Third Office for Mac 2011 Beta Reveals New Icons, Splash Screens, more

[Shadrack]

Still fail tho, I work in education and I will from time to time have a student bring in a .pages file that we can't open at all, as we have no macs on site so they have no choice but to go home and re-export the work, it just wastes people's time. All of which could be saved by Apple creating something like Microsoft have, i.e powerpoint/word viewer.

A windows compatible pages/numbers/keynote viewer is a good idea. They should have that. The kid and parents probably learned something about file formats so it wasn't a complete waste of time.

[Xtreme $niper]

Since no one in their right mind would use iTune unless they purchased an iPod or iPhone I don't consider iTunes free. I have never had any problem with Messenger on OS X, it's not "pretty" but it's never crashed on me.

I must be crazy then. Even if I didn't have an iPhone or iPod, I would use iTunes.

Count me in on that crazy train. I used iTunes for years (on Windows, no less) before I even got an iPod of any kind, and at that point it was only because I had won it in a contest. I have never bought an iPod. Either I've gotten it through contests or back to school deals. Then when I got a Mac, continuing to use iTunes was a no-brainer.

iTunes is just very simply the best music organizer that I have ever used. Perhaps most people don't know how to set it up right, since most of its useful features are off by default. I have my iTunes automatically make a copy of any song I dump into the library to the Music folder, and from there I have it automatically organize the songs by folder structure (Artist, then Album) and then save the song files by song number and name. It also embeds the album art into all the files, and correctly tags them (and I can batch correct them if something is wrong).

From there, if I ever need to make a backup of my music, it's all in one simple folder that I can copy to a drive. Or if I have a mp3 player that simply acts as a storage device (my old iRiver H120 did that) I can just dump the folder into the root of the drive and it all shows up nice and organized in the player itself. That's right, I used to use iTunes to indirectly sync to my iRiver.

I don't see the problem here. As far as I'm concerned, whenever I see people moan about iTunes it's because they just don't know what they want it to do. If someone honestly prefers WMP for music organization, then maybe anything they say from here on out should only be taken with a grain of salt.

Also,

Since no one in their right mind would use iTune unless they purchased an iPod or iPhone I don't consider iTunes free.

Wow. Just wow. There's not much to say in response to that other than: :huh:

[Chaltalian]

Communicator and Excel look odd to me. PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook on the other hand look very nice. :)

[mdtaUK]

... iTunes is just very simply the best music organizer that I have ever used. Perhaps most people don't know how to set it up right, since most of its useful features are off by default. I have my iTunes automatically make a copy of any song I dump into the library to the Music folder, and from there I have it automatically organize the songs by folder structure (Artist, then Album) and then save the song files by song number and name. It also embeds the album art into all the files, and correctly tags them (and I can batch correct them if something is wrong) ...

And it will blow away your entire folder structure, tags and every other bit of organisation you may do. When you add new music to your computer or download new music, iTunes does not pick up on it, its performance under Windows is shabby. It's bloated and is always trying to install other software to your machine.

I would not recommend Windows Media Player though as in Windows 7 it is quite simply broken!!!!

Zune however is light and elegant, monitors your folders, and makes it easy to sync to a device and organise your music and media. iTunes is more fully featured, but this will come to the Zune software once Windows Phone 7 is out.

[Xtreme $niper]

And it will blow away your entire folder structure, tags and every other bit of organisation you may do.

That's the exact opposite of what I just said... What are you talking about here?

When you add new music to your computer or download new music, iTunes does not pick up on it

It's not iTunes' job to be a folder monitor, and I never once thought that I would ever use such a feature. But if you really need it, I'm sure there's a plug-in for that somewhere. You're supposed to just drag and drop a folder or file into the library to initiate a copy. Simple enough.

its performance under Windows is shabby. It's bloated and is always trying to install other software to your machine.

This is something I never understood. The last PC I ever ran was a crappy P4 3.0ghz single core machine. I ran iTunes on that for years and never felt the need to complain about performance, and I have a few thousand songs in my playlist. The only thing I can remember is that scrolling would lag a bit, but most of the time my iTunes was minimized or hidden while it played music so this was not an issue for me.

If iTunes ran adequately on a POS like that, then I'm sure it runs just fine on more modern PCs these days.

If you wanna talk about bloated, we should discuss Windows Live Messenger. ;)

[.Neo]

Since no one in their right mind would use iTune unless they purchased an iPod or iPhone I don't consider iTunes free.

Fact of the matter is that iTunes is a free product. You'd be surprised how many people use iTunes without owning a iPod, iPad or iPhone. Windows and Mac OS X users alike.

