Palm's probably overcharging to use it, giving no incentive for hardware makers to upgrade.
That, or it is totally crap.
The standard Palm applications were okay
on
Birth of the Pilot PDA
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
But they weren't great.
A bloody PDA should come with applications that were simply better than the ones that came with the Palm. I had a Palm IIIc, and I remember the limitations bugged me (poor notes and todo list applications, for example).
The problem is that PalmOS and the applications got early-mover advantage in the market by having these limitations. The low-end Palms of today are basically price-reduced variants that run faster. However the high-end Palm hardware and software didn't advance at the same rate as the rest of the market, and Microsoft overtook them eventually with a product that had a vastly superior underlying system. Symbian is also mostly there as well, and my free-with-contract Motorola A1000 runs rings around the functionality of my old Palm IIIc. Hell, my iPod nano has a lot of the core PDA functionality that people need, although lacking input of course.
Palm in around 2000-2003 should have realised that the current OS and software was a dead-end, and they should have started afresh with, for example, Linux as an underlying OS, and a Palm-like UI on top, without any of the limitations of the old OS, or the limitations that arose from migrating to ARM on the hardware side, but not the software side(!!). Then a legacy Palm emulation application should have been written and possibly integrated into the OS to minimise disruption during the migration period.
I'd argue that Java isn't a major success on the desktop because:
1) AWT sucked totally 2) Swing integrated poorly because of its design. Instead of being a neat interface like WxWindows on top of native user interfaces and layouts, etc (with a Java implementation for unsupported desktops), it did it all itself.
I can only name two mainstream Java desktop applications off the top of my head - Azureus and LimeWire, both of which have slightly dodgy reasons for existing. IIRC they either use SWT or custom interface code anyway. SWT is really the only viable option for writing desktop applications in Java these days. There are probably some other Java applications that use, e.g., KDE or Gnome or Win32 bindings too.
Thing is, the world is moving to web based interfaces. Whether it will be Google's vision, or Mozilla's vision (XUL), or Microsoft's vision (XAML) remains to be seen, but Microsoft have the existing market benefit currently.
I certainly wouldn't start a new Windows application using C or C++ these days, but that is a completely different discussion.
Note that Generic Java has been around since 1999 or before, and you could use it if you wanted to have generics in your java code before 1.5 came out.
Sun took their time with Generics for a reason, they're very powerful but easy to get wrong. Maybe they dragged their heels a bit as well - I'm sure that a few people within the Java community didn't like the idea of 'messy code' because of all those angle brackets.
I'm hoping that the C# competition will be a mutually advantageous one, with the existence of the other driving innovation. The biggest threat to Java would be ignoring C#.
I don't like the LINQ syntax, and at some level would it be neater to merely have a neat data access abstraction system than to alter the language?
SQL: SELECT name, age FROM customers WHERE city='London';
Java (I haven't used JDO or whatever it is called, but a quick implementation of an abstraction would probably come out with something like): DataSource ds;...// Returns an ArrayList of results, each result is a HashMap.// Alternatively we could create some form of Table datatype! ArrayList results = Query(ds, "customers", new Fields("Name", "Age"), new HashMap().put("City", "London"));
I think that enough forms of data access abstraction exist already, and that they are a nicer way of extending a language than actually altering the language itself.
I was just reading http://nemerle.org/Features and I think that these new C# features are merely there to fix things that aren't very nice in the C# language at the moment. I truly hope that SQL on that page isn't how you have to do SQL in C# currently!
There simply is no product that delivers the same kind of raw productivity.
Which is why all large institutions pay big bucks to J2EE developers to develop in-house applications using... J2EE!
It is nice that C# exists, and it has a lot of nice features, but I fail to understand you 'raw productivity' statement. How is C# more productive to code in than, say, Java 5?
I'm not dissing your opinion, I just want to see some solid reasons. I think that the existence of C# is good for everyone as it will drive innovation in Java, and vice versa, but I don't see where it has massive advantages overall.
