Re:I'm not an expert...
on
Office 12 Exposed
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You really don't understand the Mac way at all. It's not about how the windows look or what color they are. It's about putting the same functions in the same places. It's about consistency among menus and basic program functions like open, save, print and quit.
Really? And there was I thinking Apple wrote some extremely comprehensive human interface guidelines which covered virtually every aspect of application design - where to place buttons, what background colour to use for windows and so on.
I did search but I couldn't find the section that said "Quicktime designers are exempt from these rules". And it was QT 4.0 that started this bizarre fetish for brushed chrome. Of course OS X has rewritten the rules to support it natively and to declare that "application windows" should use it. So now every app and its uncle uses the effect, turning OS X into a sea of brushed metal and non-standard buttons.
And Apple have seen fit to let their revamped HIG apply to XP too. The new iTunes 5.0 has chosen to throw out all sorts of MS Windows conventions, such as a title frame, and it even uses Aqua style scroll bars in some places. I could understand it from Microsoft since WMP is a bloody disaster, but Apple (and its users) have traditionally been fanatical about apps following the HIG.
I wonder what happened to that zeal and why some see fit to make excuses for them now.
The sad part is that people have to copy the behaviour since Microsoft sees fit to keep them proprietary. This might keep the likes of Infragistics and Stingray in business but it's a waste of time for everyone else.
It seemed for a while that the "common controls" would allow apps to pick the new look and feel of any changes introduced by Microsoft, but the common controls are so antiquated that this is no longer the case. Apps don't even look native in XP using the common controls unless they ship with a special XP manifest file.
Re:I'm not an expert...
on
Office 12 Exposed
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Corrected link - apparently Slashdot doesn't like archive.org URLS.
Re:I'm not an expert...
on
Office 12 Exposed
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Just like Apple did. Quicktime 4.0 introduced the "brushed metal" look, as well as a bunch of non-native widgets and consequently occupied a prime position in the http://www.iarchitect.com/qtime.htm">Interface Hall of Shame.
Remember that it was Apple who sat on their high horse and said that every app look, feel and behave consistently. It made sense too. But then for reasons best known only to theirselves, decided that consistency was boring and have been changing UIs from one release to the next ever since. And each time there is more and more of that wretched "brushed metal".
Microsoft has occupied a peculiar middle ground. You can always bet for example that MS Office will dump whatever look and feel was used previously and then there will be a few years where every app tries to emulate the new look before the cycle repeats. For a while, apps could pick up the new look by using the common controls but even the common controls look antiquated these days and are full of horrible hacks for backwards compatibility.
The worst offender of them all is Unix (including Linux) where there are multiple competing widget sets and multiple competing themes. It's a wonder the platform survived before GNOME & KDE considering the combined might of IBM et al had come up with the shittiest widget set ever - Motif. Even these days with UI guidelines, and just two (!) predominant widget sets - QT & GTK apps do not look or behave closely enough to one another.
The one light at the end of the tunnel is most platforms now offer a theme engine so apps can look consistent even if they have their own notion of widgets (e.g. Java or Mozilla). It's just too bad that Apple and Microsoft see fit to keep the theme engine proprietary and even ignore it themselves when it suits them. I also wish that QT & GTK would share a common theme engine so that with a flick of a switch all apps, regardless of what C / C++ API is on top would render in the same way.
The ROKR is a phone with iTunes software, minus the purchase functionality.
Which is a point comes close to "so what"? That a phone can play AAC is no shocks since many phones have been able to play MP3 for some time.
Unless the phone was literally an iPod, and came complete with the ability to buy songs from iTMS for the same price (including network access), I fail to see that anyone would care in the slightest for it. It can't hold many songs, it looks like any other sucky budget phone and getting songs onto it is an ordeal. It could have been amazing - imagine a device where for a $15 sub it automatically downloaded a selection of tracks from your favourite bands and genres using iTMS. That would have been a killer application but it didn't happen.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if Apple tossed Motorola a bone for a big fat fee but imposed a bunch of conditions to cripple the phone for fear of dampening sales of their own devices.
If anyone has seen the sex scene in "Team America" between puppets then you know what the "Hot Coffee" mod looks like. Except the mod doesn't even bother to make either participant naked. CJ keeps his clothes on, his girlfriend wears underwear. It's no wonder it was left out because it's pretty lame.
