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Office 2003 Beta 2 Screen Shots
frooyo writes "ActiveWin is displaying screenshots of Office 2003 Beta 2 including pictures of Outlook, Excel, Word etc. As seen by the screenshot - the task based interface is much more prominent. Also - Outlook's three-vertical-pane interface is now the default." Nice to get a head start on what we'll be cloning next year ;)
Although, as an active directory admin with a few Office 97 clients left in an office XP environment, Office 97 shoots right through my GPO lockdowns.... god knows why, it just bypasses all the security... so if this helps bring a unified base, then I'm all for it....
Personally, i like the office interface, but perhaps that's just because i'm so familiar with it.
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fight global cooling
His ideas don't jive with the slashdot crowd. Sort of funny, in a way, how the people he attracted have taken his creation in an entirely different direction. Not totally different, but definitely more zealous than the creator.
That comment about what will be cloned next year, if in a comment, would be labeled as flamebait or a troll. I find it refreshing that at least the editors realize certain realities.
One of the main ones is that, yes the linux desktop borrows heavily from MS, and not the other way around, which a lot of people like to proclaim.
Simple: Microsoft shareholders.
Microsoft doesn't make money for them if people use "old" versions of their software. They have to make a newer version, with incompatible formats, to ensure as many people upgrade as possible. It's software extortion.
Trolling is a art,
... plenty of hardcore coders but a serious lack of good ui designers.
I can't debate how accurate that point is, but I have noticed, having recently read through the gnome interface guidelines, that most of the "not like this" examples are the myriads of various gnome apps. It'd probably go a long way if the developers that *do* write UI code (regardless of how "good" they are at "designing" said UI) actually follow UI guidelines.
Also, I wonder how well respected someone who mainly does "UI" design/layout things would be respected by the core development team of some project that actually has to code up the critical working guts.
I'd like to see MSFT fix *that.*
You mean like this (it prevents Outlook users from being able to access executable content)? To circumvent this the executables must be sent as compressed files which have to be then uncompressed and then execute: It's no different than chmod +x. The attributes on the file are hardly that different from the extension of the file, and indeed many compression utilities store the attributes of the file.
In any case it's interesting that what you're talking about is something that Microsoft is making great strides in "fixing", to the consternation of many Slashdotters. A heavily debated feature of Paladium is the fact that executable files have to be signed by a trusted authority (configurable by domain. For instance your corporate IT department) to be executable. There have been third party utilities that only allow configured executables to run as well via an executable database.
I'll go you one further.
I'm a UI designer. I have designed a new OS UI. It's quite radical, and new. I've solicited opinions on it from slashdot (here)as well as from a few friends.
Basically, I'm sitting on the thing right now, for two reasons: 1.) the core group of people its designed for - techies, early-adopters - are incredibly resistant to changes of this type and 2.) its nearly impossible to solicit useful feedback from said group, for the reasons you outlined in your post.
It can be summarized in one of the responses to the above-linked post; I asked if anyone was willing to undergo (possible) major learning pains to learn a more productive system. I got the only one-word response I've ever seen on /., "No."
Everyone, absolutely everyone has an almost unshakable opinion of what they like, visually, and behaviourally. Witness the near-revolt of Classic Mac OS users trying OS X, versus the newbies and Unix/Win coverts who think it's the cat's ass (er, that means 'great'). You cannot underestimate this. In 10 years of graphic design, it still boggles me. Graphic design and particularly UI design in general get 'no respect', because its simply something that people don't respect educated opinions on. Put another way, if your code works, only another programmer is going to criticise you for sloppy coding. A user doesn't care as long as it works. But if I show a UI design to a room with 15 people, you will have 15 angrily opinionated asshats barking off about how this and that should work, with no thought whatsoever to how one arrives at those conclusions.
And the kicker: you must listen to every asshat in that room, because in a way they are all right.
Anyways. My point is this: I'm the guy you're talking about, and I find it really hard to 'break in' to this group. I don't even know where to start, actually. Hell, I get dissed just because I built the UI demo in Flash.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.