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MSN Client for Mac OS X 77

Posted by pudge from the o-k dept.
DrJonesAC2 writes "MSN has released its software client for Mac OS X today. This software functions just like the PC version with a few exceptions (like chat and money). This software launch has its glitches, however; you cannot download it from Microsoft's Mac site you need to go here to get it."
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MSN Client for Mac OS X More

MSN Client for Mac OS X

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  • Does anyone care? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by osxuser-02 ( 604717 ) <davisrc@gm a i l .com> on Thursday May 15, 2003 @01:21PM (#5965669)
    Seems kinda strange to use MSN on a Mac. There are plenty of ISP options for Mac which would be either cheaper, or have more options for Mac users. Why have MSN if it's a crippled version?

    • Re:Does anyone care? (Score:5, Informative)

      by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @01:33PM (#5965776)
      yes, Because QWEST provides dsl via MSN, so its natural to be part of MSN.

      Setting aside issues about the evil empire, Microsoft products on mac frequently dont suck. (e.g. look at office) or at least they dont suck as bad like they do on windows platforms. Microsoft's mac unit often puts the rest of the comany to shame.

      • Re:Does anyone care? (Score:5, Informative)

        by osxuser-02 ( 604717 ) <davisrc@gm a i l .com> on Thursday May 15, 2003 @02:54PM (#5966507)
        You don't have to use MSN broadband with Qwest. I have DSL thru Qwest and use a third-party ISP (4dv.net). Not so much for the anti-M$ reasons, but because I get more features. MSN DSL still won't let you use gameservers or set up your own webserver.
        • What kind of gameservers can't you do with MSN DSL? I can see (to an extent) not allowing hosting gameservers, but with XBox Live they have an interest in seeing people play games online.
      • I have Qwest, but they're my DSL provider, not my ISP. Being in the Twin Cities, I use visi.com, and they've been great to work with (no, I don't work for visi, etc., I'm just a satisfied customer).

        That said, Qwest has done a good job keeping my DSL connection to visi.com running almost continuously for three years.

        So I won't be using MSN for Mac OS X any time soon either.
      • look at office


        Hi, I see you've never used Powerpoint before.

      • Re:Does anyone care? (Score:5, Informative)

        by sg3000 ( 87992 ) * <sg_public AT mac DOT com> on Thursday May 15, 2003 @10:40PM (#5969768)
        > Microsoft products on Mac frequently don't suck

        Shows the value of competition. Microsoft has to work as hard at the Mac market as any other software maker, so they're forced to compete. As a result, Office v.X was one of the first carbonized Mac applications (and used quite a few Mac OS X-specific features). Entourage is cool, Excel is really cool on the Mac, Word is okay, and PowerPoint is well ... tolerable. But they're obviously trying.

    • Re:Does anyone care? (Score:4, Informative)

      by MoCycleGeek ( 543150 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @01:43PM (#5965854) Homepage
      There are some companies who use MSN for their off-site dialup access (Don't ask my why when there are cheaper alternatives).

      With MSN for OSX the folks at those companies can use the 'approved' access method insted of having to poney up for their own dialup access. Esp helpful these days when most of the people I work with don't have their own dialup accounts anymore becuase they have switched to DSL/Cable at home for their Internet access.

    • Re:Does anyone care? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by MrTangent ( 652704 )
      I agree in principle but more choice is a Good Thing? for the Macintosh platform.
  • One word:

    woopideedoo

  • What's MSN? (Score:4, Funny)

    by joto ( 134244 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @01:33PM (#5965769)
    I thought it was a TV-channel of some kind. Or maybe some website. Oh no, now I remember, it was that extra icon that came with Windows 98 nobody used... Is that the client that is now ported to Mac OS X? I guess they'll be raving about it then... Lucky mac-users...

  • microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bobba22 ( 566693 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @01:33PM (#5965778) Journal
    Not having any MS software on my computer makes me feel a bit less "big-brothered". Apple provides me with useful tools for what I need to work/play. If MSN is what I think it is, I'm not sure they haven't been wasting their time as the target audience is certainly going to be a lot more clued-in than the general wintel user. I think people use apple to escape from products like MSN and .net. OS X is rapidy approaching the point where a virtual PC or MS software in general just isn't needed. Thanks, but no thanks.

    • Re:microsoft? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mrpuffypants ( 444598 )
      bib brother be damned. Microsoft Office for Mac OS X is great software hands down. I'd use good software even if it was called John Ashcroft's Super AIM SpySuite.

