Start the countdown right now! I know, I know, it hasn’t even been a year since the release of Mac OS 10.3, nicknamed “Panther”. Many of you haven’t upgraded to 10.2 (“Jaguar”). Many of you are still “Happy Mac OS 9 Campers”. Well, next month there’ll be a new cat in town – Mac OS 10.4, nicknamed “Tiger”.

On June 28th Apple CEO Steve Jobs will deliver the keynote address at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), during which he will preview the next major release of Mac OS X. When will Tiger be available to early adopters? There’s nothing firm, but “Panther” was previewed at WWDC last June and released in October. There is no word yet as to any of Tiger’s features, or what the price, if any, will be. “Panther” was $129 – worth every penny, in my mind.

M$ is now shipping Office for Mac 2004. Now, I take a lot of shots at M$, but Office is the one M$ product I do recommend for the Mac, especially if you have a business and require “professional” compatibility with the unenlightened. I say “professional” because AppleWorks, Keynote, TextEdit in “Panther”, and a couple of other third-party applications, can read and write Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. 2004 improvements include: the Project Center, which keeps your most important information within reach by providing quick access to all the e-mails, files, contacts, and schedule information related to a specific project; project management tools that work across the Office applications; and, a Compatibility checker that can tell you if the document you created will be usable by other users of other Office versions on other platforms. Whew.

Although most of us never use even a smidgen (technical term for “not very much) of the capabilities of M$ Word, I think it’s still the best full-featured word processor out there for any platform. In fact, some tech journalists who’ve used Office for Mac say that it’s better than its Windoze counterpart. Go figure. Oh, there are three editions of Office 2004 for Mac. There’s the Student and Teacher Edition for $140, a Standard Edition for $370, and a Professional Edition for $460, which is supposed to include Virtual PC 7. However, M$ announced this week that the release of VPC 7 will be delayed. VPC 7 will include much needed performance and user interface improvements, as well as compatibility with the PowerMac G5.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski