[Macworld]

Post your comments for Microsoft replaces Mac GM with 12-year veteran here

[I_like_Macs]

Great, I hope that hopefully in the not-so-distant future, Office for Mac will have VBA and Spaces support, not to mention compatibility with its Windows counterpart.

[alansky]

Microsoft has "the largest collection of Mac developers outside Apple" and Office 2008 is the best they could come up with??? Really???

[k2director]

In the hope that Microsoft really is listening to customers, I make this request:
Please work on speeding Office up, in a serious way. Word, Excel and PowerPoint feel like lumbering elephants on my Macbook Air, Macbook Pro and even my Mac Pro. Boot times in particular are agonizingly slow. When I need to quickly pop into a Word document or spreadsheet, I don't want to wait 10 seconds for the app to come to life.
It's 2008, guys. My machines have 2 gigs, 4 gigs and 6 gigs of RAM, respectively. Fast hard drives. Multi-core processors. So why does the Office of today feel slower than the older version of Office I used to run on a G3 Powerbook under OS 9?

[soslack]

alansky said:

Microsoft has "the largest collection of Mac developers outside Apple" and Office 2008 is the best they could come up with??? Really???

Completely agree...

[Grapho]

No kidding. Office is by far the most sluggish loading software on my Mac. I thought it had to do to fonts that I have activated for other jobs, but I see that others are having issues too.

[ebouley]

Office 2008 is pathetically slow. I actually hate to use it. Hopefully Microsoft can come up with a better program. The only good thing about the program is that it always reminds me why I left the PC and Windows.

[robco]

To be fair, Apple hasn't exactly been friendly to devs in the past. Like Adobe, MS has a lot of legacy code. Apple switched OSes, then platforms in a relatively short span of time. So not only did devs have to rewrite code for a new OS, but move to a new IDE and retool any CPU optimizations. Carbon was provided as a bridge, but only Cocoa apps made the easier transition to Intel (not to mention 64-bit support being dropped). Apple uses essentially its own language which has little support outside of Apple.
When you have a big ship, it doesn't change directions easily. Moving loads of devs from CodeWarrior to XCode (which honestly, compared to other IDEs like VS or Eclipse isn't that great), then rewriting for a new platform and rewriting legacy code to be compatible going forward takes considerable time and resources.
It's good that Apple is taking some time off adding new bells and whistles to the OS and focusing on optimization and performance. Hopefully this will give developers room to breathe and start implementing the features Apple has introduced instead of trying to play catch-up with new releases every eighteen months.

[Grapho]

This is an excellent observation that I just happen to be discussing on a deferent forum. I agree 100%

24 bit to 32 bit

680xx to Power PC

OS 9 to OSX

Power PC to Intel

Yep, you have a point and I think finally the dust will settle with Snow Leopard and if developers stick with Cocoa, it will be an easer rode for them. We will also get a platform that you will no longer have to get the latest version of software so that it can run reliably or at all.

[frgough]

Sorry, I'm not buying it.

Apple can re-write an entire operating system, including migration tools for application developers in a couple of years, but an app developer can't do it in the same amount of time?

MS didn't do it because they didn't want to do it. And when they did do it, it was crap. Here's a fun little exercise for you. Put Word 2008 in publisher view. Type some text. Check the ligatures box. Watch all your text turn upside down.

Here's another fun one for you. Paste some text into a table. Undo the paste. Watch all your font sizes in text styles based on normal switch to 12 point.

Word 2008 is a piece of buggy junk.

[MorrisTheCat]

k2director said:

In the hope that Microsoft really is listening to customers, I make this request:

Please work on speeding Office up, in a serious way. Word, Excel and PowerPoint feel like lumbering elephants on my Macbook Air, Macbook Pro and even my Mac Pro. Boot times in particular are agonizingly slow. When I need to quickly pop into a Word document or spreadsheet, I don't want to wait 10 seconds for the app to come to life.

It's 2008, guys. My machines have 2 gigs, 4 gigs and 6 gigs of RAM, respectively. Fast hard drives. Multi-core processors. So why does the Office of today feel slower than the older version of Office I used to run on a G3 Powerbook under OS 9?

Word only takes 10 seconds to come up for you? Consider yourself lucky! In the time it often takes me to open Word, I can launch Pages and create and save a new document, and Word would still be loading.
I don't know what the deal is with Word. Excel isn't as bad, but Word feels like a drugged sloth.

[robco]

Um, OS X has been in development for over fifteen years. Bear in mind that it began its life as NEXTStep in the company Steve founded after being unceremoniously booted from 1 Infinite Loop. And even then, it's based heavily on BSD. Obj-C was also in development before then. Quite a bit of technology such as Quartz (Display PostScript) is licensed. And as Apple admitted, they'd been compiling OS X on alternate platforms (Intel) for years. Apple had a lot of work done for them - they didn't rewrite OS X in a few years - far from it - it's been in the works for quite some time. This is not a bad thing.

The problem is that OS X is a completely different OS than OS 9 and it takes a while to completely rewrite a codebase that's million of lines long. Not to mention that messing with working code gives more than ample opportunity to introduce new bugs. All I'm saying is that companies like Adobe and Apple who have supported the Mac from the start have a lot of legacy code. First it was moving to PPC. Then to OS X. By the time they'd migrated using Carbon, it was time to throw that out and use Cocoa - and new development tools - to make the transition to Intel. That is an awful lot of work. It also doesn't help that Apple is extremely secretive and hence developers had no advance warning that many of these major platform changes were coming. Apple accelerated the Intel timetable by six months. Apple changes the rules of the game at the last minute - oops, no Carbon 64-bit - so no 64-bit Photoshop for the Mac.

Undoubtedly MS and Adobe are moving toward Cocoa - their new products are Cocoa. But retooling a huge, complex app to run reliably on a completely new OS and platform isn't easy. Cut them a little slack.

[Grapho]

So you think that all these transitions do not come with consequences. Think again. Adobe just rewrote parts of Illustrator that where considered low level that were left behind in 680xx code. Yes back to the Illustrator 3.0 era. This happened for Illustrator 13 or CS3. Why do you think it was so sluggish running under OSX. Both CS1 and CS2 where very slow. CS3 is a bit better and CS4 is even better in this respect.

Even Apple is cleaning house. What do you think they are doing with Snow Leopard. Sure, they are implementing new technologies, and all this is very exciting, but they are also optimizing their code to Cocoa, so that things work better and they can expand on the 64 bit promise. Basically Apple is cleaning all the transitional code left from Carbon and Power PC era. This code is no longer necessary and they best optimize it for the future. You can only hope that Adobe, MS and others will follow. Adobe has said that Photoshop will be rewritten, not so sure for the rest of the suite.
Message was edited by: Grapho

[montgomery_burns]

Give us full feature parity between Entourage and Outlook. No more crippleware. Entourage still can't access Outlook rules, notes, and tasks, for crying out loud.