The Mac Business Unit has published its fifth sneak-peak of the new Office for Mac 2008, focussing on Entourage 2008.
The video demonstrates the creation of an event in Entourage’s calendar, giving a sense of appointment features familiar (colour-coding for each calendar) and unfamiliar (allowance for travelling time to and from the appointment).
The new, previously-seen “My Day” Desktop interface for Entourage also gets a good work out. You get to see the creation of a to-do, the reordering of to-dos and other bits and pieces.
Since I am feeling grumpy with Leopard iCal at the moment (although not as grumpy as Pierre Igot at Betalogue who today rightly unloads on iCal’s lack of keyboard support 
), it all looks pretty attractive.
It pains me a bit to say it, but here is something that looks like it works. And gives users some control over how to manage their to-dos and events and edit them easily. Of course, it may be a different story when we actually have the app in our hands.
See the sneak-peak for yourself below or on the Office:Mac 2008 web site :
Looks quite nice, but I’d only ever consider returning to Entourage if they were to ditch the monolithic mail database!
I’ve had too many problems in the past with database corruption – and don’t even get me started on backing up a complete 4GB+ database because I’ve received one new email!!
It does sounds good enough, maybe not enough for myself to drop Mail.app and iCal. Entourage will only be acceptable if they already dropped that old monolithic data file of theirs and jumped to file based mailboxes instead, otherwise it will be pretty useless to both spotlight and time machine (imagine, backing up a 2Gb data file every time a new e-mail appears). Anyone know about this?
Yes, the monolithic database is a bummer. I am sure that if the new Entourage were switching to a more sensible one file per email format we would have heard about it, long and loud.
I’m also less than thrilled with how uncustomizable ical and mail.app to dos are. So Entourage sounds tempting…
But, I left entourage for mail.app only a couple years ago and haven’t regretted the move. That huge database and the lack of stability was terrible. BUT their events and to dos look really great in this release… except for that big ugly “my day” thing. Yuck!
I’ve been using Entourage since v1 and it’s my main program of choice. I use Apple mail on the laptop when away from home to IMAP to key email accounts but download at home.
Been using now for so many years and creaping up on 3GB database but it still feels snappier than Outlook on Windoze and Mail.app.
FileMaker introduced Bento yesterday with a free preview download that expires in February when the software goes on sale for $50/single $100/Family.
Pretty neat and easy to use. Heavily inspired by iWork and links into iCal and Address Book allowing editing of data. I’ve set up my projects and linked them to the appropriate contacts and tasks pretty easily. Because Bento is actually using the live data from iCal/Address book that data can be modified right from the app. Very nice.
This looks like an excellent compliment to anyone that relies on iWork/iCal/Mail/Address Book. Basically, FileMaker Lite but with the added bonus of connectivity to the Leopard system that FileMaker does not have.
Yeah, I’m liking Bento too, creating Projects and Contexts for your to-dos is pretty simple, if you like that sort of thing. And the iCal integration is superb. But linking it all to my iPhone is still a giant pain in the a**, thanks to the weaknesses of Mail and ICal — why is this such a difficult problem for Apple to solve?
On Bento, see this for the other side of the story:
FileMaker’s Bento: Undercooked and Slightly Fishy
http://db.tidbits.com/article/9313
This may sound a little mean, but I am never ever going to install any Microsoft product on my Mac in OS X mode ever. Period.
I took a peek at it when I first got my Mac’s and after seeing quite a few updates to fix critical flaws that would allow someone to break into my computer. Or at least that’s what the patch descriptions said, I will never trust an Microsoft product.
If the games I like to play were on the Mac natively, I wouldn’t even have a Windows PC in front of me.
Do you feel insecure because Microsoft announce the security holes in their apps before fixing them or do you feel secure because Apple never acknowledge them in theirs?
I am not a M$ fan but the Office suite has proven to be very useful and more complete in its feature set than Apple’s own for my own purposes. I do have iWork and use it occasionally but the functionality of the MBU’s product is more fullfilling for me and miles apart from anything the Windows side of M$ comes up with in their clumsy interface.
I don’t have the need to run a program like Word that has 50 billion features in it. It’s like using Photoshop to draw a box around a part of a picture. Sure the program can do it, but if that’s all you are going to use the program for, a cheaper alternative is way better.
From what I have seen of Microsoft’s Office for Mac, It’s going to be way to busy for the average home user. They don’t need all the stuff packed in there. iWork covers a home users needs pretty well and is way more affordable than Microsoft Office.
As for feeling secure… Given the track record Microsoft has vrs. Apple, and seeing what they did to Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows, I have decided to stay as far away from Microsoft as I possibly can. I keep feeling that Microsoft has lost an edge in development that they once had (long ago).
You may well be right about the Windows side of M$’s business but the MBU are different in their approach. I don’t want to sound as an apologist for them because I dislike much that M$ produces and the way it does its business, however with respect to the MBU’s Mac Office I do use much that the product offers.
I don’t just tinker with many of my documents. I try to learn all the functions of the Office apps and use them to the most so I guess I am the opposite to yourself there. I don’t like to spend so much money on a program and not learn how to use it the most. If there are features to be learnt then I learn them else I feel I am wasting money.
Personally I am looking forward to it a great deal. Entourage is my most used app and the ‘Projects’ section is overwhelmingly useful for me allowing me to consolidate documents, email, tasks and calendar functions together in one view. Even with a huge database file it still flies along and the sync to iCal/Address book keeps my Nokia E61 in sync with it too.
The only thing I would love to see more is a stand alone small app that would allow me to see and edit the Notes which are sent to iSync. M$-MBU could probably do something simple and free for that in a short time.
I’m new to mac and love it. I’ve used every contact manager under God’s heaven. I liked early versions of ACT, then went to Outlook, and after converting to Mac tried Entourage.
While I still wander between Entourage and Mail apps and see pros and cons in both… it doesn’t look like Entourage 2008 will inspire me.
While I miss having more features, I really love the speed, simplicity and search power of spotlight with Mac apps.
Address Book will print nice labels, Entourage will not.
As for Bento…yuk, I spent 10 minutes with it and sent it to the trash.
[...] Day” widget that presents the day’s appointments and tasks in nice little interface. As I’ve said before, reluctantly, it’s a good [...]