I'm not saying that AppleScript can be a 100% drop-in replacement for VBA... only that the power is there, if MS chooses to take advantage of it. They won't, for both technical and marketing reasons... mostly the latter.
1. there is nothing that can compete with excel; M$ owns this market, and they do so with the best app
2. writing.... well, this is a difficult issue. But this is how I see it. There are many writing apps, all that cater to different circumstances.
Stickies/textedit cater for those times when you just need to put down a few notes/maximum one page or so.
M$ Word is good if you work with mac/pc-people and need to share, it is good to write shorter essays, 30-50 pages perhpas, and don't need massive layout. It has a good spell checker (yes, it is far better than the build-in in OS X) and the app works nicley I think. Haven't tried the note-taking feature yet, but will have to learn it first).
Then we have layout-apps like indesign, but you don't really write here very much.
Mellel, Nissus writer &c: these cater to people who don't need all the features of wrod, they are cheaper, easier to use and so on (ok, not feature complete yeet... nevermind).
What is missing is an app that caters for those that write techinal stuff, long documents (phd:s and so forth) with some layouting-capabilities, and easy to get consistent (so that writing a book is easy). This was solved by framemaker... which does not exist anymore for mac, and probably not coming neither. Here Apple basically has no competition and there is a market for such an app.
1. there is nothing that can compete with excel; M$ owns this market, and they do so with the best app
Of course because every competitor is trying to be an Excel clone. Clones are rarely better than the original. Take a look at the Quantrix Modeler while I'm sure there are plenty of missing features the nucleus of this app is different and more intuitive for many functions. I imagine if Apple purchased this product and put some effort into it we'd see a nice app. It's Java too so cross platform capabilities would be fairly easy.
Word is a nice "do everything" processor but Apple could perhaps focus on having a "imminently modifiable" product that is modular. Need long document writing...plug in a component..need something tailored to the creative writer..plug in a component. Yes it is similar to Opendoc in principle. Apple should be enable a cottage industry of components for their suite. With Adobe promoting Acrobat heavily there's never been a better time to enter this market and freshen it up a bit.
For all of MS' dominance in this area I still find the tools in Office 2003 to be rather rudimentary for the typical layperson. It feels far more intuitive than previous versions but I'd say it still doesn't have the "feel" of a well written Mac app.
Take a look at the Quantrix Modeler while I'm sure there are plenty of missing features the nucleus of this app is different and more intuitive for many functions. I imagine if Apple purchased this product and put some effort into it we'd see a nice app. It's Java too so cross platform capabilities would be fairly easy.
I'm not sure I like that idea. Aren't java-applications rather alien to our esteemed Mac OS UI? Also, aren't they rather sluggish? Admittedly I'm a layman at best, but I think that Apple should focus on putting out great native software that can utilize the power of Cocoa (and Carbon). Besides, if putting out an Excel-compeditor for the Mac would piss Microsoft off, I can only imagine what a Windows-compatible version would do.
Instead... they should devot some cash to shipping all mac's with office or at least word like PC's do.
...
Again, what is wrong with appleworks ? It is fairly good enough for most purposes. At least for so called "basic stuff", like writing invitation cards.
And more.
If you are professionally on writing, then you probably have to buy the ms office suite. Period. This is monopoly gaming.
What i've never quite understood though, damn, why doesn't MS sell word seperatly from the whole office suite. Well, i am not a sells guy
MS would sell Word alone to mac customers like hot cakes.
Since 3 - and if i count the classic days - since 13 years i have never launched powerpoint. Hear that? excel? 3 or 4 times.
M$ Word is good if you work with mac/pc-people and need to share, it is good to write shorter essays, 30-50 pages perhpas, and don't need massive layout. ..
Hey don't get me wrong. THIS is not a stump speech for M$ but Word handles
docs with 150 pages and beyond quite well. No probs here.
Word is a nice "do everything" processor but Apple could perhaps focus on having a "imminently modifiable" product that is modular. Need long document writing...plug in a component..need something tailored to the creative writer..plug in a component. Yes it is similar to Opendoc in principle. Apple should be enable a cottage industry of components for their suite. With Adobe promoting Acrobat heavily there's never been a better time to enter this market and freshen it up a bit.
Yeah, Apple went big on OpenDoc, and encouraged many developers to do so. Nisus was the pioneer in moving that way. Oh, then Apple decided not to go OpenDoc, after all. So, Nisus invested heavily in that and then was left out in the cold.
The difficulty with anticipating Apple's move as a developer is: Do you believe Apple when it says - "this is the future"? We would like to think so, but history has shown many carcasses littered along the way of those who have believed Apple.