Indeed, this is really BASIC like, with 'var' instead of 'let' as the keyword. Of course, most BASICs allowed you to skip the 'let' keyword. Indeed, many BASICs also allows you to specify the type of the variable via use of $, %, etc. a$ = "foo" : b% = 2 and so on. Like I have some issues with autoboxing in Java 5 (it does make the code look nicer, but the programmer is being less concise with what they mean), I think this kind of stuff will eventually lead to more bugs and dodgy code - it isn't hard to actually THINK about the types, or use generics, and thus have proper code and design in your application.
C# is nice, but the version numbers are spiralling up before the previous version is even being used. I think they just want to catch up with "Java 5".
Maybe I misunderstand all of this, but isn't there already a cross platform XML + ECMAScript layout language, that many of us use daily, that has been around for a few years now, and which many applications use already for the interface?
Yes, I'm talking about the interface stuff from Mozilla. XUL.
XUL (pronounced "zool") is Mozilla's XML-based User interface Language that lets you build feature-rich cross platform applications that can run connected or disconnected from the Internet. These applications are easily customized with alternative text, graphics and layout so they can be readily branded or localized for various markets. Web developers already familiar with Dynamic HTML (DHTML) will learn XUL quickly and can start building applications right away.
XUL is an XML language based on W3C standard XML 1.0. Applications written in XUL are based on additional W3C standard technologies featuring HTML 4.0; Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 1 and 2; Document Object Model (DOM) Levels 1 and 2; JavaScript 1.5, including ECMA-262 Edition 3 (ECMAscript); XML 1.0.
mozilla.org is going a step further by seeking W3C standardization for the eXtensible Binding Language (XBL) (see "Supporting Technologies", below).
If you want to write an application that runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD and Mac OS X, that utilises a common interface across all these platforms, and if you want to write it today, then use XUL.
We should all bow down to Microsoft's reinvention of the wheel.
Intel have a public roadmap into 2007, so their private roadmap must extend even further.
AMD have a public roadmap into 2006, but nothing long term. Privately, it may be different.
IBM have a roadmap into next week if you're lucky. Privately it may be different, but 3GHz G5s?
AMD has Intel beat at the moment on power consumption on the desktop, we all know that. However Yonah and Merom (and server variants thereof?) are what Apple are interested in. Yonah will come in many variants, with an ULV single core at 5.5W, and dual-core LV at 15W alongside the 35W dual-core standard processor. AMD have Turion however, and it isn't that bad in comparison with the current Pentium M, and 65nm should help them along even more.
It will be interesting to see how next year's processors compare. I think that AMD will remain leading in terms of performance at the high end, but the mobile arena will become very interesting with dual-cores from both company, new 65nm processors, and more to boot.
Use the analogue controller for turning and moving forwards and backwards.
Use the remote control thing:
Tilt left and right: Strafe left and right Aim at screen: Absolute aim at something on screen Tilt up and down: Look up and down
The remote doesn't control your rotation (well, I imagine you could swap the left/right tilt and the analogue left-right functions if you wanted). In real life, when shooting people, do you shoot straight in front of you, rotating your entire body for aiming, or do you merely aim your arm?
God forbid I have to type 'apachectl graceful' ever.
But yes, it would be neat if Apache allowed you to switch in/out modules as you pleased. 'apachectl addmodule php' or 'apachectl dropmodule index' or whatever.
With the increasing number of widescreen monitors, I'd rather have the full height of the screen for the browser contents.
Please stick the downloads on the right hand side, under the find box that should also be there - not floating over the page, but just moved to the side. Yeah, Firefox has a sidebar, but who uses it? Of course make this a user setting, in case they have their monitor in portrait mode or something.
Tab specific dialogs should be attached to each tab, in the same way as dialogs are attached to Windows in Mac OS X. Maybe this would require some work with XUL, because the difficulty must be the native window dialog? Anyway, they should come up with a solution, and soon.
This is a particularly dangerous hoax, given the extremity of Animal Rights Protesters. This could have put this guy, his family and his employees in serious danger of being attacked and seriously hurt, if not killed. Especially now the story has gone onto CNN and other media...
