It’s been rumored quite some time, but now it is public. Microsoft’s next Office components (Word, Excel, PowerPoint und OneNote) will be controllable, accessable and editable using your favourite browser. It will be compatible to Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari. Microsoft puts much efford in getting their applications compatible to the internet user of nowadays who wishs to have access to his data no matter where he is right now. The Office applications will be also available on Microsoft’s Live Services and for companies subscription or volume license based.
In the video Chris Bryant – Microsoft Office Product Manager – demonstrates the abilities and compatibilities with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox
The video is courtesy of our fellow german Golem.de:
Strange things can happen. With the Lameduck Campaign Jeremy White (CEO of Codeweavers) initially wanted to:
“(..) to inspire President Bush to make the most of his final days in office. Who knew that our Challenge would have this kind of impact on the country?” White said. “On the other hand, who knew that the economy would implode, causing oil demand to drop into the abyss and gas prices to plummet as well. Clearly, investigating Bear Stearns, AIG and those guys is misplaced – CodeWeavers is responsible for this mess. So it’s free software for all!”
Luckily for the american customers the price of a gallon decreased to 2.79$ on october, 14th and so Codeweavers will give away free copies of their Crossover software tomorrow (2008 october, 28th).
Imagine the following situation. You are very keen on this EFI-X device that’s now on sale. So you order a testing device. Some days later the device arrives from Taiwan. Your EFI-X compliant system already kept waiting with a blank SATA 250GB on a Gigabyte EP35-DS3.
After having plugged the EFI-X module to your system, you install MacOS on your PC. It’s really worth the bunch of money since EFI-X lets MacOS boot like a charm. Easy and nice to handle for everyone who is not more willing to hack device drivers into their Hackintoshs. But as a tinkerer who wants to see how it works in real life and so you decide to apply the newest update for your EFI-X module. Since you’re a Mac user you decide to use the MacOS tool provided by the EFI-X team.
All works well during update, until you do the reboot. All of a sudden the intro boot screen of EFI-X looks quite garbled (like the screen below). You wonder what might have happened and do a reboot. As it doesn’t help you plug your EFI-X to another computer hoping you may be able to flash it again using Windows XP. But after all the installation argy-bargy with EFI-X’ virtual device driver under Windows XP – the update tool tells you, you are running the current version.
To make a long story short. EFI-X has customer service and they will exchange their defective units. You may also have a look at the EFi-X Bug Hunt forums for further assistence (please don’t link our article from EFI-X Bug Hunt forums, they will remove it and may ban you – don’t say we didn’t warn ya ;-) Anyway if you need to have access to your data until the RMA unit arrives, we prepped the following article. We’re going to show you how to make your system bootable after the EFI-X device broke for whatever reason.
A short remark before we start: this article is partly based on a HowTo by a guy going by the nick Menoob. We shamelessly stole the method of installing retail Leopards on PCs and adapted it a tiny bit for this EFI-X specific case. Anyway: all the shouts fly out to him.
II. What you need
30 minutes of your precious life time – you may use this time to think about why you didn’t buy a real Mac
remove the defective EFI-X device and if you feel you don’t need it, send it to the CCC for further examination
let only the MacOS drive and the CD/DVD drive plugged, unplug all other drives from your motherboard
start your computer and hit DEL key to go into your BIOS
inside of your BIOS: set the MacOS harddrive as first boot device and enable AHCI mode for SATA drives – your drives will appear orange/yellow in MacOS, don’t worry about that
save the BIOS changes and reboot
IV. Booting your system
turn on your computer
insert the just burnt Boot-132 CD-R into CD/DVD drive
during BIOS startup hit the F12 key to manually choose your boot device (applies to Gigabyte boards only!!!)
Choose to boot your CD/DVD drive
Your screen will show that ISOLINUX 3.6x is prepping to boot the Multiboot loader
since this ISOLINUX bootloader is not too user-friendly ;-) you will find yourself with a screen similar to this.
Hit the F8 Key. You’re gonna see this:
Hit the ESC Key. and You’re gonna be welcomed with this screen.
Now enter 80 and hit return, if the name of your MacOS harddrive shows up, 80 was the right number, if it does not show up, give 81 a try and so on.
