[bleen]

As from what I read from the Apple Press Release on Steve demonstration of OS X GM Wedneday is that Office 10 will be for OS X. Office 9 is 2001, Office 10 is Office XP that comes out this summer for Windows.

If the Press Release is correct then a version of Office will be released 2 months after the Windows Version!!!!! Office 9 for Windows (2000) came out between a year and a year and a half from the Mac version (2001)!!!

Uh, as far as I can tell the Mac and Windows Office products are not the same and haven't been since Office 4.2. The schedules, feature sets, and names have been different ever since Office 98 for Mac came out.

[Misha]

Microsoft has stated that they intend to have a Carbon version of Office 2001 ready by the fall.

Unfortunately, you're going to have to pay a couple hundred dollars for the upgrade...

No, Mircrosoft said the upgrade cost will be $150, not $200+ for current owners of Office 2001.

[zorn]

still 150 for a re-complie is ******** . They should have been using carbon lib for a while. And don't hold your breath for then to make it cocco ether.

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$post_count++;

Originally posted by zorn:
still 150 for a re-complie is ******** . They should have been using carbon lib for a while. And don't hold your breath for then to make it cocco ether.

You think all it takes to get Office running under OS X is a recompile? What are you kidding? Lets see why this very statement is just soooo wrong.

1. Office has 30+ million lines of code. MS used a lot of Apple's OS 9 system libraries in Office 2001 to get the look and feel right (such as using Nav Services for the save dialogs). So when Apple went and changed all the libraries, the boys (and gals) at MS now have to go back, and pretty much rewrite what has been working since Office 98.

2. Lets see when did Apple lock down the carbon spec, how about never? They still have locked down the carbon spec, and each time they put out a new version, something changes. If you look at the spec for Carbon 1.0 and compare it to todays Carbon 1.3, there is a world of difference in the systems calls, as well as what is supported and how it works. The carbon api has been changing a lot. It was not till recently, when developers complained, that Apple has started to lock down the spec. And why carbonize an app for an OS that had barely hit beta when they released 2001.

3. How about a new UI? I mean, if you wanted the old Office 2001 UI on OS X, sure, then it would be faster and cheaper. But I bet those guys at MS are rewriting the UI to take advantage of aqua. So that will take time to rewrite dialogs, get new icons, change how dialogs work and are laid out.

4. How about a whole new file system of OS X? Libraries, fonts, preferences, all go in different places now. Lots of different places depending on how the program is installed.

And its not just the people at MS facing these challenges, its also Adobe, FileMaker, MYOB, etc. Anyone porting over to OS X is facing a huge job. It takes a ton of man hours to both carbonize the code (because there is so much to work through), take advantage of some cool new Apple things (like Quartz and Aqua), and then test the whole damn thing. Everything needs to be retested, to make sure it all works. Ports are one of the most evil things to do in development, no one likes to do it. Reason being is everything breaks, and it takes a long time to figure out where it broke, why it broke, fix it, and check to see if the fix broke anything else.

You shouldn't make such large statements like "its only a recompile" with out doing any checks. Any OS X developer knows that a huge amount of work is going into brining their apps to OS X.

And did you think Adobe was just going to give away their OS X version to everyone who bought photoshop 6? Is that a good business practice, to spends hundreds of thousands of dolors creating a new peice of software, boxing it, creating the help manuals, etc for it, and then giving it away? Don't you think Adobe, MS, FileMaker, and Macromedia deserve to get some of their money back that went into making OS X an operating system you can actually use to get WORK done?

I am amazed that MS is even giving us a break on the price. I for one thought they would hit us with the full upgrade price of $250.

[dkephart]

I don't usually jump to people's defense, but I belief what zorn was trying to say is that when M$ was designing O2001 for OS9, they had to re-do a lot, and had they used the carbon lib, things such as the Aqua UI and file navigation systems would have appeared automatically. Look at quicken 2001. It was written for OS9, but using carbon, and therefore worked well enough in OSX.

I am sure a lot of what you said is accurate, and I defer to your superior knowledge of the 30 million lines of code that M$ writes, but I think you may have misunderstood zorn obviously over-brief summation and complaint.

But what do I know,

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- David Kephart
ICQ: 19510117
AIM: TheKephart

Originally posted by dkephart:
I don't usually jump to people's defense, but I belief what zorn was trying to say is that when M$ was designing O2001 for OS9, they had to re-do a lot, and had they used the carbon lib, things such as the Aqua UI and file navigation systems would have appeared automatically. Look at quicken 2001. It was written for OS9, but using carbon, and therefore worked well enough in OSX.

But thats just not true. When M$ was working on Office 2001 (we can assume 99 and 00), Apple had just announced Carbon, and then released carbon 1.0, which then went through several major revisions. Why code for a moving target? It is really hard to code for an api when everytime you get a new version of the api, everything breaks. It just doesn't make sense.

And you won't automatically become aqua complient when you carbonize, even the Apple Aqua Human Inerface guidlines acknowledge this. You have to put a lot of dev time into designing and creating the new UI to make it more Aqua. You have to move the preferences option from Edit to under the app name, you have to write code to take advantage of sheets, etc. Its not that the OS automatically does that for you, the dev has to spend a ton of time ripping out windowing code (because Apple didn't carbonize that), and redesigning the UI to be Aqua complient. Also there has to be the little things, to make it seem like Aqua, new icons, new layout of dialogs, etc that take time and dev work.

And the nav stuff doesn't come with the Operating system. You have to code into the App where you want things to go, what system calls to make to make sure its there, etc.

Now granted, if M$ rewrote the Office in Coca, most of this stuff would come free. Thats the great thing about coca, the operating system support for it is huge. For example, Carbon apps have to write code to recognize and take advantage of multiple button mice (like the scroll wheel), while Coca apps don't. (Classic apps don't get any multiple button support at all)

This is not a flame directed towards you, its directed towards the members of the Mac community, who don't code, and think creating and carbonizing OS X apps is just so damn easy.