Mac Mojo

woo-hoo1!1 looking forward to the new version of RDC.

2 Q's:

1. How can I take part in the beta test?

2. Will Office 2008 be offered as part of MSDN?

Thanks in advance!

Nice... and thanks.

Any chance the new RDC client will work properly with non US Mac & Windows keyboard layouts?

Currently, it's very awkward getting '\' characters for example. I typically resort to copy and paste from a crib sheet file I keep open.

What´s a Remote Desktop Client? Is it any good? Who should care? When is the new MSN Live Messenger coming? I love MS products for the mac except Office and Messenger, thank you Craig.

Excellent news!!!!!!!

Hopefully it won't be single instance anymore!!!

CoRD (http://cord.sourceforge.net/) is also a good substitute for RDC too. I am hoping that the new RDC is closer to functionality of Remote Desktops in Server 2003. I like the multiple saver connections/sessions in it.

This is encouraging news.  :-)  I already use the old version a lot on my Intel iMac and have no problem with it running under Rosetta.  Still - if it gets even zippier, then I won't complain.  ;-)

What I am really hoping comes with the new version has already been mentioned - (a) being able to handle multiple sessions in some intelligent manner and (b) handling the path separator character - '\' - on my UK keyboard.

RDC Menu helps, but it's not an ideal solution.

Great NEWS!!!

Mac to PC software like Microsoft RDC, Timbuktu, and also emulation products like Parallels and VirtualPC all fail identically to properly support non US keyboards.

As mentioned above the most common and most annoying symptom is the inability to type the backslash \ symbol on a non US keyboard when a Mac is controlling Windows. The backslash is of course used all the time to enter file paths.

BootCamp also initially suffered this problem but Apple DID fix it (unlike Netopia, Connectix, Microsoft, etc. etc. etc.). I reported this bug EIGHT YEARS AGO to Netopia (authors of Timbuktu and a couple of times since and they still have not fixed it.

There is ONE program which does not have this problem (if one does not count BootCamp), which is VNC. VNC was originally designed in Cambridge England (not Cambridge Massachusetts) and as such by people who realise there is life outside the USA and that you will NOT fall of the edge of the world when you leave the USA. All the rest are written by Americans who obviously still believe the world is flat, except Apple who always have to think different :).

Note: Apple Remote Desktop uses VNC to control a PC and hence it also works properly.

I have zero confidence Microsoft will fix this issue in RDC but if they do then they will have gone a long way to improving their battered reputation in my books.

I'd like to second StevenB_UK's comment on Messenger. Any news or improvements in the pipeline? Windows Live Messenger is miles infront of Messenger for Mac.

Many of you have asked about a revised version of the Mac Remote Desktop Connection client. The Mac team

Yay. Let me add myself to the group that would love multiple connections. I've tried CoRD and it just doesn't cut it. Way too flaky (not that RDC is great these days).

I can't wait to replace RDC1-7 on my mac with a single Universal Binary RDC.

Oh, and please make copy/paste more reliable. Especially for SQL Server results -> Mac office Excel.

Thanks for the hard work.

About. Freakin. Time.  Unfortunately the MacBU seems to suffer from Microsoft's well documented cases of major time lapses between releases.  I've been using CoRD instead and haven't looked back RDC for months.

Thank you.

Please add smart card support to RDC as well.

When arrive a new version of MSN Messenger???

Is not possible that a society like microsoft don't upgrade their Messenger program for other OS

WE WANT A NEW VERSION !!!

I'm about to buy a Mac for the first time, and want to run Office on it.  Any vague clues as to when Office 2008 for Mac will ship in the UK? (Ie is it a waste of money to buy Office 2004 in the next few weeks?  Is there an option to upgrade from Offie 2004 when 2008 is released?

Thanks.

Craig,

I have serious issues with the conflict of interest between Mac and Microsoft and maybe in one of your posts in either of your blogs you may want to address this. The issue is simple Microsoft is the ruler of the business tools and Mac is the king of the OS. So this means that for many of us you are the gatekeeper, the one in charge of letting us have the best of both worlds.

We all know that entourage is a mediocre mail client for those of us that use it for business. It lacks full exchange integration, its not full featured, and has no way to add old pst.  Excel is also in the light side of the range, I am no rocket scientist and a couple of the financial models sent to me don’t work in mac Excel.  Basically the tools your BU has created in the past should be re-named Microsoft Office Light.

Hope that this is not strategy coming down from the Parent Company, that has your hands tied, and I really hope you will help improve the quality and robustness of the product. If you will not be able to change things with the release of the next office please rename the versions. Office Home, Office Light+, Office Play and a little work. Don’t dare put the word Professional to refer to your product.

Best regards,

A frustrated Mac user, running parallels, XP, and MS office in his beautiful iMac.

I don't have too many complaints about the current RDC, but here they are:

1. Poor detection of lack of network connectivity. If I break a vpn connection, the RDC session will not close anywhere as quickly as the Windows RDP client would. Often, in fact, I need to force quite RDC to open a session because...

2. The one session at a time limit. I actually can work around this fairly well, until I need to force quit as seen in 1, and get angry.

Will Office 2008 ship with MSDN?  Office 2004 is a key piece of software missing from the MSDN subscription.  What gives?

