TidBITS#734/21-Jun-04
=====================
Continuing our coverage of Microsoft Office 2004, Matt Neuburg
has the word on Word 2004, including what's fixed, what's
improved, and what still needs work. Also this week, Agen Schmitz
writes about the introduction of the iTunes Music Store in the
U.K., France, and Germany. We also note Apple's expanded iBook
repair program, free Macworld Expo Boston tickets, the publication
of Adam's iPhoto 4 Visual QuickStart Guide, and the results of
last week's email client poll. Finally, we welcome Atlassian
as a TidBITS sponsor!
Topics:
MailBITS/21-Jun-04
Poll Results: Your Preferred Email Client
iTunes Music Store Launches in Europe
Word Up! Word 2004, That Is
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/21-Jun-04
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Copyright 2004 TidBITS: Reuse governed by Creative Commons license
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MailBITS/21-Jun-04
------------------
**Atlassian Sponsoring TidBITS** -- Two weeks, two new long-term
sponsors! It's great to see new companies recognizing the
effectiveness of sponsoring TidBITS.
This week we're pleased to welcome to our core group of sponsors
Atlassian, a small Australian company that makes a pair of
fascinating products for organizations looking to make their
project teams more effective. JIRA is a full-featured issue
tracking and project management application designed to help a
team track bugs, feature requests, and tasks through the lifespan
of a project. JIRA automatically generates project roadmaps,
manages access by users and groups, integrates with other systems
(including email, Excel, XML, and CVS), and offers full-text
searching and filtering. Along with JIRA, Atlassian also makes
Confluence, a knowledge management tool that lets project teams
share information quickly and flexibly. Confluence is essentially
a wiki, a Web server that allows anyone with access to edit any
page. A well-designed wiki is a great way to share information
among a group, and Confluence offers full-text searching, built-in
commenting, email notifications, and detailed security levels.
Both JIRA and Confluence are J2EE-based, so they'll run on a wide
variety of platforms, including Mac OS X, other flavors of Unix,
and Windows.
<http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/>
<http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/>
Although you can of course read more about JIRA and Confluence
online, Atlassian will also be exhibiting at Apple's Worldwide
Developer Conference from 28-Jun-04 through 02-Jul-04 in San
Francisco, so if you're attending WWDC, I encourage you to talk
with them there in person (and mention that you heard about them
from TidBITS!); it's a lot easier than flying to Sydney for most
people. [ACE]
<http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/>
**Free Macworld Expo Boston Tickets** -- Macworld Conference and
Expo in Boston is just around the calendar's corner (12-Jul-04
through 15-Jul-04), which means our friends at Peachpit Press once
again have a batch of free passes to give away. To request a pair
of passes (which are exhibits-only passes, normally $15 to $35),
send an email message to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with your name
and postal address. The passes are available on a first-come,
first-serve basis, and Peachpit must receive all requests by
30-Jun-04. [JLC]
<http://www.macworldexpo.com/live/20/>
<http://www.peachpit.com/>
**iBook Repair Program Extended** -- Apple has broadened its iBook
Logic Board Repair program to include more models of the laptop
(see "Apple Announces Replacements for Some iBook Logic Boards" in
TidBITS-715_). The new range of affected units were manufactured
between May 2001 and October 2003, with serial numbers ranging
from UV117XXXXXX to UV342XXXXXX. Problematic iBooks suffer from
one or more of the following symptoms on either the built-in
LCD or attached external display: scrambled or distorted video;
appearance of unexpected lines on the screen; intermittent video
image; video freeze; or the computer starts up to a blank screen.
Apple is providing repairs (including shipping costs) for free;
see the FAQ page at Apple's site for more information. [JLC]
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07527>
<http://www.apple.com/support/ibook/faq/>
**iPhoto 4 Visual QuickStart Guide Available in Print and PDF** --
This is embarrassing, but I just realized that I never mentioned
that the latest version of my iPhoto book - iPhoto 4 for Mac OS X:
Visual QuickStart Guide - has been available for sale since the
end of April (Peachpit released it right as we left for my
sister's wedding in Hawaii, where I was sick the entire time -
that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it!). Anyway, I've also
now made the electronic version available for sale via eSellerate
(alongside the electronic version of The Wireless Networking
Starter Kit, Second Edition) for those who prefer PDF to print.
