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?"

Comments

Apple is stepping up

[chia_monkey]

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.

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 .doc files made on a PC. Go Apple!

Re:Apple is stepping up

[dbrutus]

Web services nightmare

July 4, 2006

Dear Mr. Bank CEO,

Apple customers + Linux customers are about 7% of the desktop market. The xxx Bank web banking solution doesn't support anything but Internet Explorer which is not available on any platform but Windows. As a shareholder, I'm concerned that we're losing customers and money because of this. I intend to bring this up at the shareholder's meeting. You're in the business of making the bank's shareholders money, not shilling for Microsoft. There is *no* reason not to support everybody's computer platform. Their money spends just as well.

Sincerely,

Large shareholder mac user

Re:Apple is stepping up

[Maserati]

I'm not keeping numbers at work, but PowerpointX is right behind Quark 4.11 as my #1 source of trouble calls. Lately, I've just been opening them in Keynote (we only have one license for the moment) resaving them as .ppt's and sending them back. This usually cuts the file size down by a third and solves a lot of simple corruption issues. I switch an executive assistant to Keynote tomorrow.

EntourageX is #3 on my list, and I'm looking forward to the improved mail.app in Panther, as it is right now, mail.app is completely unusable for someone bumping into EntourageX's 4GB database limitation. I want it faster, a lot faster before I start deploying it. We used AppleScript for the QuickMail Pro-> Entourage migration (a bigger upgrade than going to Mail.app will be), so that won't be a big hassle.

G5s this Fall !

It works

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Office Package Speculation

[Johnny Mozzarella]

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.

Once they have the bugs worked out, they will release Document which will be able to open .doc files perfectly and resave them into Document's native XML format. Document will hopefully be available for Mac OS X and Windows.

Microsoft's .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.

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.

Re:PDF

[kilgore_47]

PDF is a native graphics format for MacOS X.
open /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemStarter/QuartzD isplay.bundle/Resources/BootPanel.pdf
Look familiar? (on preview: drop the space in "QuartzD isplay" that slashcode put there)

A vector desktop

[Redundant offtopic t]

It would have been kind of cool if the window would be rendered in vector graphics, in the reality, and directly displayed to PDF. A vector desktop still seems to be a dream, or did I get something wrong?

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.