Despite not having access via Technet to any of the Microsoft Mac apps (hey MS please change this!) I have been able to conduct some testing with the betas of the new office suite coming this holiday season.

Where Office 2008 was a combination upgrade (file formats, tools) and downgrade (no vba support), the coming release looks much more viable particularly if you are using a Mac as your system of choice in business.

The big change is the replacement of the much maligned Entourage with Outlook. While I don’t need to connect to Exchange for business and don’t use Outlook, my research shows this offering as significantly better than Entourage and for those who are accustomed to working with Outlook, I think you’re really going to like this change. Look and feel is similar to Outlook 2010 for Windows, and they’ve done a great job on that one. If I had to use Windows and worked in an Exchange shop, I’d be ok.

I started my testing with beta 2 and just installed beta 4 at time of this writing. The new build is more stable as one would expect and the implementation of the ribbon interface is far less disconcerting than I expected it to be. Particularly in PowerPoint when I revert to the Office 2008 version for production work, I find myself missing the ribbon interface! It’s that good. I just wish there was a ppt player for the iPad as the Keynote iPad app needs a lot of compatibility work.

Excel works nicely although I had to change the default display zoom on the Mac Pro so I could read the content. The Vba macro support works for the most part although I’ve had complex Corp Finance created macros make the boom boom.

Word is just excellent, with great performance and ease of use. I typically use the very strong Neooffice for work since we do everything in the open document format, but when I need to share something in the MS formats I pull into Word to do a quick format verify. I also like the track changes functionality when working with teammates on RFPs. It’s very simple and clean. I ran into some formatting challenges with documents coming from Office 2003 for Windows, particularly in tables and bullets but when I cleaned them up, I was able to confirm that they went back to Windows as doc files without any problems. This is critical because of the significant growth of Macs in the enterprise and the need for seamless interoperability. Microsoft looks to have some really good work here.

I’ll look forward to future betas and the final FCS release as what I see so far is a winner.

Don’t steal movies and / or music.  There.  Now that that’s done I can get to the point of the post.

Lately, on the odd occasion that I actually buy a movie, I look for Blu Ray versions with the digital content option to make it very easy to get the movie that I am paying for onto my AppleTV and iPad.  Unfortunately there are movies I have bought and movies that are being reissued that I want that don’t have this option.

Lots of people, including myself have written about how to get your movies off your legally purchased media into digital format that you can reuse for your personal use.  That’s not the point of this post.

When I look at my digital content, I like the metadata to be complete and the artwork to be clean.  In the past I would hunt this stuff down manually, then for audio, let iTunes do the Gracenote update.  But movies were always a pain.  I tried MetaTag X and while it could work, I more than often enough had corruption of the file occur and I found the write changes process to be really slow.  So I gave up.

This past week I discovered an amazing little tool called Subler.  It uses data from Tagchimp and makes updating metadata and artwork incredibly easy.  Open the movie file in Subler.  Type the title into the search box.  Select which of the returned options you prefer.  Save the file.  Done.

Subler has a very basic UI and does this one thing only.  But it does it extremely well.  Subler is written by Damiano Galassi.  At the time of this post, it is at version 0.97 and available for download at http://code.google.com/p/subler/ It is a Mac app requiring OS X 10.5 or later and works fine under Snow Leopard.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I recently discovered to my chagrin that Apple Mail on my MacBook Air would no longer start. This was part of a much larger set of problems that this machine was starting to demonstrate including slowdowns, application lockups and other issues.

In doing some research on how to fix this problem, I discovered a series of threads I wanted to share with you. Many Mail issues can be resolved through rebuilding the index for Mail. Here’s how.

1. Open ~/Library/Mail where the ~ represents your user home folder
2. Drag the file called Envelope Index to your desktop
3. Make sure this file no longer shows in the Mail folder
4. Relaunch Mail
5. Accept the prompt to import messages
6. Review any messages telling you that your machine is out of sync with MobileMe and make the decision that best suits your data.
7. You’re done

If this doesn’t work for you completely, you’ve got a bigger problem, but it does solve a number of issues.