The prices are roughly the same; the print book lists for $20
but is available for $14 via Amazon, so I set the price of the
electronic edition at $14 to avoid competing with Peachpit.
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321246624/tidbitselectro00/ref=nosim/>
<http://store.esellerate.net/store/cart.aspx?s=STR4750768179&Cmd=BUY&;
SkuIDC=SKU0695255939>
Two notes: First, if you want both the print and PDF versions of
the book, buy the print edition, since then you can download the
PDF for free (the main difference is that the PDF has full-color
screenshots). Second, if you already own my iPhoto 2 Visual
QuickStart Guide, I can't in good conscience encourage you to
buy this one (though I'd certainly be happy if you did). I have
of course completely updated the book for iPhoto 4, adding eight
pages to cover new features like smart albums, Rendezvous photo
sharing, and editable film rolls, but the simple fact is that
the primary improvements to iPhoto 4 were in the realm of
performance, and thus didn't entail significant changes to
the book. I've also moved the iPhoto book's support pages from
Swiki over to a moderated discussion on our Web Crossing server
so I can experiment more with managing support discussions in
Web Crossing. [ACE]
<http://iphoto.tidbits.com/>
<http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/>
Poll Results: Your Preferred Email Client
-----------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Last week's poll asking about your preferred Macintosh email
client generated some interesting data, non-scientific though it
is. Apple's Mail ran away with the poll, picking up 41 percent of
the more than 2,600 responses. During our last poll on this topic
four and a half years ago, the default email client was Outlook
Express, which won only 12 percent of the responses then, leading
me to think that Mail is both generally more capable than Outlook
Express was in comparison with the competition, and that a bundled
program from Apple trumps a bundled application from any other
company. (Unfortunately, due to the ballot box stuffing for
both Cyberdog and Emailer last time, it's difficult to compare
percentages accurately.) Nonetheless, Mail's strong showing
wasn't surprising.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbpoll=83>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07704>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbpoll=16>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=05664>
Though it fell to second place, garnering 28 percent of the vote
(down from 37 percent last time), Qualcomm's Eudora is clearly
still heavily used - perhaps disproportionately so - among TidBITS
readers. Eudora has long cultivated a reputation for being the
best email client for people who receive vast quantities of email,
and since TidBITS readers tend to fall in that category, it makes
sense to me that Eudora would still fare well in our polls.
I was somewhat surprised at Entourage's third place finish, with
only 13 percent of responses. Entourage is unquestionably a top-
tier email client, and its inclusion in Microsoft Office would
seem to indicate that millions of Mac users must have it. I would
expect Entourage to command a higher percentage of the overall
market; perhaps the TidBITS audience is unrepresentative in
this regard.
After the big three, the numbers fell off fast. PowerMail led
the way with 5 percent, followed by Mailsmith and the Netscape/
Mozilla/Thunderbird troika at 3 percent. If I had been betting
on it, I would have guessed that more TidBITS readers would use
the tweaky Mailsmith over PowerMail, though I'm not surprised
that the Mozilla-derived email clients didn't do better, since
they're up against more powerful programs that offer better
Mac interfaces.
At the bottom of the barrel, Emailer squeaked out 2 percent of
the vote with a little ballot-stuffing help from a mention on the
Emailer mailing list, Outlook Express and Web-based mail garnered
barely 1 percent, neither QuickMail nor America Online managed to
break 1 percent, and other clients, like GyazMail, Mulberry, Nisus
Email, and Magellan combined for 3 percent of the vote. The low
showing of the Mac OS 9-only clients isn't unexpected, given that
people still relying Mac OS 9 likely aren't bothering to read
news sources like TidBITS, since there is almost no news related
to Mac OS 9 any more. Web-based mail is supposed to account
for a significant percentage of users in the overall Internet
population, but the fact that only 22 people (admittedly, up from
4 in the previous poll) said they use Web-based mail clients may
indicate that TidBITS readers aren't an entirely representative
in this regard either.
Our polls don't pretend to be statistically significant, but it
is interesting to pick up a rough sense of the lay of the land
from the responses. Thanks for participating!
iTunes Music Store Launches in Europe
-------------------------------------
by Agen G. N. Schmitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Apple staged its own British invasion in London last week,
announcing the opening of the iTunes Music Store in the United
Kingdom, France, and Germany. A pan-European iTunes store is
expected to open in October to cover countries not involved
in this week's launch, according to Apple.