It's laughable that religious nuts and publicity whores from both parties should seek to decry this tame, lame, disabled mod when the actual:
Glorifies gangs
Offers numerous ways to murder people including slashing their throats, setting them on fire, cutting them to bits with a chainsaw or just shooting them./li>
Murdering cops
Doing drive bys
Stealing cars
Robbing houses
Firebombing houses
Running people over
Pimping hookers
Blowing up vehicles including aircraft
Personally I think GTA is a blast and GTA: SA is nothing short of a classic, but the hypocrisy concerning this mod is pathetic.
Because it's not free. The consumer pays by having a less stable, slower system because the bloody mouse driver runs all the time and inveigles its way into various running applications using TCP/IP hooks, sniffers, screen scrapers etc.
If there were genuinely useful reason for this I could understand, but not for a flashing light gimmick when you get an IM.
The answer is they don't. But if you're a mouse and keyboard maker, you'll cast desperately around for ways to make your product look useful and relevant.
Personally I'd be happy with a mouse and keyboard which did what they're meant to without screwing up my machine with a bunch of apps and dlls that destablize the whole OS by running the entire type, installing hooks and "sniffing" for various things.
And kitchen-sinkier. GNOME appeals to me because it is trying very hard to keep it simple. The desktop is clean, the control panel and core apps are clean. To me, KDE is overwhelmed with superfluous options and tabs until finally you don't know where the hell anything is, including the really common things.
I looked it up just there - it was actually something called 3GP although pspvideo9 looks a lot nicer. I think both are shells that execute ffmpeg so they do much the same thing but pspvideo9 does the copy / rename step too, making it more useful.
There's a piece of freeware whose name escapes me which can convert DIVX, DVDs or many other formats to MP4. It uses ffmpeg and other open source tools to do it. It's not stunningly fast but it works. I was able to produce a perfectly watchable conversion of 2hr movie that took up 250Mb.
The PSP is very fickle about file names though. You have copy the movie to a specific folder with a specific naming convention or it doesn't work. The same with AAC MP4 music tracks - they have to be called.mp4, rather than.mpa or.mpu that you might have if you've been ripping with iTunes. Of course for mpu you'd have to run JHymn over them as well.
Back to movies - It's annoying that you can't use the full res of the PSP to view compressed movies but the quality is adequate all the same.
I bought a Sandisk 1Gb memory stick pro duo from Lik-Sang.com for $115. It can be had for $99 from the US but foolishly I didn't bother buying it when I was over. The same memory stick costs 149 euros in Ireland. The same with the peripherals. I bought a USB cable / charger for $4.99 from Lik-Sang. The same cable in my local GAME store cost 13 Euros.
As I said, they're just gouging people at the moment.
No I was in the US for a holiday. It has nothing to do with VAT. The RRP in the UK is £179 which ex VAT is £152 which converts to $280. You can get a PSP in the US for $230. Even if you slap on a bit of sales tax - say 10% or $23 it is still nearly $40 cheaper in the US.
As for the price of PSP games... Nintendo DS games are 5-10 euros less. I don't see why PSP games should cost any more - especially when PSP games sell for $40-50, and UMDs from $15-25 in the US.
There is no accounting for discrepancy except that Sony and the stores are in gouge mode right now. They know some people have been fed so much hype that they'll rush out to buy a PSP even when there is precious little reason to do so. It's not going to disappear overnight, titles are going to increase and prices are only going to come down, so such behaviour to "get it first" just mystifies me.
HMV, Virgin and the other stores are gouging the early adopters. The console, games and UMDs are selling at rip off prices. In the ROI, games typically cost 50 euros but I've seen them as high as 55. The crappy movie titles are selling for 30(!) euros on UMD when they're in the DVD bargain bin for 8.
I was actually looking forward to the European release since I already own a PSP (a US one), bought for a reasonable price. I don't care about the movies (since I can make them myself from my DVD collection and region encoding mean they don't work) but I was looking forward to being able to buy games locally. I don't think I'll bother for a while - what's the point when I get the same game sent all the way from Honky Kong from Lik-Sang.com and still pay less, even if I did get caught for the duty?
Why would anyone be so eager to buy a PSP in this climate? I realise the PSP is a great console, but to be honest most of the current titles are pretty meh. Lumines is great but most of the others are so-so. I'm looking forward to seeing what GTA & PES looks like when they appear on the PSP but they're at least a month or two away.
The same goes for the XBox 360 BTW in case you think I'm rooting for that. Assuming it appears this side of Christmas, you just know early adopters are going to be raped for their zeal. In return they'll be rewarded with an overpriced box and a handful of games.