On the other hand, the modular approach makes sense. And I think both Mellel and Nisus could be big players in this. They approached OS X development differently, but offer competent products. And of course, one wonders how much longer MS can continue to build on the build of the build of the build...
of course you can write 150 pages with Word. but you don't have all the layout-tools that make documents look great, no matter how many pages they are. files don't iincrease in size as much neither with document length; consistency in layout/tables/notes/bullets/equations is a lot easier with framemaker (once you know how to do it!). besides, TOC and so forth are easy to make and become interactive in pdf-s. think about it like making all the stuff for a book - few books are printed straigth from MS Word (or from pdf-s from Word). They go into quark or indesign - this you don't need with framemaker.
The difficulty with anticipating Apple's move as a developer is: Do you believe Apple when it says - "this is the future"? We would like to think so, but history has shown many carcasses littered along the way of those who have believed Apple.
They've addressed this problem pretty well since the Return of Steve. A bunch of legacy technologies got retired, and since then they've been pretty consistent. The only exception I can think of is GameSprockets, which got retired for the much lower-level HID Manager. Mostly, though, Apple seems to have earned their trust. I get the impression that this your mentioning this is an artifact of some explanation of why Mac Office has historically hardly ever used any native widgets or functions, preferring always to exist as its own island.
Rick's blog crystallizes a lot of comments I've read on the AppleScript Users' list: First, that MS seems to take a perverse amount of pride in the sheer size of Word's dictionary, and second, that Word is its own world, and MS feels no obligation to make any of its features or feature names correlate to anything else in existence. (Word's AppleScript dictionary is as alien as it is vast; as Rick basically says, it's a thin veil over the old solution, which was to put a bunch of VBA into a string and tell Word to execute it.)
Since Rick doesn't even touch on Word's legions of bugs when he describes why some people hate it so much, I won't touch on the legions of bugs as a reason some people hates scripting Word.
They already do. Look in any catalog. It's the price that's the problem
Price is definitely the problem! As a student, in particular, Word is basically the same price as the entire Office suite! I'm not a huge fan of PowerPoint, and Entourage drives me crazy sometimes, but if I can get all four programs for $150 or Word for $150 (haven't looked at the prices lately, so don't hold me to those), it only makes sense to buy the entire suite, even if you simply "think" about using Excel every now and then.
MS Office is bloated and nasty on Mac OS X (and Windows for that matter). BUT... it's the best we've got right now and we have to deal with that. I'd say that overall the MS MacBU has done a pretty good job with it. They're just following their own trail instead of Apple's. And Apple has to go along with it for now because without Office, Apple would be in trouble.
I'd love to see an updated AppleWorks. I'd buy it in an instant... if it didn't come with my new PowerBook.
to be part of the "industry standard", we will see M$ Office for Mac for a while.
But:
* mail - a nice mail app, has the function for "the rest of us", not as complex as entourage
* iCal - a nice calender; not as complex as entourage/outlook, but you can share, sync, etc.
* keynote - a nice? you got the idea?
what is missing?
* a new, intuitive word processor; we still work with the typewriter metaphor - ok, ok, I can train Word a lot of tricks, but who does? I imagine the functionality of the intelligent playlists of iTunes with the design effects of keynote ("select the type of writing: book, dairy, private letter, official letter?", autofill of adresses, auto print out of couverts, auto integration from iPhotos, etc.)
* filemaker express/iFile/iShelf - delicios library has a nice conecept; and again, the iTunes way-of-browsing
* spreadsheet? hmmm, very difficult; I share the view, that Excel is state-of-the-art; and, I don't neet a spreadsheet, not private, not in my job (I do my calculation with a calculator)
the AppleWorks<>Office connection will be as in "powerpoint<>keynote" - basic, but useful.
I'm sure, with Tiger we will see the renaissance of AppleWorks, we'll see in January?
Agreed. Yes, you can do long documents with Word, but Word's long documents do you, too. FrameMaker, on the other hand, is just lovely.
Oh Frame we love you...
THE only application for long document design IMHO (and the market leader for technical documents).
Imagine Apple putting its software/design/UI teams onto Frame. The super powerful features which are a pig to use in painful dialogue boxes would be easier to use. Appleworks Pro anyone
the Apple stlye, to offer an app in two versions, the "i one" and the pro one, should be reflected in a word processor - hey, my grandma doesn't do headers&footers, indices&footnotes - she needs nice templates and the adress in correct place?-
Comments
I'm not saying that AppleScript can be a 100% drop-in replacement for VBA... only that the power is there, if MS chooses to take advantage of it. They won't, for both technical and marketing reasons... mostly the latter.
1. there is nothing that can compete with excel; M$ owns this market, and they do so with the best app
2. writing.... well, this is a difficult issue. But this is how I see it. There are many writing apps, all that cater to different circumstances.