<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/jun/15itunes.html>
<http://www.apple.com/itunes/>
The new online storefronts are accessible via the newly released
iTunes 4.6 (which also adds support for July's release of Airport
Express hardware and AirTunes software). A pop-up menu at the
bottom of the iTunes Music Store home page takes you to the
territory-specific store. Prices in the U.K. for individual songs
are 0.79 pounds ($1.45 in U.S. funds) and 7.99 pounds ($14.68)
for most new albums (which compares to between 9 and 10 pounds at
Amazon.co.uk), while Germany and France offer 0.99 euros (a more
economical $1.20) for songs and start at 9.99 euros ($12.10) for
albums (compared to 12.99 euros in Germany and over 16 euros in
France at Amazon.de and Amazon.fr, respectively).
<http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/>
<http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/>
<http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/airtunes.html>
As someone who buys an inordinate amount of music from
Amazon.co.uk, I was frothing at the mouth to buy and download the
latest B-sides from Ash at the U.K. iTunes Music Store. That dream
died rather quickly with an error message, telling me my U.S.
account was not valid for the U.K. store. Due to song licensing
agreements, you can purchase music only from the country-specific
iTunes Music Store where you have a credit card associated with a
billing address. To create a new account, choose your territory's
store via the country pop-up menu, then click the Account button.
A Sign In dialog opens, from which you can create a new account
or associate an account with an existing .Mac ID.
Apple claims 700,000 songs at launch for the three territories,
but those come from the five major music labels. You will find
lots of artists supported by global music label backing, such as
Beastie Boys, Anastacia, and The Corrs. But there is a dearth of
selection from independent labels - which are more pronounced in
the U.K. where indies have a broader reach into the top of the
pops than in the United States. Glancing at BBC's Top 40, the U.K.
iTunes Music Store is missing quite a number of big albums,
including Supergrass and Keane (the biggest album of the year
in Britain, though the Music Store does provide two extended
singles and an AOL live exclusive).
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/chart/top40/albums.shtml>
Some U.K. users have also complained about their version of the
iTunes Music Store missing a significant number of artists that
are available in the U.S. version, undoubtedly due to arcane
licensing issues.
[Agen Schmitz is a freelance writer and editor, former Senior
Editor in the Amazon.com Electronics Store, and all-around
Britophile.]
Word Up! Word 2004, That Is
---------------------------
by Matt Neuburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
As you know, unless you've spent the last couple of years
re-enacting Shackleton's third voyage to the Antarctic, Microsoft
Word 2004 is now a reality. The previous major upgrades were Word
2001, which (just to confuse future historians) appeared in 2000,
followed about a year later by Word X, which had few new features
aside from Mac OS X compatibility.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06637>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06514>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06161>
Word 2004 introduces no fundamental changes in behavior, and if
you aren't having problems now, there may be no compelling reason
to upgrade. But if you are running into certain limitations,
particularly in the areas of revision tracking, AppleScript
scriptability, Unicode-based fonts, or Windows compatibility,
Word 2004 could be a must-have. Other new features, such as
Notebook View and the new animations and inline buttons, are
less compelling, in my opinion.
**Installation** -- Installation from the CD was easy. You may
drag an Office folder directly to your hard disk or run an
installer program which allows some choices about what's
installed; I ran the installer program, as Microsoft recommends
(other TidBITS staffers saw problems when performing a drag &
drop install over a beta version). It permitted me to install
on a secondary partition. Users now each have a Normal template
in their own ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data folder; previously
it lived in the Office folder and was shared by all users, which
was just plain wrong, since it is the repository of most user
customizations. As in the past, my old Normal template was
automatically found and used, but I had to retrieve my other
custom templates by hand.
My Office 2004 installation, which omitted foreign-language
proofing tools and other extras I felt I wouldn't need, is about
50 percent larger than Office X (over 360 MB on my machine); most
of the difference is a new, larger collection of fonts (80 MB, as
opposed to 2 MB in Office X), some of it is tutorials (23 MB), and
some of it is new templates (13 MB more than before). A complete
or drag & drop installation would be 525 MB.
When I first started Word, it installed about 60 fonts in my
User Fonts folder. Some of these fonts are valuable and useful.
