mac with PlainTalk</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_6090" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_6090">In TidBITS-544, I wrote about continuous speech recognition on the Mac using IBM's ViaVoice, which enables you to dictate sentences and have the computer type them</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 28 Aug 2000</div></div>
<a href="/article/6085"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('6085', 'show')">Talk Is Cheap - ViaVoice Enhanced Edition</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_6085" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_6085">[Note: I am indebted for technical assistance to my father, Ned Neuburg, who was on the ARPA steering committee in the 1970s; and to Erik Sea, IBM's Development Lead for ViaVoice/Mac, for answering some key queries.]Classic science fiction, by and large, has proven both myopic and optimistic when it comes to computers</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 21 Aug 2000</div></div>
<a href="/article/6069"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('6069', 'show')">Up, Up and Away with Starry Night Backyard</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_6069" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_6069">Since the dawn of time, people have sat outside at night, gazed up at the stars, and said: "What the heck do you suppose is going on up there?" They've also said: "Boy, my neck hurts</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 07 Aug 2000</div></div>
<a href="/article/6025"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('6025', 'show')">Inspiration 6 More Inspiring - To Kids</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_6025" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_6025">Inspiration Software recently shipped Inspiration 6; TidBITS readers may recall from my reviews of Inspiration 4 and 5 that this program is an outliner sporting a diagram view, where each item of the outline can be accompanied by a picture, and lines with arrows and labels can run from one item to another.For a complete list of the changes in version 6, consult the Inspiration Web site</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<a href="/article/5931"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('5931', 'show')">It's a Keeper (Idea Keeper, That Is)</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_5931" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_5931">Computers are marvelous at storage and retrieval of information, so why are some things so hard to keep track of? You probably know where you put the draft of your novel, or that letter to your congressman</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 08 May 2000</div></div>
<a href="/article/5881"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('5881', 'show')">Freedom of the Button Press - OneClick 2.0</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_5881" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_5881">In the struggle to return control of the computer to the user, macro utilities are indispensable. Such a utility acts as a ghostly simulacrum of a live user, choosing from menus, typing keys, and clicking the mouse; an assemblage of such actions can essentially script the unscriptable, driving any application to customize or automate frequent or repetitive tasks</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<a href="/article/5843"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('5843', 'show')">Tools that Never Died: DiskTop and DiskTracker</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_5843" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_5843">Back in the hoary days of System 6, the Finder badly needed help, and DiskTop was one of my favorite helpers. Over the years, DiskTop somehow fell off my radar screen, though I was dimly aware that CE Software had spun it off to the Prairie Group; and TidBITS hadn't reviewed it since 1994, when Stephen Camidge looked at DiskTop 4.5</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 13 Mar 2000</div></div>
<a href="/article/5837"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('5837', 'show')">Fontastic Voyage: Font Reserve 2.5</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_5837" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_5837">It's now more than three years since I first glimpsed Font Reserve in action. In the two years since I started using it (in version 1.0.1), I haven't been without it for a moment, and I still feel as I did then: "Now this is how font management on the Mac should work!" Font Reserve accepts fonts and, storing the originals, copies, or aliases, makes them selectively available to the system</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 06 Mar 2000</div></div>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_5822" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_5822">IBM Updates ViaVoice, Dragon Reneges -- IBM has posted a free 1.0.2 update to its ViaVoice continuous speech recognition software, correcting some annoying minor bugs such as problems with extra spaces, backtracking over errors, and training words with special characters</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 28 Feb 2000</div></div>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_5814" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_5814">For many years, FileMaker Pro has been one of my standard tools for storing and retrieving structured information: with FileMaker, it's easy to build yourself an address book or a guide to your music collection, and its thorough scriptability makes it splendid for exchanging data with other applications</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 21 Feb 2000</div></div>
<a href="/article/5801"onMouseOver="blurb_slide('5801', 'show')">Canvas 7 - Not Quite Heaven</a></h4>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_5801" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_5801">For the past six years, my relationship with Deneba and its combination draw/paint program Canvas has been something of a roller-coaster ride. With Canvas 3.5, I was contented: it was an excellent replacement for my old favorite SuperPaint, which was starting to show its age; and, Canvas's splendid import/export capabilities made it useful in many difficult situations</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 14 Feb 2000</div></div>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_5781" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_5781">Throughout my Classics career, the hardest part of scholarly writing was managing the bibliography. My thesis was particularly nightmarish. Like most humanities Ph.D</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 24 Jan 2000</div></div>
<div class="article_preview" id="blurb_5679" style="display:none"><div id="popup_inner_5679">UserLand Releases Frontier 6.1 -- UserLand's Web site management and scripting system Frontier 6.0 was described in TidBITS-476; version 6.1 adds many technical improvements, but its most significant innovation is Manila, UserLand's new content management system</div><!-- blurb inner --></div><!-- blurb outer -->
<div class="featured_meta"><a href="/index.cgi?tbcat=" class="category"></a> | by <a href="/author/Matt%20Neuburg">Matt Neuburg</a> | 06 Dec 1999</div></div>
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