Now I will never have to buy any of your products again!
The latest issue of Editorium Update has arrived, and Jack Lyon reports the following:
Word 2008, for Macintosh, isn’t out yet but will be later this year:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/jan07/01-09MacworldPR.mspx
Like Word 2007 for Windows, it will feature the Ribbon interface, with all of the drawbacks I discussed in the previous newsletter:
http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1720752173
But there’s one more drawback that will be utterly devastating: No more recording, programming, or even running of macros.
(hysterical emphasis mine)
No macros.
No. Macros. At all.
According to this Macworld article, you’ll be able to do macro-type-things using Applescript and Automator and whatever—I confess that I have not tried to wrap my head around that stuff at all yet; go ahead; suspend my Geek license—but if I have to write my own scripts, why the fuck would I write them to control Word? If I’m going to put that kind of effort into something, obviously it would make more sense to trick out a free word processor than a piece of overpriced bloatware from a company that has demonstrated time and time again that it doesn’t want my business.
Duh.
I already decided that when I get a laptop this year, I am going totally hardcore OPEN SOURCE. Whole shebang. I can’t stand the idea of Vista, or updated versions of Word and everything else. OpenOffice, here I come. Ubuntu, I am yours.
There are a lot of advantages w/Open Office and one is conserving HD space. MS Office sucks up soooo much space. I had to install it for my daughter for school reasons, but our bookstore computer has been using Open Office for a year. I have played with Nvu as I half-assedly try to learn web design, India–any opinion? This seems such a logical solution…therein lies the flaw perhaps? Too good to be true?
I know nothing about Nvu—never touched it—though I suppose I should consider trying that out at work. I’ll be getting both Dreamweaver and GoLive as part of Adobe Creative Suite, but I’ve never used either one and have always had a kneejerk dislike of Dreamweaver. Back in the old days, it seemed to be the tool of choice of a lot of people who had no clue what they were doing; I’m sure that’s changed. Sure-ish, at least.
The last time I managed a Web site, both it and I were on Windows, and I worked in HomeSite. It overpressed my computer’s memory a bit, and the built-in FTP stopped working for some reason we could never figure out, but it had good support for ColdFusion, which was relevant at the time.
When I left that job I bought my first Mac, and since then, for what little HTML I’ve tinkered with, I’ve used BBEdit—so that’s what I put on my wish list for work. But I’m not in love with it; it can do a lot of excellent things, but there’s some right nastiness in the user interface. I’ve been meaning to try TextMate, since Rands and his colleagues are so hot for it:
Anybody else have software suggestions? I spent an hour or so tricking out Firefox with web development–related extensions last week, but I haven’t had a chance to really work with them yet. l should give this stuff its own post, I suppose.