What I want to know is if the iPhone is using its Bluetooth link to talk to the GPS Car Kit, does this stop it from also stop it from using a Bluetooth Handsfree Car Phone kit or Bluetooth headset at the same time? I have a built in Bluetooth handsfree kit in my car, which conveniently kills the radio/CD player when I receive a call, and pumps the phone call out the car speakers. I would not want to loose this functionality. Also, how does the Tomtom app behave when having a phone conversation at the same time? Can both run side by side? If not, then you either have a choice of navigating incommunicado, or chatting to your significant other for half an hour and getting hopelessly lost.

What about iSCSI? There isn't a single solution out there for Mac OS X to provide iSCSI Target functionality. It's a royal pain in the ass, and it should be available in the OS as standard. I'm debating whether to re-install my Mac Mini with Linux at the moment to get me out of a hole and I shouldn't have to do that. Either that or I go and buy a new system to install Linux on.

Does it sync everything in my address book or can I select specific groups? I've 815 address book cards, and most of those are work related; so I'd only want friends and family uploaded to google and leave the bulk of them alone.

I'm all for this if I can get this functionality:

*) Shared AddressBook groups with my wife, so that we only have to maintain one set of groups for friends and family. Note, I said "groups" not the entire AddressBook, as neither of us is interested in the other's business contacts. Also both of us have to have read +write access to the common groups so we can update them on the move.

*) Multi-calendar support on the iPhone. Why is this taking so long? Ok it's not possible to see multi-calendar month views on a iPhone the way you do in iCal, but you could flick through them in serial fashion. A mutli-calendar day view would work on the iPhone, and so would a multi-calendar List view (Google has already shown how to do this).

*) Shared (multi) calendars, so my wife and I always have up to date, synchronised access to social events, birthdays, etc. Again, this needs to be read + write by both parties on the move.

*) ToDo support enabled in calendars, so we can share task lists, shopping lists, etc.

Ah, thanks Cliff, that's the reason. I'd forgotten about that.

You must still be running Tiger. When I fire up automator there are no Microsoft options. So I did a search for "automator" on MS Word Help and this is what it has to say for Automator Workflows and Appliscripts:

"Running Automator workflows and AppleScripts from the Office script menu is not currently supported under Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard)."

Shame, as I'd like to try this out.

O2 have just launched a HSDPA service. The info on their data card claims speed up to 1.8Mb/s. I saw one today, and the guy who owned it claimed he was getting close to that. 3G devices are ubiquitous now in the UK, and HSDPA is very close behind. So EDGE is just a complete waste of time. Apple would be better off installing their Email and Google Maps software on the iPod Touch for use over WiFi, and forgetting about the iPhone until they can package HSDPA with a reasonable battery life. This is a different market to the US, and EDGE isn't going to attract anyone when the competition is so much faster.

Re: Comment 24:

Not sure what happened there. Typed it all in to the text box; selected it; copy/paste into TextEdit; changed the font+size+colour to proof read; selected the TextEdit text; command-C to copy; command-A in the text box; command-V to paste and over write and then clicked to add.

It appears the Command-A didn't select everything in the text box, maybe only what was visible at the time. So I have a duplication of text. If you want to zap that comment and this one, I'll do it again properly.

There's a bug here somewhere.

Like Matt, I'd also assumed that Office for Mac 2008 was going to be an automatic upgrade. I use my MBP in business full time and my clients span the telecoms, financial and biotech industries; so document compatibility is very important for my business. Until about year ago (before trying NeoOffice) I was wholly reliant on MS Office 2004 but its emulated performance since switching to an Intel based Mac has been a real killer. For small stuff it's fine, but large complex spreadsheets grind Excel to a halt, and Word just can't handle documents with a handful of embedded images (exported from VISIO). That latter problem recently left me in the embarrassing position of having to refer a document edit to a colleague because simple stuff like inserting a couple of lines when an image was visible would cause the CPU load to max for up to a minute while it worked out how to redraw the screen. It was unusable.

NeoOffice has been a big help since I discovered it. It's much faster than Office 2004, and its spreadsheet app performs much better than Excel, as well as being simpler and easier to use. It's been set in Finder as my default spreadsheet application for several months now.

As good as NeoOffice is, up till this point I'd still planned to upgrade MS Office as soon as a native version was available. But now I think that's changed and here's why.

1) iWork 08.
Oh what a joy it is to work with. I'd never got on with the previous version of Pages, but this new version is so much more complete and functional as a word processor. I love the Styles draw. I've always struggled and hated MS Word for the way document styles work (or don't). It's more like Voodoo than science and seems to have a mind all its own at the most inconvenient times. Pages 08 is a breath of fresh air. Document comments are much easier to work with too, but the real bonus is that it can render and handle embedded images with no visible slow down at all.

Numbers so far seems to do a fantastic job with all but the largest of spreadsheets, where admittedly it does struggle. But then it is a v1.0 application, and for 99% of the documents I get sent it can read them without problems. Both apps do sometimes complain about formatting options they don't like. But Apple traps them all; gives you an easy way to review them, and for the most part handles them gracefully. Where these issues are important to me, I've filled in (several) feedback forms on Apple's web site.

