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 :

microsoft, office for mac 2008, entourage, ical, mail.app, apple mail, switching, productivity, email, MBU

Joe Tan at Tan Tan Noodles has written up a way to switch from Outlook to Mail.app using the open source utility, libpst , which was originally developed for Linux but runs fine on Mac OSX.

There are already a number of tried and true ways to crack open Outlook’s PST files and make the transition, either using Mozilla or (for Outlook Express users) DbxConv.

Or you could use the shareware utility, O2M (formerly known as Outlook2Mac) which only costs USD 10.

Still, some people get a kick out doing this kind of thing for free, and libpst offers another way.

Joe outlines just twelve steps from downloading the source code, compiling (not as hard as you imagine) and running it, to the end result.

If I had a PST file to hand, I’d try it myself. Fortunately, I don’t.mail.app, apple mail, outlook, outlook express, microsoft, pst files, switching, freeware

The BBC will shut the “minority of consumers who either do not use Microsoft or do not have an up-to-date Microsoft operating system” out of its new on-line, on-demand services, according to proposals put up for public comment by the British broadcaster.

The restriction is driven by DRM concerns as the BBC outlines in a weighty (652KB) PDF of its new plans. It intends to place all content on the net for seven days after the initial broadcast, so that users can “catch-up” on shows they have missed.

But it won’t be a free-for-all:

In respect of the seven-day catch-up over the internet service, the files would require DRM to ensure that they were appropriately restricted in terms of time and geographic consumption. The only system that currently provides this security is Windows Media 10 and above. Further, the only comprehensively deployed operating system that currently supports Windows Media Player 10 and above is the Windows XP operating system. As a result of these DRM requirements the proposed BBC iPlayer download manager element therefore requires Windows Media Player 10 and Windows XP. This means the service would be unavailable to a minority of consumers who either do not use Microsoft or do not have an up-to-date Microsoft operating system.

Mac users (and others) will take some comfort from hopes of a less proprietary future:

However, over time, technology improvements are likely to enable even more efficient methods of delivery. Further, it is our understanding the BBC Executive are working towards the iPlayer download manager being able to function on other operating systems.

If you have strong views about these things or simply like your media free of proprietary constrictions, the BBC welcomes comments .

[Via Boing-Boing -- Thanks, Conrad]

UPDATE: According to fifthdecade, who posts in the comments below,

Microsoft are getting a 2 year exclusivity deal which they haven’t paid for. It’s a scandal! That alone must be worth millions to Microsoft if next year’s Premier League football TV coverage is worth £600 million!

Read more on his blog.microsoft, DRM, BBC, cross-platform, media player, data security, apple, linux

Having recently posted four work-arounds to stop Mail subscribing to the public folders in Microsoft Exchange Server, I am delighted to discover that soon none of them will be necessary.

Leopard Mail has an elegant built-in solution to this problem.

Mail Stamps developer Andrew Escobar has posted a detailed account of how the new feature will work.

When an Exchange account is highlighted, choosing the “Get Account Info” item in the contextual menu item (or ⌘-I) pops up a new window that allows users to unsubscribe to the public folders:

Problem solved. And another upside?

After the fix, I never have to deal with Public Folders again. While I’m still using Tiger on a daily basis, once Leopard ships in the spring of 2007, I’ll finally be able to ditch Entourage and use Mail as my sole email client.

mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, microsoft, exchange server, public folders, workaround, tips

Two and a half years ago Microsoft executives were privately green with envy over the features soon to be released in Mac OS 10.4 Tiger.

According to a report on UK web site PCPro , Microsoft’s envy was revealed in a series of emails, submitted as evidence in the Iowa antitrust lawsuit.

Mail.app and Spotlight particularly impressed Lenn Pryor, former Director of Platform Evangelism:

Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store. I did system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and … my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was fucking amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.

Top Microsoft executive Jim Allchin was also impressed: “I don’t believe we will have search this fast,” he wrote.

The most recent batch of emails are available as a PDF file online:

In a nice tribute to Apple, the emails also reveal that Microsoft’s top executives were so taken with Tiger that they refused to share their installation discs for fear they might never get them back.

Previous emails from Allchin in the same case told how he would buy a Mac if he didn’t work for Microsoft and that Microsoft’s attempts in 2003 to come up with an iPod rival were very, very depressing.

All of this and more is available on the Comes vs Microsoft lawsuit web site. apple, microsoft, allchin, windows, searching ,spotlight, mail.appm apple mail, green eyed monster

Florian Beer has posted two tips which stop Mail.app syncing Exchange’s public folders.

One of them has been covered on Hawk Wings before, but the other one brings the list of possible work-arounds to four:

1. Reorganise your Exchange folder tree. Create a new top-level subfolder and set an IMAP path to match.
2. Tweak the settings in Windows Active Directory . If you have administrator rights, you can switch the syncing off at Exchange’s end.
3. Perl it out of your life . Lars Eggert has written a Perl script which allows some control over which folders (if any) are synced.
4. Lock the local cache. Florian’s second tip explains how to lock your local cache folders so that Exchange can’t sync with them.

Caveat Lector — I have absolutely no experience with Microsoft Exchange Server and no interest in acquiring some. mail.app, apple mail, microsoft, exchange server, imap, public folders, perl, local cache, email

It’s not nice for Mac users to laugh at those who are less fortunate, but when the situation involves a intoxicating mix of Microsoft, email marketers and HTML email, the temptation becomes irresistible.

Outlook 2007 is making a change in the way that it renders HTML email. In the past it used the rendering engine in Internet Explorer, but now it is switching to the less fully-featured rendering engine in Word 2007.

According to Campaign Monitor, this is a disastrous step which “takes email design back 5 years”.

In particular, Outlook 2007 users will find the following things missing from their HTML emails:

1. No background images – Background images in divs and table cells are gone….
2. Poor background color support – Give a div or table cell a background color, add some text to it and the background color displays fine. Nest another table or div inside though and the background color vanishes.
3. No support for float or position – Completely breaking any CSS based layouts right from the word go. Tables only.
4. Shocking box model support – Very poor support for padding and margin, and you thought IE5 was bad!

Campaign Monitor carries an image of how the same email laid out with CSS looks in Outlook 2000 and 2007:

Email marketers are steaming with rage . They will have to redesign all their HTML marketing templates as Office 2007 starts to spread through the corporate and home user markets.

In an interesting twist, some takes this as a tacit admission by Microsoft that the HTML engine in Internet Explorer 7 is still a security liability.

The most important thing Mail.app users can do about this is to keep themselves clean by resisting the Schadenfreude tsunami. microsoft, email, html, outlook, rendering, plaintext rOxOrs, schadenfreude