It is more than irresponsible for the newspaper to publish this type of story without any proof, without contacting the people involved, and so on. It might be a tabloid newspaper, but that doesn't give them the freedom to lie! It just means the published stuff is more 'people centric' than 'political/business centric'.
In the URL when you click submit, you get: passwd=b035ed4a8143f22d9874858c079ab002
Which isn't exactly passwd=PetName is it?
2) The chances of this are really tiny unless you leave a reply to an email open in a window overnight or something. In which case you should save as Draft in case your computer crashes or you have a power cut or something.
Love our government. Take VAT off the price of the iBook and it suddenly isn't that much more than the price in the US, which doesn't have any taxes applied.
I think a Mac Mini + decent TFT 15" - 19" monitor would have been a better option for her, and cheaper. But you had your reasons I'm sure. The 12" iBook is reasonable value for money considering the OS you get installed, but the 14" shouldn't be that much more - maybe £100 more for the extra processor speed and so on. But £900 - (£900 / 1.175) = £134 in taxes. For me personally, not having to run Windows is worth around about £200 a year in hassle and stress and angst, so well worth it.
What performance hit? Universal binaries aren't bytecode like Java or.NET, they're simply application packages with both a PowerPC and an x86 version of the application inside. In fact, I believe that even now some applications are using them - for 32-bit PowerPC and 64-bit PowerPC.
Forced obsolescence of a DEVELOPER product that is under development? I mean, that'd much worse than, say, writing an operating system kernel and altering the ABI to break binary modules every so often I reckon*.
* probably the reason that the new x86 build of Mac OS X has the compatibility issues.
They're kinda handy because all us PowerPC Mac owners aren't going to wake up in mid 2006 and find their processor has been replaced by the processor fairy with an Intel processor. Until 2008 or 2009 I expect that PowerPC will remain the dominant processor in the Mac user community.
Is that really so surprising? That a company will act to protect its products from people who are blatantly pirating it and enacting workarounds to bypass whatever security might have been present to ensure it only worked on developer workstations?
Oh no, your pirated pre-release software can't be upgraded! Teh horror!
There is very little consistency (fair enough, maybe the theme isn't complete yet) in the look of items.
It is better than rows of toolbars, as I said. Is it an ideal solution? I'd have to use it, but how would work if I was in a table or list? Show the table/list view, or the font view, or heaven forbid I might want to do something else! I think automatically changing the selected 'tabbar' would be quite disconcerting. And if it isn't changing, it is basically Wordstar but replacing words and keyboard shortcuts with icons and no keyboard shortcuts.
Also note I did say "whilst Pages isn't functionality the same as Word". However the document formatting and layout and all that is pretty much the same. It isn't as if Pages doesn't have underline or tabs or tables. And in that respect, Pages wins. Also the creation of styles, and access to styles is much smoother with Pages than Word 2003. I think that by concentrating on the 90% of people 's needs, Apple have created a good application - it'll be interesting to see how version 2 changes things of course - fix issues with version 1 with some additions to functionality, or really expose the internals of Pages via AppleScript and Automator?
Also Office Vista will make my girlfriend's recent investment in a course on Office dated. I think the interface is being changed for the sake of change, for the sake of being 'new'. Maybe it will bite Microsoft in the butt this time around.
I like the image of clouds of rabid fruitbats on the horizon. Hopefully the horizon is located over Redmond...:p
But yes. Anyone who has used Pages for what it is, and not as a Word replacement, really likes it. Also its implementation of tables works. 75% of the documents that ANYONE creates can be done within Pages I reckon, and it'd be more fun to use than Word. I think that Pages should come with more default style templates however, but hey, version one.
The only good that will come out of this is the removal of crappy toolbars with illegible icons (OpenOffice people please take note - your background colour icon SUCKS) that all blend in with each other. I'm a hater of toolbars of small icons unless they are extremely identifiable - i.e., DPaint's 2 colour icons worked because it was obvious what they did, but Microsoft couldn't make a 24x24 full colour icon identifiable if they tried. Again, Pages wins, by having fewer, larger, important icons only in the toolbar.
