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Third Office for Mac 2011 Beta Reveals New Icons, Splash Screens, and More
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New icons and splash screen?
I would be more impressed didn't take Excel 10 seconds to open on my 3 month old MBP.
The splash screen is irritating. It covers up whatever else I'm trying to look at while I wait for the app to open up. Why don't they ditch them and just bounce the icon like every other good app?
I would be more impressed didn't take Excel 10 seconds to open on my 3 month old MBP.
The splash screen is irritating. It covers up whatever else I'm trying to look at while I wait for the app to open up. Why don't they ditch them and just bounce the icon like every other good app?
Read my mind. Even going back to 2001 and Office v.X the icons looked decent. Until now.
As for productivity, I'd love to be able to give up the sluggish and non-intuitive Office suite but sadly can't because of enforced compatibility with my knuckle-dragging PC colleagues.
Much prefer the Apple equivalents. Pages is superb, Numbers the equal of Excel (don't use much regardless) but the killer app is Keynote, which is a pterodactyl-sized pigeon to Powerpoint's statue.
1st, The ICONs are ugly for sure!!
Maybe they think those are art, but I think art should be brought to everyone like Apple style!
2nd, the splash screens? What the hell are those splash screens doing there?
Who ever needs splash screens?
It's soooooo PC! It's sooooo 1990's!!!
Wake up M$ Mac Unit people, well come to 2010, and well come to Macintosh world!
I think M$ Mac Unit should just copy iWork design and creativity.
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Maybe they think those are art, but I think art should be brought to everyone like Apple style!
2nd, the splash screens? What the hell are those splash screens doing there?
Who ever needs splash screens?It's soooooo PC! It's sooooo 1990's!!!
Wake up M$ Mac Unit people, well come to 2010, and well come to Macintosh world!
I think M$ Mac Unit should just copy iWork design and creativity.
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I don't understand everyone's bitching about the icons.
Sure, they could use a few more rounds of revisions but the overall idea makes sense.
- They stand out amongst other icons that are probably loading up your Dock.. If you are someone who uses Office on a regular basis, it will help these programs stand out amongst the bunch.
- Microsoft is pushing Ribbon, correct? The icons emphasize this and I'm sure the rest of the marketing will follow suit.
Sure, they could use a few more rounds of revisions but the overall idea makes sense.
- They stand out amongst other icons that are probably loading up your Dock.. If you are someone who uses Office on a regular basis, it will help these programs stand out amongst the bunch.
- Microsoft is pushing Ribbon, correct? The icons emphasize this and I'm sure the rest of the marketing will follow suit.
I use it daily, but it requires the server OCS, telephony integration (VOIP) etc. to work. It is not a simple stand alone app.
Besides the important new icons
I was kind of wondering about 64-bits. This is supposed to be Cocoa, right?
I didn't say it was just a rename. I said renaming it doesn't mean it's not crippled. As you point out, I'm quite right-- they called it Outlook but built it around a gimped alternative to MAPI.
Entourage started useless because it was a subset of Outlook for Windows, and then was engineered to be worse than useless because the interface was straight out of Fisher Price. Now they've gone from one broken web services interface to another and changed it's name-- maybe this will mean different headaches, but it will certainly mean headaches.
Why is Microsoft insisting on using different exchange interfaces for their PC and Mac products? They own MAPI, it's not like they need to break in and steal the interface documents...
You could make a strong case that Apple does the same thing every year with iTunes updates. It went from being a simple music player to now being a jack-of-all-trades music player, music store, data management application, etc.
I actually really like the Beta 3 icons and was impressed with the speed of Beta 2. Overall, Office 2011 seems to be heading in the right direction.
What does this even mean?1st, The ICONs are ugly for sure!!
Maybe they think those are art, but I think art should be brought to everyone like Apple style!
When you have large applications like Adobe CS5 or Microsoft Office that can take a while to load, users typically want to see something, anything, that lets them know the application is loading and not stalling or crashing. Hence, a "1990s" concept of a splash screen. It's called good interface design.2nd, the splash screens? What the hell are those splash screens doing there?
It's soooooo PC! It's sooooo 1990's!!!
Wake up M$ Mac Unit people, well come to 2010, and well come to Macintosh world!
If they do this they would have an inferior product. iWork pales in comparison to Office.
There's this new concept called an opinion, sometimes referred to as "different perspectives." This new concept raises a very inflammatory conjecture: that some people like one thing while others don't like it. Thus, I know it's hard to believe, but some people might like the Beta 3 icons just because.Since we all know the majority of people have bad (or no...) taste I think we can conclude the new Office 2011 icons look quite good.
