I've been using Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac since its release sometime around the date of the MacWorld convention. This software epitomizes everything bad about applications that are released before they're ready for prime-time. For the first couple of days, it seemed as though it was working just fine. Then, I started trying to open documents attached to email messages. Two out of every three attempts to do so would lock up my entire Mac system (particularly when the attached document was an Excel file) forcing me to use the power button to reboot the system. I've been using a MacBook Pro for approximately 8 months now and MS Office is the ONLY application that has ever caused my system to behave in this manner and, believe me, I've downloaded and tested ALOT of shareware and open source software for the Mac. It truly bothers me that a company like Microsoft can release and actually demand money for an application that is clearly substandard.

I just installed SP1 for Office 2008 and I'm hoping the application will stabilize a bit. I'm not holding my breath, though. I suppose anything Mac will be treated like a red-headed step child by Microsoft so I should have expected no more than what I received.

I've been using a Mac PowerBook now for about 6 months. I love most things about it. The one thing that consistently frustrates me, however, is the ability to integrate stand-alone Macs into Windows networks. And, as one might expect, Microsoft and Apple point the finger at one another saying the other is to blame. I've had various levels of success getting my Mac to talk to a Windows Active Directory. Printing works great, domain login works great, resource enumeration works great (most of the time), but that's where it turns ugly. Accessing Windows file shares is essentially a hit or miss proposition. If you've got administrative access to the network and you're able to map an administrative share to a server (C$ on a remote resource, for example) this will generally work well. But....how many of your users have administrative access? The answer to that should be a VERY low number. Accessing conventional Windows shares is problematic. I can generally map the share, view volume contents, and even open files to which I have access. The problem comes when you try to save or copy files to the share. I've seen at least a half dozen strange and inconsistent error messages that all end with the same result.....a 0KB file "ghost" on the share. I've literally spent about 12 hours in total researching and attempting to employ various fixes to the problem with mixed results. Today, I downloaded a product from Thursby software called "DAVE". It has promise. It immediately fixed some of the major problems I was having with file transfers and saving to shares, but it seems to have broken some networking functionality that was working. I'm going to continue to evaluate this product and I'll let you know how it goes.

I heard several weeks ago (during MacWorld, I believe) that VMWare would be releasing a version of VMWare Fusion that would allow you to run virtual Mac OS X server images. I think they even demonstrated an early version that was actually running OS X server at their booth at MacWorld. I haven't seen or heard a word about it since, not even on the VMWare site. Has this idea been abandoned? I'm anxious to evaluate the Mac server platform and this solution would allow me to do so without spending a small fortune on equipment. If you know anything about this, please leave me a comment.

Apple, for reasons unknown to me, elected to remove NetInfo Manager from OS X Leopard. I used to use this tool to map computer netbios names to private IP addresses because I work from multiple offices (on different subnets) with VMWare images of Windows 2003 servers used for development. Fortunately, there is a fairly simple workaround that works pretty well and very much like the LMHOSTS method utilized in the Windows environment. There are a couple of tricks to get it to work, however, because you're working with system level files that are hidden by the OS. First, select "Go To Folder..." from the "Go" menu in Finder. Enter "/private" in the dialog box and click "Go". Find the "etc" folder, right-click it and select "Get Info". At the bottom of the Info screen is a small lock icon. Click the lock and enter your password (this assumes that the user ID you're logged in with has administrative privileges on the system). Enter your password when prompted and click "OK". Click the + symbol at the bottom of the Info screen and select your user name from the "User or Group" dialog box. Once you have your name added, make sure that you have Read and Write access to the etc folder. Open the etc folder and repeat these steps for the "hosts" file. Open the hosts file and create an IP mapping to the server you want to resolve. You'll first enter the system's IP address, hit the Tab key, then type the name you want to be resolved. Save the file and you're good to go. I created an Alias to the hosts file and keep it in my Dock for quick access. You can place several entries to the same netbios name in this file and comment them out (using a single "#" sign) or uncomment them as necessary to accommodate different networks. As per usual, be very careful working with hidden system files as you can render your system unbootable if you screw something up.

