I got my hands on a copy of Mac Office 2008, and was so excited to check out the new entourage, since I’ve always had gripes about the lack of functionality of Entourage. Well, turns out that all Microsoft did with Entourage is add a few eye candy features, and shipped it back out. I figured, in 4 years, they would’ve had enough time to invest in sprucing up the functionality to become at least comparable to the PC version. I was wrong!
I am just recently a Mac person, and never really had any bias towards Mac users, but now that I have my own Mac, I will refer to “US MAC USERS”! :-P, we, feel left out.
Here’s my opinion about it though, ever since Leopard came out with the spiffed up version of OS X mail, I’ve been using that with no complaints. ok, maybe a couple, like the lack of a nice archiving system like the PC version of outlook has, and which Entourage STILL doesn’t have! I have not tested full functionality of Office 2008, because I’m still dealing with the initial shock of disappointment!!
At this point, I’m thinking of reverting back to OS X Mail, and using the PC version running Office 2007, on my Parallels VM. cloodgy? maybe, though with the Parallels tools installs, the locations of my files don’t even matter.
Before I finish my rant on Office, I have one more gripe! Pricing!
Hello!? $400??? for the standard version of Office 2008 that actually supports connection to Microsoft Exchange. Hmm… I work for a school district, and when they create a version of office that says on it “Teacher and Student edition” … I would expect all teachers and students jumping on that version, when, in reality, in my case, 100% of the teachers will actually need Exchange functionality! So now, $150 for the retail price of the Teacher and Student edition won’t be enough anymore, and the $399 edition will be required. Granted, educational pricing will probably still be lower than that, I think that the featureset that got offered in this version does not deserve this big hype, and certainly not this high price!
Oh, and I don’t believe I’m the only one that had this issue with Office 2008 for Mac… reading reviews about it, I see these complains all over… Microsoft! get on the ball with Mac users!
I am a relatively new Mac user, and I am still learning the ropes. One of the things that I used to be bale to do very easily on the PC was to create an ISO (CD Image file) from a CD. On the Mac, I attempted to do it using DiskUtility, which is a native tool that comes with OS X, but it does not really do the job. So, after a little bit of research, I found a cool way to do it, which is fairly easy. For this to work, you probably have to be a little comfortable using your “Terminal” application. I will try to put the steps in as much detail as possible, so that you can follow along:
Disclaimer: Please note that the tool used in this article (dd) can be dangerous, and, if used incorrectly, can end up wiping your whole hard drive, so, consider yourself warned!!
- Open “Terminal” : Applications / Utilities / Terminal
- With your CD mounted. (You should be able to see the CD on your desktop, type: df -h
The important line is /dev/disk1s1s3 . This is the device reference to your CDROM drive.
This number may vary, and in order to be sure that your CD device reference is the correct one, you can run the following command, and that should give you at lease the first part of the device without the reference to the volume:
drutil status
This /dev/disk1 is the CD Drive.
- Unmount your CD:
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1 Disk /dev/disk1 unmounted.
- Now create the ISO
dd if=/dev/disk1s1s3 of=mynewcd.iso bs=2048
- When the process finishes, you should be able to mount that image using this command:
hdid mynewcd.iso
Or you can mount it by double clicking on the iso file, and it should show up on your desktop.
Gotchas:
- The main problem that I had with doing this process was to refer to the CD device, instead of the volume that I need to rip. (i.e: /dev/disk1, as opposed to /dev/disk1s1s3). If you use dd and get the final file, it’ll look fine, but when you try to mount it, you will get an error. So make sure you refer to the correct volume.
- Make sure that you are writing the ISO file somewhere within the filesystem that you have WRITE access. The safest place would probably be your home directory, so your dd line would be best that way:
If you’ve never heard of Zoho, you may be wondering what the heck that subject means. Well, it’s very easy to explain: 99% of users have used an office suite of some sort, whether it be Microsoft Office, Microsoft Works, Open Office, or any other product. Unfortunately, up until very recently, most of them were actually offline productivity tools. With the new and upcoming Web 2.0, the world has changed, and shifted to online collaboration and productivity tools.
If you are at all involved in the online world, you may be familiar with the Google Docs applications. Zoho is a very similar set of online tools, whose sole purpose is to not only provide a set of application that seamlessly integrate together, but also allow for simple collaboration between groups. The applications range from any thing simple like creating a word document or an excel spreadsheet, to creating a full fledged application with backend database supporting it, using a very user friendly interface, as well as options to script the application manually (for advanced users) using the Deluge scripting language.
One of the very cool features that I personally like about zoho, is that they allow you embed any application, anywhere, they also have plugins for outlook, to collaborate when using their CRM product, as well as other plugins to integrate with other office products, as as facebook.
Now, even you can create something really cool to impress your friends on your MySpace page, or even your professional website, collecting customer’s contact information, or a poll or what have you …
If you are intrigued as to what Zoho can do, you can check out that YouTube video that gives a brief demonstration of the product.
You can also run this search to get a whole slew of additional videos that demonstrate the different products that Zoho offers.
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If you’ve never heard of Zoho, you may be wondering what the heck that subject means. Well, it’s very easy to explain: 99% of users have used an office suite of some sort, whether it be Microsoft Office, Microsoft Works, Open Office, or any other product. Unfortunately, up until very recently, most of them were actually offline productivity tools. With the new and upcoming 
