Archive for the Technology category
A few months ago I “upgraded” Office on my Windows laptop at work to Office 2007. I know, I was using the older version for too long - but it was working fine, till it stopped.
A few months after the switch, I still can not figure out the disastrous Office 2007 user-interface changes. This is a huge step backwards in productivity for me. I keep staring at the huge buttons - 100 pixels tall of wasted space across the entire top section, in all office applications, the strange ribbon (what was wrong with the single line customizable toolbar?), and the unintuitive office button at the top that hides all the useful stuff - it all seems like a move designed to give a sense of “need” to the Office suite, without a real benefit to the user. It clearly seems like Microsoft was trying to desperately make it look much different, in the false pretense that “different” == “improved”. Not so.
This week I actually stopped using word on Windows and moved to WordPad just because of the slow speed and bloated and useless user interface. I know its way too simplistic, but you know what? For editing RTF files, with some headers and fonts, you don’t need more then that.
Surprisingly for me, the Office 2008 suite on the Mac is actually one of the most polished, fast and beautiful applications I have ever seen from Microsoft. Not only it is on par with every other Mac application in terms of sleek-factor, fast-loading and intuitive to use, the user interface stayed true to the original menu paradigm throughout the lasts years, and did not change for the worse as in the Windows version. My guess this is due to the strict UI guidelines developers respect in the Mac application world.
On top of that, its elegant and beautiful. There are many small touches that are hard to notice without a careful one to one comparison - like the nice shading in the active cell in Excel, the beautiful fonts in all applications, or the more useful page layout in Excel. The Mac version of Excel is becoming one of my favorite applications on the Mac.
My suggestion for all the Office power users - try Office on a Mac. You will not believe this is a Microsoft product.
That’s it, it has been said at last.
Here is a statement by Microsoft’s partner group manager, Simon Aldous:
“One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics”
Isn’t it awesome and refreshing?
The following statement is out in the wild now, and there is no going back - in spite of Microsoft’s cruel response (To Mr. Aldous, that is).
Dear Mircosoft: Its OK to take the best and most useful ideals from your competitors, and build upon them. Its OK to praise a competitor on some aspects of their product, while still claiming that your product is better in other ways. But no, Mircosoft, it is NOT OK to lie, and it is NOT OK to throw one of your loyal managers at the dogs.
Also - I am sorry to be the one that tell you this, but we, the simple users, are not dumb. At the end of the day, every one of us decides if they want to use your products on their merits and our convenience. So please continue to improve Windows, make it nicer and easier to use. You can even try to innovate, as you are doing with the Surface. Just don’t lie to me.
Anyone that uses more than one computer would stumble pretty soon on the issue of syncing files between them. Especially when you try to be organized - you need your documents, media, configuration, and basically, life - available on every machine you frequent.
Of course, many people opt on the new philosophy, Living in the Cloud. Every day now it becomes easier then yesterday to have all of your data in the cloud: GMail, Google Docs, Pandora, Hulu, you name it. This method works fine most of the time.
Personally that is not how I want my life to be. There are many issues with keeping your data elsewhere - no internet connection, or provider server down (happens to all, even the mighty G). Being locked out of your data is a scary proposition, and for me not an option.
I opt on the other approach - keep my data local, but automatically replicate it across all of the my machines. This allows for immediate access to the data, plus the non-obvious but huge benefit of backup and automatic restore - in case of a catastrophe on one or more of your machines, your most important data is already backed up everywhere.
In the past I used Folder Share, that became Windows Live Sync once they were bought by Microsoft. I stopped using it once the application chocked on a folder containing more than 10K files. Also, the way to configure it is quite crude, where you have to login to the website, add machines, add folders, define permissions and connect them together. Arggh.
Enter DropBox. This is by far the simplest, hassle-free, most automatic and smart solution to folder syncing. It just works.
With DropBox you create a folder that is automatically synced to their server as you change it. Then, when another computer installs DropBox and uses the same dropbox account, its DropBox folder gets synced with any changes from the server. From this point on both folders continuously replicate each other.
It could not get any simpler then that.
There are many amazing little things this little service does so well. For instance, when you add or change a file, the file icon has a small sticker that shows its syncing, that changes to a green check-mark when its done. Of course, on all platforms you get a small floating notification once all files were synced to your current machine. Another thing: If you happen to work on the same file at once on both machines, you get a collision notification for you to decide which version to keep.
I use a Mac at home, a Linux workstation at work and a Windows laptop in between. DropBox works seamlessly on all operating systems, and its quite amazing to see your new note created on Windows, edited on Linux and immediately viewed on your Mac.
Did I mention its free?
I use it for several specific features:
- Keep all my archived files available always
- Centralize my notes and ideas flow
- Sync my passwords through encrypted files (Password Safe)
- Publish massive files for external consumption (a unique feature of DropBox for file sharing to non-DropBox users)
The iPhone app is out for a few months, and its another neat way to get to your data on the go. Sadly it is read-only, which means you can not add or change a file. If they would enable text file editing through the app, DropBox will become the killer note-taking app on the iPhone, as nothing can beat editing a note and having it immediately available on all of your machines.
Usually I tend to shun free services, but the business model is to hook you enough so you will need more than the free 2 GB provided in the free account. A 50GB package costs $10 per month, and 100GB for $20. This seems like a fair price to me for such a huge feature, and its clear that somewhere down the path I will have more than 2GB of data to sync…
All the best, DropBox: Keep up the good work. I wish that more applications would be like that - elegant, simple and just working.
This is a very funny commercial from Verizon.
I won’t tell you which phone they are smacking, you will have to guess. :)
Very well done.
Its amazing how frustrating Windows can be. No wonder my wife says she does not deal well with “computers”.
