Back when I was going to Berkeley and the Web was just some research project at CERN, the way I kept up with Mac OS news was via Usenet. There were only a few comp.sys.mac.* newsgroups back then, one of which was comp.sys.mac.digest, which was very much like a repository for the daily mailing list digest of the InfoMac Mailing List. Lots of questions and answers, comments on various Mac topics, and a list of new files recently submitted to the InfoMac archive at Stanford. The new files were particularly interesting to me back then as I liked to download and try any new piece of software that came along. The InfoMac Digest is now only a sporadic endeavour, as lack of time and other sources of information have supplanted its usefulness. But it's still a great place to see what new shareware people are writing.

The other great source of Mac information was and still is TidBITS, which began as a HyperCard-based magazine and evolved into an email-based weekly periodical. Much more focused, as it only has 2-4 articles per issue, with a lot of articles written by Adam Engst, the editor and publisher. At least in the beginning, it was very much Adam's personal view of certain Mac happenings, along with weekly summaries of Apple news. Nowadays there are more writers and the web site is becoming a useful adjunct to the weekly news.

So those were the two big sources of Mac information on the Internet, before the web, at least for me. In print I had subscriptions to MacWorld and MacUser. Annoying thing was that I'd subscribe for 4 years to each, but due to whatever glitches, they'd accidentally chop off a year from my subscription. And I'm too passive to do anything about it. Anyway, once I got a job I was finally able to apply for and receive a complementary subscription to MacWeek. Although MacWorld and MacUser had good articles on new products, how to use your Mac, and some amount of news, MacWeek specialized in breaking news and rumors. It also had a distinct bias towards the graphic artist profession, those people making their living off of high end graphics or DTP programs.

Eventually, as I started using the Web, I found several sites with Mac news that were only a day old instead of a week old. One of the sites was Ric Ford's MacInTouch which was a more comprehensive version of his MacInTouch column in MacWeek. Back then it was a rather plain page, come to think of it, it's still a model for a spartan site that eschews graphics for news. I also visited the MacWeek (now rolled into Mac Central) site after I changed jobs and lost my MacWeek subscription. That had more regular news items compared with MacInTouch which is mostly notices of new programs and tidbits of information.

Based on those two sites, I branched off into other Mac news sites, discovering them when they were mentioned in MacInTouch or MacWeek. Mac OS Rumors (now defunct) started out as a good and bad rumors site, many times being a bit too hasty. But it has gotten more dependable, although less updated. Another rumors site, with better presentation and graphics, although even less often updated, is Apple Insider. The Macintosh News Network and Mac Central are both good all-around news sites that tend to report on most everything. MacNN seems to get the most tidbits submitted to it out of all the sites. The Mac Resource Page deals mostly with new programs and updaters, sometimes it has information not found in other sites.

Two sites which are slowly going down in my esteem are O'Grady's PowerPage, which became part of the Go2Mac portal. The portal is too slow and requires too many clicks to get to the information I want. Although it still has good, if a bit occassional, information specific to PowerBooks, iMacs, and Palm Organizers. The other site is MacKiDo, David Every's opinion site wherein he posts a lot of rebuttals and opinion pieces supporting the Mac OS and PowerPC architecture. He's been really busy the few months so the site isn't being updated, other than the quote of the day, which I use for my tag line in public posts.

So that's an overview of my Mac news sources. There are other out there that I've tried and dropped, and these are the ones that I still go to every day. If there was only one site to recommend then I'd have to pick MacNN as it has the most news items with lots of links to other news sites as warranted. I would still recommend MacWorld as a good magazine for beginners to the Mac OS, but I've heard good things for MacAddict.