  • Important development (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rumpledstiltskin ( 528544 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @01:53PM (#5965943) Homepage Journal
    This is actually an important development, considering that OS X has a BSD core. MS is developing products that will interface with that operating system. Maybe this could be a step in the direction of developing applications for the OSS community. Mod this down as a troll if you'd like, but despite the heavy anti-MS rhetoric here on slashdot, MS does employ some of the best coders around. Having such a heavy player develop applications for free OS's could only help them become more accepted and mainstream.

    • Re:Important development (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cmoney ( 216557 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @01:59PM (#5966014)
      Yes, but it's very easy to produce an OS X app that doesn't have anything to do with BSD. So MS producing an OS X app in and of itself shows no bearing on whether they'll be producing BSD (or OSS) apps in the future.
      • Just to add fuel to your correct point.... it, MSN is written for the Mach kernel that Apple has closed sourced, no? The BSD aspect is the subsystem, all those nifty tools.

        Carbon and Cocoa (mmmm) are also closed sourced. They have nothing to do with X11.

        • Actually, you can download everything but Carbon and Cocoa essentially, in an open source distribution approved by Richard Stallman his very self, and run another implementation of the Openstep standard, which OS X is an implementation of, called GNUstep, and write programs that will compile fine on each one.

          So, I guess I just added some chemical flame retardant to the 'fuel' you added to the other comment. Enjoy.
          • Nope, you really can't. They aren't source comptabale :) Try again. Light flame. tssssssss

            The API's have different names. Openstep was the base :)
            • For most of the APIs the names are the same. The drawing and OpenGL and Carbon (bleargh!) APIs, along with Quicktime and AudioUnits are the different ones. Most applications would be quite portable between the two. And with NextStep as well, as I know from having a FreeBSD GNUstep box, a PA/RISC system running NS 3.3 and my TiG4.

              Porting apps is quite trivial if portability is considered as a design factor.

    • Re:Important development (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Oh, boy. No, you're not a troll, but you are WOEFULLY underinformed.

      Think of OS X as "UNIX plus." Okay? (Yes, this post sounds almost exactly like one from yesterday. That's because it's important enough to bear repeating.)

      OS X has most of the application environments that are traditional in UNIX-based operating systems: the BSD environment (which includes libc and the other standard libraries) and X. (X is an optional install, but it's just a download from Apple.) It also includes things like OpenGL that

    • "MS does employ some of the best coders around."

      ... which is the reason, I guess, that MS Project is such a joy to use? That we can now be thankful that when Word crashes now it saves a useful recovery document 50% of the time? That Word:Mac v.X is the only non-beta program under OSX that crashes on me more than once a month? (Yes, that's more than the Safari Beta, with Word:Mac at a crash per 7 uses or so.) That Longhorn, scheduled to arrive in 2005, will be implementing features from OSX from 2001,

    • Considering that many of my programs work on both Mac OS and Mac OS X, there's no reason to think that MSN for Mac OS X interfaces directly with BSD. Microsoft has lots of Mac products, and most of them don't touch BSD directly (or if they do, only minimally), but instead go through the same old Mac API they have always gone through (i.e., Carbon).
    • This is actually an important development, considering that OS X has a BSD core. MS is developing products that will interface with that operating system. Maybe this could be a step in the direction of developing applications for the OSS community. Mod this down as a troll if you'd like, but despite the heavy anti-MS rhetoric here on slashdot, MS does employ some of the best coders around. Having such a heavy player develop applications for free OS's could only help them become more accepted and mainstr

  • The beginning of the end (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Enrico Pulatzo ( 536675 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @02:00PM (#5966025)
    for MSIE, that is. I can't remember where I read it (and if I'm making it up, I get credit for calling it first ;), but MS is supposedly replacing IE with MSN Explorer for your internet exploring needs.

  • Does anyone know which browser engine this uses? Can someone with it installed get and post the user agent?

    I guess it could use the version of IE that comes with all versions of OS X.

    Does this come with popup blocking like the new version of AOL that saw my parents using?

    • The MSN client is the browser. Which means that there's yet another browser out there to worry about when designing pages. Sigh...
      • Nothing to worry about though. It's just IE with a different GUI.

