TransMUG

If you are writing posts for a Mac user group for translators, the latest Macworld is one of the strangest you may have attended in the recent years: a Macworld sans Mac! No hardware announcements, no software announcements, only iPods, old and new (the AppleTV is a sort of screenless iPod with video connectors and Wi-Fi, and the iPhone, an iPod mobile…). As a matter of fact, both new products sync through iTunes… Enough said!

So what left is there when iWork ‘07 is not part of the top billing? Office 2008. Yes, 2008. That’s pretty much when you will be using it. Previously named Office 2007 for the Mac, the Microsoft suite is slipping ever more, from the first half (June?) to the second half of 2007, and don’t count on July. But demos were presented at Macworld, on the stage not at the booth’s workstations, and a nice slideshow on the eWeek site offers clearer first looks at the beast than the amateur photos snapped on the Expo floor that have popped up online.

Microsoft’s copy machine has never been running at higher speeds! Take the Aperture loupe, some Adobe layout tools, Pages’ templates, and sprinkle all this on top of Office 2007’s (the Windows one) “ribbon” interface and… voilà: Word 2008 with a Mac-only Publishing Layout. PowerPoint, too, receives a serious dose of “fresh” inspired by Keynote. Now, it would be fun to find the new features of Excel in Apple’s rumored spreadsheet app that would be added to iWork ‘07, expected long before the new Office.

The new features and looks should be an improvement, not withstanding speed and stability when, while used on an Intel Mac, the suite doesn’t have to run atop Rosetta. Still, as it was confirmed to me at the booth, Word 2008 will not run legacy VBA macros. Unless there is a way for Yves Champollion to port its great translation memory tool, Wordfast, to AppleScript, we will have to make some hard choices by the end of this year. AppleTrans and OpenOffice never looked so good… A story to be continued.