In the Beginning there was the Word, and the Word was: Crash!

Arghhh!!! What is wrong with Microsoft? How has one of the biggest software companies in the world got it so wrong?

As you may know I recently escaped to a Mac to avoid the problematic and unappealing MS Vista, unfortunately I still do a lot of document editing and so one of the first installs on my shiny new MacBook was Office 2008 for Mac. On XP I had already noticed that Outlook 2007 had some nasty interface bugs, but these pale into insignificance compared the the hideous crashfest that is Word 2008 on the Mac.

I'm working on a significant document at the moment (its a bid for EU funding so its relatively big - 70 pages or so - and complex - tables, figures, references, etc.) and I needed to do some editing in Compatability Mode (thats what Word 2008 does when you load up a .doc rather than a .docx). I quickly noticed that Word was a bit unstable, crashing in flames and losing all changes about once every 20 minutes. I adjusted my workflow (repeat after me: save your work frequently) and soldiered on; however the crashes increased in frequency and by the time I got to one crash per minute I gave up, and used my precious minute of teetering instability to save out sections of the document in smaller chunks.

This seemed to do the trick and I managed to complete the sections, however on returning to the big document to incorporate my changes Word upped its game to an effective lifetime of ten seconds, rendering it useless. Honestly, Team Fortress 2 would have been a more effective way to write a collaborative document.

I sought Solace in some MS Office forums (Hello everyone, my name's Dave and I'm a Word user) and noticed that there was an update to Office for Mac that was supposed to address some of these problems - however the MS Autoupdater wasnt picking up on it for some reason.

I diligently downloaded the 114MB update by hand - 114MB! Christ on a Bike, what's in that thing! - however when I tried to install it the updater said:




It turns out that this is a known problem with the update, and that the problem is that the MS Autoinstaller is buggy. So I downloaded and installed the new version of that - but still no joy. I had a buggy version of Word, and a patch that refused to install. In the end I had to follow the advice on the forums and uninstall Office, reinstall Office, reboot, and install the update.

Only problem was that this didn't actually make any difference to Word's seizures every time it sees some text. Nowhere in those 114MB had an MS developer managed to fix the problem I was having.

In the end I had to take the extraordinary measure of using NeoOffice (a Mac open source office package based on OpenOffice) to read and edit the proprietary document format that the official software could not read without falling on its face.

Now that is an extraordinary state of affairs :-( And what's worse, losing several crucial hours with a deadline looming has made me so angry at the stinking thing that I've wasted another 30 minutes writing this blog post.

Bill - your company needs you back at the helm, and if you cant fix it, then at least you could have the decency to go down with the ship!

The Switch is Flipped

In my last post I described why I have decided to switch to a Mac. Well a shiny new MacBook Pro rolled up earlier this week, I've had a few days to acclimatise, and its probably a good time to report on what life is like this side of the switch.

Before the machine arrived I noticed an interesting change in my attitude to Windows, I don't know if it was the feeling of freedom, or some sort of psychological post-decision justification, but I finally lost all patience with the old girl. Eccentricities that I had put up with for years...

("your update is complete, your machine will restart in 5 minutes without your permission and lose your current working space and very likely the work that you had spent two hours creating before you foolishly turned your back to get a coffee")

...suddenly became unbearable insults, and bugs that I had learned to live with...

 ("your IMAP folder is at 90%, so I have decided to create a modal dialogue box that snatches focus away from you - oh, and because this is Outlook 2008 the OK button will no longer make this dialog disappear, however please click it in futile horror to create even more indestructible dialog boxes - if the despair doesn't finish you off, please laugh at the irony of it all")

...became hot pins under my fingernails. I think it's fair to say that when the time came I was all too happy to leave Windows before I jumped through it.

Nice Surprises:

The MacBook itself was a really nice surprise. I bought a 17" machine, and was a bit worried that it might be to large, but actually its only slightly heavier (an extra 0.2kg), slightly wider (about 1"), slightly deeper (about 0.5") and actually a bit thinner (0.5" thinner). It's also a beautiful machine, with an overall simplicity which is really appealing, and little touches (like the magnetic power cord and pulsing sleep light) that make it feel cared for and considered.


The software learning curve has been far easier than I expected, things are different - but natural and consistent. The things that are most different are also the things that are much better. I have a WiFi printer, and I've set it up on a number of windows machines. This involves Googling through HPs cryptic website, downloading and installing a HP suite of unwanted applications (several hundred MBs) to get the one driver you do want, and finally struggling to get the setup wizard to see the printer on the network. I started this process on the Mac and then caught myself, instead I opened the Printer config bit of System Preferences and there was my Printer already listed (the Mac had already found it on the network - I didn't even have to initiate the search), I selected it and clicked "Add Printer" and I was done. The whole process took maybe 20 seconds.

I've also really taken to some of the Mac's visual tricks - such as Expose, and the virtual desktop system (called Spaces). I've tried virtual desktops on Linux and Windows boxes before, but it's integrated so well, and the animated transitions are so good, that it just feels a natural part of the system.

I have had a couple of crashes; an open source FTP client called Cyberduck has died on me a few times (otherwise its really good), and the Microsoft Office installer keeled over the first time i ran it. The problem is very different then on Windows. On Windows when a process falls over it goes in an explosion of chaos, freezing great tracts of screen estate and pulling down related processes and often the GUI shell itself, all of which is topped off by a loud boing and another of those damn dialog boxes. On the Mac the application kinda twitches, and then it disappears. In fact the clean up is so elegant that I didn't notice the few times that Cyberduck crashed. One moment it was there, the next it was gone.

Oddities:

There are some negatives, but they don't seem so bad. The built in Web Browser, Safari, isn't so great. It renders pages OK, but it looks cramped, and feels quite basic in some intangible way. I've installed Flock (a version of Firefox) instead - and that's great to use.

The keyboard is US, which means that the " and @ keys are in the wrong place (for my jaded fingers anyway) and I seem to have lost the hash key (see - I cant even type it!). Also the Enter and Cursor keys are weirdly small, the functionality of ALT and CTRL are different (and mixed up with the Mac COMMAND key), and given that the Mac uses context (right) clicks all over the place - why oh why oh why doesn't the trackpad have a second mouse button! I know I can two-finger click instead but its just annoying that its left out - presumably to make a pointless point about simplicity :-/

Story so far?

Overall I'm very happy with the Mac. This is the first computer since my first computer (and thats a lot of beige boxes) that I've actually got excited about. Its fun to learn to use it - it rewards you at every turn - its achingly beautiful - and the community actually likes itself and the products that its based around.

And the killer feature - the thing that its worth switching for all on its own - is that the Mac wakes from Sleep (well, pseudo sleep) in seconds. I got into my office yesterday, and decided to read my email on my Mac laptop rather than my PC desktop, because the Mac powers up more quickly from sleep than it takes Windows to log in.

Three seconds from off to on, and then when it arrives, by god its all so pretty :-)