For example, the new Verdana includes twice as many characters as
the Verdana already in /Library/Fonts. But once you have multiple
copies of the same font, it's difficult to know which will apply
at any given time, and it's rude to install 80 MB of fonts -
particularly those that might override or be overridden by
existing fonts - without at least telling the user what's about
to happen.
**Comments and Revisions** -- A comment in Word, you may recall,
is like a footnote, but it isn't part of your printed document;
it's a remark made by the author or by someone else through whose
hands the document has passed, and it is extremely useful as a
means of communication amongst several people by whom a document
is to be vetted (as happens with the manuscripts for our Take
Control ebooks, for instance). In the past, comments appeared in
a secondary scrolling pane at the bottom of the window, and caused
no end of troublesome interference with your work; for instance,
scrolling the comment pane would also cause the main document to
scroll, and inserting a comment would cause the selected main text
to be a highlighted in yellow, in a way that prevented you from
knowing what text you were selecting. Both problems have been
fixed, making Word 2004 significantly easier to use for
collaboration.
Word's capability to record changes made to a document (revisions)
may not be important to everyone, but to folks who exchange a
document with an editor, it's invaluable (again, this is crucial
to how a Take Control ebook is developed). In the past, however,
users who needed the revisions feature have had to wrestle with
its shortcomings and inconveniences. The presence of changes
was indicated only by markings such as colors, underlines, and
strikethroughs; if you wanted to know who had made a change, you
had to hover the mouse over your text to make a balloon appear,
and even then all you learned was that something had been
"inserted" or "deleted" by someone, with no further statement
of exactly what had happened. Formatting changes (changing text
from plain to bold, for instance) were not noted at all.
All of this, too, has been fixed, and again, authors and editors
will rejoice. You can display the reviewing pane, which now
contains all revisions and comments as a simple list. The list
is descriptive and includes formatting changes: so, for example,
you learn that the font was changed to bold, or that the word
"decision" was deleted. Revisions and comments have thus been
melded into two aspects of the same thing, which, of course, they
are; you can simplify the list by asking to see just comments, or
just revisions, or just changes made by a particular person.
In Page Layout View, comments and revisions can also appear as
persistent balloons in the right margin where they don't interfere
with your view of the text. The balloons are interactive - you can
type in a comment balloon, and you can click a button in a
revision balloon to accept or reject the revision. It's a pity
these balloons are limited to Page Layout View, since they make
following the revisions and comments in a document even easier
than the reviewing pane.
The Page Layout View balloons and the state of the document can
appear in four different ways: Original, showing the document
before revision tracking started, with no balloons; Original
Showing Markup, showing the document with deletions incorporated
but insertions described in balloons; Final Showing Markup, with
insertions and deletions incorporated and deletions noted in
balloons; and Final, with all changes incorporated and no
balloons. These can be combined with preferences about whether
or not to display incorporated changes inline (for example,
whether or not deleted material should remain visible as
strikethrough text) to provide powerful representations of
the document's revision history.
For those who need them, Word's revisions features are
unparalleled; I know no other program that does anything similar.
However, one unfortunate limitation still exists. Surprisingly,
Word fails to distinguish between multiple editing sessions by
the same person: for example, changes made by Adam are not
distinguished from changes made by Adam a week later on top
of intervening changes made by Matt.)
Despite this lack, the Word 2004 improvements transform these
features from being useful but painful to ingenious and
delightful; I now look forward to using them. Loud applause
for Microsoft on this one.
**AppleScript** -- In the past, Word's support for scriptability
via AppleScript has been spotty and undependable. Only a small
fraction of Word's capabilities were exposed directly to
AppleScript, and trying to script them could easily crash Word.
The workaround was to use Visual Basic for Applications. VBA is
Word's native scripting language and can make Word do absolutely
anything. Since AppleScript allows you to create a VBA script as
a big string in your AppleScript code, and then send that entire
string to Word, you could use VBA from within AppleScript to
compensate for the shortcomings in Word's AppleScript model. But
this was an unsatisfactory solution. The resulting code was ugly
and difficult to maintain, and even more important, the VBA-
within-AppleScript routine couldn't return a result to your
script, so the script wasn't properly interactive. Scripters
devised various horrible workarounds, but the fact remained that
there were severe limits to what could be accomplished through
external scripting of Word.
