f13.net

From: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/sep05/09-13OfficeUI.mspx

New Office UI:

(http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/images/features/2005/09-13Office12-Word_lg.jpg)

(http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/images/features/2005/09-13Office12-Excel_lg.jpg)

(http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/images/features/2005/09-13Office12-Access_lg.jpg)

Are you suggesting that copying the Mac represents some new MS tendency?

No, they are just making absolutely no attempt to hide it anymore.

Edit:  More screenshots (http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/pdc2005_office12_01.asp)

Balmer to the MS developers: "That screen's not lickable yet!"

The snozberries taste like snozberries?

They're Excellicious!

Ironically, I've been using Office 2004 Mac for the past week or so and it's been quite a pleasant experience. Part of it is that the Mac display is better so there's less eyestrain, but the layout of Word is nicer too (floating windows for styles and whatnot, mainly). Only thing that's been a pain is learning to cmd-click instead of right click. You can get two-button mice to fix, but I'm using a laptop so that's not horribly likely.

The Mac version is much less cluttered than the version posted above, too. That actually looks like it's running under Vista, though. Hope you have 2gigs of RAM!

Windows Vista/Office 12:
(http://www.winsupersite.com/images/showcase/pdc2005_office12_03.jpg)

Mac OSX/Office 2004:
(http://www.microsoft.com/mac/images/officeDemoS2004_02.jpg)


And before the peanut gallery pipes up, I *know* I can't run any games on the Mac. Given my ADD that's actually a GOOD thing. I bought it as a nifty word processor/email client and it handles that job spiffily.

So, the machine of Lum the Mad is a Mac...

eenteresting.

That said, most of my postage is done from my powerbook, so I've got your back, man. And I do agree that my Office 2004 experience is better than my Office XP or 2003 experiences on the PC. If for no other reason than the glaring lack of Outhouse.

I don't use Entourage (the Mac version of Outlook) either. The included Mail app seems to have better spam blocking (built in Bayesian filtering ftw)

How does that Mac version compare to Office 2003 for Windows?  I  :heart: Office 2k3... its is pure love.



I love you Lum.  Manbabies?  :hello_kitty:

No manbabies, please.

Uh, it's about the same featurewise, as far as I can tell. There's some Mac-style UI improvements (the floating windows I mentioned earlier, font styles/names show up as their actual font in menus, etc) and a new "notebook mode" for note-taking (what's in the screenshot), but overall it just works. I've been doing final revision edits on my book this past week and it's been handling winword 2003 templates and files fine.

Like Lum said, Office 2k4 is on par with 2k3, the biggest exceptions being that it follows Mac conventions rather than PC conventions, so it seems, to me anyway, less cluttered and intrusive. I will say that the little glowing toolbox that tells me my documents may not be compatible with anything older than Office XP is annoying in an existential angsty way, but other than that, it just annoys me slightly less.

While I can't argue with the Mac's ease of use, I'm so goddamn sick of the shiny glass button look that has permeated the graphic design ethos since the release of the fruity Imacs.

So I guess this means we're all about to learn the joys of one-button mice... ;)

Nah, one button mice are so last month (http://www.apple.com/mightymouse/)  :-D

There can be only one true Mightymouse!

(http://www.kennethrapp.com/mightymouse.jpg)


Though there is room in the world for runner-ups:

(http://www.1967z28.com/gallery/fullrace/Ken/Little%20Hoss/mightymouse.jpg)

OSX pwns. Microsoft has a good team working in their mac division, Office is great on the Mac. With the lackluster pc gaming offerings (imo) this year, I'm probably going to skip my next pc upgrade and save for a powerbook, mostly for pro tools. I'm pretty much a mac convert.

We are a multi-OS site, and staff collaborating on documents have no problem going back and forth between windows (XP, various office versions) and the macs (OSX, various versions). Thank god imo.

Poco, I don't know any Mac users who use a one-button mouse (I know, I saw your winky, I'm just sayin'). Not only is it counter-productive and annoying, the mice from Apple are shitty quality. They last about a week in the children's room, about a month anywhere else. Weak cables mostly. We let the public beat them up and replace them with two-button jobbies.

Bottom line, both mac and pc versions of Office are goddamned nice...but very bloated.

Hi Lum,

If you'e able to, install Sidetrack (http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/sidetrack/) on the laptop. It replaces the normal touchpad driver with one you can customize. I have mine set up for scrolling on the right side and right click as touching the pad. I also have corners for Expose and Dashboard. Works like a charm.

You can actually change that in Appearance.

You can run games on Macs - I have the entire Myst series for it. BTW, I thought the new powerbooks were gonna have Intel inside.