        • Re:Which browser does it embed? (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Well My OpenSource Mambo admin controls work fine in IE 5 , Moz, Safari, but not MSN Ver 2 errrr whatever it is.
          Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; PPC Mac OS X 10.2.6; Tasman 0.9; MSN 8.0; MSN Explorer 2.0; MSNbMSN; MSNmen-us; MSNc11)

          • Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; PPC Mac OS X 10.2.6; Tasman 0.9; MSN 8.0; MSN Explorer 2.0; MSNbMSN; MSNmen-us; MSNc11)

            Wow, even longer than most Gecko user agents: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030513 Mozilla Firebird/0.6

            Thanks. So the answer is Tasman, the Mac IE engine. But 0.9? Either the Mac IE team didn't think Tasman never was 1.0 material or the MSN people forked it earlier. The former I think considering how long it has been out. Maybe the version of T

            • If Microsoft upgraded IE or used Safari, I could see a lot of people using MSN... it's actually better than AOL. Unfortunately, they've chosen to neglect IE on the Mac for some bizarre reason (read: Safari). Why they've chosen not to use Safari is beyond me. Their need to control the browser market must override the need to make MSN profitable.

              na
            • I suspect that Tasman 0.9 is newer than the version in IE 5.2.1. According to CodeBitch's latest article [macedition.com], she's already seen a new version of IE in the logs, and the version in MSN Explorer for Mac is the same as the version that will be in the next IE.

  • I've been waiting to switch... (Score:5, Funny)

    by heldlikesound ( 132717 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @02:46PM (#5966424) Homepage
    ...to OSX, but this was the one killer app I needed!

  • Not Mac specific... (Score:3, Informative)

    by hexdcml ( 553714 ) <hexdcml AT hotmail DOT com> on Thursday May 15, 2003 @03:47PM (#5967055)
    Has anyone noticed this particular instruction?
    To download: Click the Download link to start the download. Do one of the following:

    To start the installation immediately, click Open or Run this program from its current location.

    To copy the download to your computer for installation at a later time, click Save or Save this program to disk.

    Isn't that a PC/IE trait? My IE for mac never used to give me that, nor Safari.

    Hmm, just thought I'd bring that to light.

  • Broadband Access (Score:2, Informative)

    by svenjob ( 671129 )
    The one thing that MSN lacks is TCP/IP based broadband access on a pre-existing service (cable modem or DSL). AOL has it. Let's say you have a cable modem and want to try MSN. Too bad, you can't unless you have a modem. Not true for AOL. If they add that feature and then possibly charge a lower monthly fee for that kind of access, I feel they would attract a much larger audience (read: parents who already have cable modem or DSL). I know of 5 families who got hooked on AOL even though they already had

  • define irony (Score:3, Funny)

    by branchstudios ( 621496 ) on Thursday May 15, 2003 @04:02PM (#5967195)
    Isn't frustration with MS one of the reasons most people move to Mac/Linux?

    I just can't see all those Mac users saying "mmm... finally, secure computing!"

    • Actually... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by douglasq ( 590528 )
      Satisfaction with the Mac OS is why Mac users never move to Windows. I cannot speak for Linux users.
      • I actually moved to Windows for a while because I disliked MacOS 8 and 9 so much. Of course, I stopped using Windows after about 6 months when I set up Linux, but the point stands. MacOS X looks pretty neat, but I'm pretty much entrenched in my old Linux system by now. I still love MacOS 7, though. I used a Mac IIsi for about five years, and if it were able to decently run any software these days, I'd still have it up.

  • OK, so I'm installing this thing, because I want to see what improvements -if any- they've made to the standards support of the once-great Tasman engine.

    What's this version 2.0.0 bit, though? I mean, if it's the first release, then how can it possibly be 2.0?
  • It seems that the MSN software isn't free. To use it, you have to essentially rent it from MSN for $10/month.

    Anyone remember when they made Internet Explorer free, to price-gouge the competition out of the market? Now we see why: no longer fearing competition, they're charging again. Highly uncool, no?
  • "you cannot download it from Microsoft's Mac site you need to go here to get it."
    Funny, I thought you had to go to hell to get any of Microsoft's software.
  • don't see where the news is. So okay, now there's a MSN client I won't use on OS X, just as there's a MSN client I won't use on Windows. Have a nice day.
  • My Apple squashed your butterfly. Get over it!

  • Butterfly (Score:3, Funny)

    by Erik K. Veland ( 574016 ) on Monday May 19, 2003 @06:34AM (#5990337) Homepage
    Funny thing that they chose to use a Butterfly as it's icon as it's essentially a bug.

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