Microsoft Office 2008 vs NeoOffice vs iWorks’08

I was happy user of the iWork Suite 08 since I moved to OS-X. It somehow better matches the way I am thinking and does much better job than Office to get me from idea to acceptable looking rendering of that idea in the form of document, spreadsheet or presentation.

In past two month I was involved much more interaction with the requirements, business analysis and project management part of the process. Which inevitably means much higher exposure to documents creation, collaboration and exchange. iWork gives you reasonably good compatibility with Office document formats, which means that you can easily import almost every Office document modify it and export it back so that Windows user will see almost all of your changes. Almost everything will be just fine. Unfortunately, almost is not the same as everything: it often breaks fine details of formatting, reviewer comments and does not really work for more complicated Excel spreadsheets. Especially those spreadsheets which project manager-ish people so love to create.

I tried to use OpenOffice/NeoOffice which suffers from the same malady. It spoils different set of features than iWorks, quite often works well, but it cannot be trusted. On top of that, it just does not feel right and is kinda ugly.

So I had to take a deep breath and installed Office 2008. After few weeks, here is my impression and very brief comparison of all three mentioned suites.

With Office 2008, I was not having very high expectations regarding user experience on Mac and I have to report that Microsoft did not disappoint. I indeed was not too great experience, starting with installation.

Office 2008 contains 4 products. I absolutely wanted Word and Excel, was not quite sure about Powerpoint (because Keynote is sooo much better),  and certainly had zero interest in Entourage and Microsoft Messenger.
Guess what: Microsoft installer, as many times before, knew better what I want and did not give me a chance.  All questions asked were related to what Microsoft needs to know (serial number), with little regard for users interest.  It also installed whole bunch of fonts, which I did not really want – but I guess to provide 100 % compatibility with Windows, it may be a good idea to include same set of fonts as Windows office has.

After installation, Office 2008 works reasonably well. Minor annoyance is start taking forever – I guess it is because (unlike under XP/Vista) OS-X does not preload shared components (and does not eat up memory just to make Office appear start snappier).  As soon as any Office application is running, I have occasionally seen weird behaviour when switching between windows (note lowercase ‘w’) and does not play nice with Spaces. Sometimes scrolling forgets to redraw screen in word and you have to minimize/restore to get back to readable text. And it is generally quite slow even on very fast and powerful machine.

With respect to the main motivation for getting Office – seamless document compatibility – that problem appears to be solved. So far I have not seen anything that would be distorted or deleted just because I touched the file on the Mac.  Only exception is Excel – Office 2008 does not support VBA macros, so your mileage with more advanced spreadsheets may vary.

Should I mark my experience with Office 2008 using school grades, it would be:
- installation: C
- user experience: B-
- compatibility with Windows Office: B+
- price/performance ratio: D
- overall: B-

For iWorks’08 it would be:
- installation: B (if I recall correctly, it was OK, but required installer).
- user experience: B+
- compatibility with Windows Office: C
- price/performance ratio: A-
- overall: B

For NeoOffice:
- installation: C-
- user experience: C-
- compatibility with Windows Office: C+
- price/performance ratio: A
- overall: C+

Recommendation:

If you are working on Mac as part of a team that collaborates using Office documents, you most likely need Office 2008. Unfortunately the only office package that comes very close to be compatible with Office 2003 and Office 2007 is Office 2008.

If you value user experience, aesthetics and are OK with mostly one-way conversions between Windows Office, you will find iWork provides excellent value and will make you feel at home. If you never have to exchange documents with Windows world, enjoy it – we all who have to do it daily are green with envy.

If you for economic or ideological reasons refuse to pay for software (or only for software made by certain companies ) – or if you require compatibility with Linux based office, you have no other choice than NeoOffice or OpenOffice. The first one looks considerably better on OS-X – although still not quite right.

VMWare Converter error P2VError UNABLE_TO_DETERMINE_GUEST_OS

This was error I have received while trying to convert physical machine running Windows 2003 SP1 into VMWare image.

After some googling around and experimenting (this link was most helpful to point me in correct direction) I found solution that worked for me.

