Tag: office_apps

Mac, Technology

Running Windows on OS X

Actually Sprinting Windows on OS X might be a more accurate post title or Screaming Windows, or…

Parallels is virtualisation software which allows you to run other OS’s on your Mac. I splashed out recently and bought myself a new 15″ MacBook Pro (2.16ghz intel core duo, 2gb ram, 120gb hd).

Now that I have an Intel based Mac, I decided to purchase a copy of Parallels and try out Windows XP on OS X.

Parallels installs easily enough but getting it to install Windows is not trivial (yup, I had to read the Help file to figure it out!).

Having said that, that is the only quibble I had with parallels – once Windows (XP Pro) installed, it ran very smoothly.

Windows XP on Mac

It also works perfectly in full-screen mode (but then the screenshot wouldn’t be as interesting!!!).

I downloaded IE 7 beta and Office 2007 beta to try them on XP on the Mac and they work flawlessly. In the image above you can see IE 7 in the foreground and Word 2007 in the background.

What is most impressive though is the speed of XP on the MacBook.I only assigned it 512mb ram but everything is completely instant. Click on the Word icon and it is open, same with any of the Office apps, or Firefox, or Flock. IE 7 is a little slower but only because I have a multiple tabbed window as my home page. It runs faster than I have seen XP run on any PC.

Between that and the fact that the latest desktop Macs are coming out $500 cheaper than equivalently specced Dells, you now have no reason not to consider a Mac as your next PC!

Search Engines, Technology

Google to release Google Office?

Susan Kuchinskas of internetnews.com, eWeek, Scoble and a bunch of others are all reporting that a Google-Sun alliance is set to announce a Google version of Microsoft’s Office suite of applications. Sun bring their much vaunted StarOffice codebase to this partnership while Google bring their experience of running massively trafficked web apps.

Google Office is a logical extension of the online Web 2.0 office apps I mentioned last week.

This development, when announced, has the capability to change radically the way people interact with their PCs (and could be an IT Manager’s dream – no more Office install or patch nightmares!).

UPDATE:
The Sun/Google announcement was a bit of an anti-climax after all the rumours. The agreement is:

to promote and distribute their software technologies to millions of users around the world. The agreement aims to make it easier for users to freely obtain Sun’s Java Runtime Environment (JRE), the Google Toolbar and the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, helping millions of users worldwide to participate in the next wave of Internet growth

So no Google Office – at least not yet anyway! Personally, I think yesterday’s rumour explosion was a kite flying excercise and that we will see a Google Office in the not too distant future for all the reasons expounded yesterday.