Originally published at: A Farewell to Sharon Zardetto Aker, Doyenne of Mac Writers - TidBITS
It is with a heavy heart that I share the news that we Mac users will never again be graced with an article or book by Sharon Zardetto Aker, one of the earliest and most prolific tech writers in the Macintosh world.
Sharon started writing professionally about the Macintosh at its inception in 1984, with articles in the earliest issues of Macworld and the premiere issue of MacUser. She contributed to The Macintosh Bible for its second edition in 1989, served as the lead author/editor for the third edition in 1991, and reprised that role for the 1,000-page seventh edition in 1998. In between, she also wrote The Macintosh Companion: The Basics and Beyond, collaborated on two editions of The PowerBook Companion with her husband Rich Wolfson, edited The Macintosh Dictionary, and penned The Mac Almanac. Throughout the 2000s, she continued as a columnist for Mac magazines, ultimately writing nearly a thousand articles, including one in the final print issue of Macworld.
Although mentions of Sharon in TidBITS date back to when I first read The PowerBook Companion (see “Travels with Charley,” 16 November 1992), we began working together around 2006, when she wrote Take Control of Fonts in Mac OS X and its companion volume, Take Control of Font Problems in Mac OS X. She thrived as a Take Control author, writing books about Safari, iBooks, and Numbers, and contributing TidBITS articles on similar topics.
In other words, Sharon was the real deal. Now let me tell you what made her so special and why we appreciated her so much.
I’ve never met anyone as insatiably curious and communicative about software as Sharon. She didn’t just want to know how an app worked; she wanted to tell everyone about it. She couldn’t open an app without poking at every menu and every button, and then asking, “What happens if you hold down the Option key while…?” Sharon never met a keyboard shortcut she didn’t like, and she lived to unearth those that didn’t reveal themselves in the interface or the app’s manual. One of her greatest frustrations must have been word- and page-count restrictions because she always wanted to tell the reader more—she appreciated writing for TidBITS and Take Control in part because our online-only approach gave us more flexibility on length.
That style of comprehensive, exhaustive, almost obsessive documentation is largely a thing of the past, thanks to the frequency of software updates and the sheer amount of software available, though I still feel its tug occasionally. I may be projecting, but I think Sharon and I shared its underlying motivation: a desire to explain everything about a topic, to be the person who knew all and could be relied upon to answer any question. It’s about acquiring and sharing that knowledge, though there’s probably also some inherent egotism.
Beyond accuracy and exhaustiveness, Sharon cared deeply about aesthetics in the service of understanding. While most tech writers would take a screenshot of a window or dialog and slap it into their article, Sharon would run everything through Photoshop, cropping out unnecessary bits and combining multiple screenshots to illustrate her points. Zoom into this random spread from The Mac Almanac, with its composed screenshots and whimsical marginalia.
My praise for Sharon’s work isn’t just in retrospect. In “Heavyweight Book Bout” (27 March 1995), Tonya wrote:
Open the Mac Almanac, and right away you notice the slightly off-white pages, the unusual (though highly legible) fonts, the numerous fanciful graphics and sidebars, and the overall dreaminess of the design. The Mac Almanac rates as the most beautiful computer book I’ve ever seen.
…
The Almanac has personality, class, warmth, empathy, and technical depth. It’s well-organized and practical, but it would also make a wonderful gift. Mac Secrets and the Mac Bible are books most any TidBITS reader would enjoy, use, and get a lot out of, but the Almanac stands out as one of the best books I’ve ever had the pleasure of owning.
Tonya had no idea that she would later have the opportunity to work with Sharon. As the editor-in-chief of Take Control, Tonya collaborated with Sharon on numerous books over the course of a decade. While editing this piece, she commented that, to Sharon, there was always room for improvement: Sharon labored to ensure that her writing was casual and clear, and that her illustrations were useful and delightful. She knew how to nudge readers into considering slightly more complex workflows that would yield large productivity gains. She would want to be remembered as a writer who set the highest possible standards for accuracy and aesthetics, and who showed the rest of us how to get the most out of our Macs.
It’s also important to remember that Sharon was a woman in a male-dominated field. The 1980s were a time when a woman’s name on a magazine masthead or tech book was highly unusual. When Sharon first met the editor of MacUser at a show in New York City several months after the magazine’s 1985 debut, he ignored her extended hand, reached into his breast pocket for a camera—film, of course—and took a flash picture of her in the crowded room, saying, “This is to prove to the people back in California that you are not a man.” She wasn’t entirely alone. There was Caroline Rose, who was notable for her role as the principal tech writer behind Apple’s Inside Macintosh documentation (and who later edited Take Control books for us). Slightly later, Robin Williams wrote The Little Mac Book. In what may be a comment on the female approach to the tech world, both Sharon and Robin helped start Macintosh user groups—the New Jersey Mac User Group for Sharon (co-founded with Rich) and the Santa Fe Mac User Group for Robin. We are appreciative.
Another thing to know about Sharon is that she accomplished much of what she did while dealing with constant pain and disability. She was one of those matter-of-fact people who wasn’t shy about sharing what she was going through—often with excruciating details and amusing anecdotes—but as an explanation, not an excuse or a play for sympathy. Even before we started working with her, she had undergone vertebral fusions, and she once shared an astonishing photo of her hands filled with just some of the stainless steel hardware the surgeon removed from her spine when replacing it with titanium. In 2010, she was further seriously injured when a car, driven by an 82-year-old diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, crashed into her, causing headaches that would plague her for the rest of her life. (In a 2013 email in response to her revelation about the cause of the headaches, I wrote: “I for one firmly believe that spinal fluid should not leak. Ever. Anywhere.”)
Because of her pain, difficulty sleeping, and inability to sit upright for long, nearly all her writing for us took place in fits and spurts while in bed. Where she had once been one of the faster writers in the Mac technosphere, she appreciated that we could be highly flexible on deadlines. By this time, we were also close friends, though we met in person infrequently and visited her home in New Jersey only once. As the pandemic dragged on, her migraines and vision problems made writing such a superhuman effort that she would propose articles she could never finish—her last TidBITS article was the excellent “Charts in Apple’s Numbers Spreadsheet: Which One When?” (14 October 2021). Her mind was still full of things she wanted to share, even when her body wouldn’t cooperate.
Eventually, the cumulative difficulties became overwhelming, and she began a decline that led to her death last week on 26 April 2025. Rich had been keeping us apprised, and he asked us to share the announcement with the Macintosh community of which she had been a significant part for so many years. Of course we agreed.
Goodbye, Sharon. Your work made a difference in the lives of untold Mac users, and you will be missed.
