Quantum Forest

Following last week’s major upgrade to Leopard and Office 2008 I needed to pick up with a few things.

I have used only the basic features of Office 2008: Word and PowerPoint look OK, although I still prefer Keynote to the latter if I can get away with it (e.g. when I am teaching). Entourage just does not cut it for me. The interface received a liftoff–although it is still far from pretty–but functionality wise is lacking:

• Email, calendar and contacts synchronise with exchange without problems, but tasks and notes do not.
• Contact groups are created in a local account rather than in exchange.
• There is no simple way to add keyboard shortcuts to file messages.
• The task functionality is still underwhelming.

Given these issues I am still relying on Mail, Address Book and iCal. The former two synchronise with exchange, while the latter does not. I am publishing the calendar in a webdav server so can access it remotely (just in case). Nevertheless, to dos in Mail are not up to scratch either, so I am relying on Things.

I did test a few task management applications and the best designed (for my taste) where Omnifocus and Things. The problem with Omnifocus is that kept pushing me to work in a very specific way, which happens not to fit with my own way of doing things. In contrast, Things let me order task in lots of different ways.

And for long documents

At the moment I am working in three long documents with a fair amount of complexity and (too) many equations. I am using MacTeX (a LaTeX distribution) with TexShop as front end and BibDesk for reference management. The interesting thing is that BibDesk has a much better interface that Endnote 9, which is the version that we are still using in the University.

I can use LaTeX only because I am working by myself on these documents, but if that were not the case, then I would rely on the not so liked standard: MS Word.