March 25 - 7:35pm EDT   In brief: Apple will open a store in Cherry Hill, NJ this weekend, Office 2008 "the missing manual" is now shipping, Sofa Control is one of the new applications on its way from Gravity, ... Apple will be opening its latest retail store in Cherry Hill, NJ this weekend. The Apple Store Cherry Hill will open to the public on Saturday, March 29, 2008 at 10:00 a.m. EDT. The last Apple retail store to open was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Thursday, March 6th. Apple is also planning to open four new stores in Europe, branching out with retail outlets in Monaco, Zurich, Geneva, and Ireland. Apple posted job listings for three of those stores, but refrained from specifying ... [full story]

March 25 - 12:20pm EDT   Microsoft is considering software development for the iPhone, writes Fortune. The financial magazine notes that for over a week, a team based in Silicon Valley has been experimenting with Apple's beta SDK, which come June will let developers publish and sell native iPhone applications. Microsoft executives explain that they are not sure whether any apps will actually be put into production, but are deeply interested in the possibility. "It's really important for us to understand what we can bring to the iPhone,” says Tom Gibbons, corporate VP of the Specialized Devices and Applications Group. [full story]

March 13 - 9:05am EDT   Having shipped the Professional version in February, Recosoft is now launching the Personal edition of PDF2Office 4.0. The plug-in reconstructs the elements of PDF documents within Microsoft Word, maintaining paragraphs, headers and footers, while generating tables and regrouping graphic elements. It additionally builds columns and sections, and incorporates endnotes and footnotes. [full story]

March 6 - 1:15pm EST   Microsoft has launched what it calls the Document Interoperability Initiative, a program to test and improve how well certain document formats work across multiple platforms and operating systems. The company will host a series of lab events around the world for this purpose, and today met with other outfits such as Novell, Nuance and Quickoffice at a first event, which was set in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The focus of the meeting was on the open ODF format, most famously used in OpenOffice, and Microsoft's less popular Open XML standard, supported almost exclusively by the company's Office suites. [full story]

February 27 - 8:50am EST   Microsoft will have to pay a fine equal to $1.35 billion for allegedly violating already existing antitrust sanctions, the European Commission said today. The demand comes after a follow-up investigation by the regulatory body which reported that Microsoft had held back on code necessary to let rival firms develop more explicitly compatible software, particularly for workgroup server programs. The amount far exceeds the original $330 million fine imposed in 2004 for the original violation and is characterized as punishment for Microsoft's reluctance to obey the ruling -- a resistance which is unprecedented for the EC, according to Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. [full story]

February 21 - 11:30am EST   Microsoft today quickly halted speculation about its significant announcement by revealing that it will freely publish the application programming interfaces (APIs) and communication protocols for many of its key products, allowing any company looking to use some of Microsoft's techniques for their own software. The access extends to both Windows Vista and Server 2008 as well as the .NET framework that underpins some application code. Office 2007 and Microsoft's latest server suites for Exchange, SharePoint, and SQL are also covered, according to the company. More than 30,000 pages are expected to go online and will include documentation of how the company implements ... [full story]

February 21 - 9:00am EST   Microsoft will make a "significant company announcement" within hours, the firm announced today. Without providing details, the software developer notes that it will hold a mid-day conference and makes clear that the news is unrelated to its attempted acquisition of Yahoo. However, the presentation will include both Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer, chief software architect Ray Ozzie, and legal counsel Brad Smith, suggesting that the news will involve legal issues relating to the company's core Windows or Office businesses. Servers and Tools senior VP Bob Muglia is also said to be involved. [full story]

February 7 - 10:00am EST   Recosoft has released the fourth edition of PDF2Office Professional, its flagship conversion utility. The program primarily converts PDF documents into Microsoft Office formats such as Word or PowerPoint, but also outputs to more generic formats such as RTF. As much of a document's original layout is preserved as possible, including paragraphs, styles, graphic elements and tables. [full story]

January 17 - 1:45pm EST   Microsoft will directly publish specs for its core Office suite's older formats as well as help developers map them to the Open XML formats used in Office 2007, the company said on Thursday. Addressing complaints that the formats for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word were not accessible, the Windows developer says it will switch from a system that only supplied the information through e-mail to posting the information directly on the web, allowing anyone to access the information needed to implement Office formats. Microsoft also plans to make the file types fit the company's Open Specification Promise that protects users from all but patent infringement claims. [full story]

January 11 - 7:55pm EST  In brief: Stevenote Flash game, Downloadable 2008 Keynote bingo game, WebAssist Dreamweaver tools released, Apple Store adds Office 2008 to lineup ... Imagine being Steve Jobs. Imagine getting ready for this years MacWorld Expo keynote presentation. Imagine having to collect all the insanely great stuff you are going to present at Macworld Expo without revealing it to industrial spies and journalists. A new Flash game that lets you "experience what it feels like to be Steve Jobs just before your Keynote presentation." [full story]

January 11 - 6:50pm EST   In anticipation of Office 2008’s upcoming release at Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Microsoft has given the Mactopia page a facelift, with a design reminiscent of the Office Mac site. The redesigned page is fairly lean, opting for an automated search of Microsoft’s main site for Mac software, rather than supplying a list of products on the left-hand side of the page. Promotions and Mac Mojo are still linked from the page, however; Microsoft’s current promotion entitles users to a free upgrade to Office 2008 when purchasing 2004 before January 14th. [full story]

January 3 - 8:55pm EST   Users eagerly await the release of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, especially those that use Intel-based Macs, as this will be the first incarnation of the suite to include Universal application support. The suite has been redesigned to be more “available” to users, introducing a number of new elements, as well as reconfiguring old features to make them more obvious to new and regular users alike. While Office 2008 doesn’t ship until the start of Macworld on January 15th, Microsoft has provided MacNN with a preview of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage ahead of the announcement. [full story]

December 21 - 10:15am EST   Microsoft has released a new beta of its Open XML File Format Converter for Mac OS X. The utility converts Open XML documents into a format readable by Office v. X or Office 2004 for Mac, and supports batch operations in addition to single-file use. Five different file types can be altered: these include standard and macro-enabled Word documents (.DOCX and .DOCM), as well as PowerPoint shows, templates and presentations (.PPSX, .POTX and .PPTX files). [full story]

December 20 - 12:20pm EST   Avaya has announced plans to ship its Avaya one-X Mobile software for iPhone in the first quarter of next year. Avaya one-X Mobile builds on the functionality of Extension to Cellular by providing a family of mobile clients designed to further enhance the productivity of enterprise mobile workers, according to the company. The family of Avaya one-X Mobile clients provides quick access to office phone functionality via an intuitive graphical user interface, and supports a broad array of devices ranging from high-end smart phones to less expensive consumer-oriented phones. [full story]

December 17 - 9:45am EST   Both Apple and Microsoft have defined the list of the most significant technology disappointments of 2007, according to a new review of the year by PC World. Windows Vista reaches first place among the disappointments for the gap between what was originally promised and actually delivered. Despite its extended, five-year development time, the software had to cast off important promised features such as the WinFS file system to make its January 2007 release window. The OS is not fundamentally flawed, but is frequently plagued by hardware compatibility issues, poor performance, and excessive security warnings. [full story]