I know a guy who won’t trust a review unless the person has had the product for at least three months, and preferably a year. The reason is simple: a lot of people are in this “new toy” mentality when they have only had the product for a few hours/days/weeks.
But what happens a few weeks down the line:. Are they still backing up with Time Machine?. Did you turn off Cover Flow because it uses too much screen space?.
Were you lynched for using templates in Mail?. Are you only using one Space regularly?. Did you revert to Firefox because Safari’s new features didn’t make up for the lack of extensions? I mean, if I picked up the new cat, I would be using all of those things (except templates in Mail) for the first few days. But after that, probably not. Heck, I have only used Expose a handful of times after those first few weeks with 10.3. Ars Technica will probably write the only review worth waiting for.
Their review of Tiger was excellent and offered interesting technical insights into the inner workings of Mac OS X and its history contrary to superficial stuff like this blog entry. While theirs will certainly be valuable, and without trying to sound like a “kiss-up”, I’m certainly looking forward to comments on it from OSNews staff. Between arsTechnica’s review + your viewpoints, I always feel like I have a better overall picture. I couldn’t disagree with you more here.
I have never owned a Mac, but I’m seriously considering it, and I basically read every Mac related review out there. Frankly I couldn’t care less if he’s been using it for 20 minutes, if there’s a chance I’ll learn something new about the OS, it’s worth a read. Anyway, so a review like this won’t tell you about important things like reliability, but I know that when I first loaded up Vista, I hated it.
A few months later: I still hate it. That information might have been helpful to someone about to fork out $400+. I beg to differ. Readers expectation in journalists are actually much higher than the value of the usual ‘first day review’ (in most cases a recap of the marketing material found on the vendor’s site). However most journalist only deliver such reviews. Even if they got big amounts of page hits due to the “novelty-factor”, their long-term impact is very limited – their “reviews” are forgotten soon and are hence irrelevant. Journalist that don’t just go for one day value “hype themes” but deliver real value to the reader will not be forgotten and can grow an audience.
Best example: John Siracusas and his former Mac OS X reviews (e. ) which are famous for being thorough and insightful. They never appeared the same day a new MacOS appeared but they are still remembered whereas a “review” such as the one linked will be forgotten tomorrow. Which one would you prefer? Timeliness is important, but I also think that timeliness is more often than not abused by many journalists (and I understand this because I worked with journalists prior to getting into IT), where it is more important to “get the story first” than it is to print something worth reading. I cannot speak for anyone else but myself, but I would much rather wait 30 to 60 days and read what someone who has taken the time to actually use the OS/hardware/software and evaluate its features rather than write a piece that is nothing more than a blog entry or an extension of the “new features” sheet from the marketing department.
The story will have value, it just won’t have the immediacy that journalists and advertisers want, and I think in many cases that immediacy is overhyped. How many stories have we read on this site (amongst others) that are light on the facts, obscure relevant details, or just ignore the truth just to get something “out the door”, and later when the facts or the other side of the story comes out, the original story usually turns out to be a waste of time to read. Just as journalists are expected to report information in a timely fashion, it is also part of their responsibility to weigh the pros and cons of each piece they intend to publish. Not everything needs to be published immediately. Some of the material I read (long term studies and various research articles) take months or years to write, I think waiting 30 days for an OS or application review is reasonable.
If I ran a site like OSNews I would much rather be characterized as being “late out of the gate” but having insightful, serious content worthy of the limited time many people have to read than to be like everybody else and publish anything that comes across the desk because it meets the time frame and an expected interest level. I am sure that advertisers and some of the readers might not like waiting, but if the end result is worth the wait why not? I really don’t think most of the readers would mind that much.
The point being that you do not have any information after one day. Maybe one month is also a bit of an exaggeration. Tempering with it for a week would have allowed you to have a better look at it than just boot it up and take a screen shot, merely for the sake of being first. Also, “journalists” get preview samples while bloggers don’t. Those who do can be first with a proper review on day one, I’ve seen it happening. However, I don’t know whether Apple graced any writers with a preview sample in this case.
We are interested in the the meat, not the head-line alone. You could have called it anything you wanted but it says “review”. It is a first look at 10.5, a day’s look. This is not the most terrible thing, but if you dilute your news items like that, I might not click your real reviews anymore if I don’t expect there to be any. That is also not so good for your advertisers.
Your question is not rude at all. I enjoy working with older apps to name a few: Acta, More, Clockwork, WordPerfect, my Epson printer, FullWrite, Loki, Netscape 4.8 (for sentimental reasons and boy is it fast) and Outlook Express (prefer it to Mail). Remember, just because an OS is newer does not mean it is better in all areas. Heck, I still use a 22″ Diamond Pro CRT monitor because it is vastly superior to newer LCDs. THe reason I thought it might have sounded rude was the abrupt nature in which I asked the question. I can understand about CRT vs.
LCD; the issue of washed out colour still exists in LCD. The move to LCD’s in the main wasn’t the result of ‘better technology’ but because it made computers more ascetically pleasing. IIRC there was actually a company, I think it was Samsung, who put out a CRT but it was significantly slimmer than a standard CRT, almost that of LCD. As for the rest, time to move on; there are replacements out there. Pages is a great alternative to Word, but then again, Office 2008 might prove my ‘Microsoft scepticism’ wrong. The issues you’re having sound more like personal preference rather than hardcore reliance on something because there are no alternatives in that given area.