Pessoal, no final deste mês deve ser disponibilizada a nova versão do RDC para Mac. Alívio para quem

Thanks for the update on Office 2008.  I think we are all excited and want it now but I can also say that we would prefer the team to get it right with as few problems and more features as possible.  

In an era of transparency telling us where you are is great but software has become more complicated with a lot more lines of code and as such can easily become a setback if released too early.

Holy sh*t! I am so excited I am going to wet myself. Its been only two years since Apple made developer machines and OS X Intel available to the MacBU and they have now announced that they *will be* producing an actual *beta* UB App. Since RDC is essentially a little homegrown Microsoft FUD wrapped in GUI on top a TCP/IP stack I can see why it took them so long. Congrats! While I go change my pants I'll swing by my PC and check to see if I have any meeting requests since Exchange still blows for the Mac. Good to see those pressing issues at the MacBU have been worked on by top coders in the last two years.

Did the real Office team print you out any certificates for shipping something, or will that wait till your first app actual ships out of beta? Man, those hard ass grownups (i.e. "Dad" right David!) can be real sticklers can't they? Kudos for the excellent work!

Wow.  Tough crowd.

While it would be nice for us to see a daily update of every programming change MS completed today and every feature they will add tomorrow, real businesses do not work that way.  Make your (well reasoned) point but cut these guys a little break.

The newest (unreleased) version of Cord let's you connect local drives and printers.  It has been working realiably for me for about a month - and I connect to bunch of 2003 servers as well as XP and 2k machines.

Please, make sure you release a real **Beta** and not an Alpha called **Beta**, I hate it when companies do that.  

For Vista RDC capable client today on OS X, check out http://desktopecho.com/tsclientx/ requires X11 and use RDPv5 for protocol.

B

Never mind MSDN, please put the Mac BU software in the Partner Action Pack. I want to be a Microsoft MAC partner! And why were you guys not at WPC. I looked.. and the three or four other partners I saw using MacBook Pros looked too..... (Its OK we have VMware fusion and Vista Unity. Its pretty decent - Outlook in a VM is faster than Entourage via Rosetta. Ouch).

Please make sure that Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac is released as  a public beta, I and many people that I know would kill for a chance to try out a pre-release version.

counting down the days!

please don't make us wait until friday! :)

Would love to see some support for Windows Home Server as well. RDC'ing into client computers with a Mac, requires rebooting into Windows to use IE7.

(Windows Home Server allows you to RDC into all the systems in your home, but you have to be running IE7 and the ActiveX RDC client currently).

Here's to hoping for Session Directory support in the Mac RDC...

Heh, I guess week of the 30th means August 3. Hopefully the format convertor will include Excel support...very much needed.

Yay! The new RDC 2.0 Beta client is now up for download:

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx?pid=download&location=/mac/download/MISC/RDC2.0_Public_Beta_download.xml

It's sad to see that I had to read the 'news' of new Microsoft Mac release somewhere else... shouldn't be this blog a 'fast lane'? :(

I tried it out and it's a mixed bag.

One very nice feature is clipboard integration - harrah for that.

One major oversight is not supporting multiple connections.  It's as if one of the major criticisms of RDP on mac wasn't even heard - boo!

-adam

RDC v2 beta is here!

The beta seems much better overall, however I have two complaints:

1) on my UK keyboard, it it still impossible to get a backslash, and some of the keymappings are incorrect (e.g. #)

3) the beta comes as a package which uses Apple's Installer.  Why?  the old RDP client came as a bundle which was a proper Mac-style drag-and-drop install!

I'm glad to see the new version.  As a person who's reported bugs in the 1.0.3 client (confirmed by both MS and Apple devs via my Higher-Ed volume sales reps) and 10.4.x for printing, I'm glad to see this problem appears to be fixed.  I'll have to do more detailed testing on the exact combination that always caused problems before to see if I can duplicate it in this.

As for CoRD, I've been using that in the place of the RDP103 client.  I've hesitated from using RDesktop (which I've succesfully compiled and installed on many systems before stumbling across CoRD), precisely because of the entire X-Windows requirement.  As beta as CoRD might be, it seems to work quite nicely for the most part.  I suspect this new Mac RDP client will work just as well.  I haven't yet deployed either to the general user population, but have limited their use to tech personnel with Macs who have need of connecting to our various 2003TS systems.

Yes, there are features still missing, as compared to the current RDP client on XP.  And yes, it's still missing features when connecting to a 2008 system as compared to Vista.  But frankly, I much would rather opt for a stable, solid, reliable, production quality 1.0.4, than a feature-filled buggy v2.  We've all complained endlessly about features and bloat, and if I had to choose between more features (some useful, some not) and just plain rock solid limited featured, I'd opt for the latter.

Yes, the features mentioned above such as multiple connections (in a nice way - not multiple .RDP files), and seamless windows, and TS-SSL/VPN are all useful.  I don't think anyone would call those features useless or bloat.  But even at the risk/cost of letting these features go (or be delayed until v2.1), I'd love to see v2 of this client be rock solid stable, updated frequently (as needed), and go from there.  Rather than trying to come out with a full-featured perfected everyone-happy client, take baby steps, and have each step be good, reliable, and worthy of your team's reputation, the MacOSX ease of use, and usefulness and responsiveness of MS to the Mac world.

Thank you for writing the v2 client.  I look forward to its production solid stable status, and will be deploying it once it reaches that state and tested with known problematic configurations.