So, I posted a couple days ago about a really annoying bug where Excel 2008 documents with celles formatted using the € currency get “converted” to $ when you close and reopen them.
Well, I sort of found a cure. A workaround really… Well, two actually.
1) Simply save your document using the .xsl format instead of the default new .xlsx format and the problem goes away. Or,
2) instead of using the Format Cell menu option then choosing Currency and €, simply use the € icon in the formatting toolbar, or use the Financial cell format (that’s what the € icon does). It does almost the same as the € “currency” format, simply adding a space between the number and the symbol…
And so I continue my venture in the shadowy depth of Mac Office 2008, wondering whether I shall finally stay with the 2004 edition… not that it was great (it wasn’t, on an Intel machine), but the 2008 edition fixed almost no bugs from the 2004 version, and added a whole lot of new bugs.
So what could they have been doing down in the Mac BU during these long years? I think I might have found part of the answer: they fell in love with Aqua and all the shiny widgets and decided they might as well spend some time on creating their own… and so, I hereby introduce the “Enlarging, Blueishing, Splashing Widget”.
Watch this video closely: you’ll recognize the widgets that live at the bottom of your Word document windows, and allow you to swap between display modes (Page, Outline…).
yes, you are not dreaming, this is a triple-action widget: when you roll over it, it enlarges, it gets blue, and there’s a splash animation within it. Said animation is probably done using raytracing and specular reflections on terapolygonal vertices, since simply mousing over the widgets taxes my 2.3GHz Core2Duo CPU… well, on some occasions, for on the video it doesn’t register much on the Menu Meter CPU display (it did 5 minutes ago, and Activity Monitor pointed to Word using up to 25% of one CPU, while doing nothing more than mousing over… and I am running a 2.3GHz core2duo MacBook Pro) but a friend of mine running on a core solo Mac mini managed to get the CPU to 75% by mousing over.
Well, I hope I’ll have some new nuggets to report to you as I’ll be heavily trying out this 2008 edition to see whether I shall migrate or stay with Office 2004.
OK, so I posted yesterday about a bug in Excel 2008, and now I just hit another one in Word (yes, I’m not counting the one that does the same sort of random document windows rearranging when you use multiple screens, it plagues Word as well as Excel, which, in a way, is sort of reassuring since it seems to imply that there is at least some common code between the various Office apps).
As soon as I hit the save button in Word 2008, Word, closely followed by syslogd go crazy and eat 95% of one of my core2duo’s firece CPUs.
It seems that the Spotlight plugin installed by Office 2008 and in charge of indexing Word documents is seriously buggy and a real ressource hog.
Now I know why sometimes my MacBook Pro’s fans would start whirring like crazy for no apparent reason.
So I’ve been using Office 2008 for a while, and been cursing and screaming at it for taking more time to launch on my MacBook Pro C2D 2.3GH than it took Office 2004 running in Rosetta. As well as for having exactly the same bugs happening in exactly the same situations, mostly in Word (like when dealing with some large Office for Windows documents, or when doing search/replace all and you get some occurrences randomly replaced by random words… yeah, try to undo that after having saved! Oh, and I forgot: when you use two displays one above the other, as soon as you move Excel in the background, all the Excel windows in the secondary display are neatly moved back to the main display… handy… NOT!).
But yesterday, I stumbled on a show-stopping bug in Excel 2008.
You see, I live and work in Europe, so when I need to do a quote for one of my clients, I do it in Euros (€).
So in Excel I set my table cells to a currency format using the € symbol, like so:
Cool, works alright… Not so much actually: when I reopen my document, ALL the cells formatted as EURO currency have turned into US DOLLARS:
Which, when you have a look at today’s EURO/USD exchange rates is probably gonna please my clients, but not myself.
Ah, yes, I forgot: this bug affects the French version of Office (I can’t test any other languages, since M$ insists on NOT shipping multilingual apps) and ONLY the EURO currency (I tried with a number of other currencies and they are retained fine).
Conclusion: I CANNOT work anymore in Excel for my quotes and invoices, so I’m switching over to Numbers.
Way to go M$... I hope the first “Office 2008 Service Pack” will solve this problem, but I highly doubt it…
So, after playing a central role in William Gibson’s Spook Country, as a means to smuggle data, the iPod is now going to feature in the latest – and last – installment of the cult video game franchise Metal Gear Solid, coming to PlayStation 3 this June.
Of particular note is the in-game iPod. Using this, you’ll be able to change the game’s background music to music data that you find in the game world. You’ll also be able to download new tracks via the web.
What better proof that an item is really becoming mainstream than to see it appearing in books, movies and videogames, not as a “cool factor” bullet-list gimmick, but simply as part of the story.
We’re hard at work, I would say, on the next version, which we call Windows 7. I’m very excited about the work being done there. The ability to be lower power, take less memory, be more efficient
So, yeah, the next Windows will, like, totally rock, will never crash and will save baby seals and reduce global warming (that latest one if probably true: a crashed PC that won’t boot will not use power nor release heat).
Don’t you love the way that each “next” version of Windows is gonna be the be-all end-all? But wasn’t the previous one supposed to be that way too?
So,
I was going back to some of my pictures I imported using Aperture 1.x and, since I’m using Aperture 2 now, I wanted to try the 2.0 RAW developer on some “old” pictures.
See, I didn’t convert my whole photo library from RAW 1.1 to RAW 2.0, because I noticed it tends to change the color balance quite a lot, which means that, if I have painstakingly tweaked and adjusted a photo, it can turn out bad if I change the RAW format but leave the adjustments made with the previous RAW developer. Like, try a photo with loads of yellow in it, polish it using RAW 1.1 and then convert it to 2.0. Yeah, yuck!
But there’s something I just noticed going over a night shot: the 2.0 RAW developper gives MUCH better results when reducing ISO noise than what the 1.0 and 1.1 did.
In the example below, which is a crop of the same image processed using (top to bottom) RAW 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0, we clearly see the differences in the three engines: 1.0 generated a lot of sharp color noise, 1.1 gave smoother results which ended up blotched, but 2.0 seems to hit a sweet spot between the two: no big blurred areas as in 1.1 but no really visible noise as in 1.0
Now, if you look at a 400% enlarged crop of the above image, you can see what happens in details:
(yes, the colors are off, but that’s because I took a screenshot of the 400% image in Photoshop.)
In a previous post, I pointed to an interesting chronicle written by a long-time Windows developer who decided to switch over to doing Mac apps because he was fed up with the ugly Win platform.
In the second part of his story, he focuses on the story of the .net trainwreck environment.
So where does that leave me? I want to write nice applications. I want to be able to concentrate on my own code rather than fighting the API the whole time. I want my applications to fit in with the OS and work in a way that’s consistent with first-party applications and even other third-party programs. I want this because I think it leads to better software; it means I can spend my time creating innovative and useful software that people enjoy using. I really want to do this, but you know what? On Windows it’s just too damn hard.
Microsoft has had good opportunities to do something about this, but they have been systematically squandered through a combination of ineptitude, mismanagement, and slavish adherence to backwards compatibility. The disillusionment I feel is incredible. I enjoy writing programs, but I don’t enjoy writing for Windows. And while once it made sense to stick with Windows, it just doesn’t any more. There’s now an attractive alternative: Mac OS X.
So, basically it all comes down to two things: 1) offer developers clean and well-designed APIs and 2) be a role-model and eat your own API dog food.
