It’s no secret that I love Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, specifically Entourage, which I consider one of the best Mac applications ever. What about PowerPoint, Word, and Excel? Yes, they’re highly capable, complex, and very compatible applications. If you don’t have a need for Windows Office compatibility, there are alternatives. Apple makes one of the best.

‘i’Work, Therefore I Am

iWork ‘08 is a compelling suite of software for Mac users who don’t require the compatibility and complexity of Office, yet need similar functions.

To be fair, it’s not a fair comparison to put iWork’s Pages against Microsoft Word, or to pit Numbers against Excel. There’s more of an argument that can be made that Apple’s Keynote is what PowerPoint would like to be.

I use Office because it’s compatible with the rest of the known Windows PC world. I use Entourage for my email because it’s a remarkably powerful tool for managing mail, tasks, projects, something not easily done with Leopard’s Mail application.

Not to be overlooked is the value in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, though I use the former far more than the latter two.

For the past week I’ve forced myself to use only iWork, and not Office 2008 for Mac, and I came away with mixed feelings. Keynote is a very good, often better substitute for PowerPoint.

Not so for Pages and Numbers, though both work quite well in their own world, not so much when required to mix and match files with the Windows Office crowd.

Numbers

Excel is the defacto number crunching standard for businesses. Apple’s Numbers is a very attractive, though not very competitive, well, competitor.

Yes, as spreadsheets go, Numbers works well, is intuitive, easy to learn, has plenty of bells and whistles, and even sports slick looking graphics. To keep compatibility with Excel, I found I had to make simple worksheets in Numbers, and could not get too fancy with the layouts.

Excel is a monster with a hefty learning curve and about 666 more functions than the average user requires, and that’s the point of Numbers. It has what most of us need, including a measure of compatibility with Excel.

Pages

There’s no shortage of word processors for the Mac, though Word continues to be the 900-pound gorilla. No word processor has more features or a steeper learning curve. That’s the point of Pages.

Apple makes Pages for Mac users who obviously don’t need Microsoft Word, but need a very intuitive word processor that is broad in features (as opposed to broad and deep), yet can read and write many Word documents.

In my week of using iWork instead of Office 2008 for Mac, I found fewer issues of compatibility with Pages than I did with Excel. Word will read Pages documents, but mess up the formatting more often than Pages will mess up word formatting.

Still, Pages has a sophomoric attitude not found in Word. Word smells like business, tastes like complexity, and has the look of hard-nosed learning requirement. No so, Pages. It’s easy to set up a complicated document, easy to make changes and additions, including drag and drop.

Microsoft could learn a thing or two about drag and drop, as well as ease-of-use, but probably doesn’t care.

Keynote

This is the gem in iWork ‘08. I plan to do an extensive ‘How To’ with each of the iWork components, but I’ll save the best for last.

There is little in PowerPoint that Keynote doesn’t do easier, faster, smoother, and with more confidence, so it requires a whole review to cover.

One thing that is curious is Apple’s iWork ‘08 pricing. It’s not that $79 is too expensive. It’s not. It’s attractive and a good value, considering how well the iWork suite works with OS X, iLife, and each component in the package.

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac can be had for as low as $150, which, by itself is a good value, especially if compatibility is on your list of criteria. An extra $70 isn’t too much to ask, and buyers get Entourage, too.

I struggle to find good software for my Mac. That may sound strange since I have about 100 applications and utilities that I use with regularity, but it’s true. How did I collect so much software? Time and patience. I try out software almost every day, discarding most, keeping a few for more in depth use.

There’s no magic. It’s a concerted effort to find software that does something unique, or does something better, faster, easier, classier, cheaper. That’s why my Mac is so cluttered with favored software.

There’s plenty from which to choose. One of my first stops each day is to MacUpdate and VersionTracker. All I’m doing is trying to find out what’s been updated, and what’s new, so it’s good first stop.

Making sure my Mac is updated with the latest and greatest is also a challenge. I like MacUpdate’s utility, and AppFresh to check my Mac and tell me what needs a new update. With 100 applications and utilities there’s always something that needs to be downloaded and updated, so I batch my effort into a once a week 20 minutes or so.

What constitutes good Mac software? Again, back to that three step process. Select something that looks interesting and useful and try it. That’s step one.

If it crashes early, or is difficult to figure out without a manual, I usually delete it and move on. Mac software should be intuitive. If it’s not, there needs to be another compelling reason to move on for a deeper look.

Performance enters into my software selection criteria. If a new utility is sluggish or has obvious flaws, again, it gets deleted quickly.

