Office Adapts to New Mac OS

With Office v. X for the Macintosh, Microsoft has made good on its promise to continue development on the Macintosh platform. The latest release of Office, one of the first major applications to be ported to the platform by any software vendor, builds on the new “Aqua” interface in the latest Macintosh operating system (OS), OS X, to achieve a high “cool” factor. However, the suite’s feature set breaks little new ground: most of the dazzle is delivered by OS X rather than Office, and some of the most significant new features in the Windows version of Office, such as Smart Tags, are missing.

OX and OS X

The Macintosh’s OS X is based on the NeXT operating system, a Unix variant built on the open-source Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University (by, among others, Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft Research). NeXT, the company that Apple CEO Steve Jobs founded after leaving Apple, was sold back to Apple on his return in 1997.

Developers can use several API families when writing for OS X, and Office X was written using the “Carbon” APIs. Carbon, which shares about 70% of its APIs with Macintosh OS 8 and 9, was developed after developers balked at learning the Objective C programming language required to develop native OS X applications in Cocoa. Applications written with Carbon are still considered native OS X applications and take advantage of many important new features of the OS X kernel, such as multiprocessor support, preemptive multitasking, large memory support, and sophisticated memory management that eliminates having to tweak the Macintosh memory pool to get applications to run properly.