Apple has made Aperture 3 available an by all data it’s an upgrade worth buying. However, I and many other people have had the upgrade result in Aperture constantly crashing on launch with a dump of messages that are not very helpful. One poster noted that he spent over an hour with Apple’s usually superb technical support yet never had the issue resolved. i discovered a potential solution that worked for me in the forums at DPReview, the superb digital photographic site.

Here’s how to fix the problem and what you’ll need.
Your Aperture 3 serial number (full version) OR
Your Aperture 3 upgrade serial number and your Aperture 2 full serial number

1. Aperture should be installed but is crashing on launch. If not, this tip isn’t the one you need. Don’t trash Aperture
2. Open the Library folder at the root of the hard disk (not the library in your user folder). Then open the Application Support folder followed by the ProApps folder. In this folder you will find .id files that correspond to whichever Apple Pro Apps you have installed. Move the aperture and proapps .id files to your desktop, ensuring that they are gone from the ProApps folder.
3. Launch Aperture. Even if you’ve entered your information before you’ll need to do so again.
4. Enter your Aperture 3 serial number. If your install is an upgrade, you’ll be prompted for your full version serial number. This is where you enter your Aperture 2 serial number.
5. Register your software if you have not already had this happen (unlikely).
6. Launch Aperture and let it upgrade your Aperture library. Be patient, this takes a while for large libraries.
7. Accept or not to use the places feature (your choice).
8. Exit Aperture and relaunch it to be sure all is solid.
9. If you have other ProApps installed, now would be a good time to launch them to ensure that they still launch properly.
10. Run Software Update. At the time of this writing, there was already a slideshow patch posted. I expect that there will be more based upon the volume of issues reported with the 3.0 release.

Of course if you have no issues with your install or now that things are fixed, dig in, it’s a solid upgrade and an excellent product overall.

In my recent post about ninite.com, I made mention of a similar service with a larger list of apps called AllMyApps.  I said I didn’t care for it and explained that my reasons were partly because of the need to install a client, but mostly due to what I felt was phishing behaviour or bouncing me around in the hope I would click on the wrong download link.  That’s the kind of behaviour that makes me nuts.  I should have been clearer that the second set of issues had everything to do with the app download site and not with the AllMyApps application.

I was very impressed to receive a direct message within a couple of days from one of the folks who build AllMyApps.com explaining their philosophy and asking my help in identifying the apps that annoyed me, and therefore had a negative effect on my perception of their service.  This is indicative of a very professional group and the fact that instead of being defensive, the person was so engaging, I agreed to go back and share with them what annoyed me.  Their model is that if one of the apps does something outside their rules, it gets dumped from the list.  I really appreciated the fellow’s concern about customer satisfaction.

So while I am not a fan of installing client software for web oriented services, I am changing my tune on the service itself.  A group that shows this much interest in doing a great job and listening to their customers has the right attitude and so I do suggest that if you have an app install requirement, go have a look.  AllMyApps.com supports Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP.  They also have apps for the Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10, 9.04, 9.10 distro builds.  Readers know that my preference is SUSE but I have to give these folks credit for leveraging their talent to populate apps into Ubuntu.  WORTH A LOOK.

Further update.  Since receiving the very courteous email from the people at AllMyApps, I did another complete test on the Windows 7 machine.  While I am a bit frustrated by some of the machinations employed by some of the app providers, the updated interface and ease of use raises my review of AllMyApps to RECOMMENDED

So you got a new Windows machine, or you’re doing a migration to Windows 7. Trust me, the last thing you want to o is migrate old apps to a new machine. You want a clean install. But getting all your key apps from all those places you downloaded them from is a pain.

Not with ninite. It’s a really simple service. Go to Ninite.com and select the apps you want from the simple graphic table. Then click the Install button. Ninite builds a custom download and installer for you that downloads. You run the executable and it installs the apps, but leaves no footprint of itself or phone home annoyances behind. I compared this with a similar service called AllMyApps that lists many more apps. I prefer Ninite because I like keeping the amount of dreck to a minimum plus AllMyApps installs its own client and some of the downloads lead you through a number of scam and phishy sites. So I don’t recommend AllMyApps at all. Ninite is simple clean and effective.