Re:Why do they have to break their own standards?
on
Office 12 Exposed
·
· Score: 1
Now Microsoft are throwing out the perfectly good menu system for something that takes literally and it seems constantly a fifth of the screen space
It's taken them a long time, but finally Microsoft have caught up with Wordstar's interface.
Problem is, Wordstar ran on 4MHz 8bit micros with a text interface! Probably more responsive as well.
Which means that you can choose to upgrade to Office 12 and retrain or your users.
Or you can sidegrade to OpenOffice which has a much more familiar layout to Office users.
Wonder which one will be cheaper to do?
Looking at the screenshots I see bling being put before usability. Whilst the concept is nice - having a single wide toolbar is like the old Wordstar help pages - how usable will it be? I can see even more mousing will be required...
In many ways it will be better than having multiple toolbars, but I can see instances where you'll be switching between 'Writing' and 'Tables' or whatever all the time, which will be annoying.
Compare to, e.g., Pages' inspector and side panels - whilst Pages isn't functionality the same as Word, the interface is pretty good for the most part. The tabs at the top of the inspector are kinda the same as the tabs in Office 12 I suppose, it just comes down to implementation. Certainly with a single floating inspector that isn't too wide, it is much easier to mouse around it than if it was the width of the screen!
I wouldn't bother with having a massively deep bench, maybe 2 foot deep.
I'd wall-mount a couple of LCDs - nothing fancy of course.
I'd have wells for various screw types, so they were always on hand.
I'd have a bare component test bed, for component tests. Set it up with a working setup, then when you need to test a PSU, Motherboard, etc, just swap it into the working setup.
Around 10000 plug sockets and a wall mounted 4 port switch. Also a wall mounted KVM?
An area to queue up units for testing - a 'quick test' area and a 'long term repair' area too.
A set of wall-mounted optics for easy access to spirits.
A mini-fridge for various mixers for aforementioned spirits.
Compressed air tank for cleaning dust out of cases, fans, etc.
PS2 and USB keyboards. PS2 and USB mice. USB hub, Firewire hub.
Did it really say that Apple is entrenched with its iPod line and won't make changes near the end? In an article about a phone that was colaunched with the iPod nano that completely replaced the top selling iPod mini line?
ROKR will not be a 'hit', but there are enough people out there who will be tempted by the device. It'll make its money back, and hopefully Motorola will let Apple design the next phone.
Slashdot Mirror
Palm's probably overcharging to use it, giving no incentive for hardware makers to upgrade.
That, or it is totally crap.
But they weren't great.
A bloody PDA should come with applications that were simply better than the ones that came with the Palm. I had a Palm IIIc, and I remember the limitations bugged me (poor notes and todo list applications, for example).
The problem is that PalmOS and the applications got early-mover advantage in the market by having these limitations. The low-end Palms of today are basically price-reduced variants that run faster. However the high-end Palm hardware and software didn't advance at the same rate as the rest of the market, and Microsoft overtook them eventually with a product that had a vastly superior underlying system. Symbian is also mostly there as well, and my free-with-contract Motorola A1000 runs rings around the functionality of my old Palm IIIc. Hell, my iPod nano has a lot of the core PDA functionality that people need, although lacking input of course.
Palm in around 2000-2003 should have realised that the current OS and software was a dead-end, and they should have started afresh with, for example, Linux as an underlying OS, and a Palm-like UI on top, without any of the limitations of the old OS, or the limitations that arose from migrating to ARM on the hardware side, but not the software side(!!). Then a legacy Palm emulation application should have been written and possibly integrated into the OS to minimise disruption during the migration period.
Instead we got Palm OS 5.
I'd argue that Java isn't a major success on the desktop because:
1) AWT sucked totally
2) Swing integrated poorly because of its design. Instead of being a neat interface like WxWindows on top of native user interfaces and layouts, etc (with a Java implementation for unsupported desktops), it did it all itself.
I can only name two mainstream Java desktop applications off the top of my head - Azureus and LimeWire, both of which have slightly dodgy reasons for existing. IIRC they either use SWT or custom interface code anyway. SWT is really the only viable option for writing desktop applications in Java these days. There are probably some other Java applications that use, e.g., KDE or Gnome or Win32 bindings too.