All I had to do was to disable Floppy Drive in the System applet of Control panel. After this, the conversion continued and right now is squeezing 100 GB disk into 50 2 GB files on external USB disk.

Free eBook on ALT.NET

It is always a nice surprise to find something that is free and actually useful on the Net . Like this one: a fellow Ottawan Karl Sequin wrote and generously made available as free download “Foundations of programming” eBook.

He touches many topics of various levels from high level design concepts (dependency injection) to low level “Back to Basics” – how memory allocation and pointers work. Especially the later is often neglected and overlooked (and consequently misunderstood) by younger developers who started their education with a garbage collected language such as Java or C# and never were exposed to beauty and horrors of C

The book is using .NET and C# as platform, but the applicability of the chapters goes way beyond the Windows or Microsoft world. After all, Alt.Net has very close relations with Java world.

If you have time, give it a look. Were it not free, I would say it is worth every penny. Now I can only say it is definitely worth the time you spend on it.

Thanks Karl, I hope I’ll meet you in person sometimes. The advantage of living in Ottawa is that you have lots of smart people around you .

Proper shellspace above all :-)

Here is a snapshot I took during today’s trip to Chapters @ Rideau. While walking out, the placement of some books caught my eye:

Note the “headlines” in the background of the Vista books: “Ailments and diseases”. Certainly unintended and a bit childish, but I found it hilariously funny

Catching up with Hanselminutes

Thanks to great weather, the walking season is in full progress and that means I was able to add some more listening material to my podcast collection. I still keep track with all part of TWIT network – This week in tech, Security Now!, MacBreak Weekly and Windows Weekly – but that is nowhere close enough for both walking and driving …

I have returned back to listening to Scott Hanselman blog (Hanselminutes) – mostly out of curiosity how did working for Microsoft change is very balanced and realistic view of technologies.

Fortunately – it did not.

Scott is still same great, very open minded developer that can see value and strength as well as issues and problems in technology regardless of its origin. It speaks a lot positives about Microsoft as well – by allowing this to happen.

Very good episodes are (back from 2007) from my personal point of view were:

• Eclipse with Bjorn Freeman-Benson
• Software Architecture with Dan Appleman
• 2007 The Year in Review
• What’s it like for Mac Developers – Interview with Steven Frank of Panic

I was pretty intrigued with the title of the episode “The Worst Show Ever with Chris Sells and Rory Blyth” – which is Episode 112 and I have to agree, the title was pretty descriptive – but it was at least reasonably funny.

I am looking forward catching up with rest of the year, which according the Weather Network should not take too long.

Thanks, Scott. Keep up the great content coming.

Blue screen of the death on a Mac

Here it comes, first occurence: one of my VM’s BSOD-ed on me yesterday.

To be completely fair, I did have experienced an occurrence of something similar twice in last moths: after wake up from sleep, the screen was collection of the color pixels, completely unreadable. After reboot, everything was normal.

I found out that the issue may be related to the “safesleep” mode. For now, I disabled the mode by

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

To re-enable SafeSleep, the command is:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3

So far, everything works – but I am still investigating. Thanks to this thread (in German) for the hint.

Free Microsoft Press E-Books !

Microsoft Press is handing out 3 books:

- Introducing Microsoft LINQ by Paolo Pialorsi and Marco Russo

- Introducing ASP.NET Ajax by Dino Esposito

- Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 by Laurence Moroney

Silverlinght 1.0 is probably a bit outdated (with 1.1/2.0 close), but the others should be good, judging by the authors. Dino Esposito wrote couple of very good books on ASP.NET and .NET.

See this blog for more details and download links.

Phaser 6120N rocks !

Today I picked the printer I have mentioned yesterday – Xerox Phaser 6120N. It is somehow more bulky than the ML-4500, but boy, does it work !! From all available connection options (parallel port, USB, ethernet) I have of course chosen ethernet. Printer after switch on spent about 5 minutes doing strange and weird noises, initializing itself and then spit out a page with its DHCP-acquired network address.

