Softwarez for teh Mac (and teh Winderz)

1. OpenOffice.org 3.0 -- First of all, let me be perfectly clear: I hate Microsoft Orifice, I mean Office. I cannot stand the app, in any of its incarnations, for either Winblows or Mac OS X. MS Office is only slightly less intuitive than a lecture on postmodernism, as intrusive as "spam," as ubituious as Starbucks and as bloated as the federal budget deficit. OpenOffice.org is an open source alternative to Orifice. Previous incarnations for the Mac suffered because the previous ports were designed to run in the Unix / X.11 side of OS X and not as a native "Aqua" interface app. In other words, Not Something Steve Jobs Would Do. OO.o 3.o is Mac OS X native -- no more X.11 OpenOffice 3.0 launches FAST in OS X -- by comparison, MS Office: Mac 2008 starts so slowly I wonder if the splash screen is my new desktop graphic. OO.o is smooth and easy on the brain, something MS Office is not. I give OO.o 3.0 a 4 star rating

2. Bento 2 -- As I wrote earlier this year, Bento is almost indispensable for the Mac user. This week, Filemaker released Bento 2. I downloaded the 30-day trial version to see if it is really any better.
Honestly, I'm disappointed. The improvements are cosmetic and few, and worse, FM wants another $49, without offering a lower upgrade price. For what I do with Bento -- maintaining RPG-related databases of people. places and things -- the full price is not worth it. Two stars.

3. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Litch King. Okay, this one is not out quite yet, and I've written extensively about it. The beta test is over, in a week it will be out. No. I'm not going to be in line at GameStop at midnight next week to buy it. I have some real concerns over how well the realms/servers are going to stand up to the new release; in beta the term "realm stability" was an oxymoron, and the beta realms were not all that high in population. My current realm is very high population, which is a bit of a worry.