2) Cost of Office for Mac 2008.
When I brought Office for Mac 2004 and realised I was paying way over the odds compared to its Windows cousin I swore, cursed, and sucked it up anyway. What choice did I have. But now the world is a different place.

iWork 08 will do for probably 90% of my needs. Where I need to check compatibility and remove the additional Excel crud that Apple (for some insane reason) add to Numbers exports (Table of Contents, and sheet renaming) I can use NeoOffice. But there are two more choices available to me now. Both more cost effective than Office 2008; guaranteed to give me file compatibility and native performance:

a) CrossOver Mac (with Office 2003). The cost of both combined is a fraction of the cost of MS Office for the Mac. It's an attractive option for the few times when iWork 08 and NeoOffice can't handle what I want to do. Plus I've seen a customer using the Linux version and it's impressive. It's given him the freedom to run a Linux desktop full time in what is otherwise a complete (desktop) windows shop. It's fast, it works, and he has no compatibility problems.

b) Office 2003 or 2007 running on Windows in VMware or Parallels. A little more expensive than option (a) and more resource intensive, but it'll also work. My MBP has 2GB ram and has already proven it can handle OS X, WinXP and RHEL running at the same time.

So I've made my mind up that I'm going to give CrossOver Mac a try with Office 2003. I'm not really bothered about Office 2007 file compatibility. I've seen zero interest in it so far from any of my customers as they're too paranoid about creating file compatibility conflict issues. And anyway, I already have two office suites that can read the latest formats if I encounter them.

For Microsoft's MacBU it's a real shame: they're just too late. I desperately needed Office 2008 months ago, and would have pretty much paid any price to get it. But iWork 08 and CrossOver Mac have tipped the balance. So I'm going to give this new approach a try see how I get on.


NeoOffice has been a big help since I discovered it. It's much faster than Office 2004, and its spreadsheet app performs much better than Excel, as well as being simpler and easier to use. It's been set in Finder as my default spreadsheet application for several months now.

As good as NeoOffice is, up till this point I'd still planned to upgrade MS Office as soon as a native version was available. But now I think that's changed and here's why.

1) iWork 08.
Oh what a joy it is to work with. I'd never got on with the previous version of Pages, but this new version is so much more complete and functional as a word processor app. I love the Styles draw. I've always struggled and hated MS Word for the way document styles works (or usually doesn't). It's more like Voodoo than science and seems to have a mind all its own. Pages 08 is a breath of fresh air. Document comments are much easier to work with too, but the real bonus is that it can render and handle embedded images with no visible slow down at all. At last, I'm free. Numbers so far seems to do a fantastic job with all but the largest of spreadsheets, where admittedly it does start to struggle. But for 99% of the documents I get sent, it can read them no problem. Both apps do sometimes complain about formatting options they don't like. But Apple traps them all; gives you an easy way to review them, and for the most part handles them gracefully. Where these issues are important to me, I've filled in a feedback form on Apple's web page.

2) Cost of Office for Mac 2008.
When I brought Office for Mac 2004 and realised I was paying way over the odds compared to its Windows cousin I swore, cursed, and sucked it up anyway. What choice did I have. But now the world is a different place.

iWork 08 will do for probably 90% of my needs. Where I need to check compatibility and remove the additional Excel crud that Apple (for some insane reason) add to Numbers exports (Table of Contents, and sheet renaming) I can use NeoOffice. But there are two more choices available to me now. Both more cost effective than Office 2008; guaranteed to give me file compatibility and native performance:

a) CrossOver Mac (with Office 2003). The cost of both combined is a fraction of the cost of MS Office for the Mac. It's an attractive option for the few times when iWork 08 and NeoOffice can't handle what I want to do. Plus I've seen a customer using the Linux version and it's impressive. It's given him the freedom to run a Linux desktop full time in what is otherwise a complete (desktop) windows shop. It's fast, it works, and he has no compatibility problems.

b) Office 2003 or 2007 running on Windows in VMware or Parallels. A little more expensive than option (a) and more resource intensive, but it'll also work. My MBP has 2GB ram and has already proven it can handle OS X, WinXP and RHEL running at the same time.

So I've made my mind up that I'm going to give CrossOver Mac a try with Office 2003. I'm not really bothered about Office 2007 file compatibility. I've seen zero interest in it so far from any of my customers as they're too paranoid about creating file compatibility conflict issues. And anyway, I already have two office suites that can read the latest formats if I encounter them.

For Microsoft's MacBU it's a real shame. They're just too late. I desperately needed Office 2008 months ago, and would have pretty much paid any price to get it. But iWork 08 and CrossOver Mac have tipped the balance. So I'm going to give this new approach a try see how I get on.

I'm astonished that anyone seriously considered ZFS could be a contender for Leopards default (system disk) filesystem. New, untried, untested filesystems are always buggy at the start. And by their nature sometimes those bugs can be very nasty because it's your data they affect. Apple would have been stark raving bonkers to have attempted to use ZFS as the default f/s today; no matter how stable it appears in the lab. They're doing the right thing. They will take their time; let people use it as a technology preview, then enable it as a fully functional data-only filesystem. In my experience I would expect ZFS to be mature enough of OS X (tested, debugged, patched) and ready as a default boot filesystem about two years from now, at the earliest.

OS vendors only use boot filesystems that they KNOW are robust and bullet proof, because just one system crash resulting in sys disk corruption is one too many.