To assign different IP address (so that it does not change) was very easy: go to http://192.168.x.x/ – whatever is printed on the status page and follow the Web instructions under ‘Network’. Set new IP, disable the automatic IP settings, wait for printer reset (and new status page) and you can go on setting the clients.

Windows installation is very smooth – drivers are on the CD – and does not even need a reboot. As a nice surprise, the CD also contained PPD files so that now I have the printer accessible from CUPS on Linux as well. And as usual, Mac installation was pretty non-existent. The printer does not support Bonjour, but somehow both Mac’s found it using AppleTalk – yet another thing I know not enough about and need to look up. So finally, all computers around my house can print reliably, in color without going through the hoops. Hooray !

The most amazing surprise was when I tried to print a photo. I have done it before and generally, laser printer comes nowhere even close to what you can get out of the photo inkjet – especially with proper paper. Now here I could not believe how good was the result: on plain paper, without any special calibration or color magic, the picture looked very close to an inkjet output – only waterproof.

This source is certainly not impartial, but anyway shows difference in fine details of output. I am no expert, but the printouts look certainly very good to me!

Disadvantages ? Beside the size, the printer is a bit noisier than ML-4500 when it prints. Other than that, none other issues found yet.

Little pains of switching

I have been running the Unix only workstations for over a week now. During this week, I have managed to clean up and convert two Windows boxes to VMWARE virtual machines, but actually had to resort to use the VM’s only in two cases. Everything else worked just fine.

The first case was requirement to review an non-trivial Excel file. Normally, Numbers does very decent job when it comes to loading Excel files and for the most the remaining cases, the OpenOffice (in it’s more polished Cocoa version NeoOffice) works just fine. Well – as long as you do not open spreadsheet with pivot tables. In my case, the spreadsheet contained pivot tables and charts based on these tables. Numbers warned during import that this feature is not supported and the converted spreadsheet was very good looking – nicer that in Excel, but not quite so functional . Strangely enough, the charts were imported OK but lost the drill-down capabilities. After trying out the NeoOffice, the imported spreadsheet had retained some pivot capabilities of the original, but lost charts completely. The only resort was falling back to Office 2003 in virtual machine and using Excel. Fortunately one of the two VM’s created from old hardware had Office 2003 installed, so that worked out OK.

The other case of “works only with Windows” was the Active X control used by our VPN to get access to internal network. There is no alternative, so to get to our internal Wiki, JIRA or timesheet system, I have to start Windows in VM.

The last issue encountered has not really anything to do with platform change, but it was triggered by this, so here it goes. Back in 2002 I purchased very small and handy laser printer Samsung ML-4500. It worked well for all those years, happily attached to my Windows desktop machine which (being always on) shared it for everybody in home network. Of course, up to the point when that desktop machine was decommissioned. Because ML-4500 is parallel port only printer, has no USB, first issue was to find a machine that actually still has a parallel port (most of new machines do not). By lucky coincidence, my NAS Linux system had parallel port – so I dived into new adventure of configuring CUPS printing system under Linux and sharing the printer via Samba. Which was much easier that it may seem – hats off to Linux hackers. The ML-4500 was part of the CUPS printer’s database and was recognized right away. Only small hickup was disabled parallel port in BIOS – but after this got corrected, things worked OK (thanks to Peter for the hint).

So now I can print from Linux, can even share the printer but still cannot print from Windows or Mac. Why so ? If you try to attach the printer from Windows machine, Windows wants to install driver. The ML-4500 is not in the default driver database. I still have the original CD from Samsung, but attempt to install driver fails with completely useless error message. Updated driver is nowhere to be found. I do not remember how I did install the driver back in 2002, but nevertheless, the machine is gone. Even if I do have the driver inside VM, I do not have VMWARE installed on Linux (and do not plan to do so). So for now, only way how to print from Windows notebooks (or Macs) is to create a PDF file on the client, save it to server and then use CUPS to print it out from Linux. What a pain …

How I see it, the days of ML-4500 are counted … especially when my favorite hardware supplier has very nice color laser network printer for a great price .

