I’m totally shocked and amazed by some of Microsoft’s latest offerings. If you are a Mac user, do yourself a favor and check out some of the Microsoft offerings. They have been quietly been making advances on a number of fronts:
Windows Live Office -> Windows SkyDrive: I signed up for the Windows Live Office when it first came out because I was testing all sorts of cloud based apps at the time. Microsoft has recently decided (for better or worse) to closed out Live Office and migrating all accounts to SkyDrive. While there seems to be some complaints online about this move, for the limited uses I have found for Live Office, I’m just happy about going from 5GB of free disk space to 25GB!!
Office 2011 for Mac: OMG – that pretty sums it up. Awesome features, very similar to Office 2010 on PC (which is actually a good thing for those of us who have to use PCs at work.) Connects to SkyDrive and SharePoint! I’m still playing with it and I’m pretty impressed so far with the overall functionality. I’ve delved into a little VBA coding and i’m trying to decide if I should try out the Outlook client. The only negative to adding this software to my machine – it doesn’t have anything to do with the product itself, but more my comfort level — I re-installed ClamXAV. Yeah, I’ve been burned too many times in the PC world. Now with this product (with VBA) being on the Mac, time to start thinking about security again.
Silverlight 4.0: Okay – in the past this was always a pain to install. However, I’d like to personally thank the install wizards for finally changing the install script to:
`/usr/sbin/system_profiler SPHardwareDataType -xml | grep “PowerPC”`;
Yup.. that’s right. It’s not looking for Intel chips anymore. It’s looking for PowerPC chip before erring out. Latest version installed without any hacking. Woohoo!
-JT
Now that I’ve pretty much ended my quest for a great calendaring solution for the family, I’ve turn my attention to sharing our media. Like a lot of families, I have a ton of music, pictures, and video scattered acrossed a number of machines. I’ve corralled a lot of this data to one SAMBA share on my Ubuntu server. This is good – as now I have one central place for all data that my family can now avoid on purpose. “What server?”, “uh, where can I find that movie/song/pic?”, etc. No matter, I will win them over soon (well… eventually.)
Ahhh.. thought I forgot about you? No, no, my poor little blog, I haven’t forgotten. Look what I got. Yes, it’s new content. Yes, I know how much you like new content.
