[X Newbies] expired MS office trial

[Bruce Klutchko]

On 1/24/04 10:56 AM, "Alex" <alist at sprint.ca> wrote:
> 
> The fallacy of cum hoc, propter hoc. Carbonized apps can offer and
> access OS X services (e.g., BBEdit, FileMaker). But it's considerably
> more difficult to implement than in Cocoa, which is why most of them
> (including, if I'm not mistaken, AppleWorks) don't.
> 
> It seems to me that much of the anti-Word feeling is based on the
> superstition that anything Microsoft is bad. In fact, they've done a
> much better job with Office X than I expected, and Word is powerful and
> flexible word processor. If you have sophisticated word-processing
> needs, everything considered (including the price for the
> Teacher/Student version) I don't see how you can do better on the Mac
> than Word. Does this mean it's perfect? Hardly, but neither are
> InDesign, Photoshop, etc. A major flaw in Word is lack of support for
> international features (e.g., Unicode input) and OpenType, but some of
> the alternatives to Word have the same problem.

There's nothing wrong with Carbon per se, but the problem is that OS X has
been out for quite some time and Office X still does not allow using
services.

Granted, it is more difficult in Carbon and trivial in Cocoa, but I use them
extensively in Safari, TextEdit, and DEVONthink. Not being able to use them
in Office means I cant use the Calc Service, the Word Service, Nisus
Thesaurus, the System wide dictionary for spelling, Grab (Unless it is
running as an app), the automatic note creator that makes RTFD notes for the
DEVON apps, WordNetX, Open URL, Speech, Google Search, and a host of others
that make using the Mac so cool.

Given the resources of Microsoft, it is sad that the Mac cannot get a suite
of applications from them written in a truly native development system.

-- 
Bruce
____________________________________________________
B R U C E  K.   klutch-at-erols.com