Firefox does do activex on Windows - there is a plugin for it. But if you're going to tell people grab a plugin, you may as well refactor your existing control and make it support NPAPI or XPCOM. Then you can port it to Mac / Linux eventually which is something you can't do with ActiveX
Either way, ActiveX and plugins should be regarded as the final solution. It is possible to talk SOAP over SSL (if need be), or implement something with basic HTML with a bit of JS. Lots of banks do it and both IE and Firefox have pretty decent XML support these days. The ones that insist on controls or applets suck a lot. One of my banks uses Java and stuffs a cert somewhere on the HD, but it is an extremely painful and clunky solution.
One noteworthy omission with Open Office is its Mac support. I haven't written many Mac documents but I wrote a manual in it once for my final year at college.
OpenOffice (including NeoOffice) doesn't import MS Word for Mac (msw) files, so I had to open it with Word for Windows, save it as a doc and then open it with OO. It came out pretty well. For good measure I also dumped it out as PDF.
I do notice that OO is much worse at getting paragraph spacing right. If I import a Word document I often find the document is longer because there are larger gaps between each paragraph. Since I'm using styles to insert a 6pt space and not blank lines I don't understand what the issue is. Otherwise, OO has been pretty good.
So in this case the preview image (for representing the object when it's not active) lives under "./ObjectReplacements/Object 1" in the zipped up.odt file. The problem with it is that the OLE object is also responsible for supplying this image. I don't know what format OLE uses but it may well be WMF or something like that. So it's not certain that it would render properly on other platforms. I suppose without looking that if it is WMF that it must be supported or why would it be using a draw:image at all?
But even if it were supported the "preview" picture is often horribly unlike the actual document underneath and may be stretched or distorted out of all recognition. I don't know how this affects printing in OO, but OLE objects are definitely supported by the Open Document format.
OLE objects are supported in the urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:drawing:1.0 namespace. This can be seen by saving a document containing an OLE object and opening up the content.xml file.
The tag will be represented as something like this:
The OLE object's content would be in that "Object 1". This is obviously not XML, doesn't have to be. When OO starts, it instantiates the CLSID specified in the Object 1 file and streams its data into it via IStream or IStorage. Thus any OLE object is supported by the spec and by OO.
The object-ole tag is documented on page 300 of the OpenDocument 1.0 spec. Other mechanisms for embedding objects are also documented.
And indeed Microsoft ported OLE2 and a good part of Win32 to the Mac. Which makes their reasons for not porting it to OS/2 even more absurd, seeing as the APIs and compiler was very similar.
I don't who said it but it is wrong. All I have to do to embed a video, sound, OLE object, Java applet or various other things is launch OO, and choose Insert | Object | from the menu. It's that simple. You can even embed a MS Word document inside OO if you felt like it.
Naturally the OLE object's content is encoded, but the document format copes with it just fine.
I have to laugh at this quote "the Office 12 formats pay special attention to compatibility with older document versions, [and] other formats do not concern themselves with this important issue.".
What??? MS Word can already load and save a large variety of formats, many of which have nothing whatsoever to do with any past version of Word. For example it loads and saves WordPerfect files. Presumably they did that so government and law could use their word processor. So what was the reason for not supporting OpenDocument format again? It certainly has nothing to writing another import / export filter since the APIs for that must be OLD HAT.
Why not just be honest and say the real reason. You don't want to support it since your own formats represent lock-in. But sooner or later they will have to though I reckon they'll do their utmost to sabotage it becoming the defacto standard.
Slightly OT: The quote reminds of the absurdities MS put out when saying why they wouldn't port MS Office to OS/2. At the time one of them said they wouldn't port it since it didn't support OLE2. Yes, and who wrote OLE2? Such ludicrous excuses emanate from MS when the real reason they don't want to do something would leave them open to accusations of monopoly.
No, I mean an executable with no UI that doesn't install help, extraneous drivers, development files, admin tools, readme's, contribs - just the DB and core tools. Your installer run the executable with a few command line params to set the admin account and it installs silently. Such an installer would probably be half the size of the full install.
On top of that it must be able to install multiple times on the same machine so that many apps could ship with their own DB engine without interfering with each other. That means being able install with different ports, install paths, service names to keep the processes distinct from each other.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? And there was I thinking Apple wrote some extremely comprehensive human interface guidelines which covered virtually every aspect of application design - where to place buttons, what background colour to use for windows and so on.
I did search but I couldn't find the section that said "Quicktime designers are exempt from these rules". And it was QT 4.0 that started this bizarre fetish for brushed chrome. Of course OS X has rewritten the rules to support it natively and to declare that "application windows" should use it. So now every app and its uncle uses the effect, turning OS X into a sea of brushed metal and non-standard buttons.
