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Microsoft drops VBA in Mac Office 2007
slashdotwriter writes "Macworld features an article stating that the next version of Office for the Mac will not include Visual Basic scripting. From the article: 'Microsoft Office isn't among the apps that will run natively on Intel-based Macs — and it won't be until the latter half of 2007, according to media reports. But when it does ship, Office will apparently be missing a feature so vital to cross-platform compatibility that I believe it will be the beginning of the end for the Mac version of the productivity suite...'"
Someone get a port of OpenOffice.org up and running natively on MacOS X!
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# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
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Yep, and with the support of the OOo folks, I hope that Windows users soon will be in a place where they don't notice the difference either... Seriously, does MS have any feet left to shoot?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Honestly, if they left VBA in we'd be questioning M$ for persisting to include a platform that has been notoriously insecure.
Considering that Office 2007 is including InfoPath and Groove as alternatives to distributing forms one has to believe that M$ first move away from VBA is not their last. Frankly having done many Office automation projects over the years I can say that VBA is quite a programming limitation, difficult to scale and prone to memory leaks.
As for alternatives, I have yet to find a management-type who wouldn't leap at the offer of replacing a stodgy, circa-1995 automated Word document with some sort of web-based application instead. For that matter, you can be outside of the M$ camp entirely by rolling out the replacements in PHP, JSP, Struts or FlashMX.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
So apparently Apple has every reason to make iWork '07 a "no holds barred" release. I expect to see a powerful spreadsheet app and probably some nifty database or drawing thing to make Access or Visio, respectively, look clunky. Given how well Apple handled the transition from IE to Safari, they certainly have a good contingency plan for the gutting/cancelation of Office.
Exchange is a great mail program, unless you want to use it to talk to a non-Exchange server. As a non-Exchange server, it sucks.
Really, it wasn't made with interoperability in mind. It was designed to woo over the Novell Groupware crowd, and then lock the users in to one system. Unfortunately, it's succeeded far to well, something even Microsoft admits. They've been trying to open it up just a bit more, but as soon as one arm of the company manages to get it to work with an open product (like WebDAV or mbox spools), another arm of the company implements another incompatible and ill-documented lockdown feature (like Sharepoint integration).
It's a shame that Novell decided to quench the pipe for the open-source Hula, which could have filled a pretty big part of the whole left by yanking out Exchange. But I guess that when you choose new sleeping partners, you also have to change the bedding accordingly.
If someone (Apple or anyone else) could come up with a window manager that followed the shared-menubar style UI of the Mac, it would be a big step in the right direction. X apps simply don't "fit" in a Mac environment. The feel is completely wrong, due to wrong UI element placement and appearance. Mac users (rightly) see X11 apps as a last resort. It's like running GNOME apps in a KDE session, or vice versa, but even worse. Different, not-entirely-compatible mechanisms of doing the same things are at work, and it's not seamless.
If there is a wm that supports Mac-style menubars, I'd love to know about it. Anyone?
Constitutionally Correct
Standardisation in Windows apps? That's a laugh...
Let's take just one example which bugs me every day I have to use Windows at work: Find again. In many apps I want to go through a page, stopping at each instance of a particular string. In most cases, you start off by pressing Ctrl+F for Find. But once you've found the first match, what do you do to skip to the next? Oh, that's easy, you press Ctrl+G. Except it's not. Sometimes it's Ctrl+Y (Y? Goodness knows.) Sometimes it's that nice memorable F3. And sometimes you can't do it at all; you have to keep the Find dialog visible, which means you have to reach for the mouse every time you switch between going to the next match and editing it. I am *forever* forgetting which strange method of control to use in which app.
And that's just one single almost-universal action, across a small handful of common big-name Windows apps I use every day. Compare that to the Mac, where it's Cmd+G in every app I've come across. And repeat across tons of other little shortcuts and common actions.
'Standardisation'? Hah.
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