MS Office 2011 Beta 4 – 100526
Since I posted my review, MS Office for Mac 2011 Beta 4 is out. It seems that the only difference is that there aren’t any VBA errors in the build. Regardless, if you have access, download the update!
MS Office for Mac 2011 Beta 3 – mini review
The third beta of the new, re-polished MS Office for Mac 2011 is out. Written from the ground up in Cocoa, it look and feels like a real Mac app. Gone is the clunky Carbon interface, and the slow, unresponsive GUI. This version, though still in Beta, is a vast improvement over its predecessor which came out in Jan, 2008. Thanks to the Beta program, I got my copy along with the rest of the world late last month. I have been playing around with the various apps, but before I ZAP them, here are my thoughts on what I’ve seen so far (dial-up alert):
Outlook for Mac
The biggest change in Office suite 2011, is the inclusion of Outlook for Mac. Entourage is dead, and everyone may breathe a collective sigh of relief. Flawed from the first onslaught, Entourage was a mentally-challenged, crippled cousin of Outlook for Windows. A face only a mother could love. It never posed a serious threat to the Mail.app or any of the Mozilla offerings, and offered limited if any kind of support for MS Exchange. As a result, it never curried favor with Enterprise users. Why, Mail.app v5 did a much better job with Exchange, and it isn’t even an MS product.
But with Outlook for Mac 2011, MS has stepped up its offering, bringing the MS Mail app few steps closer to its Windows counterpart. The ribbon interface we’ve come to love from Office 2007 for Windows, is ubiquitous in every app in MS Office 2011. It feels natural! I am told that it can import data from PST files (phew). I tried it out, with a PST file from my Windows days and it did transfer most data over. I say most, because I also had some Journal data which wasn’t recognized. I hope that other companies will offer a better solution/import for PST files (structure for which has now been shared by MS).
VBA and Macros
Visual Basic script and Macro support is BACK! Why in heaven did MS opt to leave it out of MS Office 2008, is beyond me. It is the staple of cross platform working/document sharing, and goodness how I have suffered for the lack of the same. Now let me stress, I hate VBS and Macros in my documents, but everyone I know/work with isn’t privy to this information. These two banes of my work existence have haunted my MS Office 2008 days, prompting me to switch to Windows on Parallels to edit/work these documents. But MS Office 2011 brings this support back. And it works for most part. Indeed I understand it is still in Beta, but it is a great start and it can only get better. However, I do hope that this doesn’t prompt people to continue using Macros.
Microsoft Word
The most used App in the MS Office world, Word for Mac has seen a meteoric shift since the days of PPC Word 2004. Word 2007 was a shift from the old way of doing things to a quasi-ribbon layout. Word 2011 completes this paradigm shift. Ribbons everywhere! New templates and integration with Office Online completes the trifecta of changes. In this app, as in others, the context of the task being performed, changes the ribbon. That’s very helpful indeed. The app is very polished, and contains nearly all the production-level features. There are bugs galore, though they don’t detract from using this app for day-to-day work. This is the sole app out of the suite for which I can safely say this.
Microsoft Messenger Beta 3 (build 100519)
Oh how I have looked forward to a Microsoft Messenger update. Something, anything that would bring it at par with the Messenger Live for Windows. But alas, my hopes remain dashed. Apart from a video chat feature, which has been present since Beta 1 (thank you MS), there’s nothing to write home about on this version. There are minor interface tweaks, for instance that ugly “Send” button is gone. Hovering over the friend’s display pic brings up a contextual menu. Many the bugs from the March 2010 Beta release still remain. These include, the inability to change display picture, login failures. But perhaps the biggest flaw of them all, the UI of Messenger is virtually unchanged since the Messenger 7 days. This app seems to stick out like a sore thumb. Back to Adium.
Microsoft Excel
I didn’t try Excel out as much as I would’ve liked to. There’s just so much to discover in this app, that each day I keep finding more. There is a slew of handy tools for summarizing, creating formulas on the fly. That, in addition to the variety of presets and templates, make Excel very usable even in its current avatar.
Conclusions & Caveats
Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 promises and delivers with aplomb. The GUI and features bring it closer to the Mac look and feel, while at the same time not compromising on the feature set. I didn’t notice any increase in the CPU usage, and a negligible increase in the memory usage with the new MS Suite. The conclusion to take home though: It looks great and behaves well, however, and this is a big however, it is nowhere close to a release candidate or a final product. I would definitely not recommend using this as a production system. While Word works well for most part, Outlook does not. It crashes downloading large bodies of mails, and has placeholder text and icons all over. Same for Powerpoint and Excel. Don’t even get me started on Microsoft Messenger for Mac v8.0. I for one welcome our new MS Office overlord. I can’t wait till this is released sometime late this year.
Buggy, venturing away from a dropdown in the ribbon in any app.
Placeholder texts abound.
Outlook text doesn’t wrap.
Penultimate for iPad update – wrist protection
What a wonderful update waiting for me this morning – Penultimate with wrist-protection!
The problem of capacitive multi-touch screens is that they don’t lend themselves to scribbling notes with your finger or an appropriate stylus. Natural note taking (and believe you me, I know a thing or two about that), involves resting your wrist on the surface, as you scribble on. Capacitive screens register that and you end up with a number of extra scribbles where your wrist rested.
Penultimate is a cheap app available from the iTunes store and puts forth a digital canvas on which you can scribble your thoughts. It works great for the most part, but before the update this morning, the following could be your experience while scribbling notes.