As for the rest, time to move on; there are replacements out there. Pages is a great alternative to Word, but then again, Office 2008 might prove my ‘Microsoft scepticism’ wrong. The issues you’re having sound more like personal preference rather than hardcore reliance on something because there are no alternatives in that given area. I can’t agree with your “Time to move on” philosophy.
If something works for me in Tiger and Leopard takes that away while adding virtually nothing then why “move on. ” I don’t see any compelling reason to downgrade to Leopard.
As for Pages, I tried it during the trial it was OK but why spend $$ when what I have already works. As for MS Office, I will never buy it as I loathe it and NeoOffice renders it irrelevant. Edited 2007-10-29 03:00. In my opinion, the review gave a good overview about visible features and those that may be new to Mac OS X 10.4 users. The review does not touch much of the OS features, you can see this from the chapter headings.
It’s very short sighted (read: it does not concern long time aspects). Regarding the cons the author mentioned: The default wallpaper is fugly. And changing the wallpaper is a lot of hard work, I know, you have to re-wire the bytes in memory by hand.
? To get serious again, I cannot imagine that a default wallpaper does say anything about an OS’s quality. And just because the author does not like it, it does not have any impact on this great OS. Changing wallpapers and default colours are things many users do first after install Live preview with “Spaces” on the dock would have been nice. Money floating out of the DVD drive would have been nice, too, but you can’t have everything.
? iPhoto is not included. Has it been included in prior MAC OS X versions, or did Apple announce iPhoto to be included with Leopard? Regarding a pro: “Time Machine” makes data back-ups fun (whooaa).
I really like this feature. I hope Leopard users will dp, too.
This is when standard system administration and maintenance tasks perform entertainment purposes. Quickly opening a preview of your app in the file manager without opening the associated application? That sounds a lot like Quick View, a somewhat half baked feature in Windows 95/98 which was later abandoned like Microsoft.
Let’s hope the OS X implementation fares better. Like a lot of OSX features its not original, but the first time it’s been implemented in a good user-friendly way.
That’s the whole Apple strength: taking what you thought were half-baked ideas and turning them into cool applications. I lost interest with this statement. I’ve got two systems on my desk. OS X 10.4.10 and Debian Sid/Experimental. I spend more time in Linux and have for the past 5 years. When I get the Mac Pro that will balance out. The reason I spend more time in front of Linux is Tiger runs on my iBook and the workstation with the large screen is a custom built PC running Linux.
The Mac Pro purchase and dual 22 in monitors with XCode 3 will flip my time. For ease of integration, connectivity, and more there is no way in hell I’d say Ubuntu/Debian ever ran ahead of Tiger, let alone Leopard runs neck and neck with Gibbon. I build KDE SVN and it’s got a lot of polish to go. GNOME 2.20 has made strides. Neither touch Leopard. Both I use and enjoy.
The entire article for such a Linux poster spoke nothing about the deep technologies inside Leopard. “Is Leopard worth the $149 upgrade charge?” No.
It’s worth the $129 upgrade. I’m dealing with Xorg 1.4 Server latest and Intel 950 leaking and after several hours of idle jump from 200 – 300 MB to nearly 1gig of RAM and CPU throttling around 98% on a Dual Core. Restart X to get the environment working in KDE 3.5.8 is not something I would call, stable. Hopefully the next Intel driver from Keith Packard addresses this issue seeing as how the prior release behaved itself I’m expecting some regressions from master into 1.4.1. The mouse on X randomly shooting to upper left, right or lower left, right after select left mouse click or just after selecting a window key/order front to then type keyboard input and soon watching the window become no longer key and the mouse off to a corner is not something I consider polished.
This bug has been an issue for several Xorg revisions. It gets “better” with each release, but nothing like this occurs in OS X WindowServer/Quartz interaction. When Xorg includes the new Mac keyboard I’ll hopefully no longer get spurious missing key code events in my kdm.log/gdm.log. It works minus the “special keys” for the most part. Caps lock (led illumination broke with the upgrade of Xorg 1.3 to 1.4).
I dig that FOSS has people contributing and by that gets them visibility and future high paying jobs (most of the Xorg folks are sitting on well paying careers leveraging their FOSS backgrounds). Having worked at NeXT and Apple I can tell you the resources to address such were never large. The teams, by design, are small but the level of expertise is both wide and deep. Both communities have a lot of talent. Equal footing on a finished product isn’t one of them. Apple leads in this area and that is what we all expect. When they falter they get stoned in the press.
When Linux succeeds people look shocked as they expect them to falter. I’m glad both are slowly eroding Windows. What would you base the comparison on? For me, Ubuntu is completely useless; I need Creative Suite, I need the ability (if I choose) to run Microsoft Office.
