QuarkXPress 8 Supports OpenType/Unicode

The support for Unicode and OpenType in QuarkXPress 8 represents a vast improvement in typography, and I'm hoping represents one more step towards publishers embracing Unicode standards for language font/glyph requirements.

Accordance 8.0 Is Here With More Powerful Searches

Accordance 8.0 is here. It looks like our old Accordance in most ways, but there have been many changes under the hood. I'm most thrilled to now have a Universal Binary that runs with less system resource on Intel Macs. Other fantastic features are:

• the [ANY]  tag, letting you search for, say, case across adjectives, nouns, participles, etc.
• the [FUZZY] search, which will help me find those verses where I kinda know how it goes.
• the new [INFER] command which opens many doors for searching inter-textuality.
• the new text customizations, including spacing, text color and background color.
• draggable panes (though I don't care for the look of the new horizontal text panes).
• and perhaps my favorite new feature... greater Unicode compatibility! You can paste Unicode text into a search box and it automagically gets converted to the Accordance font schemes. This renders my own Unicode to Helena converters needless, unless you're still wanting to do bible/user tool creation based on Unicode texts.

All in all, there's much here to make many happy. Do yourself a favor and check out the video demoing the new search capabilities.

Way to go, Accordance!

Accordance 8.0 Release Soon

The Accordance Blog today revealed (see "Soon, Very Soon") that they plan to release the newly rebuilt version of Accordance Bible Software in less than a month. The major feature made public is that the underpinnings of Accordance have been rewritten to run as a Universal Binary. Hallelujah! With this kind of rewrite, and with a new "point oh" release from Oak Tree, we have historical reasons to expect some serious new features.

Let's call "less than a month" less than 29 days (they're a conservative bunch). Why don't we throw up a timer then.

Update: Accordance 8.0 has been released:

VBA Coming to Microsoft Office 2012

According the the Mac Business Unit at Micro$oft, they have seen the error of their ways and determined to reintegrate Visual Basic for Applications scripting back into the next major release of Office. If only they would've consulted me to start with... VBA was a cross platform feature that allowed for advanced forms, and also tremendous customization. It was sacrificed in Office 2008 to speed up the release date.

So, you can add VBA to my predictions for Microsoft Word 2012 (or thereabouts).

Although, it's always possible that by then we'll all be using OpenOffice and not buying.

b-b-beta fever

I bought VMWare Fusion last December to load on my office computer (since our church management software is Windoze only). I've only just gotten around to installing, prompted by WMWare's release of the new beta 2.0. I installed via Bootcamp first, and the first time I saw that "Windows XP" load screen on my beautiful MacBook, I confess I had a little gag reflex. Still, everything worked perfectly... I booted into Windows, played one round of solitaire (which is all I ever see people using Windows for), and then installed Fusion. This application allows me to run Windows apps I must have right alongside my Mac apps.

As I looked down at my dock, I notice that half of my apps are in beta (I can't confirm some, hehe). Here's a screenshot of me running the new beta of Firefox and OpenOffice in Windows on a virtual machine in the new Fusion Beta. (None of which is necessary since both of them run native on OS X now.)