Almost all of my development work is done in a virtual environment. I run the IDE's on my local Mac but all the servers and development files live on the drives of one or more virtual servers. I've found this to be a very efficient method to write both CF and FLEX applications as I can literally model an entire networking environment on just a couple of virtual machines. I will generally copy the web root from the virtual server to a folder on my Mac's hard drive at least once a week, sometimes more depending on the amount and nature of the work I've done over a given time span. I've got a bit of a propensity to play with the configuration of my virtual servers to extract every last bit of performance (or convenience to me) from them. This can sometimes be a dangerous proposition if you've got an intricate virtual domain built with interdependencies among the various server images. Over the Thanksgiving holidays, I decided I was going to turn one of my virtual "member servers" into a Domain Controller in a test AD I've got set up. This would save me some time and resources as I would no longer have to boot two server images to approximate a functional active directory based network. Unfortunately, it was late and I took some shortcuts that I shouldn't have and I ended up a 39GB image of a dog terd. Wow. Realizing that I'd just blown away about a week and a half worth of development effort on an HR application that I'm working on, I decided to just go to bed and start fresh after a bit of rest. First thing the next morning, I headed up to the office where my Time Machine backup disk lives and about 30 minutes later, I was restored to the point where I was when I left the office on Monday afternoon. Ordinarilly, my backup images would have been too old to pull this off, but since I have used Time Machine religiously since I set up Leopard on the Macbook, I had a copy that was current as of that Monday. Once you have Time Machine set up to run properly, you never have to mess with it again until you need it. It runs in the background, most of the time without you even knowing about it, and backs up all your most valuable assets. Once restored, I booted my virtual server and, after a check disk performed automatically by Windows 2003 Server (I assume this was the result of backing up a server image that was probably running at the time it was backed up), I was back in business. Time Machine saved me from a potentially disasterous situation and, in my opinion, paid for the cost of the Leopard upgrade with a single recovery. If you haven't looked at Time Machine yet, run, don't walk, to your Mac and fire it up!

I installed Apple OS X Leopard on my MacBook Pro the day it was released almost a week and a half ago and, so far, so good. The only casualty I've noticed thus far is my screen saver application (a really cool little app from UselessCreations that takes a screenshot of your desktop, then uses it as the backdrop of a realistic looking fish tank). The app still works, but the desktop screen cap has been replaced by a dull gray background. I may just need to play around a bit with the settings, but so far, it's the only issue I've had with Leopard. Granted, I run my SQL server(s), web server(s) and ColdFusion server(s) within VMWare so I'm not having the CF, MySQL and Apache issues that a lot of other folks have complained about post upgrade. All in all, I'd have to call it a flawless upgrade process. The new OS features are well worth the upgrade costs, too.

A few years ago, an author who's name escapes me right now coined the term "killer app". "Killer app" essentially defines an application (software, process, or otherwise) that so dramatically improves the way a thing is done as to revolutionize it. I firmly believe that VMware products can properly be classified as killer apps. In particular, VMWare Fusion for the Macintosh platform is among the best applications I've ever used on any platform. When I recently migrated all my applications and development environments from the PC to Macintosh platform, I was concerned that I'd be giving up the power and flexibility typically afforded to software developers on the Windows platform. I'd grown accustomed to running multiple Windows Server images within the VMWare application on XP and Vista which, of course, provides one of the most efficient ways to design and write software without lugging around 3 or 4 PCs/Laptops. The very first application I downloaded to my shiny new MacBook Pro was an evaluation copy of VMWare Fusion. About 15 minutes after loading it up and testing a couple of my images (unmodified PC images I might add), I was back on the VMWare website purchasing my full-up license for the product. If you've never experimented with virtual machines, I strongly recommend that you take a look at VMWare Fusion. It's a great product and I think it's only about 80 bucks. I'm really starting to love this Mac stuff....(as I take another sip of the cool-aid).