Thursday May 17, 2007

- Adobe CS3: Trial Versions and Prices in Europe - Eric - 15:04:40

While Adobe officially announced the end of Freehand, Pix, one of our readers, sent us links and explanation to download localized trial versions of Adobe CS3 in different languages:

Hi
Its now possible to have english, french and german trials from the Adobe CS3 products. Actually only english versions are on the website of Adobe: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=photoshop

but you can log on this site and then go to a second window and open: http://trials-staging.adobe.com/Applications/Photoshop/CS3/Mac/

There you have the english, french and german trial versions....
You can also have all others like indesign, illustrator, fireworks, dreamweaver, flash.....

I am sure many users will find this information valuable, especially for those not willing to have english-only applications.

We also want to comment the explanation provided by Dave Burkett, the vice president of product management in the Creative Solutions Business Unit at Adobe, to respond to the criticism that its EU prices are unfairly high (here).
According to him: We [Adobe] use two broad criteria to establish pricing in each local currency where we do business. The first is the historical cost of doing business in each region. Pricing varies widely...The European Union is not one big market (he must be kidding) There are four major currencies (beside the Euro and £ I do not think of any other major currencies), and last but not least, the second criterion Adobe uses to establish pricing is "market research that establishes the value customers place on the products", in other words they have their own scale and try to give it a name, I really wonder what this really means.
The most amazing part come with the mention that English, spanish and french versions of CS3 are available for the North American market, while same french and spanish versions are much more expensive in Europe... he probably forgot that more than 170 millions european citizens have english, French or spanish as their mother tongue! So it can not really explain why at least those version are more expensive in Europe! Only the german version of CS3 might be considered as a European only version, but it is worth 90 millions EU citizens...

- Converter Open XML for Mac - Lionel - 14:38:46

Source : XLR8yourMac

Microsoft released to download the first beta version of its Open XML converter supposed to help Mac users to Office files created from Office 2007 PC to be readable on a Mac (RTF). For the time being the converter is only able to transcribe .docx and .docm files into RTF; and it is still bugged.
Hereafter is a more detailed description of this converter:

Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 0.1b (Beta)

With the Office Open XML Converter, you can convert Office Open XML files to a format that is compatible with Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac and Microsoft Office v. X for Mac. You can choose to convert and open one file, or convert a large number of files.

This version of the Office Open XML Converter can convert the following Office Open XML file formats:

Word Document (*.docx)
Word Macro-Enabled Document (*.docm)
These files are converted to Rich Text Format (RTF), which can be opened in Microsoft Word 2004 and Microsoft Word X.

The converter is a Beta release, and might be unable to convert all the data in Office Open XML files. After you convert a file, you should review the file carefully to make sure that it contains all of the information that you expect.

The following issues are known to exist in this Beta release:

Macros and Visual Basic content are not included in the converted file.
Charts and SmartArt graphics are converted to pictures.

The following issues might occur in this Beta release:

Graphics and other objects in the document might appear with a different size.
Color fills and shading in tables might not be preserved.
Conversion might not succeed if the document contains a bibliography or citations.
Conversion might not succeed if the document contains WordArt.
Document layout and formatting might not be preserved.
Some Unicode characters might not be preserved.
Conversion might not succeed if the document contains very large pictures.
Conversion might not succeed if you use an SMB network volume as the preferred destination for converted files.
Picture bullets might not be preserved.
Fonts might be substituted.

This Beta release expires on December 31, 2007.

To download it: OfficeOpenXMLConverter010EN.dmg

[translation by Linathael]

- A Dell 802.11n Card in a MacBook - kurisu - 08:42:39

After reading our featured article about the upgrade of a MacBook Core Duo to 802.11n wireless, I tried (in vain) to get one of those MacPro wireless cards.
Fast forward a few weeks later, a good friend of mine (hey Mike! :) ), recent switcher, IM'd me saying that he'd found a Broadcom mini PCI-E card on eBay and that he wanted to upgrade his MacBook Pro Core Duo with it, and points me to the reference "Dell Draft N 1500 Wireless mini PCI-E card". After checking it out, it turns out the chipset is exactly the same as the one our own Lionel mentioned in a recent newsbit (BCM94321MC). So I go "WTH", and ordered 2 of those bad boys.

Less than a week later, I get the cards in a small USPS envelope, and decide that I'll do the upgrade on the very same evening. With the help of my trusty philips head screw driver, I took the keyboard/top case off easily (not my first time though, so YMMV, just do not rush into it and make sure you remember which screw goes where) and removed the Apple wireless card. Here are the two little dudes next to each other. (left is Apple's, right is Dell's)


The Dell card is a tad thicker, but fits in the slot without effort or problems :


I screwed things back together (again, no rush, you do not want to mix the screws) and the machine booted normally.

Since I've got myself an Airport Extreme base station, the new drivers (aka the "802.11n enabler") were already installed along the Airport Utility. I opened the Network Utility.app and as you can see the card is showing as "a/b/g/n". Coolio.


Shockingly, the system sees the card as being from "Vendor Apple", which is another way of saying that this card from Dell is in fact virtually the same card as Apple uses in the MacPro, minus the Apple logo sticker.

Performance wise, it's very much in line with what Lionel obtained in his tests before :
On a "802.11n only" network, I got between 8.3 and 8.6MB/sec while FTPing from a mac mini hooked up via ethernet on the base station.
In mixed mode g/n I got about 5.5~6MB/s from my upgraded MacBook.
On my girlfriend's, we got the standard 3.7MB/sec of 802.11g, to put things in perspective.
Range wise, it was at maximum everywhere in my apartment, whereas my girlfriend's laptop got a little drop in signal strength in the bedroom.

The only little annoyance that I noted was due to the fact that the Dell card, since bought in the States, was set to a locale of "USA" :

which meant that the card could only see channels from 1 to 10. That initially puzzled my for a while, but then I clicked and I forced my Japanese Airport Extreme base station (which can use channels from 1 to 13, and when set to "automatic", uses the less crowded channels, i.e >10) to broadcast on a channel <11, all was good again. I tried to change the locale of the card via Windows XP and the Dell utilities for this card but the change isn't persistent across reboots. This issue is irrelevant when you operate in a 802.11n only, 5GHz network.

All in all, this is a great and cheap (can be found for US$45 + shipping) upgrade for all Core Duo machines.

Question and comments: visit the dedicated topic in our forum