Once you’ve found your MacOS harddrive, the bootloader will require again some parameters. Simply enter -v -x as parameters and hit return (you may find more infos about these Darwin boot parameters here)
if you experience the “still waiting for root device” issue, just reset your system and play with the AHCI mode for SATA inside of your BIOS
Anyway: booting will take a long while – in our case about 5 minutes until the login screen appears
login into your system
V. Saving your data
Examine which data you require from your formerly known as almost native system
plug your external harddrive (if you plan to migrate data to Windows, better have the external drive FAT32 formatted)
Copy the files
VI. Final Words
Ooop duh. You got some more options here that we cannot cover at this time:
You may revive this system with the hackint0sh ingredients (dsmos.kext and kexts for audio and video cards) – this will be a longer journey
You may also get a real Mac. In this case Apple will suddenly love you…
We recommend to give also Microsoft’s Vista a try. We feel like Vista Aero Glass effects are currently superior to Leopard’s effects. In this case Microsoft will love you (and us for suggesting this)…
You could also go up the hill to the end and find Debian and ask yourself why it took so long to understand that unix is beautiful – in this case nobody will really love you but during installation you’ll find plenty of new friends in the Ubuntu community explaining you Debian…
:-)
Anyway we hope that article helped you a tiny bit. If so you may also consider our sponsors, they also help you (and us of course)…
The iPhone Dev Team posted some news during the last days. First of all they show us they are able to run a modified 3G baseband, although it fails integrity checks (see picture). And obviously they coded a baseband tool that allows execution of custom commands on the baseband.
Their silent and evolving works seems to be succesfull. Both these steps are major steps into a custom unlock. Anyway we don’t have information how long it will take until the final unlock, but we expect it to be aired before Chrismas.
Ever wanted to do some video recording with your iPhone? With Cycorder waiting is now over. Cycorder’s features as follows:
imho best recording quality on iPhone
6-15 frames/sec
resolution 384×288 / 4:3 aspect ratio
mjpeg compression
We feel this app is really fun and we really use it a lot.
Requirements: Your iPhone has to be jailbroken (read the HowTo here) and you need to have Cydia installed, because this app is not available on Apple’s AppStore. It is maintained by the Cydia developer Saurik (Jan Freeman).
Installation: is performed by Cydia and is straightforward…
For all people being interested how the new Mac Books can be disassembled, you may have a look at the pages of the iFixit.com guys. They show us how to open the new Mac Books and the new Mac Book Pros.
We’ve all been expecting the release of the new series for the last few months. Mainly the MacBook Pro really needed a redesign. We feel like the displays look a bit like the LCDs manufactured by HP, but anyway those machines really look nice. Pricing might still feel like to to high in comparison to normal x86 Laptops. People on forums critisize that there is still no 11″ or 12″ on-the-road compatible machine. Anyway, four things are new with these Mac Books
the 13″ MacBook model comes without firewire
the case is laser cut in (almost) one piece.
no real buttons but the special Glass Trackpad with corners assigned as buttons
integrated graphics: NVIDIA 9400M combined with a 9600M GT switchable graphics chip
Prices vary at least between 1,300US$ and 2,000US$. You may find the new models on the US Apple store.
The german Golem.de got a vid showing how the manufacturing process of the cases is being done now (you may ask yourself – like we did – why the (asian?) faces of the factory workers are not being showed a single time). And Engagdet got a nice video showing the glass trackpad in action. Find both videos below.
All of us switchers know the situation: rather that switching from one application to another in Microsoft Windows we can switch from every window to another using ALT-TAB. The problem is such behaviour is not known to the Mac world.
The developer Peter Maurer puts it that way:
Sure, you can use Mac OS X’s Exposé to switch windows, but doing so can be very clumsy if you’re the keyboard-only type of user. And don’t all of these windows look just the same when they are scaled down?
Witch lets you access all of your windows by pressing a shortcut and choosing from a clearly arranged list of window titles.
And the best: it’s shareware (!) Sorry for the error before…
Three days to go until the new Mac Books will be presented to the world. On YouTube a video appeared that either shows a well done fake or it really is the new Mac Book Aluminium series. As Apple does not like to see pictures or videos of their products before their official launch we will not embed the YouTube video here.
You may go to YouTube and search for “X6jsJfiENAs“… Don’t wonder the quality is very bad…
