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Posted on 21 Sep 2005 at 16:10

Jon Honeyball gives you a taster of Microsoft's new operating system

So it's interesting to see that Apple is adopting a similar approach for the forthcoming Intel-based Macintosh computers. I've just received the Developer Kit from Apple and it's a little weird to see a G5 aluminium case with a PC motherboard inside. But running PowerPC native code on the Intel version of OS X shows just how much progress has been made in the years since Digital's FX32. It's impossible to tell whether an application is running natively or under the code emulation system (which is called Rosetta). And with the arrival of Universal Binaries, which contain both PowerPC and Intel code within the same executable file, you'll be able to choose which version to use.

Although the FX32 approach was very innovative, I can't remember anyone using such a solution to help with the transition of a mainstream OS and user base from one platform to another. FX32 was a 'nice to have' capability for the NT Alpha platform, and was actually more of a demonstration of the raw power of the processor than anything else. With the Macintosh Rosetta solution, though, it's a weighty proposition where the stakes are much higher. Getting an absolutely seamless transition from PowerPC to Intel is critical for Apple's future. As technology goes, it doesn't get much more fascinating than this.

Perfect TablePlan

When writing about software, I soon get bored with yet another disk-management utility, or something that gets your wireless networking going, despite such tools being utterly worthy and useful. And don't get me started again on disk defragmenters! So it's a real joy to come across a gem of a product - something that sets out to solve a very specific problem and achieves it with real panache. Well, PerfectTablePlan does just that.

You've guessed it, it's a package to work out how to seat people for a dinner party. Such a party might be a dozen people in your dining room, or else it might be a conference dinner layout for something like the PC Pro Awards, running to hundreds of people spread across dozens of tables in a huge hotel ballroom. You can graphically lay out the tables onscreen, whether they be round ones, square ones or blocks of rectangular ones. While doing this, you can enter details of all the attendees, together with all the necessary information about who they must sit next to, who they might like to sit with, and most importantly, who they don't want to be anywhere near. It also allows you to add vital details such as whether they're vegetarian, vegan, allergic to nuts and so forth - and most important of all, whether they've actually confirmed they're coming!

With all this information added, you can then shuffle all the pieces around and come up with an automatic seating plan that best fits everyone's needs. And once that's all done, you can print it out for everyone to see as they arrive.

PerfectTablePlan is an excellent example of a piece of software that does all you need while being easy to use too. Best of all, it was written here in the UK and costs just £17. For those of a technical bent, it uses the Trolltech QT cross-platform compilation technology, so there's a beta release of the product for Mac OS X as well. Go to www.perfecttableplan.com for more information.

Sharepoint Demo Apps

Finally, Microsoft has taken to heart some criticisms that we've been hammering it with for a while. I've been maintaining that SharePoint Server will go nowhere until it becomes much easier to see exactly what it can do. At the moment, a default SharePoint installation is like looking into a black hole - there's nothing there, and you have no clue as to what it can do, which simply isn't good enough. There's a crying need for some sample SharePoint sites that show the amazing range of things that such an installation can actually perform, and each of them didn't need to be fantastically complicated but merely show the fundamentals for solving some set of business tasks.