Want all my hardware to be supported without concerns. Comparison based reviews are based on a personal set of circumstances. What might be requirements for me, for another person, completely irrelevant. Take the above situation with me, an other person might not need creative suite, they might not even own an iPod and their hardware is supported by virtue of it being pre-loaded onto the machine. Like I keep saying, I don’t want one to win, I want all to win; I want a marketplace where Linux,.BSD, Solaris, Windows, MacOS X and the likes all work in harmony with each other. Through diversity it will force the different operating systems to play nice with each other.
I want to be able to say, “I run MacOS X” and a variety of other voices pop up, and we can share out data with each other, not worrying about compatibility issues; That is the issue at hand. Hence the reason I keep raising the ‘rage against the machine’ – there is this idea that for one to succeed, something else must die. All can succeed – and it doesn’t necessarily have to be at the expense of each other. I’ve never experienced these kinds of instabilities on Linux. Have had some problems installing or upgrading some distros, but never anything like tyrione’s report of actual usage on either of the two machines I have using Debian Testing. The usual problem is with the applications not the OS, and the problem isn’t instability, its being able to use them reasonably easily for more than basic use.
Compare Base and Filemaker. Or macros in Calc versus MS Office. Or mailmerge in Writer.
It can usually be done, but its more work, sometimes a lot more, and often its not at all intuitive. On the basic OS however, I have been very critical of Mandriva in the past, but just did an installation of One KDE for someone, and it was great. Went in from just one CD flawlessly. Completely stable, reasonably fast, very easy to administer, looks nice. Why, you wondered, do we need Leopard, when we have this?
Well, maybe we don’t. Especially not when it will involve replacing one perfectly good Core2 machine with another similarly specified one for no other reason than it has the wrong label on the front. So I have installed Leopard and I haven’t gotten into using timemachine yet, I’ve been testing my apps to make sure they work. My firt impression of the UI is that the simplicity that they have built in older versions has been completely thrown out of the window.
There seems to be a lot of stuff going on on at the same time, I dare say a bit too much. I liked the more simple less cluttered look of tiger. At this point my MBP is is indexing, and its good thing I realized that or I would complain about the speed and low framerate of the UI. I don’t mind the 3d dock, its nice for what it is, though I think I like the older one better. I think it was clearer to see what was open and to see launchers. I do like it so far though.
Why rain on the man’s parade. He didn’t say it he thought everyone should be using Ubuntu and that it was the best. He said that he liked Ubuntu and thought that OSX compared favorably to it. I happen to be a Linux user and an Ubuntu user at that and when it comes to speed ubuntu still kicks OSX’s ass all over the place on SLOWER hardware. I know because I happen to have an MBP with OSX 10.5 running right now and it can still be sluggish though its a noticeably faster than with tiger. Some people happen to like Ubuntu and the fact that it has a growing userbase and is gaining popularity might actually count for something, but when people want to troll, they could give a rats ass about what’s in front of their face.
I’m not saying Ubuntu is better than OSX, but considering that almost all the work is done by volunteers and the community, the fact that it can come close is an amazing achievement, imo. The fact that not even a year ago compiz was nothing more than a pet project and can now hold its own against the big boys, is an achievement.
What the OSS community lacks is polish, namely because polish is hard and boring, and the OSS community’s motto is scratch your own itch. Ubuntu works on far more hardware than OSX does and that is a fact, it even works on more hardware than windows does out of the box, and most of this work was done through community contributions. I am on a private list server of Mac users and they `ARE` having problems with Leopard. Not with the operating system or its feature set but with set up. Most non-tech people, which is 95 percent of the computer using population, have no idea how to perform a simple back up. Instead of being a BOFH I simply help by giving them advice.
I believe Apple’s back up program will help visual and non technical people with things like Time Machine and Spaces. I still make plenty of extra cash helping Windows users out and managing the remaining Windows servers at work. Life goes on even after a new OS arrives. Edited 2007-10-27 13:46. So far ive been very impressed after a days usage. I think the network browsing and searching is fantastic, it was always a bugbear to have finder hang for a couple of mins waiting for the network drives to disconnect. Access through finder is just so easy now.
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Love time machine excellent idea, glad it can share space with exisiting files, as i was a little worried i might have to reformat my external drive in a special time machine accessible format only. Leopard seems a little faster on my macbook and about the same on my powerbook (1.67GHZ, 1GB RAM). Mail, Calendar and Address book seemed to have grown up now and i can now be used to help me organise in a much better way (notes and reminders in mail, etc.) The consistent look across all apps is very welcome. Overall well worth the price for upgrade and looking forward to finding the other small things which bring a smile to my face and help me use my computer better. Isn’t that the case of the general majority of Windows 2000/XP BSODs as well?
Not trying to seem like a fanboy or anything, because I love operating systems in general. I just think the whole Steve Jobs attacking Microsoft is getting pretty childish. There’s a major difference. APE is actually modifying components of the operating itself to basically “hack” applications into the memory space of another.
Windows drivers, etc. That caused BSODs and so forth can often do so using the official API provided to them and even when they’re doing everything “correctly.” Windows Vista is significantly better about this I will readily agree.
For the record, I don’t own a Mac (yet) myself; the last Apple computer I owned was an Apple //C+. I spend most of my time running Solaris. IMac intel core Duo: update without a glitch. IMac appears to be more stable.
