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Microsoft to Continue Office on Mac
LiMikeTnux wrote to mention a CNN article giving details about the five year agreement now in place between Microsoft and Apple to keep Office alive on the Mac platform. From the article: "Though Apple clearly benefits from having the widely-used Office software available to its users, it may seem less obvious what Microsoft stands to gain from continuing its relationship. But according to Greg DeMichillie, a senior analyst with Directions on Microsoft, an independent consulting and analysis firm focusing specifically on Microsoft, the business is still a profitable one for Microsoft. While it's not a huge part of Microsoft's business, given the company's sheer scale, 'Apple's 3 to 4 percent market share doesn't hurt them either,' DeMichillie said. 'Also, to have them be seen going out of their way to hurt a competing operating system is not really helpful from an anti-trust perspective.'"
Don't forget that if you're a college student or work at a college or university, you can often get a license for Office X very cheaply. The school that I work at offers it for just a few dollars. Check with your college bookstore or computer store before shelling out big bucks.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
I had an old iMac that I've since retired on which I used NeoOfficeJ. It was alright when I really _had_ to do something on the Mac, but not really a working solution on that machine. It would be cool if Apple would take OpenOffice on as its office suite, but that seems unlikely. Getting OO.o to work with X11 was just too much work for me. Luckily, I have an XP machine now so I hook my iPod to that. I only kept the iMac around for updating the iPod.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
The new OpenOffice.org2 for OSX is very nice. Just drag and drop install if you've got Apple's X11 installed. It's still not native OSX graphics, but I like it better than NeoOffice/J. OO.o2 is better than OO.o1 in general, but especially on the Mac.
d s.html
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ooo-osx_downloa
I agree - Office:mac is far better than the windows counterpart. The Adobe-like palettes are far more efficient and user-friendly.
Office has a 5 year additional life on the Mac, but MSIE and Windows Media Player are terminated, including the support. Which, IMO, is good news. WMP is not good, navigates poorly on DVDs, and v9 and 10 cause random freezes and even crashes on WinXP PRO. At least on two (different) laptops I have. I've had to stop using it for DVDs.
They already have ... it's called ROTOR (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?F amilyId=3A1C93FA-7462-47D0-8E56-8DD34C6292F0&displ aylang=en) and works on FreeBSD as well.
Incidentally, if you examine Office, you will find that they also ported the entire COM runtime to the Mac to allow the VBA to work.
They don't may a Star Office branded version. But OpenOffice.org runs on the Mac just fine. I use it all the time:
d s.html
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ooo-osx_downloa
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
Disclaimer: I am an OpenOffice.org developer and a NeoOffice founder.
There are a number of tricks with which you may be able to improve presentation performance. First off, try 1.2 Beta. Older versions of NeoOffice/J were based on Java 1.3. Apple's virtual machine was buggy, so to implement drawing properly we needed to use triple buffering. With NeoOffice 1.2, we're using Java 1.4 and can access drawing buffers directly without working around bugs Apple never fixed in earlier VM versions.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you can always improve speed if you avoid transitions and animations in your presentation. Various funky cube wipes/dissolves add nothing to the content of presentations and just waste everyone's time and (I daresay) distract from the actual content. Folks should focus on what a bullet point actually *says*, not whether it flies in from the right, iris dissolves, or whatever. Sorry if it seems like a rant, but animations really are frills and should be used sparingly. In most every presentation using them, the "transition effects" actually detract from the content instead of providing meaningful information.
I've used NeoOffice and OOo X11 for presentations off of a 400MHz TiBook for years at O'Reilly conferences, business conferences, and others. If someone complains that their presentations run slowly, the first thing that runs through my mind is that it's not the type of presentation I want to be sitting through. Give me an overhead projector with transparancies anyday over something with sound effects and transitions that'll trigger seizures :D
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It's also comletely unusable. It uses X11, doesn't look anything like an OS X application, doesn't behave like an OS X application, takes almost a minute to start up on a 2005 mac.
But that all would be nothing if it... you know... actually worked with alternate keyboard layouts as used in OS X. However because this is an X11 app, I cannot use russian. That sucks. Basically, OOo is not viable on OS X IMO until a native aqua port.
How is hitting on you because you are holding a shiny expensive object not "playing dumb"?
Don't be suprised when your shallow consumerist girlfriend cheats on you just because the other guy drives a nice car.
I was curious about this, too, so I spent a good hour on the intel Powerbooks (I refuse to call it the MacBook Pro... horrible name) trying to stress test it, including word and excel.
I came to the conclusion that the new hardware is so much flabbergastingly faster than the old one that there is no perceptible performance hit in user-limited tasks like office apps. Word showed no lag to speak of. I intentionally created a thousand-ish cell spreadsheet with deep inter-cell dependencies to try to slow it down, but all calculations were nearly instantaneous. Certainly good enough for home use.
The big stress test was the 1080p HD movie trailer I got off of the quicktime site. It was able to play TWO of the things simultaneously without quite maxing out the CPUs. I later had the opportunity to try it on the current top of the line 15" in the SF apple store, and it choked on 1 movie.
The Blizzard rep was pretty informative, too. The had to decide which games to port to OSX Intel, and it turns out Diablo II, Starcraft would run fine under Rosetta, and Warcraft III would be on the fence. I think that's plenty good.
I doubt the performancw would be an issue.
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
Office 2004 runs just fine under Rosetta. It doesn't feel any slower than it did on a low-end G5 to me...and the dual core yonah systems are faster than the last ones that were being used.