Software with some measure of promise or a few features that look attractive will be saved for further use at another time. That category gets me one out of 10 tried, not a good percentage.

I have a Mac mini which serves as my test ground. I don’t really need to have some errant Mac software mess up my day-to-day Mac. Once I find something I like and it doesn’t appear to cause me any grief during testing, I’ll move it into more use on my main Mac.

About one out of five or six of those selected will make the cut and get a recommendation, a purchase, or more regular use. Despite the low percentages, I end up with plenty of Mac applications and utilities, some of which are used daily, others which get used sparingly.

For example, everything Apple gets used regularly with the exception of iWeb in iLife ‘08. I even use Garageband to work on my music making skills. The reason you haven’t heard my music is because my skills still need some work.

What’s odd about all this effort to find Mac software is that I usually have just four or five applications or utilities open and running at one time. Safari. Mail. Together. Steel, Things, and maybe a couple of others. Mac OS X Leopard handles screen clutter better than me.

Still, time and patience is required to find good Mac software.

We live in a wonderful world for browsers. Despite the lack of a price tag, Mac browsers are plentiful and just seem to get better with age. Apple claims Safari is the fastest browser. Mozilla claims a gazillion Firefox downloads, Mac and Windows. For Mac users, which is better, Firefox or Safari. I use both.

Without much fanfare, and many years after the first and subsequent Netscape Navigator deaths, browsers are hot again, more useful than ever, more feature-laden, more indispensable than ever.

For Mac users, the default browser, and easily the most popular in use, is Safari. It’s fast, relatively stable, and not prone to featuritis, a disease that afflicts so many utilities these days.

On the other hand, Firefox has matured, still has those wonderful extensions, and the latest version, Firefox 3, which I use regularly is both fast and attractive. Well, if not attractive, at least less Windows looking.

Safari vs. Firefox

Apple’s popular browser gets my nod for day-to-day web page browsing. It’s typical Apple. No clutter, just enough preferences to do the job, not so many that you’d suspect the designer once worked for Microsoft.

Safari’s progress indicator is inside the location field with the URL of the web page you’re loading at the time. That’s a perfect location for those all important visual cues I write about.

Supposedly, subjectively, and depending on who and what you read, Safari is the fastest browser, Mac or Windows. I don’t think it matters because there isn’t much real world difference between Firefox and Safari that I can tell, especially after trying the latest WebKit and Firefox beta versions.

Mac OS X Leopard does a nice job segregating window behavior. The frontmost window is darker, other windows in the background are lighter, another nice visual cue. Firefox doesn’t follow that convention and all windows are the same color in Leopard.

Safari uses the Mac’s system-wide dictionary which Firefox does not, so the experience of selecting text, entering text, and checking spelling is different between the two applications.

Though I only use a couple of Mac OS X Services, Firefox doesn’t support them, and Safari does.

Tabs? Did I fail to mention tabs? Both Safari 3.1 and Firefox 3 beta have improved tabbing conventions, but Safari is better. Both let you move tabs around, but only Safari lets you pull a tab off a page and create a whole new page.

Both Safari and Firefox manage Bookmarks differently and keep History differently. Arguably, Safari’s bookmarks are easier to manage, though Firefox extensions are available to add other features.

Safari’s History is simply easier to use. The most recently viewed URLs, 20 if my count is accurate, are right there. Not too many, not too few. Then each day has its own submenu going back a week.

Firefox users have to open the History menu to see where they went and when.

The Summary

There are other comparisons which are less important for me, including inline PDF viewing, which Safari handles well and Firefox does not. There’s also AppleScript support for Safari and not for Firefox.

One Firefox feature that I wish Safari had is the auto-restoration of a session of windows and tabs. It’s automatic in Firefox, but manual in Safari via a menu selection.

So, why do I use both? Because both are very good browsers that do different things well. Safari is sleek and elegant and gets out of the way; a true Mac-like utility. Firefox has those wonderful extensions via an official API that Mozilla publishes to encourage developers to create add-on tools.

If I’m doing web work on PixoBebo I’m likely to be using Firefox because of the web site tools. If I’m just browsing around, I’m likely to be using Safari. That tells me that competition is a good thing. Both browser development teams are sharpening themselves against one another.

That brings up another question? How many good browsers can Mac users support? Safari has a default, built-in user base. Firefox, too, though smaller on the Mac side. What of OmniWeb, iCab, Opera, Flock and others?

Finally, what is Apple’s plan for Safari on Windows? What’s the value of supporting another version of Safari on a competing platform? I don’t have answers, but I’m thinking about it.