mac os x

marketing: OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta Features:

“With Version 3.0, OpenOffice.org is now able to run on Mac OS X without the need for X11. Thus, OpenOffice.org behaves like any other Aqua application. The cool thing is, while the market leading office suite vendor dropped VBA support and the Solver feature, OpenOffice.org recently introduced limited VBA support and includes a powerful Solver component. In addition, OpenOffice.org integrates well with the Mac OS X accessibility APIs, and thus offers better accessibility support than many other Mac OS X applications. Finally, people like OpenOffice.org 3.0 for Mac OS X because of its very good stability and performance. Reportedly, some Mac users have switched to OpenOffice.org just because of its extremely good stability.”

There’s quite a few more goodies, but for Mac users this is the big one. Download from here.

Now this might just tempt me back to NetNewsWire again:

“NetNewsWire 4.0 will bring new features and changes to fall in line with NewsGator’s aspirations for taming information. At the top of the new features list will be integration with AideRSS and the company’s PostRank technology for automatically filtering newsfeeds for hot topics and headlines. NewsGator is already using this technology in its web-based client for its top 1,000 feeds, but NetNewsWire 4.0 will bring AideRSS and PostRank to Mac OS X Leopard. If you’re drowning in feeds and headlines that you constantly shrug off with the ‘mark all as read’ command, this new PostRank technology should help you to at least catch the stuff that really matters.”

Plus, there’s this wonderful news about the iPhone:

“As far as a release date for NetNewsWire 4.0, Brent has a more general Fall-ish time in mind. On top of 3.2 and 4.0 development, he’s also working on a native NetNewsWire app for the iPhone, but I can’t share many of those details just yet.”

I veer between using Google Reader and using NetNewsWire on an almost-weekly basis. I love using NetNewsWire as a client, but - despite the massive improvements that the company has made - prefer Google Reader to Newsgator on the Web.

The Mac mini which lives under the TV set and acts as a souped-up media centre alerted me today to an update of eyeTV, the marvellous TV recording software. I duly updated - I update everything - and found that it refused to launch.

In previous years, this would have been a disaster: although I’ve always backed up my files religiously, I’ve never done applications, figuring that I can always reinstall them from disk.

Of course, these days, I actually buy most of my applications online and never actually get a disk. Thankfully, though, the Mac mini is backed up using Time Machine, which means that all I needed to do was step back an hour, select the old version of the eyeTV application, and all was fixed.

So thank you Apple