Ragioni per fare il grande salto

During the vacation, we stopped in small bookstore in Verona which was selling computer software as well. At the entrance, there was a poster showing smiling Finder’s face, Apple logo and announcing reasons why you would want to make the big jump – il grande salto – to Mac platform. That is to explain the title

Grande Salto is exactly what I did. Without too much preparation or notice. Since Tuesday evening I am happy owner of the beautiful piece of hardware (17 inch 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro with 250 GB HDD and 4 GB of RAM) that is greatly complemented by the amazing software collection (OS X 10.5, iLife 08, iWork 08 and many others) running on it. I spent Wednesday playing with it and between ‘Wows’ and ‘Ahhs’ managed to setup the core applications I need for work: several configurations of Eclipse (with and without MyEclipseIDE), Netbeans with Ruby, couple of gems and of course THE editor. Then transferred the sources, installed Ant, Spring, Tomcat and couple of opensource packages (e.g. Jakarta Commons). And on Thursday, I jumped right into the field, to the client continuing in development of my current Java project in the place where I left it on Monday with Fujitsu N5100 running XP-ProSP2. As a plan B, I had my old notebook also with me – but did not have to resort to using it.

The switch was not easy and for few hours I had to fight old habits and muscle memory. As many years TotalCommander addict, I had created really fast and efficient workflows and habits how to move around. None of them was of course applicable. It is really hard to overcome these unconscious finger movements burned deep into your brain: F3 is File View, F4 is File Edit, F7 is create directory – when you have been using them for over 20 years since MS-DOS and Norton Commander. But eventually, I learned to appreciate and enjoy the New Ways. New Finder is really good and in combination with Spaces and Quicksilver allows at least as efficient ways – sometimes even better – how to accomplish things.

As I was expecting, using bash instead of pretty lame windows command shell is a big relief. I have forgotten 90% of my old shell script and command line edit keystroke skills, but it is still so much better. The file system operations are considerably faster and common tasks can be automated with minimal effort just by using symbolic links, simple scripts and shell variables. What is much better under Leopard is network connectivity – the way how it does browse and connect to Windows machines …

Working in Eclipse is same as under Windows – only it looks better and is faster – but (to make it fair comparison) it MUST run faster on 2.4 GHz Core2 Duo 4GB than on 3.4 GHz P-IV with 1 GB. Ability to use two finger scrolls, quick desktop switches and great screen resolution (1920×1200) makes the Macbook Pro close to perfect developer workstation.

I have still not found replacement for all features and tools I was using in Windows – but I am working on it. Most of them come from 3rd party software, not from OS. Right now, what I miss is (from TotalCommander):

- convenient directory comparison and synchronization with good GUI (with embedded on-demand file diff)

- transparent processing of the packed archives – TC makes them look and behave as directory sub-trees

- opening shell in directory / creating file in directory – aka “I am in the Project/demo/src directory now, please create the empty README.txt file here”. Mac works the other way – open editor with the new file and save the file to Project/demo/src/README.txt. Which is not necessarily worse, but just (still) against my instincts. I was used to get to directory first and press Shift-F4 (bound to start of Notepad++, prompting for name), or to click on TotalCommader toolbar icon “Open command prompt in current directory”

After working two full days, I have not found any real issues and was extremly pleased with the Leopard user experience. It is hard to explain – the differences are subtle but in whole it feels so much better than any other OS. I have been using OS-X for over a year now, but only at home and for mostly hobby-projects or after hour hacks. This is an attempt to make Mac the foundation for work environment as well, and use Windows for .NET development only, running it inside virtual machine. And it is very different experience – in two days I have learned a lot and found out about many more things to discover.

To make the grande salto even more complete (and potentially devastating in case of bad landing ), I have also during last week wiped out my desktop at Thinknostic and instead XP-Pro installed Fedora Linux with KDE desktop. With the Mac available and working mostly out of office I do not get so much time to spend on desktop – but it is good to have same platform on both places. I have already configured first few VMWARE virtual machines – with both Linux and Windows as guest OS. The Vmware player works great under Linux, I cannot wait until final version of the Fusion 1.1 is out to test on on the Mac.