#Office for Mac

Perhaps the most anticipated release at MacWorld will be the arrival of Microsoft Office for Mac 2008. The new Office for Mac 2008 is the first update in nearly four years, and has native support for Intel-based Mac hardware. The update brings a number of enhancements and new features to the Mac version, and improves on features found in Office 2007, the latest Windows release.

The interface has also seen a significant overhaul in Office 2008 with the new Elements Gallery providing easy, visual access to frequently used menu items in all the various Office suite components.

Office for Mac 2008 features including a library of Automator actions to streamline common tasks, a MyDay application for improved scheduling and better support of Exchange Server synchronization.

Apple's own suite of Office apps, iWork, continues to garner high marks from users, but for those still married to Microsoft the new Office for Mac 2008 is a must have. 

#MacHeist

Although it kicked off well before MacWorld, this year's MacHeist Shareware Bundle promises to deliver some big deals while the conference is in full swing. Last year's MacHeist offered a bundle of 10 Mac shareware apps last week for the bargain price of $49. Purchased separately, the total cost of all the apps would have been more than $350.

Consumers recognized the fact that the MacHeist bundle was an excellent deal, and the reaction was massive. MacHeist sold 16,821 bundles -- quite possibly the largest, most successful commercial distribution of Mac shareware ever -- and raked in an estimated $800,000.

This year's bundle features AppZapper, Snapz Pro, Awaken, CSSEdit and six other popular shareware applications. As with the previous incarnation, this year's MacHeist features challenges (or "heists" as they're known) whereby curious participants can collect clues for discounts on the software bundle as well as free licensed copies of various Mac shareware apps that aren't part of the actual bundle.

But there's no need to traipse around the web solving Mac-related missions to get a good deal, the bundle goes on sale beginning today and will available through Jan 23rd.

#core animation

Apple's release of its new Leopard operating system saw the introduction of a brand New Core Animation, a new set of tools for building program interfaces. Wil Shipley, developer of the personal media-cataloging application Delicious Library, hearlds the new tools as an interface revolution "akin to the one that came from the original Mac in 1984."

Shipley's initial release of Delicious Library, with its glossy, highly refined interface, gave birth to a new breed of developers dubbed the "Delicious generation." For these Mac developers, interface experimentation is one of the big appeals of programming.

However, despite promises of a new era of interface design, very few applications leveraging Core Animation have actually made it to the Mac desktop. 

MacWorld could mark the beginnings of a that new era though. Bento, a personal database application from Filemaker utilizes Core Animation heavily and may well see an official launch at this year's conference.

Other anticipated Core Animation heavy apps that could see release at MacWorld include Flow, and FTP program which touts itself as "the BMW of Mac file transfer clients," Cookbook, a recipe organizer and Versions a slick grappical frontend for Subversion file management.