Thing is, the world is moving to web based interfaces. Whether it will be Google's vision, or Mozilla's vision (XUL), or Microsoft's vision (XAML) remains to be seen, but Microsoft have the existing market benefit currently.
I certainly wouldn't start a new Windows application using C or C++ these days, but that is a completely different discussion.
Note that Generic Java has been around since 1999 or before, and you could use it if you wanted to have generics in your java code before 1.5 came out.
... // Returns an ArrayList of results, each result is a HashMap. // Alternatively we could create some form of Table datatype!
Sun took their time with Generics for a reason, they're very powerful but easy to get wrong. Maybe they dragged their heels a bit as well - I'm sure that a few people within the Java community didn't like the idea of 'messy code' because of all those angle brackets.
I'm hoping that the C# competition will be a mutually advantageous one, with the existence of the other driving innovation. The biggest threat to Java would be ignoring C#.
I don't like the LINQ syntax, and at some level would it be neater to merely have a neat data access abstraction system than to alter the language?
SQL:
SELECT name, age FROM customers WHERE city='London';
Java (I haven't used JDO or whatever it is called, but a quick implementation of an abstraction would probably come out with something like):
DataSource ds;
ArrayList results = Query(ds, "customers", new Fields("Name", "Age"), new HashMap().put("City", "London"));
I think that enough forms of data access abstraction exist already, and that they are a nicer way of extending a language than actually altering the language itself.
I was just reading http://nemerle.org/Features and I think that these new C# features are merely there to fix things that aren't very nice in the C# language at the moment. I truly hope that SQL on that page isn't how you have to do SQL in C# currently!
There simply is no product that delivers the same kind of raw productivity.
... J2EE!
Which is why all large institutions pay big bucks to J2EE developers to develop in-house applications using
It is nice that C# exists, and it has a lot of nice features, but I fail to understand you 'raw productivity' statement. How is C# more productive to code in than, say, Java 5?
I'm not dissing your opinion, I just want to see some solid reasons. I think that the existence of C# is good for everyone as it will drive innovation in Java, and vice versa, but I don't see where it has massive advantages overall.
Indeed, this is really BASIC like, with 'var' instead of 'let' as the keyword. Of course, most BASICs allowed you to skip the 'let' keyword. Indeed, many BASICs also allows you to specify the type of the variable via use of $, %, etc. a$ = "foo" : b% = 2 and so on. Like I have some issues with autoboxing in Java 5 (it does make the code look nicer, but the programmer is being less concise with what they mean), I think this kind of stuff will eventually lead to more bugs and dodgy code - it isn't hard to actually THINK about the types, or use generics, and thus have proper code and design in your application.
C# is nice, but the version numbers are spiralling up before the previous version is even being used. I think they just want to catch up with "Java 5".
They're not G5s however, they're PowerPC Processing Units.
But yes, IBM can do >3GHz if they want to.
Yes, I'm talking about the interface stuff from Mozilla. XUL.
If you want to write an application that runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD and Mac OS X, that utilises a common interface across all these platforms, and if you want to write it today, then use XUL.
We should all bow down to Microsoft's reinvention of the wheel.
Intel have a public roadmap into 2007, so their private roadmap must extend even further.
AMD have a public roadmap into 2006, but nothing long term. Privately, it may be different.
IBM have a roadmap into next week if you're lucky. Privately it may be different, but 3GHz G5s?
AMD has Intel beat at the moment on power consumption on the desktop, we all know that. However Yonah and Merom (and server variants thereof?) are what Apple are interested in. Yonah will come in many variants, with an ULV single core at 5.5W, and dual-core LV at 15W alongside the 35W dual-core standard processor. AMD have Turion however, and it isn't that bad in comparison with the current Pentium M, and 65nm should help them along even more.
It will be interesting to see how next year's processors compare. I think that AMD will remain leading in terms of performance at the high end, but the mobile arena will become very interesting with dual-cores from both company, new 65nm processors, and more to boot.
Use the analogue controller for turning and moving forwards and backwards.
