Microsoft Goodies for the Mac

I mentioned Google Mac Apps You May NOT Know About a few weeks ago. This week I take a look at interesting products for the Mac from Microsoft. While this may seem odd at first, Microsoft actually has an entire Mac business unit (BU) that is pretty active. Their best known product is Microsoft Office for Mac. But, there are other Microsoft products for that Mac.

The Microsoft MacTopia site is the home for all things Mac at Microsoft. The Mac BU team links their Mac Mojo blog from this site too. If you subscribe to this blog's RSS feed, please note that for some odd reason, their feed list the oldest feed item first (at the top) and the newest last (bottom). This, of course, is the exact opposite of every other blog RSS feed in the universe.

Here's a couple of Microsoft products for the Mac you might find interesting...

Silverlight is the Microsoft product that competes with Adobe Flash and AIR. Honestly, it doesn't seem to be catching on from what I can tell. However, it is available for the Mac (works with both Safari and Firefox) and there is one reason you might want to install it: The NBC 2008 Olympics website is pretty cool and, yep, it requires Silverlight to watch video clips. Silverlight's installation was pretty smooth. But, it seemed like it did not work quite right until after I rebooted my Mac.

Microsoft's MSN Messenger for Mac 7 works with both the consumer MSN instant message platform and the enterprise Office Communications Server 2007. So, if your firm uses OCS for corporate IM-ing, take a look at MSN Messenger for Mac 7.

Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2 (Beta 3) lets you control the desktop of a Microsoft Windows workstation or Server from your Mac. I've found it most useful for remote work with Windows Server boxes.

Flip4Mac WMV is a free utility that lets you play Microsoft Windows Media audio and video file formats using Quicktime on a Mac. Microsoft still offers Windows Media Player 9 for Mac. However, it is a deadend product with no further development planned.

Windows Live SkyDrive is a free 5GB web file storage service. Although it doesn't have the drag-and-drop capability found when using it with Microsoft Windows (it requires ActiveX for that), it works just fine with the conventional web interface. I often use it to store files that are in progress (Word documents, spreadsheets, screen captures, etc.). I've found it to be much faster than the Apple .Mac service I used (and then gave up) a few years ago.

I bought the Microsoft Memory Mouse 8000 a few weeks ago because I thought it might be useful to have a well designed notebook mouse whose wireless (RF) dongle doubled (tripled?) as a mouse battery recharger and a 1GB USB flash drive. It came with very little documentation. So, I was surprised to see a little switch in the battery compartment with what looked like a Bluetooth symbol. I flicked the switch and found it switched the mouse from RF wireless mode to Bluetooth mode. Better yet, Leopard running on my MacBook seemed to recognize and work with the mouse without needing any other drivers.