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No, Microsoft isn't releasing a platform-native version of Office for Linux. It's doing something a lot smarter: releasing a platform-neutral version of Office -- its vaunted Office Web suite -- that can theoretically run anywhere, Linux included.

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Going through some Web pages from the beginning of the year, I came across this excellent Lifehacker guide for switching from Windows to the Mac. The guide focuses on the two biggest headaches for switchers: Different keyboard shortcuts, and different ways of launching and shutting down programs and documents.

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Apple is white-hot. Mac sales are outstripping Windows at a time when rival Microsoft is stumbling with Vista. iTunes has roared into the marketplace to become the third-largest music retailer in the U.S. And then there's this thing called the "iPhone" -- perhaps you've heard of it?

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The novelist John Irving made that observation years ago about the VCR, and each generation of video technology brings watching and reading closer together, making video more private and more under the user's control.

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Most of the press about the iPhone talks about its high price. Even my iPhone review describes it as pricey. But if you actually think about all the things it can do, it's a bargain.

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This journal of my Friday-night search for an iPhone has everything you look for in summer entertainment: suspense, fast driving, crime, sex, Eastern mysticism, finance, humor, and adventure.

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The iPhone is a stylish gadget, but it kowtows to the established telecom industry, Slate Magazine argues. But Slate dangles an intriguing possibility as an afterthought: Is the iPhone a Trojan horse?

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Correspondent Rob Riggle will do anything to get his hands on an iPhone in this funny, raunchy short video.

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What are you doing this weekend? As I write this, it's Friday morning, and I'm hoping I'll be working this weekend, posting image galleries and writing reviews of the iPhone. Of course, to do that, I need to get my hands on an iPhone.

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Yes, there's a lot of hype about the iPhone. Yes, it's a very expensive piece of equipment. But neither of those things really matter. The only thing that really matters is: How good is it?

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Wired has the breakdown: The 8-Gbyte iPhone for $599, plus $36 activation fee, plus $220 a month for the highest-priced, highest-usage plan. The 4-Gbyte iPhone with the basic plan, at $60 a month, adds up to about $2,000 over two years.

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With iPhone hype building to a frenzy, Mac users are feeling neglected and unloved. I can't remember Apple's last interesting Mac announcement. Instead, Apple's been giving its love to the mobile phone crowd, and even Windows users.

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Daring Fireball has been doing some deliciously vicious rebutting of negative reporting on the iPhone. Here, he goes after an article in the New York Times.

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Michael Chabon concludes his latest novel, The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by naming his Mac writing software, DevonThink Pro and Nisus Writer Express. I can't recall ever seeing another a novelist credit their writing software in the afterword to a novel.

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The delightful Merlin Mann posts a one-minute video tutorial on using Sogudi to simplify searches from Safari using keywords. Keyword searches are great little time-savers, available from just about any browser and operating system.

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I'm coming to you now from a desktop with three displays: A 24" iMac display, 19" LCD external monitor, and 12" internal PowerBook display. It's ridiculous -- my desk looks like it belongs to the Biggest Nerd In The Universe.

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I've been having a terrible time getting my iCal calendars moved from the colossal iMac to the wee-small PowerBook and getting them to sync with my Palm Treo 650. I was eventually able to move the calendars, but syncing still has me stumped.

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I got the wee, small PowerBook home Saturday, and began to explore options for connecting it to the colossal iMac. I want to use the same keyboard and mouse to control both machines. Turns out there are several says of doing that, all of them pretty easy.

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Mark/Space, the company that makes the Missing Synch software that -- among other things -- synchs Palm handhelds to the Mac, took issue with my complaints about its licensing and customer service.

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A couple of days back, I was assigned a new PowerBook notebook from my company's IT department. Moving data, apps, and settings to my new machine has been pretty simple, except for one thing: I can't get the bloody Treo to sync with the Mac.

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My employers here at CMP Technology got tired of listening to me beg and threaten to hold my breath until my face turned blue, and they got me a PowerBook to replace my ThinkPad running Windows. When they delivered it, I was startled that it had a wee-small 12-inch display.

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Continuing my thoughts on Steve Jobs' keynote at the 2007 Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference: One of the items that many Mac users have wanted is for Apple to "Fix the Finder." Unfortunately, like any wish list from a large group of people, you end up with a list that is essentially infinite in length, and impossible to implement within the millennium. That's not to say that Apple has been completely deaf to these wishes. So, yes, there have been Finder changes in Leopard, although I doubt that the "Death to the Finder" crowd will find this to be the Finder they dream of.

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Readers had a lot to say about why Apple decided to port its Safari browser to Windows. Readers said iPhone users will need to use Safari to sync with PCs running Windows and suggested that Apple is doing the whole thing as a marketing move.

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For anyone expecting truly radical, groundbreaking features out of the 2007 Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference Keynote, it would be correct to say they were...disappointed. It was a somewhat muted keynote compared with some other ones, with most of the features Steve Jobs talked about being things he'd talked about last year. However, I think it would be a bit of an exaggeration to say it was a complete failure, or the worst keynote ever.

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Will Windows users switch to Safari? The new version has some intriguing features, but there are already several great browsers for Windows. Fortunately for Apple, it doesn't have to win a lot of market share for Safari on Windows to be a winner.

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On the heels of Parallels releasing the upgraded version of its software for running Windows on the Mac, VMware introduced Beta 4 of Fusion software that does the same thing.