I just downloaded iTunes 5 the other day and found that in some sort of eerie display of mutual recursion, it had been reskinned to look more like Vista.  Which is itself a step toward the Mac look and feel, so go figure.  In another couple of years the two will pass each other going opposite directions.  Windows 2010 will look like Mac OS 9, and OS XII will look like Win 95.  I have foreseen it.

No intel powerbooks til at least the second half of '07.

It seems to me that they really revise the UI of each major new set of releases, but they don't really get any better, just different. They had the yellow/blue thing going for a while, now the Mac look, and VS.net had some other scheme. I don't really understand it.

They don't understand it either, but if they were to just release it with the same look and feel, they wouldn't be able to charge you 300 bucks a license for it.

(Well, they'd try, but it'd be harder to justify)

Macs are not serious gaming machines. They haven't been for a decade and there's little chance they will be in the future, no matter what core they use. Pure and obvious business reasons, regardless of the Unix core and them going Intel.

However, as a workstation, they are pure love, particularly Tiger (10.4). If I had the cash, I'd easily get a third machine at home just to do multimedia on a Mac. I'm dual computer at work (functional requirement, and no, there is no other way), and very much prefer my Mac for design and multimedia. This is mostly because of the OS. F9 and F10 are keys I hit almost as the Backspace key (75wpm unless you count mistakes, then it's 40 :) ). Basically, the UI for the OS was designed specifically to be used. Windows, on the other hand, was built to be suffered, and to be tinkered with. And notice I didn't say "designed". That is not synonymous with Windows.

I will say though I very much would prefer using MS Office on my PC. The Mac suite is sluggish. Granted, I'm comparing the latest Mac suite with Office on a Win2k box (which, yes, runs WoW quite nicely), and I do miss the real nice Tracking Changes functions from the Mac, but the whole experience is just slow.

And I don't use Entourage. It's not as sluggish, but it takes too damned long to update with the server, and is constantly out of sync with what's in Outlook Scheduler on the PC. Finally, it don't work with my iPaq, so that's just that. Granted, I'm ditchig the thing as soon as an office suite hits the PSP, but I'm in no rush.

Oh, and yea, Microsoft is pilfering Mac design theory. I doubt they'll get it right, though Vista's search feature does seem to one-up the Mac spyglass (or whatever it's called, the menu in the upperright corner). Apple designs. Microsoft distributes. Users win.

And Lum, get a wireless two-button mouse. I think the one I got was $35 at BestBuy. I love the Mac, but one-button anything is so 1988 :)

When I was rendering and doing video editing and procedural stuff during college, I preferred to use a PC over a Mac. Macs are sluggish, sluggish pieces of ass with terribly bloated software. Shame, really. I used to be a diehard Mac fan, having owned multiple powerbooks and desktops. Now? You couldn't really pay me to use one on any sort of regular basis.

WoW runs on the Mac -- what other game do you need?

When I did my phd around 1998 I bought a high end mac system rather than a pc since I needed to do 3D work that was user fiendly to a guy like me.  Some of the 3 D models were made from brain activity patterns - so more than just building the models - I also needed the ability to slice them.

In the world of business I find you can get away with a PC - most of us are not introducing ground breaking ideas - but in basic research - especially with the 3 D brain imaging stuff I was doing at the time - my Mac was my lifeline.  The graphics in my research literally blew my department away.

I am not a technical / computer saavy guy at all - so the Mac platform was crucial in allowing me access to software on the Mac I could actually become proficient in.  Of course, even at academic pricing, the cost of the some of the software was comparable to my hardware purchase itself  :-D

In US dollars, I blew - including software - about 10 K on my system.  Outrageous I know - but my "uber" mac system easily shaved off a year of research time - which in opportunity cost is far more than the cost of the system itself.

Nope not at all.  I've blown that on one system.  Since 1987 I've owned more such systems than I care to count.  At least now it's SMT so I don't bother doing my own solder hacks.

I'm waiting for a chipset cooler for my PC for about a month now and in this time I used my Powerbook to do all things I used to do on my PC (yes including WoW, although its quite a bit slower). I rarely miss the PC anymore. I think once I've got a PS3 and no groundbreaking PRGs are coming for the PC, I can dump my Windows box for good.

I did notice it ran fairly slow when importing about 3 gigs of email. Then again, well, um, it was 3 gigs of email.

Still, it's not like word processing or web browsing is fairly CPU intensive normally. And I LOVE the hyperantialiasing Mac displays do. So much easier on the eyes.

Any Mac users have feedback on Entourage? Should I use OSX's included mail, Entourage or Thunderbird? My priority here is a working spam filter - I have an 8-year old email address so it gets a LOT of spam.

I can ask around, people here use all three of those clients (I use Entourage). However, I don't get spam, so I don't use a filter.

