Great point. I generally hate DRM, unless as you say, the process really fits a service model. Zune has since moved away from DRM when you buy music - they now generally give you unprotected MP3s. But if you get a subscription it really is a service - you can download all the music you want but it will expire if you don't keep up the subscription (although you do get to keep 10 songs a month in MP3). I think that model of DRM is the only one that I've seen that actually seems fair and works.
One thing that is different is that it auto generates python code that fully describes the spreadsheet (structure, display properties, and cell values!) - and which apparently is then executed to actually draw the spreadsheet itself (kinda a weird bootstrapping thing going on there).
Anyway, I wonder how well modifications you make to the generated code are treated by changes made to the spreadsheet itself... Anyone who has tried to hack auto-generated code - e.g. from UI code generators (VC++?) knows how ugly this can get. Maybe with the closed loop (from generating code, back to displaying the spreadsheet) they have managed to deal with this, but the screencasts only show such trivial examples of editing so you have to wonder.
The thing that seems REALLY cool about this tool (and the real answer to your question I think), is that you can take this auto-generated code + your custom code, and drop it into a.Net app as is, and you have a powerful python-powered spreadsheet engine inside your custom app. This means you can give your users a familiar spreadsheet UI as part of a larger app where appropriate, with all your business logic, without the unconstrained craziness of an excel VB App. Nice!
In science - we develop a theory, and then look for negating evidence. When we find it we revise the theory.
Its the same from chemistry to astro-physics.
Walk them through a series of simple examples...
on
Verizon Can't Do Math
·
· Score: 1
I think the best way to get them to see the error might be to firstly help them generate the correct $71 from the real $0.002 figure. That way they understand where the computer's figure is coming from.
Then show them examples of how it works for cents, starting at a 'multiplied by one' example, focusing on the CENTS unit in the answer.
For example:
"If we take the.002 dollar rate and multiply it by 35,893KB I get charged 71.786 dollars, just over 71 DOLLARS. That is what your computer system is correctly doing.
But if we take the.002 CENT rate which you are incorrectly quoting me, and multiply it by 35,893KB, we actually get 71.786 cents... so only just over 71 CENTS for the whole bill - a huge difference.
I'm going to walk you through some logic to make that clear. Please use your calculator to quote me some prices.
At your quoted price of.002 cents, how much would it cost me for 1KB? A:.002 cents
how much for 10 KB? A:.02 cents
how much for 100 KB? A:.2 cents Ok, so we're almost at a whole cent being charged now..2 cents is less than half of a single cent.
how much for 1,000 KB? A: 2 cents Right, we are now into whole cents, but we are still a long long way from whole dollars.
how much for 10,000 KB? A: 20 cents
Ok, how much for 100,000 KB? A: 200 cents
So 200 cents is 2 dollars, so if I used that 100,000 KB, it should cost me 2 dollars - OK? A: sure
2 dollars - cool. So when I use less that half that amount of KB you have in fact charged me a whopping 71 dollars! The reason is that quoting.002 CENTS is quoting a tiny fraction of a cent per KB. Your actual charges are.002 dollars, which is a pretty big fraction of a cent - a fifth of a cent in fact.
If you see written down in your prices dollarsign 0 point 0 0 2 you need to tell customers it is '.002 dollars'. If you call it.002 cents, like you have been, you are actually telling them it is dollarsign 0 point 0 0 0 0 2 which is 100 times smaller."
Most notably, the iPod has always come in elegant, easy-to-open boxes--none of this plastic bubble crap. Apple even claims that the new nano box was designed to save packaging and be more earth-friendly
Unless like me you bought your new shuffle at Bestbuy (Canada) where in their infinite wisdom they have wrapped Apple's excellent OOBE (Out Of Box Experience) in an infernal clamshell.
If they did it for security it is madness since they were all locked up in a cabnet and I wasn't allowed to walk around the store with mine until I paid for it.
I spent half an hour in the car trying to tear it open and bend my house-key in the process.
interviewer: Kevin Phillips Bong, You polled no votes at all. Not a sausage. Bugger all. Are you at all disappointed with this performance?
Bong: Not at all. As I always say: Climb every mountain Ford every stream, Follow every by-way, Till you find your dream.