All that has completely changed. AppleScript support has been
rewritten from the ground up - a massive undertaking, and
an extremely welcome change. A great proportion of Word's
capabilities (perhaps all of them; time and experimentation
will tell) are now exposed directly to AppleScript in a natural
manner. This truly splendid improvement will completely change
the way Word fits into people's workflows.
(As an aside, if you have my book, AppleScript: The Definitive
Guide, this change affects Excel as well, which means that the
book's Excel example no longer works. I've posted a new version
on my Errata Web page.)
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596005571/tidbitselectro00/ref=nosim>
<http://www.tidbits.com/matt/aserrata.html>
**Fonts and Unicode** -- Early in my use of Word X, a Classics
colleague wrote to me in some distress. At the urging of friends,
he had switched from Windows to Mac OS X, and now he couldn't read
his old Word documents that involved Ancient Greek. I had him send
me the relevant fonts and a sample document, and sure enough, some
characters in his primary Greek font (called, appropriately,
"Greek") were being replaced by an underline. I hammered away at
this problem for months, but couldn't solve it; Word just wasn't
compatible with the Greek font's Unicode characters, as I
explained in my earlier TidBITS article on Unicode. But Word was
Unicode-aware on Windows, so a document using Greek created on
Windows could be illegible on Mac OS X. Naturally, the first thing
I did once I had Word 2004 running was to open this same document.
Presto, it displayed correctly!
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06780>
Word is now Unicode-savvy on Mac OS X, including support for many
input methods as well as direct entry from the Character Palette.
(For more details, search on "multilingual support" in Word Help.)
This major advance is absolutely essential to those who need this
sort of thing. However, don't raise your hopes too high. Serious
shortcomings remain. Certain complex scripts (Indic) don't work;
neither do right-to-left scripts (Semitic). So Word 2004 is a step
backwards from Word 98 using WorldScript under Mac OS 9.2 in
this regard. Furthermore, certain typesetting behaviors involving
multiple diacritics work badly, and Word doesn't support Mac OS X
advanced typographical features involving ligatures and glyph
variants; indeed, this means that the fonts installed by Word can
mess up the display of certain languages in Cocoa applications.
[Thanks to Tom Gewecke for major assistance with this paragraph.]
<http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/mlingos9.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06222>
Also, Word has some new, incomprehensible font behavior. You can
see this for yourself using the Symbol font. If you select some
Times characters, you can change them to Symbol and then back
again to Times at will. But if you start with your insertion point
in a Times paragraph, switch to Symbol, and type some Symbol
characters, if you now select those new Symbol characters and try
to change them to Times, you can't. So you can easily end up with
a document containing some Symbol characters that you can't change
to another font and some that you can, with no indication of which
is which. And, if you do a Replace All where you replace all
Symbol characters with Times, Symbol characters of the second
kind change to Times, but the others become rectangular boxes!
I'm not sure how wide-spread this problem is - does it apply only
to the Symbol font? Users are complaining of problems with other
fonts, so perhaps not. But in any case, the fact that Word can
behave so oddly with regard to fonts is of serious and fundamental
concern. It would be better for Word to at least put up a warning
and explain why it's behaving in this curious manner. Instead, the
user is left puzzled and even a little fearful, since it is all
too easy to put the document into a perilous state, with fonts
that can't be altered, or with those horrifying rectangular boxes.
**Compatibility** -- If I'm being a bit hard on Word for not
putting up an informative explanation of font problems, it's
because one of Word's new features is that it does provide
informative explanations of possible font problems. The
Compatibility Report (shared with Excel and PowerPoint, but
probably most important in Word) is a utility panel listing
aspects of your document that might present incompatibilities
with earlier versions of the program.
For example, if you type "1/4 of our users are ecstatic", Word
2004's auto-formatting now changes the three characters "1/4" to a
single fraction character - because Word now does Unicode, and can
display this character. But previous Mac versions of Word don't do
Unicode and can't display this character. The Compatibility Report
lets you know that your document contains a character that might
prove troublesome; in fact, after Word creates the fraction
character, the Toolbox button in the standard toolbar starts
glowing red, to alert you that you might want to examine the
report. Similarly, when you save a document, Word may recommend
in the Save dialog that you check compatibility, and you can
perform the check right there. Other reported incompatibilities
include such things as line-breaking differences and substitution
of one font for another that wasn't available when the document
was opened.
