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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 00:04 CEST and is filed under Software, Spot the Idiot. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.