Use the remote control thing:
Tilt left and right: Strafe left and right
Aim at screen: Absolute aim at something on screen
Tilt up and down: Look up and down
The remote doesn't control your rotation (well, I imagine you could swap the left/right tilt and the analogue left-right functions if you wanted). In real life, when shooting people, do you shoot straight in front of you, rotating your entire body for aiming, or do you merely aim your arm?
God forbid I have to type 'apachectl graceful' ever.
But yes, it would be neat if Apache allowed you to switch in/out modules as you pleased. 'apachectl addmodule php' or 'apachectl dropmodule index' or whatever.
With the increasing number of widescreen monitors, I'd rather have the full height of the screen for the browser contents.
Please stick the downloads on the right hand side, under the find box that should also be there - not floating over the page, but just moved to the side. Yeah, Firefox has a sidebar, but who uses it? Of course make this a user setting, in case they have their monitor in portrait mode or something.
Tab specific dialogs should be attached to each tab, in the same way as dialogs are attached to Windows in Mac OS X. Maybe this would require some work with XUL, because the difficulty must be the native window dialog? Anyway, they should come up with a solution, and soon.
This is a particularly dangerous hoax, given the extremity of Animal Rights Protesters. This could have put this guy, his family and his employees in serious danger of being attacked and seriously hurt, if not killed. Especially now the story has gone onto CNN and other media...
It is more than irresponsible for the newspaper to publish this type of story without any proof, without contacting the people involved, and so on. It might be a tabloid newspaper, but that doesn't give them the freedom to lie! It just means the published stuff is more 'people centric' than 'political/business centric'.
1) On the Y! Mail Login Page (http, not https), in the login form:
/ login/us/ym/*http://login.yahoo.com/config/login') "
action="https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?"
onsubmit="return hash(this,'http://us.rd.yahoo.com/reg/login1/lisu
In the URL when you click submit, you get: passwd=b035ed4a8143f22d9874858c079ab002
Which isn't exactly passwd=PetName is it?
2) The chances of this are really tiny unless you leave a reply to an email open in a window overnight or something. In which case you should save as Draft in case your computer crashes or you have a power cut or something.
VAT.
Love our government. Take VAT off the price of the iBook and it suddenly isn't that much more than the price in the US, which doesn't have any taxes applied.
I think a Mac Mini + decent TFT 15" - 19" monitor would have been a better option for her, and cheaper. But you had your reasons I'm sure. The 12" iBook is reasonable value for money considering the OS you get installed, but the 14" shouldn't be that much more - maybe £100 more for the extra processor speed and so on. But £900 - (£900 / 1.175) = £134 in taxes. For me personally, not having to run Windows is worth around about £200 a year in hassle and stress and angst, so well worth it.
What performance hit? Universal binaries aren't bytecode like Java or .NET, they're simply application packages with both a PowerPC and an x86 version of the application inside. In fact, I believe that even now some applications are using them - for 32-bit PowerPC and 64-bit PowerPC.
Certainly offtopic by the tone of the post.
Forced obsolescence of a DEVELOPER product that is under development? I mean, that'd much worse than, say, writing an operating system kernel and altering the ABI to break binary modules every so often I reckon*.
* probably the reason that the new x86 build of Mac OS X has the compatibility issues.
They're kinda handy because all us PowerPC Mac owners aren't going to wake up in mid 2006 and find their processor has been replaced by the processor fairy with an Intel processor. Until 2008 or 2009 I expect that PowerPC will remain the dominant processor in the Mac user community.
Is that really so surprising? That a company will act to protect its products from people who are blatantly pirating it and enacting workarounds to bypass whatever security might have been present to ensure it only worked on developer workstations?
Oh no, your pirated pre-release software can't be upgraded! Teh horror!
Look at the screenshots!
There is very little consistency (fair enough, maybe the theme isn't complete yet) in the look of items.
It is better than rows of toolbars, as I said. Is it an ideal solution? I'd have to use it, but how would work if I was in a table or list? Show the table/list view, or the font view, or heaven forbid I might want to do something else! I think automatically changing the selected 'tabbar' would be quite disconcerting. And if it isn't changing, it is basically Wordstar but replacing words and keyboard shortcuts with icons and no keyboard shortcuts.
