Solver for Excel, which was axed in Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, makes a come back as the original developer Frontline Systems has released it as a standalone app. Solver for Excel 2008 works with the latest version of Excel, is a Universal Binary app, runs on Mac OS X Leopard or Tiger, and is a free download.
When Microsoft released Office 2008 for Mac, it dropped the support of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripting language, along with it the popular Solver tool which depends on VBA. Microsoft has promised to bring VBA back to Mac version of Office, but there is no definite schedule. And Solver for Excel is now developed and released outside of Microsoft.
“It’s our way of re-introducing ourselves to the Mac community. This version of Solver is a Frontline Systems product and will be supported by us — but we owe a big THANK YOU to Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit for (i) asking us to do this and (ii) supporting our efforts intensively with AppleScript help, QA testing, and localization.” — Frontline Systems
Google Suggest has graduated from Google Labs and is now available by default on the Google.com homepage. It is a search feature that suggests to you in real-time a list of popular query words when you start typing into the search box. Google Suggest, which debuts in 2004, has been incorporated into other Google products such as Google Toolbar, Firefox search box, Map search, YouTube, and now Google.com.
Google Suggest aims to help people search more efficiently and conveniently. At a loss for words for your search query? Google Suggest helps you formulate your queries string. In addition, Google Suggest helps to reduce spelling errors and save some typing keystrokes. Google Suggest is useful and convenient, we only hope Google Suggest can make it to Safari search box soon.
Head down to Google.com to see Google Suggest in action.
The largest US cable operator Comcast has announced that it will limit customers’ Internet broadband usage to 250GB per month per account starting October 01. This applies to all residential broadband.
Comcast mentioned that if customer exceeds the 250GB limit, Comcast will call the customer to warn about the “excessive use” and suggest the customer to upgrade to a more expensive commercial-grade plan. If customer does not upgrade and exceed the limit for a second time within six months, Comcast will terminate the account for a year.
Bare Bones Software releases BBEdit 9 professional HTML and text editor with over a dozen new features and enhancements. Chief among the new features is the Projects feature, an enhanced version of its existing ‘File Group’ concept. Other additions include auto completion during typing, modeless find/replace windows, integration with MobileMe, Scratchpad for quick text edits and transforms, and preview of HTML documents in browsers under VMWare Fusion 2.0’s MS Windows instance.
The features set looks impressive and seems to be a worthwhile upgrade. Upgrade is at $30 and is free if you purchased BBEdit 8.5 to 8.7 on or after January 1, 2008. BBEdit 9 is at $125 for new user. A video highlighting the new features is available at BBEdit website.
Adium 1.3 is released, it is a major version upgrade which took seven months to develop. Among the changes are improvement to performance and memory usage, Facebook chat support, improved MSN chat support with personal messages, and a revamped Contact Inspector user interface (previously Get Info Window) with live contact search. Check out the list of new features and changes.
Download from Adium website or through Adium’s build-in updater if you have old version installed.
For those not in the know, Adium is a popular free multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Mac. You can use it to chat with anyone from AOL, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, MSN etc. It is based on the libpurple framework which is also used by the other popular IM program Pidgin for Linux/Windows.
Best Buy has announced that it will start selling Apple’s iPhone 3G on September 07 at its 970 full-size stores and 16 Best Buy Mobile stores. This coup makes Best Buy the first independent iPhone retailer outside of Apple and AT&T’s stores since its launch on July 11. AT&T, the exclusive U.S. carrier for the iPhone, sells it in more than 2,000 stores. Apple has 189 U.S. stores.
“We had a lot of work to do, obviously, to get in a position where Apple and AT&T would feel good about Best Buy Mobile carrying it, and that’s what we’ve done in the last 18 months,” said Shawn Score, president of Best Buy Mobile.
Best Buy also resells Apple’s Mac computers and iPod media players. It announced last week that it has completed a two-year conversion of its store to include upgraded cell-phone departments. Best Buy has also upgraded its computer systems for cell-phone activation and spent 250,000 hours training its employees.
Best Buy’s iPhone prices will be the same as Apple and AT&T stores: $199 for the 8 GB model and $299 for the 16 GB model. Customers must sign a two-year AT&T contract.
Microsoft today issued updates for both Office 2004 for Mac and Office 2008 for Mac that addresses security vulnerabilities, and improves stability and performance. These updates are labeled as “critical” and Microsoft recommends them be installed “immediately”. Office for Mac users can update their software via Office Auto Update or from Microsoft Mactopia downloads site.
Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.2 Update addresses security vulnerabilities and improves performance and reliability for Word, Excel, and Entourage. Word gets significantly faster launch times, Excel gets performance improvements for working with large datasets, and Entourage has improved stability when using Microsoft Sync Services.
Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.5.1 Update addresses security vulnerabilities, and fixes Word 2004 stability issue when opening documents containing numbered lists. Entourage 2004 gets the updated Japanese postal codes.
Microsoft’s update support pages provide additional information and detail these improvements.
Google has issued an apology for its system wide GMail outage for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon.
Many of you had trouble accessing Gmail for a couple of hours this afternoon, and we’re really sorry. The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly. Everything should be back to normal by the time you read this.
Gmail, including the email service provided by Google Apps, is estimated to have about 100 million users. Around 20 million users access GMail each day, and for a few hours yesterday afternoon, they all see the same “Temporary Error (502)” when accessing GMail. The error was first reported by users around 2pm PST, and twitter was storming with complain posts about the email service downtime. Well luckily for us, Google never highlighted in its apology that its GMail service is still under beta, as labelled under the GMail logo.
The first iPhone application “I Am Rich” made specially for the rich and not so famous, now has a full length guided tour on YouTube, courtesy of NPomerleau.
Apparently eight people actually bought the $999.99 iPhone application before Apple took it off the App Store. “I Am Rich” shows off what money can buy these days, and it comes with a mantra to inspire the rest of us to work harder:
Google has added an iPhone interface to its Google Translate service, which let you convert on-the-go from one language into one of the 23 available languages. You can access Google Translate by choosing the “more” tab in Google mobile (www.google.com) on your iPhone or iPod touch. Or you can go directly to translate.google.com in the Safari browser.
In time for your summer vacation, Google has reworked the mobile interface using AJAX technology so that it retrieves as few data over the net as possible, in order not to break your bank when you’re abroad for data roaming charges. Google software engineer Allen Hutchison noted that he could get between 200 and 400 translations in 1MB of data download.
Google Translate on the iPhone also remembers all your previous entries, so your past translations will be there each time you come back to the page. This allows you to go back and re-translate them all to another language without reentering. Also, Google has added the feature to allow reverse the two language in translating on the fly. This quick switch is convenient when you are communicating with someone else in foreign land, you can let the person type using their own language.