Powerbook 15″: clean install, procedure as advertised. Powerbook feels faster, interface is less sticky. Powerbook 17″: upgrade install. Leopard refused to upgrade.
Ran a hardware check (as advised) and harddisk appeared to be in bad shap (after almost 5 years of intensive use). Mac OS X repairset couldn’t help me here, but Diskwarrior could and fixed the problem.
Time to get the data off and replace this machine. Now on with the rest of the fleet: G5’s and some intel portables.
An anonymous reader sends a pointer to Erik Schwiebert's blog — he's the design lead of Microsoft's Mac Business Unit — where he announces that. Not in Office 2008, which started shipping earlier this year.
We discussed the announced in Mac Office 17 months back. Schwiebert says that the interval to the next version of Mac Office will be shorter than 4 years but isn't able to offer any more detail. The blog post calls for feedback on what features of VBA and Windows interoperability are most important to people. The movement times of things from Microsoft seem to be monumentally slow, and even after taking so long, there's nothing to show for it. Years between XP and Vista.
They didn't really add many true features, and a large proportion of people would rather be running XP. Compare that with Linux Distros, where a new release happens every 6 months. New features are incorporated as they come available, and things can be changed incrementally, because of the frequent releases. My Mandriva box probably has changed quite a bit more than XP to Vista did in the same time frame, but it hasn't been quite as painful because it has been so incremental. Also, I bet they could sell a lot more retail boxes, and make a lot more money if they released every 6 months and charged $30-$40 for each release, rather than release every 5 years, and have nobody buy retail and everybody just get the $50 OEM license.
Even if they only get 2 upgrades over the 5 years, they are still pulling in more money than they would only selling OEM licenses. I am sorry I don't see Linux Dwarfing Windows. Linux is an excelent Server OS but it really is sub-par for desktop use, even the mighty Ubentu holds on to the old way of doing things and doesn't offer any real competitive advantage over Mac and Windows to really get a majoirity to switch unless they need a new version and scrap for cash.
I am talking about the average computer user. They really don't care what OS they run, if they have 98% uptime vs. 99.9999% doesn't bother them.
All they want to do is pl. That's ok, they don't actually have to port it anyway - the Mono project has already done that for them.
I'm not convinced that.Net is the right tool for most users anyway If you've got an inhouse development team, or money to contract some development out, then using a real development environment makes a lot of sense, and the.Net interface allows some pretty powerful features to be added to Office. Your average Excel user doesn't want to sit down and learn a new language though, they just want their spread. Why they didn't write one portable VBA engine for Windows and Mac I don't know. Probably because VBA was introduced around 1993, the same year the first Pentium (running at 60MHz) was introduced. The typical machine had a 486DX2 running a single instruction pipeline at 33MHz, and maybe 16-24MB of RAM.
Oh, yes, and Windows 3.1, which is 16 bit and has all its 16 bit glory. Still, C code can be reasonably close to assembler in efficiency, especially if you profile and use assembler only in tight loops. It shouldn't be that hard on modern systems to cross compile to C against some kind of simple virtual machine. I'm guessing that the code probably makes a lot of direct Windows API calls without any framework or abstraction.
This probably means that collectively the VBA code for MacOS and Windows is significantly larger than for Windows alone. If this is true Microsoft would have to port a lot of the Windows API to MacOS (nobody is better positioned to do this), or they have to do a rather massive refactoring. Since porting the API is undesirable for other reasons, and refactoring is desirable for others, I'm guessing they're planning on cleaning things up enough to make a Mac port viable. I think the VBA engine is somewhat tightly tied to the win32 API and system DLLs. Most likely having a single engine would have been a complete mess as its a 'middle layer' component, and has to interface the system and office beneath it and the window manager above it. Sometimes it's easier to just branch the code base than try to maintain too many interfaces and libraries with their own edge cases and corner cases. What would they do if two obscure bugs intersected such that the semantics of fixing on.
Why they didn't write one portable VBA engine for Windows and Mac I don't know. From what little I know, it seems like the team that develops Office for Windows and the team that develops Office for Mac are entirely separate, and don't work together. So the Mac team looks at the Windows version and ports over what features they can, but the Windows people don't do anything to make that process easy. So as a result, you don't get real Exchange support in Entourage, and you don't get VB support.
It's also worth noting that the Mac team is either under-resourced or mentally retarded. As mentioned in the original blog, and in the comments of this blog, the VBA support was cut because the VBA engine in Office 2004 was very specifically designed to operate on the PowerPC architecture.
The engine would have to be rewritten to run on Intel on a Macintosh and that was not something that could be accomplished in their schedule. So they would have to either delay Office 2008, make it PowerPC only and run under Rosetta or cut VBA from this release and review it again at a later date. I'm more concerned that they are going to continue it at all.
It's pretty significant that they are going to continue Office on the Mac. It's REALLY significant that they are doing this after pronouncing Mac Office dead. I think what this means is that they are more open to the idea that they are losing the desktop and probably won't be able to do much about it. But they are really worried that the same might happen with Office. If a small number of significant companies start using non-Microsoft applica.
I write VBA routines all the time at work. To an engineer they're invaluable. One of our data acquisition boxes always outputs a fubar CSV style file.