Also note I did say "whilst Pages isn't functionality the same as Word". However the document formatting and layout and all that is pretty much the same. It isn't as if Pages doesn't have underline or tabs or tables. And in that respect, Pages wins. Also the creation of styles, and access to styles is much smoother with Pages than Word 2003. I think that by concentrating on the 90% of people 's needs, Apple have created a good application - it'll be interesting to see how version 2 changes things of course - fix issues with version 1 with some additions to functionality, or really expose the internals of Pages via AppleScript and Automator?
Also Office Vista will make my girlfriend's recent investment in a course on Office dated. I think the interface is being changed for the sake of change, for the sake of being 'new'. Maybe it will bite Microsoft in the butt this time around.
I like the image of clouds of rabid fruitbats on the horizon. Hopefully the horizon is located over Redmond ... :p
But yes. Anyone who has used Pages for what it is, and not as a Word replacement, really likes it. Also its implementation of tables works. 75% of the documents that ANYONE creates can be done within Pages I reckon, and it'd be more fun to use than Word. I think that Pages should come with more default style templates however, but hey, version one.
The only good that will come out of this is the removal of crappy toolbars with illegible icons (OpenOffice people please take note - your background colour icon SUCKS) that all blend in with each other. I'm a hater of toolbars of small icons unless they are extremely identifiable - i.e., DPaint's 2 colour icons worked because it was obvious what they did, but Microsoft couldn't make a 24x24 full colour icon identifiable if they tried. Again, Pages wins, by having fewer, larger, important icons only in the toolbar.
Now Microsoft are throwing out the perfectly good menu system for something that takes literally and it seems constantly a fifth of the screen space
... it ain't what it used to be.
It's taken them a long time, but finally Microsoft have caught up with Wordstar's interface.
Problem is, Wordstar ran on 4MHz 8bit micros with a text interface! Probably more responsive as well.
Progress
That interface is completely different.
...
Which means that you can choose to upgrade to Office 12 and retrain or your users.
Or you can sidegrade to OpenOffice which has a much more familiar layout to Office users.
Wonder which one will be cheaper to do?
Looking at the screenshots I see bling being put before usability. Whilst the concept is nice - having a single wide toolbar is like the old Wordstar help pages - how usable will it be? I can see even more mousing will be required...
In many ways it will be better than having multiple toolbars, but I can see instances where you'll be switching between 'Writing' and 'Tables' or whatever all the time, which will be annoying.
Compare to, e.g., Pages' inspector and side panels - whilst Pages isn't functionality the same as Word, the interface is pretty good for the most part. The tabs at the top of the inspector are kinda the same as the tabs in Office 12 I suppose, it just comes down to implementation. Certainly with a single floating inspector that isn't too wide, it is much easier to mouse around it than if it was the width of the screen!
Knowing Microsoft
I wouldn't bother with having a massively deep bench, maybe 2 foot deep.
I'd wall-mount a couple of LCDs - nothing fancy of course.
I'd have wells for various screw types, so they were always on hand.
I'd have a bare component test bed, for component tests. Set it up with a working setup, then when you need to test a PSU, Motherboard, etc, just swap it into the working setup.
Around 10000 plug sockets and a wall mounted 4 port switch. Also a wall mounted KVM?
An area to queue up units for testing - a 'quick test' area and a 'long term repair' area too.
A set of wall-mounted optics for easy access to spirits.
A mini-fridge for various mixers for aforementioned spirits.
Compressed air tank for cleaning dust out of cases, fans, etc.
PS2 and USB keyboards. PS2 and USB mice. USB hub, Firewire hub.
Music system.
Did it really say that Apple is entrenched with its iPod line and won't make changes near the end? In an article about a phone that was colaunched with the iPod nano that completely replaced the top selling iPod mini line?
ROKR will not be a 'hit', but there are enough people out there who will be tempted by the device. It'll make its money back, and hopefully Motorola will let Apple design the next phone.