I’ll be at Redmond next month with the rest of the SL MVP gang. Don Box just gave yet another reason for me to get excited.
We’re being let in on the top secret project that Don and ChrisAn have been working on since WCF/WPF.
I’ve been using Office 2007 for the past six months but its just today that I ran into the awesome keyboard shortcut.
Man, the Office guys have really pulled a rabbit out of the hat with this one and I can shoot myself for not figuring this out earlier.
What it boils down to is that every icon in the ribbon/toolbar has a keyboard shortcut and you can get it to with a few keystrokes WITHOUT HAVING TO REMEMBER ANYTHING! Whoooooooooooooo.
Just press Alt and start typing in the characters that start showing up on the toolbars to get to your icon.
For example to do a ‘Paste Special’ (which I keep doing a lot) you just need to type in ALT, H, V, S. Perfect!
Jensen Harris has more at the Office UI Blog.
I love the Vista unzip dialog. Just two steps to unzip a file. Although XP first added the unzip to Windows, it was crudely done. It always went through the wizard which had three pages to add to the misery the check setting to ‘Show extracted files’ never remembered its previous state.
[UPDATE] I’ve been getting quite a lot of hits from Google with people searching on “How to unzip files in Vista”. You basically need just two steps.
1. Right click on the zip file.
2. Click on ‘Extract All…’ to get the dialog box shown above.
3. That’s all!
Is Microsoft Innovative? A fun debate between Robert Scoble and Dave Winer on the Wall Street Journal online.
What’s even more interesting is this comment left by a guy called Stan on Scobles blog.
Winer is either completely ignorant or is just playing the “MS just copies” role for effect.
Here are some MS innovations off the top of my head (some big, some small, some built on top of previous work, but lots of “innovations” in tech build on previous work):
* AJAX
* Web browser component usable by any app
* OLE
* Spreadsheet Pivot Tables
* Tabbed spreadheets (since then, copied by other apps such as browsers)
* On-the-fly spell check in word processors
* LINQ (the upcoming tech that will be in C# 3.0 and VB9)
* Video codec innovations that have led to VC-1 being the premier codec for HD-DVD and BR discs.
* Mouse scroll wheels
* Mouse GoForward/GoBack buttons
* Ergonomic mice (I recall the days where you had to press down on a mouse while moving it in order to move the cursor; Microsoft ended that nonsense).
* Ergonomic keyboards
* Office 2007 UI
* Mac Office floating palette UI
* TerraServer (precursor of Virtual Earth, NASA WorldWind, Google Earth)
* Ability to alter compiled code while debugging it
* User Agents
* Wizards
* Intellisense
* Answer Wizard technology in Office Help
* ClearType
* TrueType (collaboration with Apple)
* Bob (yeah, it failed in the marketplace, but it was innovative (too much for its own good))
* Dynamic HTML desktops
* Taskbar
* Alt-Tab to switch apps
* Lots of small innovations in .NET that when combined equal large cumulative innovation.
* ActiveX (yes, it had security issues, particularly before XP SP2, but is great in an intranet setting)
* Net-DDE, the first tech to allow clipboard functionality over LAN
* Singularity
* Combining the Back and Forward history buttons into one navigation stack control in IE7
* Photosynth
* XPS (does everything that PDF does, adds graphical effects that PDF lacks, does it in a smaller file size, and does it using XML so the files can be manipulated via XML parsers)
* Windows Live Contacts (being developed by Danny Thorpe (legendary programmer at Borland, who jumped to Google, then 4 months later went to Microsoft))
* A bunch of little stuff in IM via MSN Messenger
* OneNote (I don’t think there’s any other app really like it (and those that try to be like it aren’t anywhere near as good), particuarly when used on a Tablet PC)
* Mac Word 2004’s notebook layout and microphone support
* Zune’s WiFi (yes, the RIAA only allowed 3play/3day sharing, but its use will grow into other areas)
* First console to have a harddrive (Xbox)
* Browser runs in a sandbox (IE7 on Vista)
* First browser with anti-phishing tech
* Multi-core/CPU calculations in Excel 2007
* XNA
* Vista’s ability to allow the user to increase RAM simply by plugging in a USB 2.0 flash drive
* First OS to support delayed clipboard rendering
* First OS to have a 3D Sound api for games
* Shadow Copy
* Media Center Extenders (which iTV looks to be a copy of)
Microsoft this week announced the licensing of the Office 2007 User Interface (i.e. the Ribbon bar) to the partner community. The licensing is royalty free, anyone who wants to develop an application with the new UI needs to sign up on the web.
I didn’t really believe that Microsoft would let every Tom, Dick and Harry copy their new patented UI. Reading into the article you find the catch though ‘The license is available for applications on any platform, except for applications that compete directly with the five Office applications’. There you have it. The master stroke. The Open Office guys who have been aping Microsoft Office for so long are stuck in an island now. Unless they can out-innovate on the user interface these guys are pretty much stuck in the 1990’s UI world.
Finally one less beta on my system.
Office 2007 here I come!
Get your hands on all the brand spanking new releases from a single location at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/devsolutions/
Includes download links to the .NET Framework 3.0, 2007 Office System and ASP.NET Ajax bits.
I’m downloading the fx3.0 sdk and run-times on last time.
Hold your horses, Vista RC2 on Friday, say Paul.
Microsoft this Friday will ship the final pre-release version of Windows Vista and, unexpectedly, will name the release as Release Candidate 2 (RC2). Previously, Microsoft had publicly asserted that it would not ship an RC2 milestone release of Windows Vista. But don’t let the name fool you: RC2 is really just a standard interim build of Vista and will not be given out to millions of users as was RC1.
The RC2 build is 5743, and Microsoft is currently testing it internally. As with the previous interim build, 5728, RC2 will be given out to beta testers, MSDN and TechNet subscribers, and a random, limited selection of Consumer Preview Program (CPP) members.
Dang and here I was painfully downloading 5728 for the last three days.
The latest version of of Vista (RC1) is available for public download. Go get it now at http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/rc1/en/download.htm
The guys over at LinuxAdvocate.org have a slightly biased ‘Plain English’ translation of the legalise in the Windows XP EULA. Many of us have clicked on the ‘I Agree’ button without really understanding them but given that they are non-binding, I guess it doesn’t matter what **** they have in there.
Makes for interesting reading: http://www.linuxadvocate.org/articles.php?p=1
The funniest part, as mentioned in a recent InfoWorld, is this translation:
Microsoft is not liable even if they break the terms of this agreement.
