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Panther's TextEdit to Open MS Word Files
2muchcoffeeman writes "Further signs that Jobs and Gates probably won't be vacationing together anytime soon: New Damage has what looks to be screenshot proof of Panther's TextEdit.app opening a Microsoft Word .DOC file. Panther beta users who have tried this report at MacSlash that it works, to a point. So what's next? Is Apple now going to bring back the late, great MacWrite Pro?"
Why did they use a PDF to display a screenshot, I wonder. Any ideas?
Apple has been getting bold. And I love it. I still wonder about it all though. Safari rocks. Of course MS gets scared and stops making IE for Mac. FinalCut Pro kicks ass. Now Adobe wants to stop making Premier for the Mac. Apple has Keynote to compete with PowerPoint. And PDF creation with OS X is damn simple.
.doc files made on a PC. Go Apple!
Apple is taking on all the big boys...something you just don't see these days. It's very exciting. And let's all be honest. Why do Mac users buy MS Office? Because it's good? Nope. So they can open up
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
It works, but it's not perfect, in some of my documents there are some minor problems, mostly with escape characters. Though, more importantly the fonts are rendered beautifully, instead of the jagged fonts that one has to deal with when using Office v.X.
I have heard rumors of Apple working on an Office suite which includes a word processor called "Document" and a spreadsheet app cleverly called "Spreadsheet". It seems as though they are going to test and hopefully perfect the most important feature in TextEdit first, reading .doc files.
.doc files perfectly and resave them into Document's native XML format. Document will hopefully be available for Mac OS X and Windows.
.doc format has a death grip on the business world. Unless there is an affordable alternative that can read .doc files it isn't going very far.
Once they have the bugs worked out, they will release Document which will be able to open
Microsoft's
The word processor is the only piece of the office package that most users need. Apple should make just Document for the PC and make it affordable. It will introduce many PC users to how software should be written. Like the iPod it will be a trojan horse that will hopefully cause them to consider a Mac for their next purchase.
As an aside, I no longer find myself 'just firing up' something or other.
Apps like Oo.O are run at start, and left running. Along with Safari, Mail, iTunes, Reason, SlashDock, etc. etc.
2gb of RAM seems to help. Why 'open & close'...'open & leave running', I say.
Of course MS gets scared and stops making IE for Mac.
Now come on. Everyone knows Microsoft dropped its support for IE because it wasn't making any money. ;-)
On a more serious note, considering that the browser was a freebie, why didn't Microsoft continue to improve it after its initial release? Does anyone remember the fancy flash animation MS produced starring "Zippy" that showed IE with a built-in media player and other nifty features? WTF?
Your point about MS Office is right on, though. Initially it seemed like a cool offering. But damn is it an annoying set of programs! I actually find it more pleasant to use Dreamweaver to make documents, and then print them into PDF files.
-- thinkyhead software and media
When I first heard of Apple using display pdf for the gui and high resolution icons in something named "the dock", I was hoping that they had implemented what SGI did with their OpenGL--vector graphics on the desktop. Now, that was (is still? been 10 years, kinda hazy) an amazing desktop. each window had a thumbwheel that would continuously scale the icons in the window. the icon for the media drive would change to show empty/full/in use by overlayed animation. Eye candy, sure, but informative eye candy. Main things about a vectorized gui--clarity and speed.
Seems to me that apple has everything in place to do this--opengl and display pdf. They can go a step further to my ultimate dream--resolution independent wysiwyg. That is, system-wide, having 12 point type be 12 points high whether the display is 72ppi or 123ppi. Also, having the menu bar stay the same apparent height through resolution changes. (yes, my eyes are getting old.) Win hints at doing this with small/med/large font selections, but Apple has the technology to do it right.
hmm, well you can start openoffice and have it running as a server.
Then your java apps (or python or whatever) can just talk to it via java objects (or whatever).
Makes it trivial to create word doc's.
In a day I made a web page where you could type in a web url or upload a word document, and it would create and return a pdf.
The current climate and the latest license proposals from MS have focused the minds of business people on alternatives to just buying the latest from MS. There is an opportunity here for an alternative to Office, it would have to be cross-platform though and marketed a damn sight better than WordPerfect.
Keynote is already more compatible cross platform than Powerpoint. A colleague created a Powerpoint document on Windows for his boss to present on his G4 laptop. Powerpoint from Office v.X wouldn't play the presentation correctly. Keynote read the presentation in and worked. Interestingly the when the presentation was exported from Keynote as a Powerpoint document the Office v.X would play it without problems.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
Yeah, too bad that Apple doesn't have some technology for managing calendars and synchronizing them with other networked sources that they could build upon...
Oh, wait! ;)
If Apple is pursuing a strategy of replacing Microsoft technology wholesale, then I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find an update to iSync that knows how to push bits between an Exchange server and iCal.
Seems to me that's a better rationalization for iCal's existence than trying to push Palm out of the Palm Desktop business... even if Palm Desktop for Mac could use the competition.
What's truly funny is that I remember that TextEdit in the very first public beta of OSX (a few years back) was already able to open Word docs. This feature never made it to any of the current upgrades though. I guess they had planned for this for a while, but MS b*tched at them a little too loud at the time. Now the question is: is this gonna make it in the released version this time around?!?