Enter wrist protection! The app actively monitors the surface of the iPad screen for what it can interpret as a wrist (by calculating surface area I presume). And to my utter delight, it works like a charm. It manages to detect my wrist as I scribble away, every time. Kudos to the devs. Apps like these make me so glad to own an iPad. My productivity will certainly go up a wee bit more now.
AND to enhance your iPad note taking experience, might I recommend Pogo Sketch stylus? Made for capacitive screens, it is quite portable, and yet very usable.
Socialite (formerly Eventbox) ideal mate for Google Reader
For the longest time I resisted RSS feeds, dismissing them as too cumbersome to keep track of, and rather too concise for my needs. Over time though, with the plethora of sites I keep track of, not to mention the trackers and feeds for breaking news on CNN, BBC, I decided to make the shift to RSS. I toyed with subscribing to individual feeds in Firefox, but soon gave up on that idea. With around eleven feeds, I couldn’t keep a history of older feed stories, as well as, mark them as read/unread. I looked to Apple Mail, but apart from a marginal improvement from Firefox (in terms of history), I didn’t see a benefit.
Enter Google Reader. It does it all, aggregate feeds into one feed, and allows for a history as well as marking the same (starring in Google terms). I can access my feeds and read/unread status from any computer/device. Wonderful, but only restricted to the actual GReader site. That was until I found Socialite (formerly Eventbox).
Socialite supports Google Reader in it’s entirety, allowing one to subscribe to a feed from the client, unsubscribe, mark as read/unread, star/unstar, etc. With Growl support, this is by far the best Google Reader RSS feed client for the Mac. What’s more, this client integrates support for various social networking APIs such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. A definite MUST try.
AVCHD Lite vs Motion JPEG – editing ease on the Mac
With the new camera come a whole slew of editing questions – which format is better, which format lends to easy editing, which format produces the best audio/video… To better educate myself on this topic, I have been trawling the web, finding resources, reviews, experiences of ZS3 users, as well as shooting sample videos using my ZS3 and editing the same on my Mac. It turns out that Motion JPEG is better overall, in terms of quality of audio/video and ease of editing – the two most important benchmarks in my opinion. Intrigued? Read on. Word of caution – this is aimed solely at the hobbyists – people who shoot videos for personal or family leisure. Professionals, well you are just way off base here.
AVCHD Lite is the 720p cousin of the more famed AVCHD format pushed by Sony and Panasonic. Recording at 30fps, at a variety of Mbps (9-17), it is a newer format being implemented by many Point and Shoot cameras. The main pro of shooting in this format is the smaller file size on the card. Everything else touted as a pro, is actually a con. AVCHD uses frame blending (the main reason why the file sizes are smaller) to capture video. It encodes one full frame every X second, the rest being all deltas, which is GREAT for file sizes, but is horrid for editing when converted to another format.
MJPEG or Motion JPEG was the first generation of video compression available to the users back in the day, and arguably is the least efficient way to compress video, but it is on the flip side, the fastest to decode and edit. This is due to the fact that each frame is encoded separately using JPEG compression. It takes the least amount of processing power to encode, edit or playback. It is indeed very wasteful in terms of space consumption. An eight minute sample will take 2GB of space in 720p setting.
Before we start, editing an AVCHD Lite video is NOT natively supported with any of the OS X based video editors. Some have pointed that Final Cut Pro (FCP) can edit the AVCHD files, but I can confirm that it actually converts the MTS video to ProRes 422.
Test Setup
I shot three sequences of videos in low light, out in the snow, and indoors – well lit. All shot in AVCHD Lite format, SuperHigh settings (17Mbps) with Dolby Digital stereo audio, with auto focus in manual settings. I used iMovie ’09 and Final Cut Pro. The former imported the MTS files as AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec) and the latter as ProRes 422 (HD) files. The time taken to convert the MTS files to AIC and ProRes 422 were nearly 80% of the length of the clip. For instance, a clip of a minute took 40 seconds to import to iMovie and FCP.
I repeated the same set of videos with MJPEG, auto-focus and manual settings. There was no conversion necessary and all clips were natively imported in iMovie ’09 and FCP.
The movies were then spliced together, and output as an HD MOV file with bitrate of 9100kbps and two pass encoding. I can post the other setup variables as well. The encoding took the same amount of time, since working with AIC and ProRes 422 is the same as working with MJPEG (native).
Initial Reaction
Video
The time taken for video conversion notwithstanding, the MJPEG format seemed to be a clear winner of the two. Not only was the video sharper, featuring more vibrant and true-life colors, and much less noise (especially compared to the AVCHD videos converted to ProRes and AIC), but also, the quality of the output encoded video was clearly much superior. I could already notice artifacts and loss of quality on the ProRes and AIC encoded videos but this got trebled (nearly) in the final product. The end result seemed to be shot with a normal non-HD camera.
Audio
There was no appreciable difference in terms of audio quality. Even though the AVCHD Lite format supports Dolby Digital audio input, after encoding and compression, there is no discernible difference between the AAC encoded audio from AVCHD Lite and the stereo 2-channel audio recorded with MJPEG.
Preliminary Conclusion
Clearly from an editing standpoint, on the Mac, MJPEG is the clear winner. The editing ease and persistence of quality and low level noise in day-to-day videos makes the benefits of AVCHD (eg. longer recording times) moot. Even though with MJPEG videos are limited to 8 minutes per recording, and translate to roughly 2 GB file (per 8 minutes of video) on the SD card, it more than offsets this lack of compression, with the ease and ability to edit and encode the video on one’s tools of choice be it basic trimming with Quicktime, or Timeline based editing on iMovie and FCP.
My recommendation is a resounding yes for MJPEG. Keep a couple of 16GB SDHC Class 6 cards handy though.
