"Look Up" in Entourage 2008

[Sue Donum]

Entourage 2008 includes a nice feature enhancement over 2004:
Control-clicking (or right clicking -- same thing) on a word in an email
activates a drop-down menu that includes "Look Up," which, when selected,
offers 4 choices: "Definition...," "Synonyms...," "Encyclopedia...," and
"Web Search...." However, regardless of which one I select, I am presented
with the same drop-down "Reference Tools" pane, which shows small windows
for Thesaurus, Synonyms, Encarta Encyclopedia, Dictionary, Bilingual
Dictionary, Translation, and Web Search.

Is there a setting one must adjust to present only "Dictionary" when one
selects "Definition...," etc.? If not, why are the separate "Definition...,"
"Synonyms...," "Encyclopedia...," and "Web Search...." choices being
offered?

 

[Diane Ross]

Is there a setting one must adjust to present only "Dictionary" when one
selects "Definition...," etc.?

Not as far as I know. Be sure to send feedback to let Microsoft know you
would like to see this option.

 

[Sue Donum]

Not as far as I know. Be sure to send feedback to let Microsoft know you
would like to see this option.

OK. Thanks.

(It certainly seems like someone forgot to finish coding the application,
don't you think?)

 

[Diane Ross]

(It certainly seems like someone forgot to finish coding the application,
don't you think?)

Entourage 2008 was pushed out the door to coincide with MacWorld. There was
a huge amount of work in this build. Here are some comments about the
change:

<quote>
Saw the stream of comments here and I'd thought I'd briefly mention why
going to Mach-O and universal binary is more than a "nice to have" thing.
Apple has openly stated that further Rosetta development is pretty much end
of life and it's not unconceivable that one day our apps will stop running.
You can imagine the public outcry should that happen.

"So how do you feel about re-writing MacOffice code every few years when
Apple makes some major architectural change?" Well, it's not the best
feeling and it gets worse when users then ask ³why didn¹t you add any Œreal¹
functional or cross-platform improvements?²

Take the scrolling in Styles Pane for example. While the Styles Pane may
look to you as exactly the same as Word 2004 and that we didn't spend any
time on it --- well, that's the farthest from the truth.

When we moved to Mach-O and HiViews in Word 2008, the Styles Pane was
completely broken. Simply, it became unusable. Just to get the pane to
work like 2004 took us 4 weeks of re-architecting it. We're a small team
with 1/5 of the WinWord devs --- over here in MacWord land, the same dev
working on Styles, may be the same dev working on the OOXML format.
Software development is all about trade-offs and please remember that when
you ask for 3 improvements, there are tens and thousands of users asking for
a different 3. </quote>

 

[Ed Kimball]

Entourage 2008 was pushed out the door to coincide with MacWorld. There was
a huge amount of work in this build. Here are some comments about the
change:

<quote>
Saw the stream of comments here and I'd thought I'd briefly mention why
going to Mach-O and universal binary is more than a "nice to have" thing.
Apple has openly stated that further Rosetta development is pretty much end
of life and it's not unconceivable that one day our apps will stop running.
You can imagine the public outcry should that happen.

"So how do you feel about re-writing MacOffice code every few years when
Apple makes some major architectural change?" Well, it's not the best
feeling and it gets worse when users then ask ³why didn¹t you add any Œreal¹
functional or cross-platform improvements?²

Take the scrolling in Styles Pane for example. While the Styles Pane may
look to you as exactly the same as Word 2004 and that we didn't spend any
time on it --- well, that's the farthest from the truth.

When we moved to Mach-O and HiViews in Word 2008, the Styles Pane was
completely broken. Simply, it became unusable. Just to get the pane to
work like 2004 took us 4 weeks of re-architecting it. We're a small team
with 1/5 of the WinWord devs --- over here in MacWord land, the same dev
working on Styles, may be the same dev working on the OOXML format.
Software development is all about trade-offs and please remember that when
you ask for 3 improvements, there are tens and thousands of users asking for
a different 3. </quote>

If the MacBU would write their code to conform to Mac coding standards
instead of coding around them so often, features wouldn't break so often on
new releases of Mac OS.

On the other hand, such a practice might well make cross-platform
compatibility even more difficult. I guess that's one of the trade-offs the
"dev" was referring to. ;-)

 

[Diane Ross]

If the MacBU would write their code to conform to Mac coding standards
instead of coding around them so often, features wouldn't break so often on
new releases of Mac OS.

For example, one of the updaters for Entourage 2008 broke because Leopard
released a security update a couple of days before the Office updater was
released. The security update blocked AppleScripts in updaters. The
Microsoft updater ran a script to be sure all Microsoft applications were
quit. Result. Failed updates!