And Apple have seen fit to let their revamped HIG apply to XP too. The new iTunes 5.0 has chosen to throw out all sorts of MS Windows conventions, such as a title frame, and it even uses Aqua style scroll bars in some places. I could understand it from Microsoft since WMP is a bloody disaster, but Apple (and its users) have traditionally been fanatical about apps following the HIG.
I wonder what happened to that zeal and why some see fit to make excuses for them now.
But how does having virtually every window use brushed metal and huge swathes of screen real estate for chunky buttons and padding help?
It seemed for a while that the "common controls" would allow apps to pick the new look and feel of any changes introduced by Microsoft, but the common controls are so antiquated that this is no longer the case. Apps don't even look native in XP using the common controls unless they ship with a special XP manifest file.
http://web.archive.org/web/20001203002400/http://w ww.iarchitect.com/qtime.htm
Remember that it was Apple who sat on their high horse and said that every app look, feel and behave consistently. It made sense too. But then for reasons best known only to theirselves, decided that consistency was boring and have been changing UIs from one release to the next ever since. And each time there is more and more of that wretched "brushed metal".
Microsoft has occupied a peculiar middle ground. You can always bet for example that MS Office will dump whatever look and feel was used previously and then there will be a few years where every app tries to emulate the new look before the cycle repeats. For a while, apps could pick up the new look by using the common controls but even the common controls look antiquated these days and are full of horrible hacks for backwards compatibility.
The worst offender of them all is Unix (including Linux) where there are multiple competing widget sets and multiple competing themes. It's a wonder the platform survived before GNOME & KDE considering the combined might of IBM et al had come up with the shittiest widget set ever - Motif. Even these days with UI guidelines, and just two (!) predominant widget sets - QT & GTK apps do not look or behave closely enough to one another.
The one light at the end of the tunnel is most platforms now offer a theme engine so apps can look consistent even if they have their own notion of widgets (e.g. Java or Mozilla). It's just too bad that Apple and Microsoft see fit to keep the theme engine proprietary and even ignore it themselves when it suits them. I also wish that QT & GTK would share a common theme engine so that with a flick of a switch all apps, regardless of what C / C++ API is on top would render in the same way.
Which is a point comes close to "so what"? That a phone can play AAC is no shocks since many phones have been able to play MP3 for some time.
Unless the phone was literally an iPod, and came complete with the ability to buy songs from iTMS for the same price (including network access), I fail to see that anyone would care in the slightest for it. It can't hold many songs, it looks like any other sucky budget phone and getting songs onto it is an ordeal. It could have been amazing - imagine a device where for a $15 sub it automatically downloaded a selection of tracks from your favourite bands and genres using iTMS. That would have been a killer application but it didn't happen.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if Apple tossed Motorola a bone for a big fat fee but imposed a bunch of conditions to cripple the phone for fear of dampening sales of their own devices.
They also own up to their mistakes which is rare indeed.
The new mod will also contain a woman looking curiously like Hillary Clinton being fucked by an alsatian.
It's laughable that religious nuts and publicity whores from both parties should seek to decry this tame, lame, disabled mod when the actual:
Personally I think GTA is a blast and GTA: SA is nothing short of a classic, but the hypocrisy concerning this mod is pathetic.
If there were genuinely useful reason for this I could understand, but not for a flashing light gimmick when you get an IM.
Personally I'd be happy with a mouse and keyboard which did what they're meant to without screwing up my machine with a bunch of apps and dlls that destablize the whole OS by running the entire type, installing hooks and "sniffing" for various things.
And kitchen-sinkier. GNOME appeals to me because it is trying very hard to keep it simple. The desktop is clean, the control panel and core apps are clean. To me, KDE is overwhelmed with superfluous options and tabs until finally you don't know where the hell anything is, including the really common things.
I looked it up just there - it was actually something called 3GP although pspvideo9 looks a lot nicer. I think both are shells that execute ffmpeg so they do much the same thing but pspvideo9 does the copy / rename step too, making it more useful.
The PSP is very fickle about file names though. You have copy the movie to a specific folder with a specific naming convention or it doesn't work. The same with AAC MP4 music tracks - they have to be called
Back to movies - It's annoying that you can't use the full res of the PSP to view compressed movies but the quality is adequate all the same.
As I said, they're just gouging people at the moment.
As for the price of PSP games... Nintendo DS games are 5-10 euros less. I don't see why PSP games should cost any more - especially when PSP games sell for $40-50, and UMDs from $15-25 in the US.