Right now I'm on the list for an upgrade, I'm on a 700MHz G4 with 1GB RAM. It does what I need it to very snappy, just slows down when I bog it with a lot of tasks: surfing, burning an iphoto cd, listening to itunes (which is a resource hog on winders, too), email proggy in the background.

I sure wouldn't mind an intel mini, they're nice little machines (that is, the G4 minis we have now). I really, really hope they don't go the way of the cube.

I use both OSX Mail and Entourage for 2 different mailboxes. Reason being Entourage (2K4) is better at supporting Exchange which my corporate address is, but i prefer the Mail interface. Entourage has some nice features though - if you're an Outlook junkie and want your contacts, calendar, notes, tasks and mail all in one place Entourage is the way to go. Since i synch via BT to a bunch of devices i prefer to use the Mac Address, Calendar as they are easier to manage via iSync. Bottom line - i use Entourage for Exchange mailbox and calendaring but stick to OSX apps for personal email and PIM stuff.

Oh and Haemish - they are pretty much done with the lickable interface - take a look at the latest iTunes or Mail apps for the direction they're going in.

I still have a pc for gaming but to be honest as i only play WoW and Shadowbane and console games my laptop has been the primary axe for sometime. Only when raiding MC do i use the PC and even then a recent .5 gig ram upgrade makes that doable on my mac.

oh and Spotlight = LOVE.

Sun, HP and IBM Unix systems for serious business.

Windows boxes for playing games and running stolen office software from work.

Macs for creative and Internet stuff when you don't want to spend evenings debugging a games box.

This is a games site full of youthful people who steal software. You are expected to be Windows zealots.

Heh, I work in a rather creative environment which is also very profitable - our first major leap (which had the old guys shaking) was when we moved from Quark to InDesign and now were slowly moving from Mac to PC. Of course we'll have to kill every member of our IT-department first - Mac zealots can't be swayed, but the people adept at more than burning through company funds on overpriced and underperforming hardware has seen the light.

Apple makes good MP3-players.

(no dig on Lums machine. That seems to be the perfect use of a Mac - after reviewing the Mac Mini I was slightly in love and considered buying one for the wife for that very purpose. Mail, internet and easy support)

Given the choice between overpriced, underpowered hardware and overpriced, underperforming, insanity inducing software, I'll take the latter.  :ipod:

Marginally less money on hardware, hurrah! More money on certified Windows experts, retraining, support, software, restaffing, etc. BTDT. IT in most companies tends to be the corporate equivalent of onanism, and is entirely self serving. If you're already supporting a host of expensive Windows systems, moving DTP systems to Windows is probably not a critical failure.

If you are using Windows systems in a recording studio, you're throwing good money after bad and compromising your ability to attract the best creative talent. However, these decisions often come down to who the most empowered people in a company are - the IT bigots, or the content creators.

You are expected to be Windows zealots.

I was just responding to this elitist beret-wearing Mac zealot crap:


I work in publishing. InDesign is superior to Quark. Winboxes run InDesign better than Macs and are cheaper to buy and upgrade. The switch is good business sense - I'm sure there's still plenty of places were the Mac is superior (like what Lum uses his for), but your patronizing generalization was just stupid and needed to be called that.

And to use the obligatory anecdotal evidence. I don't know whether it's the hardware, the company or just the morons drawn towards it - but I've never met so many unflexible people downright bad at their job as the (socalled) support people working the 2 It departments in the companies running Macs, I've worked. Just getting rid of them is good business sense.
I cannot help thee with that... I'm sure there a job for these assholes in the mmog industry.

BTW, my girlfriend's into graphic design.  She uses both quite frequently.  And daily I hear her saying how pretty the Mac is, but what a piece of shit it is.  There are trained professionals without bias who prefer Windows.  Quite a few, in fact.

And now from a 3rd perspective.   Cad programs on Linux?  Never heard of 'em, but if their output files aren't compatable with the one program that holds a 90% marketshare in the drafting world, AutoCAD, then you're fucked.  (In fact, a quick google shows me that the few programs that are out there are so underfeatured and underdeveloped that they are comparable -at best- to programs I used 11 years ago.)

Oh, 3d design/ drafting in the building industry?  Again, never heard of a single one for Linux.  There's a few for both Mac and Windows and the version that was written for Macs runs a LOT better in the Windows version.  Two-or-more-button drafting & keyboard is far and away a better option than single button & keyboard. 

Then again, among techhies zealotry is 3-flavored, so you've hung your flag quite prominently, Righ.  There's no one 'best overall' OS for "serious business" or otherwise.  (Oh right.. the 1.1 trillion the Construction industry did in 2000 is 'small time').  Those who loudly shout that there is are jsut narrow-minded twats of a different color.