Today while my 2 year old played with my laptop (Dell Lattitude 420), she pulled an amazing feat: She succeeded turning the display completely sideways. I am talking about the whole Windows desktop and apps were 90 degrees sideways. Now this leads to 3 frustrations:
- The touch-pad is now physically rotated to the screen; Up on the pad moves the cursor left. Now try to navigate like this!
- I had no clue how the hell she managed to do that.
- I had no clue how the hell I am getting the machine to function back again.
A quick search and I got to this page on //engtech. This was a real sanity saver! Thanks to this Canadian dude. Oh, and the best part in the page design is that the answer is written sideways! You have to check it out. Thats a very clever things to do.
It turns out that there is a stupid hot key combination (ctrl-alt-left / right / up / down) that triggers this behavior on certain graphic cards. This should definitely be turned off, and also be clearly accessible as a main tab on the display control-panel.
Conclusions
- Turn off this silly feature on the OS level. (Yeah, right, like this will ever happen).
- Google is a worthy asset - but you have to know how to search.
- Common bloggers can be your friends
- Take the laptop out of reach of your two year old.
It still beats the hell out of me how she succeeded pressing ctrl-alt-arrow. Kids can be extremely resourceful.
Everyone has an opinion on the new iPhone by Apple. As a long time admirer of Apple (heck, I still have the first PDA ever, Apple’s Newton), I have an opinion as well.
First off, its an amazing device - but marketing it as a phone does not work for me. I would almost say that if you consider it as a phone, it is an overly expensive and fragile piece of hardware (although very cool). Just think about the horror of dropping it accidentally and cracking the display - how many times did you drop your phone to see it bouncing off the floor, sliding face down across the room or just forgetting it somewhere? Try doing that with a $500 phone with a huge LCD.
In addition, I guess I am not so excited about this as a phone also because personally my phone life does not involve browsing the web, or playing music. I am OK with separating my music (iPod 4G, quite old nowadays) from my phone (those get smaller by the day). I just need to be able to call or receive calls.
However…
The most exciting thing about this device is its amazing user interface. I is almost an alien technology: Its so much more advanced then anything on the market today, that it would take years for anyone to duplicate the UI with any degree of success. This is the main reason I am still considering buying this adorable device: To be able to scroll stuff, view photos and resize things all day long.
For me, the killer feature is actually text entry and retrieval. I tried for years all sorts of devices: Starting from the Apple Newton, which was a very ambitious effort, but due to high cost ($800), too slow CPU, imperfect hand-writing recognition software and too big form factor did not make it. It was a huge idea, but they needed hardware that was only appearing years after.
I used Palm V for a year or two - its quite convenient to read and retrieve, but for me the experience of writing using the stylus did not work, handwriting recognition sucks, and portable keyboard is too bulky.
Consider the iPhone, now: Having a device that allows you to write text, send it as email and view it in the best UI ever (which only Apple can deliver) might be the winning solution. It still seems to be proven how easy it is to enter text through the thumb-based interface. Even it is quite expensive as a content writing and retrieval gadget, it might be still a winner.
The next OS?
Which leads me to the revelation: I am predicting that a few months after this gadget hits production, Apple would reveal the new iMac that has the same user interface (UI). Imagine a desktop OS that behaves with the same elegance and flow - dragging windows, arranging images, smart context-sensitive dialogs, tactile scrolling, etc. Apple did the unbelievable and put OS-X on a slim portable gadget - now, once the UI technology matures, the next big thing would be to complete the full loop and bring this innovative UI to the desktop.
Obviously this is not an easy feat: I can think easily of many challenges. How would you “right click” without a mouse? How would you make all buttons and widgets finger friendly? What would you do with all the applications out there? All in all, quite challenging. But Apple had already demonstrated that they can deliver. They can do this again.
Wouldn’t that be something? What do you think?
Here is a short review of my chosen Firefox extensions, which without them my web life would have been extremely miserable. All of them are recommended, and most of them are completely essential.
Ad Blocking
This extension is a must to save you many precious seconds of your life. In essence, in every page that contains a Flash animation, you will find a small (F) instead. Clicking on it will start the original Flash - but most of the time you are not interested in that (Thats because most of them are just ads). You would not believe how faster your pages load with it.
Tabbed Browsing
This small extension allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts to switching tabs. I use ctrl-left and ctrl-right, but you can choose your favorite shortcuts. Essential for speed.
This adds a new preferences tab in your control panel, regarding tab behavior. It adds tons of customizable options to tabbing - and if you are a tabbing freak, like me, it allows you complete control.
A simple and cute add-on, that allows you to shrink the tab header to the icon only (favicon). This helps a lot when you have lots of known tabs open, which you can navigate to using the icon only.
Bookmarks Synchronization
With Foxmarks you can synchronize two PCs to share the same bookmarks. It works like magic.
Download
Now all your downloads appear as small and clean progress bar down on your status bar. Go away the download window!
With this extension, all PDFs that you click on will prompt you as to what you want to do - you can safe directly, or open in Firefox, or other options. As the PDF within Firefox is quite limited in functionality, this is a great helper.
A nice extension to download some types of video to Hard Disk. I started to see more and more sites that this extension is not working for.
Firefox Application
This cute extension adds a splash screen to Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird. This makes the application seem so much more professional. Why the Firefox developers did not place this feature (still) officially is beyond me.
A great addition to Firefox - notifies you when your add-ons or Firefox have updates, downloads them for you, and let you decide on when to restart. Complete!
Web-Dev
Adds a small eyedropper icon on the lower-left corner, and allows you to sample the color from any pixel on the current web page - and in addition, has tons of other color-oriented features. Superb tool for web developers!
This advanced add-on allows you to examine forms data before transmission, and change it at will. With it, you can capture what is really going on between a web-application client to its server - weather yours or not…