Apple has hired Heidi Roizen, 37, as VP of Developer Relations. She's a developer herself, co-founder (with her brother) of T/Maker -- the Mountain View company that made it big in Mac/PC clip art, fonts, desktop publishing software, and children's CD ROMs. She has a Stanford MBA and was president of the Software Publishers Association for several years. "After running T/Maker for 13 years, I was ready to do something new." Roizen is . [DaveNet, 1/25/96. Also SJM, 1/26/96, 1C.] (T/Maker has been sold to a check-printing company, and will continue under marketer John Tompane. The corporation has about 100 employees.)

Dave Winer has put up source code for MacBird Runtime and a new manual for the Frontier scripting language on his website, . Code contributions from Mac hackers are welcome. [, DaveNet, 1/28/96.] (He and Guy Kawasaki are excited about having someone at Apple who understands and cares about independent developers. A renaissance is possible.)

Rumors have been flying about Apple possibly being sold to Sun for $4B. Cooperative ventures would make more sense for Sun, though. It's likely that Sun offered $23/share and Apple is insisting on at least the current market value of $33/share -- after having turned down IBM's offer of $40/share two years ago. Sony might bid higher than Sun, but there's really no reason for the company to be up for sale. Apple has twice the revenues of Sun, and great prospects. 10% market share isn't bad for a premium product, demand is ahead of supply, disappointment with Windows 95 is spreading, and Apple's bad quarter (or year, or two) is hardly unusual for high-tech companies. Mercedes had a much worse year, and it's not for sale.

A 4,000-person survey by Government Computer News (1/8/96) rated MacOS 7.5 above MS DOS and Windows alternatives in compatibility, power/speed, ease of use, memory use, installation, documentation, interface, CD ROM customization, and enhancements. Windows 95 was rated superior only in multitasking and price. [Chris Habig , MacWay, 1/16/96.] (Macs can transfer files in a background window while you get work done in another, but not all web browsers have implemented the capability. The chief advantage of preemptive multitasking is keeping a CPU running when one of its processes wedges. Anyway, Macs should have it in another year.)