July 9 - 3:30pm EDT   Microsoft's Monday event should mark a more formal debut for the company's Office Web suite, tipsters said on Thursday. Although announced nine months ago, the suite is now said by Neowin to be getting a demonstration. It's not known if Microsoft will commit to a public release at the gathering. [full story]

January 9 - 9:40am EST   Pages has always been a decent word processor, but it’s never been powerful enough to replace Microsoft Word. Apple has, fortunately, boosted Pages '09 with more features in order to make it a better word processor, and an easier desktop publishing program. It may still not match Word feature-for-feature, but that could be a good thing, as what it does offer may be what you really need. [full story]

November 6 - 4:30pm EST   Jumsoft is shipping Keynote Objects FX 3.0, its latest art collection for Mac apps. Objects FX is in particular aimed at both Keynote and Pages, and supplies a variety of pre-rendered 3D images for inclusion in presentations or documents. Version 3.0 doubles the collection size from 50 to 100, in categories including the likes of parties, plants, and soft or metallic objects. [full story]

November 6 - 1:35pm EST   Nisus has released a v1.2 update to Writer Pro, its flagship word processing software. Pro differentiates itself from Express with features such as comments, mail merges, and the ability to create indexes and tables of contents. New to v1.2 is an upgraded import component, said to improve the accuracy of file translations, particularly in terms of Microsoft Word documents. [full story]

July 21 - 1:20pm EDT   You Software says it has released v1.7 of You Control, its utility for Mac OS X. The program lets people create custom menus in the operating system, which can be placed in locations such as the Menu Bar, a corner of the screen, or in the middle when triggered by a hotkey. Users can launch any file, folder or application present on their Mac. [full story]

June 13 - 1:20pm EDT   RedleX has released Mellel 2.5, a significant update to the leading word processor for Mac OS X. The new release adds robust cross referencing capabilities, allowing users to refer from one point in the text to another (e.g., "see page 15"). Mellel's reference entry dialogue allows, accordingly, to create reference formats, composed of different elements such as reference to the page number, position in the text (above, next page, below, etc.), page range, and so on. Users can also save and re-use such formats again and again, making the necessary modifications as they go along. [full story]

April 15 - 2:10pm EDT   Nisus Software has announced the upcoming release of Nisus Writer Pro 1.1 Preview, the latest version of the company's alternative word processor. This release adds several new features including Comments, Mail Merge, Go to Page, and more. Also added is a Large Caret option, as well as several additions and enhancements to the Nisus Macro Language. Nisus Writer Pro 1.1 will be available later this Spring for only $80. A CD version is available for an additional $10. A three license Family Pack is available for $100. Nisus Writer Pro uses the same core as Nisus Writer Express, but sports several additional or expanded features including a Table of Contents generator, ... [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]

January 25 - 7:15pm EST   Nisus Software has released Nisus Writer Pro 1.0.3 and Nisus Writer Express 3.0.2. These new releases, which are free to existing users of Pro and Express 3, fix some image display and footnote issues. Writer Express is a scaled-back version of Writer Pro, missing features such as indexing and tables of contents; it nevertheless shares common elements, such as the ability to open Word, WordPerfect and AbiWord documents, as well as view text in scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Hebrew. One of the major upgrades from earlier versions of Express is "floating" graphics, enabling text wrap around them. [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]