The selection of apps is sufficient for most needs including Office apps, image manipulators, antivirus and malware protection, browsers, utilities, and very useful services like Dropbox, Evernote, Google Earth and KeePass.

Even if you think you have all the core apps you need, it’s worth your time to look at Ninite. I discovered it only before the holidays and used it during that week of fixing family and friend’s computers. Big time savings and reduced hassles. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

You know you want to participate in the Twitterverse, but you run Windows and the Twitter apps you’ve looked at all leave you cold. They aren’t creating a lot of value for you.

Enter Blu. It’s from a neat company called thirteen23 They build utilities for Windows and Blu, as you will have guessed by now is their Twitter client. The web page says it is the Twitter client for Vista and I guess both people who run Vista are pretty excited. Fortunately Blu also runs on Windows 7 and does so wonderfully. thirteen23 does some other neat stuff but their killer app is Blu.

One of the things that challenges me with Twitter is that I’ll get a reply to something I posted but the reply doesn’t pull together the entire conversation, so I have to hunt for it. Blu does this automatically. Want to reply, DM, or retweet? Blu makes it simple, just click the reply and the original tweet flips over to give you an entry box. Could not be simpler.

Adding shortened URLs is easy with no buttons or sites to select, it’s automatic. You may have seen apps that run out of Twitter api uses pretty quick. That’s annoying. Blu stays on the mark so just scroll for more tweets. It’s so good I wish it had a Mac version. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I really like Evernote but I discovered an issue this week where the Mac internet plugin was the root cause of dropdown menus on Java pages not staying dropped down. To remove the plugin go to your Library | Internet Plugins folder and move the plugin to the trash. Logout and log back in and you should be good to go.

UPDATE JAN 22 I’ve discovered that the most recent update of Evernote has fixed this issue.

VMware is well known for its enterprise class virtualization solutions and of course as noted previously here at thehumantouch.ca for VMware Fusion the awesome virtualization application for OS X. But long before Fusion there existed VMware Workstations and those of us who have had to build complex demonstrations involving multiple servers and workstations have used VMware Workstation to accomplish these goals.

With Version 7 of VMware Workstation, the VMware team have made an excellent product even better. It runs on both the Windows and the Linux platforms. The new version is fully tested on Windows 7 and even offers DirectX 9.0c Shader 3 and openGL 2.13D graphic support in virtualized Windows machines. It also supports the Aero graphics routines in vm’d Windows 7 implementations. It continues to support a wide variety of Windows and Linux guests and I have yet to be unsuccessful in building a VM of anything that could be installed natively on an Intel processor (excluding OS X of course) with VMware.

If you are doing any kind of development work, well you probably aren’t reading this site, but in case you are, the new version integrates directly with Eclipse, Visual Studio and Springsource for app development and debugging. Virtualization is a great way to test the execution of your app on multiple platforms without building up a lot of physical hardware.

VMware Workstation costs about $190 USD but there are promos running from time to time where you can save money. If you don’t need to build VMs, just to run an existing one, such as the prebuilt machines in the VMware marketplace, you can also get VMware Player as a free download. Recommended

We have a lot of Mac users hitting the site for which I am very grateful. Microsoft makes a really solid Office package and at a decent price in the Home and Student version.

That said, when we are looking for great tools, an open mind is a good thing. You’ve probably heard of OpenOffice.org that in its V3 release made a decent Mac offering available. You may not know about Neooffice though. This team lives by donation and have been doing open office for the Mac longer than anyone. With great respect to the OOO team, the Neooffice team has built a product that looks more Mac like, doesn’t need X11 and easily shares files using the Microsoft file format. Neooffice released V3.01 today with full Snow Leopard support. It’s excellent and highly recommended.

You can download this from Neooffice.org at http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php