I have a script in my personal.xls file that anytime I open one of these files I run this script and it does 10 minutes of cleanup in 10 seconds. I know that some people write entire programs in Excel but I'd wager that 90% of VBA programs are something written by an engineer or other technical person to make their life easier. And yes, I know about Matlab. Problem is not everyone has a $10k seat. Everyone has Excel. I'd never publish my code to anyone but as far as making my job easier, you're damn straight I love VBA.
That is just so cool. I'm absolutely dying to help my customers by creating cross-platform applications in VBA.coughs.
I've heard someone tell me once to never buy stock in a company that uses shared Excel files and VBA for their main accounting due to the fact it tends to often grow gross inaccuracies over time due to sloppy user work and lack of auditing actually cooks their books without anyone really knowing about it. Of course he was the person maintaining the VBA code so he might have been biased. keeps them on the upgrade treadmill forever. No it does not. Last time I looked previous versions of office still worked as good as they did back then.
You can argue the same for using any software, but it really does not force people into an upgrade cycle. I think it's more a human obsession that people feel inadequate without the latest version of something. I often talk to people about updating software and they cannot give any good reason for doing it or any benefits they think it will bring. No it does not. Last time I looked previous versions of office still worked as good as they did back then.until you can't buy a new copy of it any more. What are you going to do when your precious VBA scripts which are company-wide and need to be on every user's computer don't run on the new version, and you can't buy more of the old version? Your choices are 1) throw them away or 2) software piracy (even if you buy the new version that doesn't legally entitle you to the old version, which means you're vulnerable to BSA blackmail) (Why would someone deploy their scripts that way?
Because it's more enterpri. Last time I looked previous versions of office still worked as good as they did back then. Indeed they do, and most of the world would be quite happy running Office 97.
They won't sell it to you, though. For new computers, you can just use your old copy until you can't buy XP anymore (I don't think it plays nice with Vista).
But if you need a new license for a new hire, you have to buy at least Office 2003. To be fair to Microsoft here, I'm not aware of any major Open Source applications that are kept up-to-date but stable feature-wise from 1997.:). That seems 'stable feature-wise' to me.
It's Coming: Mac Bu Announces Intent To Deliver Office 2008 For Mac Mac
It upgrades your settings, tries to prevent destruction due to new features, but the new changes obviously aren't backwards compatible when you run the old version again. It still seems to me to fit that idea. The prefs file format is generally the same, and even with this change, you could still continue to use the older versions with the same pref file, you would still get the same behavior from the old version even after you ran the new version. Not all, but some. Most of the stuff built with these things are small utility applications for specific departmental uses.
It's Coming: Mac Bu Announces Intent To Deliver Office 2008 For Mac Download
The beancounters know what they're doing, i.e. A book on Excel and VBA for Joey down in the warehouse so he can automate his inventory sheets to print in location order so his job is easier vs. A department of expensive CS majors bitching about doing 'crap work' like this doesn't take much to see where the value to the stockholders is.
The right tool for the right job, not everything needs. Wasn't it just a few weeks ago that the OpenOffice 3 announcements were made, including partial VBA support for the Mac version? Microsoft seem to be happy to drop VBA support from the Mac version to try to persuade people who rely on it to switch to Windows, but to add it back when that reason no longer applies, so as not to lose marketshare to the reason that it no longer applies. (And yes, there were other office suites that could do that beforehand, but businesses are at least likely to have heard of OpenOffice.org/StarOffice.). Out of curiousity, have you (or has anyone) actually seen.any.
version of OpenOffice that will open and run spreadsheets with VBA? I keep hearing vague claims about VBA compatibility (what the heck is 'partial VBA support'??), but every version of OO I've tried (including 3.0 beta for Windows) chokes on my VBA spreadsheets. I was able to port these spreadsheets to Starbasic leaving 90% of the code unchanged (and with a.lot. of help from the forums at Openoffice.org). But I have yet to see any reasonable o.
The blog post calls for feedback on what features of VBA and Windows interoperability are most important to people. One of the things I dislike about MS products is bloat. Features I don't need only serve to get in my way and waste memory and drive space. Getting rid of unneeded bloat is a good thing.
OTOH another thing I dislike about MS is its seeming inability to work and play well with others. If they're going to remove interoperability thay've already accomplished (by accident?), that's not a good thing. There is simply no compelling reason for me or my organization to deploy the new version of Office - why spend thousands for new licenses (and associated deployment and support) when I can stick with the tried-and-true 2004 and just wait a couple years for 'Office 2010'? I find that Office 2004 is quite a bit faster than Office 2008 on my Intel-based MacBook. I'm not sure what they did to it, but it isn't impressive in terms of performance. You'd think that converting from translated PPC code to native x86 code would be a huge performance advantage, but somehow the Microsoft managed to slow it down quite a bit.
Oh, and Office 2008 has fewer features, like no VBA. What was Microsoft thinking during design and testing? Clearly they have totally lost focus and ability to release a decent product. You'd think that converting from translated PPC code to native x86 code would be a huge performance advantage, but somehow the Microsoft managed to slow it down quite a bit. MS probably has a short memory from the Word 6.0 fiasco.
