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Microsoft At Macworld
Rolan writes "Microsoft announced several Mac software updates at Macworld. Updates include MSN Messenger 5.0 and Improved Outlook imports (PST File import). The article also says Microsoft has also been working with Apple to ensure that Apple's Spotlight search technology works well with Office documents."
Spotlight will index and search Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, but unfortunately it will not work with Microsoft's email and information manager, Entourage.
:-)
Which makes total sense when you think about it. All Microsoft email apps use a large Database file to store email (think mbox but proprietary). All Microsoft email applications on the Mac have used that type of format (going back to Outlook Express 4 at least).
Do you really think Microsoft would totally re-engineer their current database storage format to be compatible with Tiger and Spotlight? Yeah, me neither.
On the other hand, having the PST Import tool will be a huge leap forward as then it is possible to migrate users more easily to the Mac (and the new Mac Mini)
Your Windows PC is my other computer.
Cheers,
Ian
Actually I suspect that the reason there isn't a spreadsheet app included is because Apple just hasn't developed one that is currently ready to ship out the door.
We'll probably see one eventually (maybe next year at this time), if for no other reason than that they want to replace most of the functionality of AppleWorks.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
It will.
The next paragraph of the article:
"It won't index Entourage and that's simply due to the way that Spotlight was made versus Entourage," said Erickson. "Entourage saves everything in a database format and we are working with Apple to see how Spotlight can index the database."
This is technically simple -- Microsoft needs to write an Entourage importer for Spotlight. I'm sure it will get done, although who knows if it will be in time for the release of Tiger?
From Mactopia.com (NOT Macworld, I know): "Find out how Internet Explorer 5 for Mac can show you the Internet in new, exciting ways."
Wow, IE 5, I've been waiting to see what the Internet would look like fresh technology like that. Will it match my brand new blueberry iBook?
.\.\att Clare
While Pages may not affect businesses so much, it may affect regular consumer sales as most people don't need as powerful of a word processing program as Word is....let alone one as expensive as it.
$79 for iWorks compared to $400 for 2004 standard edition...I dunno about others, but I know I'd sure give iWorks a good look depending on my needs.
I wish I could agree with you on that one. If the sole job of WMP was to open and play Windows Media files you download, then yes, it would be fine. Unfortunately I would mainly use it for streaming video. And in that regard it is simply horrible. I really wish they'd make that aspect of it usable before the baseball season starts. No matter how fast the connection, I always run into problems with buffering and bad audio-video-synching. And it doesn't support nice features like full screen. All of which was no problem when I tried watching the same file on a Windows computer.
And yes, I know that mlb.com offers all of their live-streams in Realplayer, but all of the archives are Windows Media only and thus as good as unavailable to me. Same goes for Comedy Central.
Hank! White!
I'm disappointed that Entourage still lacks the Exchange support needed to fully eliminate the need for Outlook 2001.
All the Macs in my workplace have to keep Classic just to run Outlook. When you have a shop full of non-OS9 G4s and G5s, it's a disgrace. And while Mail.app can work with Exchange servers, it can't touch the Global Address Book and other important things.
Maybe someday...
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Actually, you kind of have that backwards. You don't rewrite your file format to be Spotlight-savvy. Instead, you provide a Spotlight plug-in called an "importer." An "importer" is a little object file that implements exactly one function: GetMetadataForFile. GetMetadataForFile takes a data structure of attributes, a content-type value and a path to a file on the disk as arguments. You write the function in such a way that you extract the metadata from the file and put it into the attributes data structure, then return boolean true.
Easy, easy.