(Sings)
A dream that will last
All the love you can give
Every day of your life
For as long as you live.
All together now!
Climb every mountain
Ford every stream...
verb [ trans. ] (often be effected) cause (something) to happen; bring about : nature always effected a cure | budget cuts that were quietly effected over four years.
For a lot of tasks I prefer LaTex, but here are some things I've used that weren't on your list, and these aren't crazy way out minority user features:
Tables (and their formatting) Styles Equations indentation Hyperlinks headers footers watermarks embedded objects from other apps Document metadata (author etc.) Columns Margins Page orientation Borders line Spacing Table of contents End notes Add comments Track changes
Now putting all of those features, plus the ones in your list, and some power features for people like Mail Merge etc. and you've got a complicated UI.
The new version tries to make all those features more accessible by ditching the pure toolbar and menu models that had collapsed under that feature weight.
Office 12 is easier to use than Open office, AND it has more features.
Objects should not be distinguished only by colour (hel-LO, heard of colour blindness?)
I'm colour blind and have no problem in general with these buttons on the mac because they ARE coded for more than just colour - in this case they also use position: Left, right, and middle.
Now when I DO have trouble is when this gets switched into a vertical visual like the zoomed version of the iTunes equilizer - I can never remember which does which and from memory it doesn't even show you the icon when you put your mouse over...
What is really an embarrassment to science is that we are being given a critique on global warming on the front page of slashdot from a website that has articles supporting creationism:
"It is time we removed the phony and inaccurate label of 'science' from evolution and see it for what it really is - a religion, based on faith and a system of belief"
Take a look through the other religion and science articles from this "news source" and you'll get a pretty good idea where they are coming from!
The reason for this is apparently due to the fact that for some reason cell providers decided to make cell numbers indistinguishable from normal land-line number.
By law it is then impossible to charge people to call that number if they can't tell if or what they will be charged.
I guess that they could start introducing a new set of distinguishable cell numbers, but the current model is probably too entrenched by now - and must have it's own advantages.
As in your parent post, you should read Jenson Harris' blog.
Until you've read the meat of that you really can't comment to intelligently on what their goals are for the massive user interface changes in Office 12.
This is a real risky move for MS to move away from menus, and if you read the blog you can see that every decision they have made is carefully reasoned and then tested with users in the lab. They can't afford not to.
They have also been conducting tests examining learning time and impact for new users - to measure the obvious confusion that will be caused by the change.
The Office usability team have no problem with menus in general (or toolbars as long as they have text labels). They are trying to address a different problem - the fact that Office's rich and deep functionality has out grown those interface models. There is so much in the product that people can't find it all and there is nowhere to put new and useful functionality.
(You can argue that Office just has too much functionality - which is probably true for some classes of user - but that is another argument!)
This isn't about UI issues from the last 20 years. This is about issues for the largest and most complicated applications the world has ever seen being used by "every day" users, and how to expose only the functionality that they need when they need it.
Ribbons are just toolbars on steroids, plus _CONTEXT_
Why present the user with a table menu and all of it's functionality when you aren't working with tables?
Time will tell if the ribbon solves these problems, or just causes more, but your arm chair judgements of their worthlessness based on your "20 years" of reading usability studies is pretty weak if you don't even seem to know they problems they are trying to solve.
Windows still has no way to stop these things, whereas OS X/Linux/*BSD are designed from the ground up to be immune to the kinds of attacks that Windows gets constantly pounded by.
Most of the viruses I see use social engineering to trick the user into opening an application. That application then uses the user's contact list to send itself to everyone they know. The virus might then have some side effects on your system. (e.g. deleting all your personal files)
OS X is in no way "immune" to that kind of attack, and a user can still find themselves hit, their friends hit, and all of their personal files deleted.
What OS X DOES have is protection against the virus digging deep into the system because of OS X's clean authenticate to administrator model. However, most of the damage can already be done with user privileges.
If its any good, I expect it to be replicated. I really dont think you'll see many other apps doing likewise. Toolbars work fine, thanks much.
No they don't - sometimes.
In the case of office they have so many features that there are over 30 toolbars, and many of the newer features weren't even being included in the toolbars because they were becoming too overloaded.
The ribbon is an attempt to hierarchically deal with that chaos - for a program with very rich, very deep functionality.