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I gave the new version of Parallels a short workout today. The software, which runs Windows on Intel Macs, is a powerful upgrade to the previous version. But it was also disappointingly confusing to figure out.

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I don't care what Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz said, or how the Mac community interprets what he said, the idea that ZFS will be the default, boot FS in Leopard makes no sense.

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I've been working today on a review of the recently released version 1.5 of the Camino Mac Web browser. So far, I'm impressed. It's lightweight, sleek and fast, and fixes a lot of the user interface clumsiness that's kept me off Camino in the past.

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I've given NeoOffice, the Mac port of OpenOffice.org, a workout recently, editing and annotating word-processing documents, printing them out, and sharing the files. It's got me wondering: Why do otherwise sane people pay for Microsoft Office?

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Jim Rome writes about Mac drawbacks after switching from the PC. Overall, he likes the Mac, but he has problems with music and the user interface. He also describes how he uses virtual desktop software to manage multiple running applications.

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In my transition from Windows to the Mac, I faced a real quandry with regard to Microsoft Office. I don't spend much time working in an office suite. I don't want to spend $300 for software I'm not spending much time with. But when I need an office suite, I need it badly, and I need it to be Microsoft Office-compatible. I don't want to mess around with an open-source alternative that might let me down when I need it most.

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I'm done with my fast-and-dirty evaluation of the Safari as a potential replacement for Firefox on the Mac, and I'm sticking with Firefox. Here's why I stuck with Firefox, and what I still miss about Safari.

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I switched from Firefox on the Mac to the Safari browser yesterday. So far, after a couple of hours on Safari, I'm concluding that they're both fine browsers. On the other hand, each one has limitations. I really wish there were a browser that combines the best of both.

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Since I converted to the Mac two months ago, I've been playing Russian Roulette. I haven't had a good system for doing backups. But that changed Sunday when I discovered the Amazon S3 online storage service which, when used with the free software Jungle Disk, provides a cheap, easy way to back up your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer online. Storage prices for Amazon S3 are staggeringly cheap.

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Is the Mac more secure than Windows, in some absolute measurement of security? And does it really matter? Senior writer Sharon Gaudin talked to a few security experts and reported the consensus that, despite a recent increase in reported security flaws, the Mac is still more secure than Windows. But it's doubtful that'll change anybody's buying decisions -- Windows users know that their software has security problems, and yet they use it anyway.

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This humorous video pits Microsoft's Bill Gates and Apple's Steve Jobs against each other in a parody of the "I'm a Mac / I'm a PC" TV commercial. Cute. Watch it below the fold. Contains some mild foul language.

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This video of a kitten playing with a MacBook has been making the rounds of the blogs. Of course, real men don't watch kitten videos, so of course I didn't watch it. And I especially didn't say "Awwwww."

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Last week I confessed that I have become an obnoxious Mac evangelist. A friend who is a Windows user was complaining that he'd misplaced his reading glasses and had to crank up the zoom in Microsoft Word so he could get work done. I commented that the Mac has this really great magnifier built in; it's become one of my favorite Mac features. He told me to go away. But the thing is, the Mac zoom really is a great feature. Let me tell you about it, and hopefully you won't tell me to go away.

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To my shame the other day, a friend called me on the fact that I've become one of those obnoxious people who turns every conversation about computers into a Mac-pimping session. Here's an actual instant message exchange:

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I expected to see a lot of Macs at South by Southwest, but I didn't realize they'd be this dominant. You have to look hard to find anybody using Windows.

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Until a couple of years ago, I thought that the Mac was for dummies who were not smart enough to use a keyboard, and who, therefore, needed to use a mouse for everything. That may have been true back in the 20th Century, but the current Mac OS X, perhaps because if its Unix heritage, has keyboard shortcuts for just about everything. And if that's not good enough for you, just download and install the free Quicksilver utility, which lets you almost avoid the mouse entirely.

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It looks like I'm going to be buying Microsoft Office for the Mac after all. I had hoped to avoid it -- not because I'm anti-Microsoft, which I'm not, but rather because I just wanted save the hundreds of dollars that Office costs. However, I was unable to find a suitable substitute among all the alternatives I tried.

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Lately, I've been gnashing my teeth and swearing at my new best friend, the Mac. It's been behaving in a decidedly un-Mac-like manner. I've been having trouble getting it to do what I want it to do.

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I decided the other day that I'm going to strive to avoid putting Microsoft Office on my new Mac. Like many users, I have a deep-seated moral principle preventing me from deploying this Microsoft product. The principle is: I don't want to spend $300 if I don't have to, especially since I only use Office once or twice a day.

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You wouldn't know it from all my kvetching, but I'm actually happy about making the switch from Windows to the Mac. However, if you're thinking about making the jump yourself, you should know that it's an enormous pain in the neck at first.

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There are few things more frustrating than getting a new computer and finding out that it might need to go back to the shop right away. My six-day-old Mac runs flawlessly except for one thing: After I've been running Second Life a while, the Mac crashes hard, locks up, and throws up an error message that says it needs to be re-started.

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My first couple of days as a Mac user, after a quarter-century using Windows and DOS, have been pretty frustrating. But it's not the Mac's fault. When you're used to working on one platform, you get used to doing things a certain way, and it's maddening to go to another platform that has different ways of doing the same things.

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Do I look different to you? More genteel? More elegant? Maybe even taller? I just made the switch from using a PC as my primary machine to using a Mac. As a matter of fact, I've spent more time on the Mac in the last day and a half than I've done in the preceding 24 years of using personal computers.

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