Macworld: New Software Puts Macs To WorkMacworld: New Software Puts Macs To Work

With Apple giving up a lot of the spotlight at Macworld this year, that left room for other vendors to take some of the stage and introduce a wide variety of applications designed to make Macs more productive.

Announcements include upgraded virtualization software from Parallels, new Office software from Microsoft, speech recognition, task management, and more.

Parallels

Parallels introduced an upgrade to its Mac OS X virtualization software, adding experimental support for running Parallels on Snow Leopard, and running Windows 7 (to be released in beta any any day now) on Parallels.

Build 3810 of Parallels 4.0 also includes user interface, performance and battery life improvements. It supports Apple remote disk, to let users connect to a shared CD or DVD drive on another Mac in Windows, or install Windows from a shared CD/DVD on another Mac. The software adds "silent start" in Coherence mode, to start Windows automatically in the background when opening a Windows application n the Mac desktop. And users can now drag Windows files to Mac applications in the Dock.

Speed improvements add DirectX 9.0 with Shaders Model 2 support, Intel streaming SIMD Extensions, and faster suspend and resume operations. The new version also improves CPU usage for improved battery life.

The update is available immediately for registered Parallels Desktop for Mac users. The software retails at $79.99 for new users and $49.99 for upgrades.

MacSpeech

MacSpeech plans this month to introduce a new version of its Dictate speech recognition software. Ars Technica reviewed an earlier version in November and said it was a good start, but nowhere near as good as the much more mature Dragon Naturally Speaking, only available for Windows.

The new version promises better integration with third-party applications, along with the ability to import text that was typed rather than dictated into MacSpeeech. Pricing starts at $199.

IBM

IBM announced the availability of Lotus Notes 8.5, as well as the upcoming availability, later this month, of Lotus Symphony document, spreadsheet and presentation software for the Mac.

Notes 8.5 improves storage efficiency over previous versions, offers a tweaked user interface, integration with Google, Yahoo, and hundreds of other public Internet calendars. Notes also runs in Windows and Linux devices.

Symphony is derived from the OpenOffice.org codebase. My colleague Serdar Yegulalp, who reviewed it last month as part of an overview of open-source office suites, described it as "OpenOffice.org, plus polish."

Iron Mountain Digital

Iron Mountain is the company with the science-fictiony underground caverns that store government records, Bill Gates's Corbis collection of historical photos, original prints of classic movies, and more.

It's got another line of business that's less glamorous, but more likely to be useful to regular people: Remote backup over the Internet.

The company introduced Mac support for its Connected Online Backup Service, to be available in March. The service is designed for business, with encryption for security, and deduplication to reduce the volume of data being backed up. The service will be priced starting at $6.67 per month.

Microsoft

Maybe you've heard of these guys? Their major product, "winnders," enjoys some popularity, I've heard.

Anyway, this year they're celebrating their 25th anniversary of Mac support, which began with Word 1.0 in 1984 (that one needed belt and suspenders). Today, Microsoft claims its software is used by more than 75% of Mac users.

At Macworld, Microsoft introduced two new applications:

Microsoft Document Collaboration Companion for Mac Beta is a Cocoa-based application that makes it easier to upload and download documents to and from SharePoint Products and Technologies and Office Live Workspaces. Entourage for Exchange Web Services improves performance and reliability for Entourage 2008 when used with Exchange. Users will be able to sync their Entourage Tasks, Notes, and Categories with Exchange.

Cultured Code

The biggest non-Apple Macworld announcement for me, personally, was that Cultured Code released its long-awaited Things personalized task management software for the Mac. Things is designed to help you keep to-do lists of all the things you need to get done for work and personal life, from taking out the trash to fulfilling your lifelong goals.

I tried out Things the week before Macworld, after interviewing Michael Simmons, the company's marketing director. After a few hours playing with it, I was hooked. It has a clean, Leopard-style user interface that lets you enter tasks quickly, organizing them by criteria including project, area of responsibility, beginning date and due date. And you can also tag your to-dos to make them easier to sort -- tag them by priority, or by the time of day you need to do them (for example, you might want to tag some of your to-dos to be done "not at work"), or the location you can do them in (office, home, while running errands), or by any other criteria you wish.

I find Things to be similar to OmniFocus, by the OmniGroup, which I'd been using faithfully for roughly all of 2008. However, Things has a cleaner and simpler-to-use interface while simultaneously being a bit more flexible than OmniFocus -- although, on the other hand, OmniFocus does know some tricks that Things apparently can't do, so I do miss OmniFocus a little bit.

Like OmniFocus, Things has a version for the iPhone and iPod Touch that synchs to the desktop version; the iPhone app has been available since the App Store opened in the summer, and is #6 in paid apps in the Productivity category of the store. The iTunes App Store this week released version 1.3 of Things for the iPhone and Touch, which includes support for tagging and other user interface improvements.

Things is available for $49.95 on the desktop, and $9.99 on the iPhone or Touch. Also Worth Noting

Solid Thinking, a 17-year-old company with industrial design software for the Mac, which had been focused on the Italian market, made its software available globally.

Active Storage demoed an iPhone application that allows users to remotely monitor and manage the company's Mac network storage systems. The company is waiting to release the iPhone app until Apple releases an upcoming version of the phone operating system that will support limited background operation of third-party applications.

And in other Macworld news, covered elsewhere on information:

Finally, for Apple, it wasn't a show about big announcements, but it did launch a couple of meaty product upgrades. Apple upgraded its 17" MacBook Pro, launched a plan to eliminate DRM from the iPhone music store, and upgraded its iLife and iWork suites.