Rosetta
Near the tail end of last year, I replaced my Powerbook for some nice Apple Intel goodness. For the most part, I have loved my new MacBook, although it did require some changes in workflow. This is due to the fact that, at least for me, Microsoft Office runs horribly on Rosetta. It runs worse than my old Photoshop 7.
I switched my one email account (this one) that I used on Entourage over to Mail.app. That was the big change. I don’t use Word or Excel that much, and Keynote puts PowerPoint to utter shame. After that, I spent very little time thinking about it.
Today, I was forced to recall the pain. I needed to write a quick business letter and fired up Word. I guess it was the instance of Photoshop CS3 (wonderful, I should add), but it took literally a minute and a half for the project dialog to come up and be changeable. Everything just sort of hung there afterwards.
Ultimately, the whole ordeal took about an extra ten minutes because of Rosetta, and this was for a ten minute letter. I can only imagine what people who have to use Word for extended periods of time think about this joy. Personally, I’m glad I have nice Universal apps that cover my general writing needs.
While I can accept that it can take a bit of time to update an application for a whole new architecture, I am reminded of why most magazines (that are Mac houses) switched over to InDesign. Adobe took a bit of time in converting their apps over to Mac OS X, but Quark took a much longer time. This meant that any creative who needed a layout program and wanted a new computer had to either run Quark in a hobbled environment or use Adobe’s flashy InDesign. If you take a look at the field now, you can see what most shops with a decent budget chose.
Maybe it’s time for someone to really challenge Office on the Mac…