I dont see people complaining about Adobe using splash screens or mentioning that fact it's got MANY more features than pages or the fact it's a business standard for a reason. If Pages was "just as good" then I'm sure companies would buy it for their Mac users because it's so much cheaper. Our company has an active ban on Keynote because we have had so many cases of a user making a presentation in Keynote then failing to convert it before giving it to others and then no one else can edit the presentation or even re-use it. 9 out of 10 times the only reason that Keynote looks more "pretty" than Powerpoint is that they assign a designer to make the Keynote presentation and when they want a Powerpoint presentation just just assign some assistant to do it. It's like complaining that a paint brush is total **** because I can't paint as good as Leonardo DiVinci.

You don't read well do you? I already said that iWork (which includes Pages) is a much younger product and as such lacks certain advanced features Microsoft Office does have. However, the applications are much better written, have better fitting interfaces and make full use of Mac OS X' capabilities. I have no doubt the next version of iWork will catch up with Snow Leopard's new technologies as well.

The rest of your story is subjective and doesn't apply to me.

iWork is useless to 80% of the world until PC users can edit/create files in iWork format. Until then its ONLY useful in companies that are all Mac.

I have been using it just fine for the past 5 years. Even noticed the fact you can export to PDF and other popular formats such as DOC? And before you come up with the whole lay-out argument: Advanced lay-outs can cause problems even between computers running Microsoft Office simply because A) Not everyone uses the same Office version B) Not all fonts are always there.

Zune however is light and elegant/quote]

While the Zune software does perform better on Windows than iTunes I find its interface to be rather confusing and a bit too candyland-like.

[Elliott]

And it will blow away your entire folder structure, tags and every other bit of organisation you may do.

iTunes preserves your ID3 tags, etc. without any problem. As for reorganizing your file structure, yes, it's set up to do that on purpose. You can turn that off.

[.Neo]

And it will blow away your entire folder structure, tags and every other bit of organisation you may do.

If iTunes does that it's only because you told it to. The first time you launch the application, be it on Mac OS X or Windows, the setup wizard will ask you if you want iTunes to manage your files and folders or to do it manually yourself. It's not Apple's fault that you don't read before hitting "Next". ID3 tags are preserved.

[saxondale.]

I'm glad you still post .Neo, i don't have the patience with these guys anymore.

[.Neo]

I'm glad you still post .Neo, i don't have the patience with these guys anymore.

Keeps me busy while setting up my new iMac. :laugh:

[PyX]

Keeps me busy while setting up my new iMac. :laugh:

You?re always doing that. Setting up your new computer I mean... :-\

[.Neo]

I can't help that Apple sent me two defective iMacs before this one...

I'm going to send the second one back with Windows 7 installed on it. Thought that would make a good joke... :laugh:

[PyX]

ROFL that's pretty funny indeed :p

I just hope you won't waste an hour just for installing Windows 7 and making them a joke :p

But two defective iMacs... There’s a few people out there who are just out of luck with those Apple products, but I thought they were doing this on purpose. Like "hey, each time I drop my iPod on the floor it breaks, so I send it back to Apple" XD

I’m surprised you had 2 problems in a row.

[.Neo]

Windows setup doesn't require you to sit in front of your computer looking at how the progress bar fills up...

Next to that I want to see how Windows 7 performs without screwing up my production machine.

But two defective iMacs... There’s a few people out there who are just out of luck with those Apple products, but I thought they were doing this on purpose. Like "hey, each time I drop my iPod on the floor it breaks, so I send it back to Apple" XD

I’m surprised you had 2 problems in a row.

With Apple's quality control these days it's really not that surprising...

[rawr_boy81]

With Apple's quality control these days it's really not that surprising...

Where is the evidence that the percentage of defects have increased? All evidence shown is the defect rate is no worse than it used to be - I'd argue it is lower when compared to the fiascos when they used PowerPC and custom chipsets that were as buggy as hell.

[.Neo]

All evidence shown is the defect rate is no worse than it used to be.

Where's your evidence?

Anyway, this is totally off-topic.

[rawr_boy81]

Where's your evidence?

Anyway, this is totally off-topic.

Having been in the 'Mac community' (if there is such a thing) since 2002 where I regularly look at Macrumors, Appleinsider, Arstechnica etc. The number of people complaining is not better or worse when compared to crappy SMP PowerPC implementation, the horrible chipset that would result in the eMac having better disk I/O than the G5 iMac, the slow death of G5 PowerMac's due to cooling defects and the iBook G3 fiasco - I'm sure there are more that can be added to the list.

[.Neo]

Long story short: You have no real evidence either. (Y)