Word 5.0 was great on a Mac. Word 6.0 was horrible.
It was slow and buggy. The reason had to do with the development of Word 6.0. Originally, MS decided to build Word 6.0 for Windows and Mac from a new but common code base. That way the feature set would be comparable and cod. What interoperability features I want? Except for the interoperability features that are really bugs.
Seriously, the only point of Office on Mac is to be able not to buy a windows license. If Microsoft isn't willing to do a feature complete replacement, maybe they should just rethink it and not sell Office for Mac if they can't swing it. They don't want to, because unless they port the bugs too, that makes office for mac better than office for windows, for certain values of 'office for mac sp. Microsoft if fighting a battle against becoming irrelevant.
On one hand their products are hindered by backwards compatibility required by the business community, yet on another hand, their products are becoming irrelevant thanks to web platforms like Google apps, and virtualization tools like Parallels and VMware. If Microsoft cuts their ties with 'old-school' software like VBA, ActiveX, and 16-bit dos-era software to improve their current offerings, they slit their throats with the business community - it will force their 'cash base' of customers to find something new - and it probably won't be a Microsoft product. If Microsoft does not cut their ties with old-school software, the development cost of keeping the backwards compatibility causes their current software to stagnate compared to the dynamic offerings of Apple, Google, and the open source community. Microsoft is becoming less relevant by the day. I see it at my company and many others. My comment was meant to highlight the large number of competitors that Microsoft never had before.
Google, Apple, and the open source community now have entire application platforms that can compete with Microsoft. Does this mean that all the networks built in the last 20 years will, overnight, switch to something else? What it does mean is that slowly as new systems are evaluated and rolled out, Microsoft is being considered less and less.
It's Coming: Mac Bu Announces Intent To Deliver Office 2008 For Mac Free
Just yesterday we rolled out OpenFire as our internal IM system. With NeoOffice and OO.org many Mac users already feel we have no more need of MS office. In four years' time, that will only be more true. The end of MS' monopoly on business software is definitely in sight now, and they brought it about themselves with their greed, over-confidence, and short-sighted policies. It wasn't so long ago I pretty much had to use MS software on my Mac to do all I needed to do - WMP, Office, IE.
Today, the only MS code on my Mac is codecs for wmv and wma files (which I play in mplayer). This is real progress, and we owe a big debt of gratitude it to the FOSS guys. What features of VBA and Windows interoperability are most important to people. When I was writing VBA for Excel spreadsheets, I had this really great book on it (VBA for Excel), but many of the examples simply didn't work.
This was mostly because of differences between VBA versions (I believe the windows version was 6 at the time, but the mac version was 4, but I could be way off. This is 4 years ago, I'm talking about). This caused me to have extreme issues not only learning the.
Since switching to using a Mac at work last summer, I've been pretty happy, except for the god-awful problems with Mac Office. It's my one remaining annoyance on OS X. Office 2004 was so slow on my Mac (a 2.4 ghz core duo MacBook Pro with 4 gigs of RAM) that opening any Word doc longer than four or five pages caused massive hiccups. Trying to open things that contained images or (god forbid) had 'Track changes' enabled - well, forget it. When Office '08 was released I was happy - until I installed it. '04 might be slow, but '08 randomly causes hard system freezes (mouse responsive, but nothing else works - forces me to reboot). No real pattern to it, either.
Has never happened unless an Office program is open. Missing VBA is not so bad for Word unless you count the subsequent loss of all plug-ins, including EndNote - which as a scientist I really can't live without. Not to mention the problems with Excel, which is where I assume 90% of the VBA complains have come from. So many Excel spreadsheets rely on macros to work properly.
And the user interface? The changes in Office 08 might seem like improvements for anyone that has never used Office on Windows, but going from 07 at home to 08 at work makes me want to tear my hair out. The floating 'toolbox' palette is horrible and unusable, but the floating, undockable Formula bar in Excel - how did that actually make it past quality control? The most damning thing about this all is that they are charging MORE for Mac Office than they are for Office 07 - more money for fewer programs (no OneNote, for example, no Access, no real Outlook compatibility - Entourage is not Outlook, thank god I don't have to use either, but many people need it). More money for what are essentially broken components (half the known issues with Office 08 are compatibility problems with 07, plus the loss of VBA that has caused so many problems).
And now they are telling us that our problems will be solved, so long as we will just wait a few years and then hand them even more money? There are reasons I have NeoOffice installed, and 90% of those reasons are the idiotic decisions made by the Mac BU. As much as I like open source, I would be perfectly happy using Microsoft Office if they would deliver on the Mac the same functionality they offer on Windows - but if Microsoft won't deliver, my money is going elsewhere.
