Exclusive: Spy shot from behind closed doors at Canada’s newest Apple store.

Apple is normally very secretive about keeping the veil on Apple Stores until they are completed. Which makes this sneak peek a tasty tidbit. You may have already seen the floorplan, and you may have already seen the cloaked storefront but now… VistaSucks.WordPress.Com bring you the first spy shot of the interior of the new Apple Store Vancouver…

Why ‘No Macs’ is no longer a defensible IT strategy

Once confined to marketing departments and media companies, the Mac is spilling over into a wider array of business environments, thanks to the confluence of a number of computing trends, not the least among them a rising tide of end-user affinity for the Apple experience.

 

Luckily for IT, many of those same trends are making it easier for tech departments to say yes to the Mac by facilitating IT’s ability to provide enterprise-grade Mac management and support.

“We’re seeing more requests outside of creative services to switch to Macs from PCs,” notes David Plavin, operations manager for Mac systems engineering at the U.S. IT division of Publicis Groupe, a global advertising conglomerate. There are so many requests that Plavin now supports 2,500 Macs across the U.S. — nearly a quarter of all Publicis’ U.S. PCs.

And Plavin is less of an anomaly than you might think. Buoyed by increased interest in the consumer arena, Macs are cropping up in more and more organizations, in large part because end-users are pushing for them. Read the full article on InfoWorld.Com

 

School happy with switch to Intel Macs from PCs

“When visitors trooped into Iona College’s Ryan Library in the spring of 2007, they were amazed — and delighted — to see 52 sparkling new iMac computers ready for business. Since that first rollout the systems have seen nonstop usage, and requests for more Macs are springing up all over campus — remarkable, given that Iona had maintained a Windows-based computing environment for more than 20 years. With the availability of Boot Camp on Intel-powered iMac computers running Mac OS X Leopard, faculty, students, and all users have the best of all computing worlds.”

“When we started researching Boot Camp, we realized that we could give our faculty the advantages of Mac-based software while supporting our Windows-based environment all over campus.” Read the full article on Apple.Com

Review: Microsoft’s “Word” vs Apple’s “Pages”

AppleInsider.Com has posted an in-depth comparative review of Microsoft Word and Apple Pages. If you’re considering alternatives to Microsoft’s Office software you may want to give this a read. Read the review on AppleInsider.Com

Review: Microsoft’s “Excel” vs Apple’s “Numbers”

AppleInsider.Com has posted an in-depth comparative review of Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers. If you’re considering alternatives to Microsoft’s Office software you may want to give this a read. Read the review on AppleInsider.Com

Microsoft’s Big Mac Sales

Here’s a big number: 20 percent of Microsoft Office’s U.S retail sales are the Mac version, according to NPD. Here’s another: Mac users account for 10 percent of retail Windows Vista Business and Ultimate sales. Read the full article on Microsoft-Watch.Com

OpenOSX Office 2.0 adds finance software

Want a low cost, yet powerful alternative to Micrsoft Office for your new Mac? OpenOSX has released v2.0 of OpenOSX Office, a Mac OS X equivalent of the GNOME Office suite for Linux systems. All of GNOME Office’s applications are bundled together, among them AbiWord, the Gnumeric spreadsheet, and the Gimp image processor. The second edition is native to both Intel and PowerPC (new and old) Macs, but most importantly introduces Gnucash, a financial program that tracks accouns, stocks, incomes and expenses. More info. [via MacNN]

Opinion: What’s wrong with Mac OS X?

“…Paul Venezia bamboozled me into buying a MacBook Pro back in January, and I’ve been using it semi-daily ever since. And yeah, overall, I’ve been pretty happy. Of course, the only reason I was willing to buy one at all was because Parallels made it so easy to run Windows. But while my initial usage ratio was 85% Parallels, 15% OS X, over the past six months, that’s changed dramatically to 45% Parallels, 55% OS X. Yup, the Orchard does slowly assimilate you.” Read the full article.

Apple Polishes Spreadsheets With Numbers

Macworld says that iWork ’08’s Numbers changes the spreadsheet paradigm. Mac guy Merlin Mann says Numbers is like the Excel librarian who ditches her horn-rims, opens a button and shakes her hair. We decided to give Numbers a test-drive ourselves to see if it really deserves all the praise. In fact, while Numbers isn’t a revelation, it does for spreadsheets what the iPod did for MP3 players. Read more.

MacOffice Supports Office 2007 Formats

Mac Office announced the immediate availability of MacOffice Professional on Wednesday. MacOffice Professional is a business suite for Mac OS X that is compatible with Microsoft Office, and supports the new file formats used in Office 2007 for Windows. It includes tools for word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, relational database development, equation editing, charting and drawing. It also supports converting PowerPoint-compatible presentations into Flash .SWF files. Read more.

Apple Beats Microsoft at its Own Open XML Game

Apple Inc.’s release of iWork ‘08 this week is “embarrassing,” an analyst said Friday, not for its maker, but for Apple’s rival, Microsoft Corp. Tuesday, Apple rolled out a refreshed iWork that added a spreadsheet, dubbed Numbers, to the earlier mix of a word processor/page layout Pages and presentation maker Keynote. But it was iWork’s ability to handle the Open XML file format — the new native format for Microsoft’s own Office 2007 application suite — that Michael Gartenberg of JupiterResearch talked about. Read more.