But go ahead, just assume anyone who doesn't agree with you has bad taste. But I'm sure if tomorrow Steve Jobs wrote an open letter talking about what great icons Beta 3 uses, you'd turn around and say you love them.
What exactly is OneNote, why is it so important, and, in which IT environments would I likely find everyone using it? I've heard of it, but, don't have any personal experience with it.
Plus a lot of people on these MacRumors forums worship the ground Steve Jobs walks on, so naturally any icon design out of Microsoft is immediately crucified as terrible, amateur, uninspired, etc. Yet you know that if the exact same icons were packaged with iWork '10, everyone would be talking about how great they are and worshiping Steve Jobs even more.
OneNote is note-taking software, essentially. It has auto-save and there is no real concept of a page... You can write anywhere, draw anything and drop in media, pictures, etc. I don't know how useful it is in a business setting, but it's probably my most-used software as a college student. It's far more useful than taking notes in Word just because of the way the program works. Like a wiki, you can have various notebook "tabs" that are hyperlinked together, and then you export various snippets of your notes into other Office programs. You can also take screenshots and import them into OneNote, you can import snippets of text and have the program cite them for you, etc.
Please explain how EWS is broken, particularly as iPhone and Windows Mobile devices use the same interface.
That is a matter of opinion. As I already said, Entourage was built out of Outlook Express for Mac, so the UI was naturally expanded from that. And now they've thrown the whole thing away and started again, and people are still not happy. If you want them to keep on with the Entourage/Outlook Express 5.x codebase, then I'd write Microsoft now before it gets any further along.
Getting hung up on MAPI or not-MAPI is stupid. As long as you can get out of the thing what you need, who cares if it's MAPI or little mice running back and forth between between your computer and the server? And more specifically, you don't know what's involved in accomplishing what you're suggesting, particularly when it comes to porting to the multitude of platforms that access Exchange. It's all very easy to say they should be throwing all their resources at doing it when it's not you who needs to actually do it. So, once it's on the Mac, what about Android? iPhone? Everything else? Everyone will be crying poor. Never mind the fact that it's a closed box that was originally built years ago. Web Services is HTTP (natch). As long as they progress Web Services to feature parity, that's all that matters.
How exactly do they hurt your eyes?
Because my eyes bleed every time I look at the iWork '09 icons.
Just so you know, he'll never get back to you because he never had an argument in the first place. He was just looking to get in a cheap Microsoft jab, because that's the trendy thing to do nowadays.
Depending on what apps your colleagues have, you might enjoy playing a prank by spelling out naughty words in their dock. Of course I've never done that!
I figured as much, so I elected to ask for specifics rather than sit there and pour my time into an unnecessary defence of EWS.
The thing that's annoying is that unlike most people here, I've actually used the damn thing. And I'm happy and I'm impressed. And I've had to support Office 2008, cos I'm the guy who has to fix it for everyone, not just one person at a time; Entourage is the bane of my existence. I know there's a gap still between Outlook for Mac and Outlook for Windows, but the top 90% of everything you ever complained about with Entourage is basically gone.
Database: fixed. Multiple calendars: sorted. New protocol: yep. PST import: done. Much more Mac-like: you bet. Speed: 2 seconds to launch Word into the Document Gallery; after disabling the Document Gallery and quitting, 3 seconds to launch and open a blank Word document; 4 seconds for Outlook to launch and show me a window. (2.53GHz Core 2 Duo MBP).
And there is plenty of potential to whittle away more if it with incremental updates, simply by getting onto a decent application path.
And yet, ppl are sitting here wailing about the damn icons and talking as if from experience about a product they've never touched.
Amen. It's not any more wondrous that that. And if you need more than Word offers, get Circus Ponies Notebook.
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Good to know that's called good interface design.
Maybe Adobe Photoshop CS5 is a large application which needs load a lot of plugins when it starts, the splash screen is indeed needed.
But M$ word needs splash screen just because word is a large application???
Or because word is not well coded application?
Have fun
This is Word in its four main levels of Ribbon-ness.
Ribbon open.
Ribbon closed.
Ribbon off.
Toolbar off.
If you genuinely can't find a Ribbon level that you can live with, then there's very little hope for you. (You can also turn off the toolbar independent of the state of the Ribbbon for even more combinations.)
M$? Really?Good to know that's called good interface design.
Maybe Adobe Photoshop CS5 is a large application which needs load a lot of plugins when it starts, the splash screen is indeed needed.
But M$ word needs splash screen just because word is a large application???
Or because word is not well coded application?
Have fun
And yes, Microsoft Word is a large application. It has many features, perhaps more than most people need. Large applications with longer loading times typically employ a splash screen.
The fact that you're bothered by a splash screen is quite reaching.