I have a hard time thinking I'd be the only one making the same decision. I have to agree with a lot of the other posters in that Microsoft's only advantage was (is?) 100% compatibility with PC Office, which since Office 98 has slowly been chipped away. Office 98 was not only highly (if not 100%) compatible with Office for PC, but it was almost identical at the UI level. This was really nice for students in Mac schools because they could get the MS Office training to get a job someday rather than take Computer Applications 101 on Claris Works, because there are so many people that learn by contrete example (writing down steps) rather than computing concepts and general usage. However, in later versions, Office for Mac has become more uncompatible (Mac only stuff that doesn't port to PC, PC only stuff that doesn't port to Mac), that there really is no reason to pay the hefty MS pricetag over Open Office.org. Even the 'the UI is the same so our 'special' users can figure it out on a different platform' argument is gone. As much as I hate to say it, Macro compatibility was their.last.
stride above the competition (aside from brand recognition) and without that MS Office Mac is really just one of many implementations that gives the 'kind of works' compatibility competiting (free or commercial) products already give. So MS is asking what features people would like in a platform on which to build office solutions.
I'd say that the primary thing they need to implement is stability in the platform. You're a complete sucker if you decide to build something on top of Office For Mac. Fool-me-once and all that. Any IT decision maker that places their bets (and invests) in this technology simply doesn't understand business. MS has done exactly what they intended: disable people's confidence in the Mac (or at least, in Offi. What do I want in Office? How about consistency in the layout of a document, for starters?
Every version (Mac or PC) seems to make slightly different approximations, resulting in differences in where page breaks or text/picture frames end up every once in a while. Used to be way worse, but it's still not perfect. How about consistency in the use of special characters between Mac and PC? If I type pi (the lowercase Greek letter, using the Symbol font) in a Mac, I expect it to read as pi on a PC.
I know that this has been said before and that I'm not the first person to say it but I think that Microsoft is going to be in for rough times because of Vista and because of the speed of the PC hardware that has been released over the last six years. Five years ago I built my parents new PCs based upon AMD CPUs and ASUS motherboards and running Windows XP. Since then I have upgraded the RAM on their systems out to the max of 1.5Gb and they still run just fine, my Dad has a few newer games that are a bit slow, but applications such as Office, IE, FireFox, Adobe, TurboCAD, etc run just fine under XP. My laptop at work is almost four years old, I've had more memory installed and a larger hard drive but again, it works just fine with Office, etc under Windows XP. Newer hardware offers more bells and whistles but unless you're doing video work, or playing games a decent system put together in 2003 or 2004 will run XP just fine. No one I know on the Windows side of the IT world is looking forward to upgrading to Vista because in order to do so we'd have to junk a bunch of perfectly good systems to install an OS that brings no benefit in a business environment. Features are important?
How about making it so some middle manager can not make some MS Access app and then have upper management have you deploy it for 100+ users to use. The number of fricking POS Access applications I had to support that were coded so badly that it took days to figure out what the person was trying to do is insane. Corporate america is riddled with these kind of monsters causing IT people to ball up under their desks and cry through the night. I was happy when they removed VBA because it stopped that nightmare.
12.3.6 / March 12, 2013; 5 years ago ( 2013-03-12).9 or later Website System requirements or (500 MHz or faster) or any processor or later 512 MB Free space 1.5 GB Optical drive (for local installation) Notes Unofficially runs on Macs (like the in Bondi Blue) and with less RAM. Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is a version of the for. It supersedes (which did not have Intel native code) and is the Mac OS X equivalent of.
Office 2008 was developed by Microsoft's and released on January 15, 2008. Office 2008 was followed by released on October 26, 2010, requiring a Mac with an Intel processor and or better. Office 2008 is also the last version to feature Entourage, which was replaced by Outlook in Office 2011. Microsoft stopped supporting Office 2008 on April 9, 2013. Contents.
Release Office 2008 was originally slated for release in the second half of 2007; however, it was delayed until January 2008, purportedly to allow time to fix lingering bugs. Office 2008 is the only version of Office for Mac supplied as a.
Unlike Office 2007 for Windows, Office 2008 was not offered as a public before its scheduled release date. Features Office 2008 for Mac includes the same core programs currently included with Office 2004 for Mac:,. Mac-only features included are a publishing layout view, which offers functionality similar to for Windows, a 'Ledger Sheet mode' in Excel to ease financial tasks, and a 'My Day' application offering a quick way to view the day's events. Office 2008 supports the new format, and defaults to saving all files in this format. On February 21, 2008 Geoff Price revealed that the format conversion update for Office 2004 would be delayed until June 2008 in order to provide the first update to Office 2008. Microsoft is not supported in this version. As a result, such Excel add-ins dependent on VBA, such as Solver, have not been bundled in the current release.
In June 2008, Microsoft announced that it is exploring the idea of bringing some of the functionality of Solver back to Excel. In late August 2008, Microsoft announced that a new Solver for Excel 2008 was available as a free download from Frontline Systems, original developers of the Excel Solver. However, Excel 2008 also lacks other functionality, such as Pivot Chart functionality, which has long been a feature in the Windows version. In May 2008, Microsoft announced that VBA will be making a return in the next version of Microsoft Office for Mac. And the will still be supported.
Limitations. Error message in Microsoft Excel showing features that are not supported Office 2008 for Mac lacks feature parity with the Windows version. The lack of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) support in Excel makes it impossible to use macros programmed in VBA. Microsoft's response is that adding VBA support in Xcode would have resulted in an additional two years added to the development cycle of Office 2008. Other unsupported features include: equations generated in Word 2007 for Windows, Office ', and an extensive list of features are unsupported such as equivalent integration with the Windows version. Some features are missing on Excel 2008 for Mac, including: data filters (Data Bars, Top 10, Color-based, Icon-based), structured references, Excel tables, Table styles, a sort feature allowing more than three columns at once and more than one filter on a sort.