There is no accounting for discrepancy except that Sony and the stores are in gouge mode right now. They know some people have been fed so much hype that they'll rush out to buy a PSP even when there is precious little reason to do so. It's not going to disappear overnight, titles are going to increase and prices are only going to come down, so such behaviour to "get it first" just mystifies me.
I was actually looking forward to the European release since I already own a PSP (a US one), bought for a reasonable price. I don't care about the movies (since I can make them myself from my DVD collection and region encoding mean they don't work) but I was looking forward to being able to buy games locally. I don't think I'll bother for a while - what's the point when I get the same game sent all the way from Honky Kong from Lik-Sang.com and still pay less, even if I did get caught for the duty?
Why would anyone be so eager to buy a PSP in this climate? I realise the PSP is a great console, but to be honest most of the current titles are pretty meh. Lumines is great but most of the others are so-so. I'm looking forward to seeing what GTA & PES looks like when they appear on the PSP but they're at least a month or two away.
The same goes for the XBox 360 BTW in case you think I'm rooting for that. Assuming it appears this side of Christmas, you just know early adopters are going to be raped for their zeal. In return they'll be rewarded with an overpriced box and a handful of games.
Either way, ActiveX and plugins should be regarded as the final solution. It is possible to talk SOAP over SSL (if need be), or implement something with basic HTML with a bit of JS. Lots of banks do it and both IE and Firefox have pretty decent XML support these days. The ones that insist on controls or applets suck a lot. One of my banks uses Java and stuffs a cert somewhere on the HD, but it is an extremely painful and clunky solution.
OpenOffice (including NeoOffice) doesn't import MS Word for Mac (msw) files, so I had to open it with Word for Windows, save it as a doc and then open it with OO. It came out pretty well. For good measure I also dumped it out as PDF.
I do notice that OO is much worse at getting paragraph spacing right. If I import a Word document I often find the document is longer because there are larger gaps between each paragraph. Since I'm using styles to insert a 6pt space and not blank lines I don't understand what the issue is. Otherwise, OO has been pretty good.
<draw:image xlink:href="./ObjectReplacements/Object 1" xlink:type="simple" xlink:show="embed" xlink:actuate="onLoad"/>
So in this case the preview image (for representing the object when it's not active) lives under "./ObjectReplacements/Object 1" in the zipped up .odt file. The problem with it is that the OLE object is also responsible for supplying this image. I don't know what format OLE uses but it may well be WMF or something like that. So it's not certain that it would render properly on other platforms. I suppose without looking that if it is WMF that it must be supported or why would it be using a draw:image at all?
But even if it were supported the "preview" picture is often horribly unlike the actual document underneath and may be stretched or distorted out of all recognition. I don't know how this affects printing in OO, but OLE objects are definitely supported by the Open Document format.
The tag will be represented as something like this:
<draw:object-ole xlink:href="./Object 1" xlink:type="simple" xlink:show="embed" xlink:actuate="onLoad"/>
The OLE object's content would be in that "Object 1". This is obviously not XML, doesn't have to be. When OO starts, it instantiates the CLSID specified in the Object 1 file and streams its data into it via IStream or IStorage. Thus any OLE object is supported by the spec and by OO.
The object-ole tag is documented on page 300 of the OpenDocument 1.0 spec. Other mechanisms for embedding objects are also documented.
So it is supported by the Open Document spec.
And indeed Microsoft ported OLE2 and a good part of Win32 to the Mac. Which makes their reasons for not porting it to OS/2 even more absurd, seeing as the APIs and compiler was very similar.
Naturally the OLE object's content is encoded, but the document format copes with it just fine.
What??? MS Word can already load and save a large variety of formats, many of which have nothing whatsoever to do with any past version of Word. For example it loads and saves WordPerfect files. Presumably they did that so government and law could use their word processor. So what was the reason for not supporting OpenDocument format again? It certainly has nothing to writing another import / export filter since the APIs for that must be OLD HAT.
Why not just be honest and say the real reason. You don't want to support it since your own formats represent lock-in. But sooner or later they will have to though I reckon they'll do their utmost to sabotage it becoming the defacto standard.
Slightly OT: The quote reminds of the absurdities MS put out when saying why they wouldn't port MS Office to OS/2. At the time one of them said they wouldn't port it since it didn't support OLE2. Yes, and who wrote OLE2? Such ludicrous excuses emanate from MS when the real reason they don't want to do something would leave them open to accusations of monopoly.
On top of that it must be able to install multiple times on the same machine so that many apps could ship with their own DB engine without interfering with each other. That means being able install with different ports, install paths, service names to keep the processes distinct from each other.