In the past, Word would warn you only that you might lose some
data or formatting without telling you conclusively that you would
or specifying what you might lose. For anyone who regularly shares
files with users of other versions of Word, therefore, the
Compatibility Report is a big help. Keep in mind, though, that it
presently is still somewhat incomplete and buggy. I immediately
encountered a situation where Word failed to report correctly that
a certain font required by the document was missing, and instead
gave a completely different and inapplicable warning (it said that
a Russian font was in use and warned that Russian proofing tools
were missing). Still, this feature is definitely a step in the
right direction.
**A New View** -- Notebook View is a mode of display reminiscent
of programs like AquaMinds NoteTaker and Circus Ponies NoteBook.
By default, Notebook View has ruled horizontal lines and a
vertical margin line, like a paper school notebook; it has a
large blank area at the top for a title, and it has section tabs
down the right side. You can add sections and change the titles
of sections; within a section, you can make an outline of notes,
and an entry can even have a checkbox and a priority mark.
<http://www.aquaminds.com/product.jsp>
<http://www.circusponies.com/pages.aspx?page=products>
The correspondence between Notebook View and other views of your
document works like this: outline entries are automatically
assigned paragraph formats "Note Level 1", "Note Level 2", and
so on; the blank area at the top is a page header; and the section
divisions correspond to new-page section breaks, with the section
titles corresponding to nothing at all.
But Notebook View is thus not ontologically similar to Outline
View, Page Layout View, and Normal View. Normal View and Page
Layout View show the same document laid out slightly differently;
Outline View displays your document's existing structure, using
Heading paragraphs as the levels of the outline. Thus, these views
are all ways of looking at the same thing. But Notebook View shows
a completely different thing, because a word-processing document
doesn't typically have any Note Level paragraphs! Indeed, if you
switch an existing document to Notebook View, Word warns that some
conversion will take place and offers to create a new document
with the information instead. If you persist in converting, your
document's formatting and structure are largely destroyed.
The trouble here is that NoteBook View isn't a view at all. It's
a representation of a completely different sort of document - a
Notebook document. That's not a useless kind of document, to be
sure; but in the first place, it properly belongs to another
application (which, on the Windows side, it is: Microsoft
OneNote), and in the second place, Microsoft's implementation of
the notebook metaphor is feature-poor and clumsy compared to the
elegant AquaMinds and Circus Ponies implementations. My personal
feeling is that if you need a notebook program, you should get
a good notebook program like NoteTaker, NoteBook, or one of the
many other snippet keepers I've reviewed over the years.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbser=1196>
**Buttons and Bows** -- Word 2004 makes much use of small,
colorful animations, markings, and button-like objects that
float over or within your document. When you introduce Unicode
characters into your document, a palette button throbs crimson.
The Formatting Palette fades gradually to transparent when not in
use, and snaps back to opaque when you hover the pointer over it.
When you type "teh" instead of "the", a blue horizontal double-
line animates under the word as auto-correction takes place.
Furthermore, if you later click in or hover the pointer over that
word, the double-line reappears, and if you hover over the double-
line, it turns into a button you can press to pop up a menu of
options (revert to "teh", remove "teh" from the auto-correction
list, and so forth). Similarly, whenever you paste text, a button
appears at the end of the pasted material; if you hover over this
button, it turns into a pop-up menu where you can choose how you
want the pasted material formatted (using the formatting of the
source, of the destination, or as text only).
This eye candy is a bit silly, turning your document from a calm
sheet of virtual paper to a world of glowing activity - rather as
if the design of Word had been put in the hands of Xbox fanatics.
It involves no new content; these are all cues for actions that
you could have performed in some other way. At the same time,
it can be welcome, because these cues expose information about
actions you might not have known how to perform or options you
didn't know existed. If you've ever typed a line of code such as
"i = 3" in a Word document and wondered why "i" changed to "I"
and how you could prevent it, now you need no longer wonder.
**Conclusions** -- I haven't described every change in Word 2004;
indeed, I probably haven't discovered them all. Instead, I've
discussed what I take to be the largest, most significant
innovations. But small changes can be important too. For instance,
Word now deals properly with long filenames and long file paths;
it's only fair to acknowledge the fix, even though this is how
things ought to have been all along. Also, the notorious bug where
saving a document repeatedly while working on it could hit the
system's open file limit and cause you to lose all your changes
is said to be gone.
