office:mac 2008

The new version of Office is great.  It works well with office 2007,  2003 and 2004 documents and the improved integration with Exchange within Entourage is great.  I use Sync services to synchronise contacts and calendar with the Blackberry (as I operate it on a BIS and not a BES – work wouldn’t pay the mean so and so’s). The only quirk I have found is that sometimes Sync Services turns itself off and calendars don’t get updated – very annoying.  I haven’t found out why it’s doing this, so if anyone has any ideas PLEASE post a comment or direct me to a forum or something to help me out here.  I have tried searching to no avail . . . .

OK, so I needed to look at it some more. . .

Quick view works great for all the file types I have, I just hadn’t found that yu needed to hit the spacebar . . . sorry Mr Jobs.

I’m more and more impressed with Leopard the more I use it.  It seems faster than Tiger on my MacBook (2GHz Core2Duo with 2GB RAM) and I don’t think I’ve found anything important that doesn’t work.

Having just got myself a Blackberry Curve I’m also playing with syncing calendar and contacts with Entourage.  If anyone has had experience of this I’d welcome any comments on the subject.

Upgrade to Leopard

Well I upgraded to Leopard.

I backed up my hard drive to another drive using Carbon Copy Cloner and then just ran the install.  Everything went well and it was all complete in about an hour and a half.  No issues found yet.

I’ve just installed the keychain patch, which went well as well.

I like the interface changes.  Spaces is great and better than Virtue Desktops that I had been using (and which I uninstalled before upgrading to Leopard).  The interface changes to Mail is great too. Stacks is the coolest feature yet, and one I’ve been waiting for especially, as I like to organise things in this kind of way leaving the desktop free from clutter.

Coverflow I can take or leave - in some areas it’s really annoying and other areas good.

Quickview is a bit quirky - if I have a .ppt file it does not allow quickview, so it looks like to only quickviews things that the native OS X can read.  Presumably it would work with keynote . . .

I’ve not found any applications that have problems - yet . . .

Please post your experiences and comments so we can share thoughts.

New Mac OS X Leopard release

I’m very pleased to hear about the forthcoming release of Leopard on October 26th.  I’m planing on being at the Apple Store in Sheffield to get my copy as soon as I can – hopefully on the night itself.

Once I have had a chance to play a bit I’ll post some notes here.  Anyone else planning on doing the same?  Please post comments and share experiences.

Interesting Applications for OS X

I found a few nice applications recently, either heard about through RSS feeds or Podcasts I listen to.

Joost, currently in beta, is great for gathering together lots of media channels on the web and allowing you to browse by category or search for content.  Definitely worth a look at.

Radioshift from Rogue Amoeba is also good if you like to listen to web radio and want to record programs and drop the recorded programs into iTunes.  Good search capability too.

For those of you who get PDF documents and want some way to read them and comment on them in the “margin” then Skim is for you.  There is also integration with other document types - see the web page and online documentation for more information.

If, like me, you regularly take your Mac Laptop between different networks each with their own settings needed, then you meed to handle that in a smart way.  MarcPolo is an application that allows you to switch locations by setting rules based on a number of different criteria.  I’ve been using this for some time and find it works great for me.

More application information soon . . .