I've never had a reason to switch from windows to anything else. I installed red hat a couple of years ago and played around with it then asked my self. Right, so what can I do now that I couldn't do before? Answer was nothing, I only lost options + a truckload of time. There's a good saying which I'm sure a lot of you have heard, linux is only free if your time is free. Also I know that a large portion of the users who bash windows in favor for something else are jerk offs who wants to feel a little bit special. I can give *nix they're powerful sollutions for servers, but for anything else windows is better. Call me narrow-minded but prove me wrong first.

A good friend of mine is an engineer with NASA responsible in no small part of the programming of the escape pod simulators and now currently involved in the next generation of "shuttle".  He's a Mac bigot to a tee.  It's amusing to hear him rave about Windows' shortcomings and why Macs/Linux are superior.  His last tantrum was because his division shut down their Mac support much as you're describing.  If you can actually get him to specifics he'll admit much the same issues you and other folks cite with Mac techies and the product itself.

But it matters not since Microsoft is evi and the world are sheep eating from its hand (these are his words - I'm not exagerating them).  Nothing I love more than a government employee sucking off the tit of the taxpayer who complains about Big Evil Corporations.  He's also a very conservative Republican - who says genius is consistent.  He's a brilliant guy and I really enjoy his company - as long as we avoid certain issues... ;)

Oh fuck.

Get this to the Den, stat!

Unless you want to argue Ford vs Chevy next?

I can't see messages in the Den, so where would I get support questions about my new iBook answered?  :-D

And yeah.  I'm platform agnostic. I learned programming on a Macintosh using Pascal and those huge System books (I think it was System 5 back then, if you want to carbon-date me.) I game on Windows. I wouldn't install a server on anything but Unix. I think my new Mac word processor is spiffy. I love Japanese RPGs on consoles.

I think the term for this is "sleeping around".

Some people call that having an "Open Mind." I realize in the US today, that's the same as being a 'dirty red pinko Commie bastard' but hey, whatever burns your country down in a flaming pile of shit, right?

Every platform has a use, every platform has its benefits and drawbacks. It's a goddam tool, not a fucking holy tablet from the heavens. Use it for what it does, leave the rest of the shit to ragheads with dynamite strapped to their chests screaming obscenties at followers of the other invisible fucker in the sky.

Or be a platform fag and go hang out with the useless beret wearing pigfuckers who refuse to do their job on anything but a particular set of hardware and claim its shit don't stink despite all evidence to the contrary.

Dirty red pinko Commie bastards for the muthafuckin' win.

Small world. Same here. Just not the same area of the world though. Not only that, but I too bought a Powerbook this year and use it for most of the day-to-day tasks. Quite the handy little toy and I really enjoy the feel of the keyboard so I use it for all of my writing. All of my unpublished, non-royalty earning writings. ;)

To me, the more platforms, the better. I started on some ancient mainframe, not even sure the OS (because I was 5 years old in 1975). Learned to program on a TRS-80, then C64. In music school, we used macs, not even sure the OS version (1990-1). Played lots of games on pcs, still have an XP machine for gaming. Love my OSX machines at work, the xserve is great. Don't really have time to mess around with Linux, but not against it in any way.

Yeah, open mind is the only path to walk.

One of my greatest achievements here has been dissolving my supervisor's mac zealotry. We still love macs, but he isn't the ignorant windows hater he used to be. He now sees all pcs as pcs, including macs. His mac usage is now a preference, not a crusade. That's all I ask.

Of course, it was easier to be a hater when we were dealing with the earlier OS versions, which all sucked imo. Win95? OS7? Garbage. WinXP and OSX are both damned fine OSes imo, especially as they work great together, so now people can just use whatever they are most comfortable with, which is the most important thing.

As I said earlier, my next 'pc' at home will most likely be a powerbook, because I'm gaming less and doing music more. And they're sweet.

Give me an XML based scriptable UI for cripes sake so I can customize it to my liking.  I'd wager Microsoft has kicked that idea around for years but stears clear of implementing it because they want their desktop to have a standard, recognizable feel to it...with the start button and logos and all.  It really is ridiculous that in 2005 we have to resort to craptastic 3rd party theme engines that make Windows run slow as shit just to change colors.  I, too, feel that Windows XP is a good operating system, at least relative to what else is available...but geez the UI is stale.  I'm sure Vista will change significantly over the next year, but the beta version I'm testing right now does not bring any significant new customization features to the table, sadly.

I've only Very recently started running XP... but doesn't Chrome let you change the UI somewhat?  At least, the PlaySkool interface and the normal one are rather different looking.  And Chrome should be editable, color-wise, and ideally position-wise.

Alkiera