InBox: All About Microsoft; Mac Text Editors, AppleWorks.

“Do you honestly think even a small percentage of iPod owners will switch to Microsoft? Already they don’t like Windows and a few million Windows users are impressed with how everything Apple just works”.

I know they wont switch (but who cares). ......A few million people out of over 750million (Windows users) people isnt going to change the fact that MS can and will drive sales to their store.

Like usual MS is Dead last, yet ready to stomp on apples ass…I like and use iTunes and most likely wont switch. But if I cant buy from any store I want (for pricing reasons) and have the ability to play whatever that format may be, I will switch to an iRiver.”

“While it won’t fail because it’s MS, it will not going to be raging success. Some analysts just see the numbers of WIN users and don’t discount that 98% of corporate users are not going to allow employees to buy tracks or the huge % of machines serve as retail wedding registries, cash registers, etc ... so while Ms is quick to claim there are 350 million WMP users, how many serve as video players on cash registers? (my local market has about 10 such registers) how many people willingly downloaded the last player?

What do you have left - you have either dyed-in-the-wool MS fans and you have people too lazy/too dumb to download itunes ... that’s still quite a lot - now whether people who are too dumb to know how to download itunes will suddenly get smart enough or eager enough to use MS player AND buy audio tracks is another matter entirely. You could also argue that people who buy $499 machines are not exactly the type who will seemingly just at the chance to spend hundreds/thousands of dollars on DL music.”

“Personally, I like AppleWorks. It does most of what I need it to do. It’s not feature bloated, hard drive clogging or overly complex.

For file compatibility, couple AppleWorks with a copy of MacLinkPlus and I don’t need MS Office… Period. AND for a LOT less money than Office!

True, it hasn’t had a real upgrade for 3 years or so. I’d love to see full support for Mac OS X”

“It seems to me that criticizing an application simply because it has not been updated recently is nothing but a symptom of latest-and-greatest syndrome. Some people seem to do nothing with their Macs except look for software updates and new icons.

AppleWorks is an extremely useful suite. I use the word processor the most, but the drawing module is great for page layout (I wish they would change the module name to Page Layout so people would use it more), and I use the database to track my bank accounts and business expenses. It’s a bargain.”

“Basic text editor? Simple word processor? Worthless carryover from NeXT?

Whatever it is it stinks. For pity’s sake, find and replace in TextEdit makes SimpleText look like BBEdit by comparison. And about that NeXT font palette, nice - in something like Quark Xpress. But just in the way for simple ‘word processing’.”

“vi is a transcendental experience.  I had to use it on my last job and, by God, I learned it.  However, after a while some of the key sequences become so engrained that you can do them, but you couldn’t explain to someone what you just did.

Now, I got on the BBEdit train before it got on its hyperinflationary spiral so upgrades have been relatively painless.  I see that they spun off TextWrangler by axing some of the HTML editing and scripting capabilities. Is it otherwise identical to BBEdit?  If so, that may be a better choice for some users. “

“Emacs is wonderful - the best text editor for programmers.  It has a gui, but it still has other keyboard commands that make it as powerful as Vi. Just the fact that you can have different buffers in one window, with one of them being a shell if you wish, makes it wonderful. You can even collaborate by having two different people edit the same file - if you configure XWindows just right.  I can go on.”