Benchmarks suggest that the original release of Office 2008 runs slower on Macs with PowerPC processors, and does not provide a significant speed bump for Macs with Intel processors. A data-compatibility problem has also been noted with 's chemical structure drawing program,. Word 2008 does not retain the structural information when a chemical structure is copied from ChemDraw and pasted into a document. If a structure is recopied from a Word 2008 document, and is pasted back into ChemDraw, it appears as a non-editable image rather than a recognized chemical structure. There is no such problem in Word 2004 or X. This issue has not been fixed in the SP2 (version 12.2.0, released in July 2009).
On May 13, 2008, Microsoft released Office 2008 Service Pack 1 as a free update. However, there have been many reports of the updater failing to install, resulting in a message saying that an updatable version of Office 2008 was not found. This appears to be related to users modifying the contents of the Microsoft Office folder in ways which do not cause problems with most other software (such as 'localizing' using a program to remove application support files in unwanted languages), and which do not affect Office's operations, but which cause the updaters' installers to believe that the application is not valid for update. A small modification to the installer has been found an effective work-around (see reference). Another widespread problem reported after SP1 is that Office files will no longer open in Office applications when opened (double-clicked) from the Mac OS X Finder or launched from other applications such as an email attachment. The trigger for this problem is that Microsoft in SP1 unilaterally and without warning deprecated certain older Mac OS 'Type' codes such as 'WDBN' that some files may have, either because they are simply very old, or because some applications assign the older Type code when saving them to the disk.
Users have seen the problem affect even relatively new Type codes, however, such as 'W6BN'. Microsoft is apparently looking into the problem, but it is unclear if they will reinstate the older Type codes, citing security concerns. Another problem with cross-platform compatibility is that images inserted into any Office application by using either cut and paste or drag and drop result in a file that does not display the inserted graphic when viewed on a Windows machine. Instead, the Windows user is told 'QuickTime and a TIFF (LZW) decompressor are needed to see this picture'.
A user presented one solution as far back as December 2004. A further example of the lack of feature parity is the track changes function. Whereas users of Word 2003 or 2007 for Windows are able to choose freely between showing their changes in-line or as balloons in the right-hand margin, choosing the former option in Word 2004 or Word 2008 for Mac OS also turns off all comment balloons; comments in this case are visible only in the Reviewing Pane or as popup boxes (i.e. Upon mouseover).
This issue has not been resolved to date and is present in the latest version of Word for the Mac, namely Word 2011. The toolbox found in Office 2008 also has problems when the OS X feature is used: switching from one Space to another will cause elements of the Toolbox to get trapped on one Space until the Toolbox is closed and reopened.
The only remedy for this problem is to currently disable Spaces, or at least refrain from using it whilst working in Office 2008. Microsoft has acknowledged this problem and states that it is an architectural problem with the implementation of Spaces. Apple has been informed of the problem, according to Microsoft. The problem appears to be caused by the fact that the Toolbox is -based. Using Microsoft Office with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard solves some of the problems. In addition, there is no support for and languages (such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, etc.) in Office 2008, making it impossible to read or edit a document in Word 2008 or PowerPoint 2008.
Languages such as are similarly not supported, although installing fonts can sometimes allow documents written in these languages to be displayed. Moreover, Office 2008 proofing tools support only a limited number of languages (Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Swiss German). Free youtube downloader. Proofing tools for other languages failed to find their way to the installation pack, and are not offered by Microsoft commercially in the form of separately sold language packs. At the same time, Office applications are not integrated with the proofing tools native to Mac OS X 10.6 Leopard. Is not available for OS X. This means that any embedded Visio diagrams in other Office documents (e.g.
Word) cannot be edited in Office on the Mac. Embedded Visio diagrams appear as a low-quality bitmap both in the WYSIWYG editor and upon printing the document on the Mac. Editions Comparison of different editions of Office 2008 for Mac Applications and services Home & Student Standard Business Edition Special Media Edition Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Exchange Server support No Yes Yes Yes Automator Actions No Yes Yes Yes Office Live and SharePoint support No No Yes No No No No Yes See also. References.
Retrieved February 10, 2018. January 15, 2008.
Retrieved January 5, 2017. January 9, 2007. Archived from on October 11, 2007.
August 2, 2007. April 2, 2007. Archived from on September 28, 2007.
Retrieved September 19, 2007. January 15, 2008. August 8, 2006. January 15, 2008. June 26, 2008. August 29, 2008. August 29, 2008.
May 13, 2008. March 13, 2008. March 13, 2008. January 26, 2009, at the.
Archived from on June 26, 2008. Retrieved June 30, 2008. CS1 maint: Archived copy as title. Archived from on July 2, 2009. Retrieved July 9, 2009. CS1 maint: Archived copy as title. Archived from on February 27, 2009.
Retrieved May 30, 2010., Macworld, December 8, 2008. ^, Microsoft.
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