| |
 |
Tuesday, October 8, 2002 |
The Problems With Word on OS X Are Worse Than I Imagined
Word has become, for me at least, almost unusable since my upgrade to Jaguar. Here's what Microsoft's MVP support team has to say on the subject:
Unfortunately, Word is not going to work properly under Jaguar unless Microsoft releases a patch for Microsoft Office. The problems have now been analyzed, and the experts have found that Word v.X is not fully compatible with Jaguar, and there is nothing you can do to make it so.
What incredible garbage. Now what am I supposed to do? I have a publisher waiting for a book. They use Word. Their feedback to me is in Word comments, which are frigging broken in Word on Jaguar.
Arrogance screws the little guy once again.
9:32:53 PM 
|
|
TidBITS rates OS X
Adam C. Engst rates OS X, reporting what he told the recent O'Reilly OS X conference. For the most part I agree with him. In fact, I was gratified to see a couple of my pet peeves -- which I was beginning to think I was the only guy on the planet who had noticed or at least who cared -- singled out by Mr. Engst as well.
I love his observation about type-ahead:
Apple appears to be moving in the right direction, since Jaguar includes many fixes, such as type-to-select in the Finder (though Open and Save dialogs remain a festering boil of awkward and inconsistent interface).
He gives OS X a B- for its UI. I'd be less generous and give it a C.
On programmability, he makes me smile broadly with this observation:
The two flies in the ointment are that Apple still thinks HyperCard smells funny, and the company seems to have developed an odd aversion for AppleScript, with AppleScript support in too few of Apple's own applications.
Amen! HyperCard remains one of the best thought-out development tools in the history of computing. I'm glad there's Runtime Revolution, which in many ways improves on HyperCard. Still, for Apple to treat its premier scripting environments so shabbily says something unpleasant, unsavory and unenlightened about the company's direction.
8:18:30 PM
|
|
The Perils of .Mac
Keeping your stuff on the Internet is a long-held interest of mine. I have been writing and talking for years about what I call the "Zero-Pound Computer." I really yearn for the day when I can walk into any Internet cafe, Kinko's or well-equipped public library in the world, log on to a site and get my "stuff". Apple's .Mac is a step in that direction, but as I've written elsewhere, it's not as ready for prime time as I'd like to see it. Two recent multi-hour outages in two weeks have shaken what little confidence I had in storing meaningful information on the .Mac servers.
What's a fella to do?
Apple's .Mac service goes down again. As the company phases out its free iTools service and tries to bump customers to the new paid offering, .Mac is not cooperating. It's gone down twice now in as many weeks. [CNET News.com]
10:55:16 AM
|
|
© Copyright 2002 Dan Shafer.
|
|
|
|
|