Stickies/textedit cater for those times when you just need to put down a few notes/maximum one page or so.
M$ Word is good if you work with mac/pc-people and need to share, it is good to write shorter essays, 30-50 pages perhpas, and don't need massive layout. It has a good spell checker (yes, it is far better than the build-in in OS X) and the app works nicley I think. Haven't tried the note-taking feature yet, but will have to learn it first).
Then we have layout-apps like indesign, but you don't really write here very much.
Mellel, Nissus writer &c: these cater to people who don't need all the features of wrod, they are cheaper, easier to use and so on (ok, not feature complete yeet... nevermind).
What is missing is an app that caters for those that write techinal stuff, long documents (phd:s and so forth) with some layouting-capabilities, and easy to get consistent (so that writing a book is easy). This was solved by framemaker... which does not exist anymore for mac, and probably not coming neither. Here Apple basically has no competition and there is a market for such an app.
Go Apple Go!!!
The other very handy thing about Word is tracked changes when work is shared around.
Originally posted by dividend
not as well as framemaker did.... sure, not the prettiest programme, but very very good.
Agreed. Yes, you can do long documents with Word, but Word's long documents do you, too. FrameMaker, on the other hand, is just lovely.
1. there is nothing that can compete with excel; M$ owns this market, and they do so with the best app
Of course because every competitor is trying to be an Excel clone. Clones are rarely better than the original. Take a look at the Quantrix Modeler while I'm sure there are plenty of missing features the nucleus of this app is different and more intuitive for many functions. I imagine if Apple purchased this product and put some effort into it we'd see a nice app. It's Java too so cross platform capabilities would be fairly easy.
Word is a nice "do everything" processor but Apple could perhaps focus on having a "imminently modifiable" product that is modular. Need long document writing...plug in a component..need something tailored to the creative writer..plug in a component. Yes it is similar to Opendoc in principle. Apple should be enable a cottage industry of components for their suite. With Adobe promoting Acrobat heavily there's never been a better time to enter this market and freshen it up a bit.
For all of MS' dominance in this area I still find the tools in Office 2003 to be rather rudimentary for the typical layperson. It feels far more intuitive than previous versions but I'd say it still doesn't have the "feel" of a well written Mac app.
Originally posted by hmurchison
Take a look at the Quantrix Modeler while I'm sure there are plenty of missing features the nucleus of this app is different and more intuitive for many functions. I imagine if Apple purchased this product and put some effort into it we'd see a nice app. It's Java too so cross platform capabilities would be fairly easy.
I'm not sure I like that idea. Aren't java-applications rather alien to our esteemed Mac OS UI? Also, aren't they rather sluggish? Admittedly I'm a layman at best, but I think that Apple should focus on putting out great native software that can utilize the power of Cocoa (and Carbon). Besides, if putting out an Excel-compeditor for the Mac would piss Microsoft off, I can only imagine what a Windows-compatible version would do.
Originally posted by salmonstk
...
Instead... they should devot some cash to shipping all mac's with office or at least word like PC's do.
...
Again, what is wrong with appleworks
And more.
If you are professionally on writing, then you probably have to buy the ms office suite. Period. This is monopoly gaming.
What i've never quite understood though, damn, why doesn't MS sell word seperatly from the whole office suite. Well, i am not a sells guy
MS would sell Word alone to mac customers like hot cakes.
Since 3 - and if i count the classic days - since 13 years i have never launched powerpoint. Hear that? excel? 3 or 4 times.
What a huge waste of resources and money.
my 2cents
Originally posted by dividend
...
M$ Word is good if you work with mac/pc-people and need to share, it is good to write shorter essays, 30-50 pages perhpas, and don't need massive layout. ..
Hey don't get me wrong. THIS is not a stump speech for M$ but Word handles
docs with 150 pages and beyond quite well. No probs here.
Originally posted by hmurchison
Word is a nice "do everything" processor but Apple could perhaps focus on having a "imminently modifiable" product that is modular. Need long document writing...plug in a component..need something tailored to the creative writer..plug in a component. Yes it is similar to Opendoc in principle. Apple should be enable a cottage industry of components for their suite. With Adobe promoting Acrobat heavily there's never been a better time to enter this market and freshen it up a bit.
Yeah, Apple went big on OpenDoc, and encouraged many developers to do so. Nisus was the pioneer in moving that way. Oh, then Apple decided not to go OpenDoc, after all. So, Nisus invested heavily in that and then was left out in the cold.
The difficulty with anticipating Apple's move as a developer is: Do you believe Apple when it says - "this is the future"? We would like to think so, but history has shown many carcasses littered along the way of those who have believed Apple.
