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.

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.

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).

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 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.

FileMaker’s Bento: Undercooked and Slightly Fishy
http://db.tidbits.com/article/9313

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.

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.

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!