<http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2004/05/19/135315.aspx>
At the same time, any revision of Word brings its share of
problems and disappointments, and Word 2004 is unlikely to be an
exception. Your "favorite" bug may well not been fixed, especially
if it lies deep in code that Microsoft is unwilling to touch. For
example, there are reports that graphics pasted or imported into
a Word document still sometimes don't print properly. Scrolling
with the Page Up or Page Down keys still moves the insertion
point, which makes any attempt to glance at a different part of
your document an action not to be taken lightly. The problem where
the menu of styles is only ten items tall, even if you have dozens
of styles and a huge screen, is not fixed. And of course when you
apply a style you still get the same inscrutable behavior that
I've been complaining of for years.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=04822>
New problems have doubtless been introduced. For example, EndNote
is said to break on Word 2004. I've experienced some difficulties
with the Find dialog: during a repeated Find, sometimes the
selection point in the main document simply vanishes, as if
an invisible nothingness were selected. Double-clicking and
dragging to select by word can end up including an additional
word to the left of the one you initially selected if you drag
up and to the left and then down and to the right. And new
features, no matter how attractive, will need break-in time
before users discover how well they work in the real world.
For example, in addition to paragraph and character styles,
there can now be table styles and numbering styles; will these
help users create consistent documents more easily, or will
they add to the confusion that automatic numbering and styles
have caused in the past? Time will tell.
<http://www.endnote.com/>
By now, however, long-time Word users are surely accustomed
to all of this. They know from long experience that an upgrade
to Microsoft Word is like buying a new car: it's expensive,
it looks better in the showroom than in your garage, and it
has the potential to reveal previously unknown problems at some
inconvenient moment down the road. Frankly, we should all just
take a deep breath, douse our faces in cold water, and face
reality: Word is a massive, complicated program, full of legacy
code and constantly treading the fine line between the Macintosh
and Windows worlds. Word will never get any simpler, and Microsoft
may never get to the heart of some of Word's deep-seated issues.
Those longing for a return to Word 5.1 will be, as always,
disappointed in Word 2004; Word 5.1 was a program from a simpler
time, and Microsoft won't be returning to that era.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07139>
And yet, like a new car, when you need the latest Word upgrade,
you need it, and despite any annoyances, you'll still enjoy the
new car smell and power door locks. Whether your old ride was Word
5.1 or (as is likely) a more-recent version of Word, Word 2004's
radically improved commenting and revision tracking features,
improved Unicode capabilities, full support for AppleScript, and
compatibility checking add up to a significantly enhanced program
for those of us who use these features on a daily basis.
Word 2004 is most commonly purchased as part of the full Microsoft
Office suite, which lists for $400 or costs $150 for educational
users; upgrades cost $240. If you wish to buy Word by itself, it
costs $230, with upgrades listing for $110. Resellers like TidBITS
sponsor Small Dog Electronics generally knock $30 to $40 off those
prices. You can also download a "test drive" version of Office
2004 (186 MB) that works for 30 days. Microsoft Office 2004
requires Mac OS X 10.2.8 or higher.
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/office2004/howtobuy/howtobuy.aspx>
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/default.aspx?pid=office2004td>
<http://www.smalldog.com/search/x/x/wag125/?z=1&find=Microsoft+Office+2004>
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/21-Jun-04
------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The second URL below each thread description points to the
discussion on our Web Crossing server, which will be much
faster, though it doesn't yet use our preferred design.
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/>
**AirPort Express** -- How well will Apple's new wireless gadget
bridge other base stations, and when will we see a remote control
for AirTunes? (11 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2249>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/115>
**Switching from Eudora to Mail?** Readers offer tips and software
resources for those contemplating a switch from Eudora to Apple's
Mail. (7 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2253>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/119>
**FileMaker Synchronization** -- Last week's news of SyncDeK
prompts mention of another tool for synchronizing FileMaker
and SQL databases. (1 message)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2250>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/116>
**Software Migration Feature** -- The improved Mac OS X setup
assistant in the new Power Mac G5s could be a win for people
who fear upgrading because of the hassle of transferring data.
(2 messages)
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2251>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/117>
$$
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