On the other hand, the modular approach makes sense. And I think both Mellel and Nisus could be big players in this. They approached OS X development differently, but offer competent products. And of course, one wonders how much longer MS can continue to build on the build of the build of the build...
Rick Schaut weblog
Originally posted by Kickaha
A link would be lovely.
Rick Schaut Weblog
Originally posted by GrayShades
The difficulty with anticipating Apple's move as a developer is: Do you believe Apple when it says - "this is the future"? We would like to think so, but history has shown many carcasses littered along the way of those who have believed Apple.
They've addressed this problem pretty well since the Return of Steve. A bunch of legacy technologies got retired, and since then they've been pretty consistent. The only exception I can think of is GameSprockets, which got retired for the much lower-level HID Manager. Mostly, though, Apple seems to have earned their trust. I get the impression that this your mentioning this is an artifact of some explanation of why Mac Office has historically hardly ever used any native widgets or functions, preferring always to exist as its own island.
Rick's blog crystallizes a lot of comments I've read on the AppleScript Users' list: First, that MS seems to take a perverse amount of pride in the sheer size of Word's dictionary, and second, that Word is its own world, and MS feels no obligation to make any of its features or feature names correlate to anything else in existence. (Word's AppleScript dictionary is as alien as it is vast; as Rick basically says, it's a thin veil over the old solution, which was to put a bunch of VBA into a string and tell Word to execute it.)
Since Rick doesn't even touch on Word's legions of bugs when he describes why some people hate it so much, I won't touch on the legions of bugs as a reason some people hates scripting Word.
Originally posted by Vox Barbara
Again, what is wrong with appleworks
I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that...
Originally posted by Vox Barbara
MS would sell Word alone to mac customers like hot cakes.
They already do. Look in any catalog. It's the price that's the problem
Originally posted by Frank777
They already do. Look in any catalog. It's the price that's the problem
Price is definitely the problem! As a student, in particular, Word is basically the same price as the entire Office suite! I'm not a huge fan of PowerPoint, and Entourage drives me crazy sometimes, but if I can get all four programs for $150 or Word for $150 (haven't looked at the prices lately, so don't hold me to those), it only makes sense to buy the entire suite, even if you simply "think" about using Excel every now and then.
MS Office is bloated and nasty on Mac OS X (and Windows for that matter). BUT... it's the best we've got right now and we have to deal with that. I'd say that overall the MS MacBU has done a pretty good job with it. They're just following their own trail instead of Apple's. And Apple has to go along with it for now because without Office, Apple would be in trouble.
I'd love to see an updated AppleWorks. I'd buy it in an instant... if it didn't come with my new PowerBook.
Originally posted by adamrao
P
I'd love to see an updated AppleWorks. I'd buy it in an instant... if it didn't come with my new PowerBook.
I'd rather see Apple buy Nisus.
But:
* mail - a nice mail app, has the function for "the rest of us", not as complex as entourage
* iCal - a nice calender; not as complex as entourage/outlook, but you can share, sync, etc.
* keynote - a nice? you got the idea?
what is missing?
* a new, intuitive word processor; we still work with the typewriter metaphor - ok, ok, I can train Word a lot of tricks, but who does? I imagine the functionality of the intelligent playlists of iTunes with the design effects of keynote ("select the type of writing: book, dairy, private letter, official letter?", autofill of adresses, auto print out of couverts, auto integration from iPhotos, etc.)
* filemaker express/iFile/iShelf - delicios library has a nice conecept; and again, the iTunes way-of-browsing
* spreadsheet? hmmm, very difficult; I share the view, that Excel is state-of-the-art; and, I don't neet a spreadsheet, not private, not in my job (I do my calculation with a calculator)
the AppleWorks<>Office connection will be as in "powerpoint<>keynote" - basic, but useful.
I'm sure, with Tiger we will see the renaissance of AppleWorks, we'll see in January?
Originally posted by Mr. Me
Agreed. Yes, you can do long documents with Word, but Word's long documents do you, too. FrameMaker, on the other hand, is just lovely.
Oh Frame we love you...
THE only application for long document design IMHO (and the market leader for technical documents).
Imagine Apple putting its software/design/UI teams onto Frame. The super powerful features which are a pig to use in painful dialogue boxes would be easier to use. Appleworks Pro anyone
Originally posted by othello
?
Appleworks Pro anyone ?
<raising hand>
the Apple stlye, to offer an app in two versions, the "i one" and the pro one, should be reflected in a word processor - hey, my grandma doesn't do headers&footers, indices&footnotes - she needs nice templates and the adress in correct place?-
Originally posted by k_munic
<raising hand>
...
hey, my grandma doesn't do headers&footers, indices&footnotes - she needs nice templates and the adress in correct place?-
Again, Appleworks does this pretty good... well, basically.