Alea jacta Ouest

(L’application n’est pas localisée à ma connaissance, aussi je ne poste pas ce billet en français – mais je vais contacter l’auteur pour lui faire la suggestion )

Now I usually don‘t post here too often about applications that are not in direct relationship with Office, but I thought I could make an exception
I spend a lot of time at work crunching numbers in Excel or other applications (Prism is my friend).
Very often, I just want to run a quick calculation. I used to be a heavy HP48 user, but my calculator dies a while ago and I learnt to live without it.
I recently got an iPod Touch I started looking for a decent scientific calculator that would also support the RPN notation.

Well the search is over, I found it!
I first tried the lite version (free) then quickly migrated to the full, paid version of PCalc.
PCalc is developped by TLA Systems (they also make the famous DragThing) offers all the functions I’ve been looking for (and was updated today with even more goodness)

• Scientific calculator
• RPN mode with two lines of text (I’d love to be able to squeeze even more, bt I understand that it might not be really practical on the iPhone/iPod Touch screen).
  Conversions, tons of conversions
• paper-tape mode (do all your calculations and have the app summarize the all thing as if you had been using a paper-tape printing calculator – very useful to summarize a long set or inter-related calculations)
• Themes (I like themes)
• octal, hexadecimal, etc calculations (I don’t use this, but many people do)
• etc…

If you are like me and think that the built-in calculator is far too limited for your taste and are on the market for something like that, I encourage you to try the lite version first. Be careful, you might get hooked like me and get the full one ($9.99 — but well-worth it in my opinion).

In addition, the author seems extremely active, responds quickly to suggestions (and Tweets)

Now there is also a regular MacOS X version, but I can’t comment on it since I haven’t tried it (I use the iPod Touch all the times for these quick calculations)

A couple of days ago, Microsoft posted on their site an announcement about the availability of a new beta for Entourage.
This new version allows Exchange 2007 users to access their e-mails through Exchange Web Services (EWS for short). This has serious advantages over the previous method (using WebDAV).

• Much faster
• You can now sync categories, tasks notes, etc,

Now be careful. This update is not for everybody.

• It cannot connect to an exchange server through WebDAV, so if you have an account on Exchange 2003, don’t even think about installing it. If you have more than one Exchange account, one on 2003 and the other on 2007, it’s a no-go there too.
• It requires Exchange 2007 SR1 on both the front-end server (usually OWA) and the mailbox server (back-end). MS also mentions that the minimal requirement would be SR1 with rollup 4 (the latest update as of today is rollup 6). Apparently these updates corrected a lot of WebServices-related issues. You can usually figure out what’s installed on your server by connecting through OWA: On the top right part of your Page click on Options. On the Option page, select About (bottom of the left-side panel). The presulting page usually lists the version installed on OWA and the mailbox server. Figuring out which rollup you have is not always easy. Mine says 8.1.336.0, which means:
  8: Exchange 2007
  1: SR1
  336.0: that’s the build number and this one corresponds to Rollup 5.
  At this point, I’m not sure what version corresponds to Rollup 4…

How to get it:
Go to the blog post I indicated, read everything then click on the link on the bottom of the page.
This leads to Connect, Microsoft beta-testing reporting platform. You can create an account there and apply for the beta. It takes them a couple of days to review the applications and give you access to the download link and reporting forms (for the bugs).

With all that in mind, it looks like a great beta to me. I hope people will install it and report tons of bugs that MS will be able to fix quickly for a nice and stable release.