Also, standard toolbars are very small, and often contain a large number of farly arbitrary symbols which most users don't understand. The ribbon is designed to scale, so that when possible (most of the time) it displays labels.
Also, with 30 toolbars, you can't keep them all within easy access on the screen because you have no screen space left for your document view. The ribbon provides a way to navigate the new replacement for "toolbars / menus"
Finally, the ribbon also allows live previewing of results in your document breaking the 'menu-select-apply-check results' cycle that can be a huge pain in the ass.
The OS X implementation of toolbars is pretty good, but won't scale well. Great for simple apps though.
Of course you might reply that e.g.. MS Word has too many features. Well for some people that is probably true - stick with Office 97.
On the other hand, the ribbon (in testing) is letting people find functionality they wanted, but never knew was there.
Watch some of the demo's of the Ribbon. It is working towards solving some very real problems that cannot be solved with toolbars. Sounds like innovation to me, but time will tell if it really works well.
Yeah sure it is a clever marketing move, but you a way too harsh.
For example one of the interviews with the vista audio engine guys they talk about how Mac OSX has been a long way in front and how they are inspired by great compeditors.
They have an OS X box on the wall
And if you look at the MS Office user interface work, you can't claim that isn't innovative work
Finally if you actually watched the linked video you'd see they actually talk in depth about the flaws in the windows architecture and how they are trying to move forwards.
Slashdot Mirror
Great point.
I generally hate DRM, unless as you say, the process really fits a service model.
Zune has since moved away from DRM when you buy music - they now generally give you unprotected MP3s. But if you get a subscription it really is a service - you can download all the music you want but it will expire if you don't keep up the subscription (although you do get to keep 10 songs a month in MP3).
I think that model of DRM is the only one that I've seen that actually seems fair and works.
So someone on their laptop with no internet connection couldn't synch with their phone?
:-)
Can't see that working so well
One thing that is different is that it auto generates python code that fully describes the spreadsheet (structure, display properties, and cell values!) - and which apparently is then executed to actually draw the spreadsheet itself (kinda a weird bootstrapping thing going on there).
.Net app as is, and you have a powerful python-powered spreadsheet engine inside your custom app. This means you can give your users a familiar spreadsheet UI as part of a larger app where appropriate, with all your business logic, without the unconstrained craziness of an excel VB App. Nice!
Anyway, I wonder how well modifications you make to the generated code are treated by changes made to the spreadsheet itself...
Anyone who has tried to hack auto-generated code - e.g. from UI code generators (VC++?) knows how ugly this can get. Maybe with the closed loop (from generating code, back to displaying the spreadsheet) they have managed to deal with this, but the screencasts only show such trivial examples of editing so you have to wonder.
The thing that seems REALLY cool about this tool (and the real answer to your question I think), is that you can take this auto-generated code + your custom code, and drop it into a
In science - we develop a theory, and then look for negating evidence.
When we find it we revise the theory.
Its the same from chemistry to astro-physics.
I think the best way to get them to see the error might be to firstly help them generate the correct $71 from the real $0.002 figure.
.002 dollar rate and multiply it by 35,893KB I get charged 71.786 dollars, just over 71 DOLLARS. That is what your computer system is correctly doing.
.002 CENT rate which you are incorrectly quoting me, and multiply it by 35,893KB, we actually get 71.786 cents... so only just over 71 CENTS for the whole bill - a huge difference.
.002 cents, how much would it cost me for 1KB? .002 cents
.02 cents
.2 cents .2 cents is less than half of a single cent.
.002 CENTS is quoting a tiny fraction of a cent per KB. .002 dollars, which is a pretty big fraction of a cent - a fifth of a cent in fact.
.002 cents, like you have been, you are actually telling them it is dollarsign 0 point 0 0 0 0 2 which is 100 times smaller."
That way they understand where the computer's figure is coming from.
Then show them examples of how it works for cents, starting at a 'multiplied by one' example, focusing on the CENTS unit in the answer.
For example:
"If we take the
But if we take the
I'm going to walk you through some logic to make that clear. Please use your calculator to quote me some prices.
At your quoted price of
A:
how much for 10 KB?
A:
how much for 100 KB?
A:
Ok, so we're almost at a whole cent being charged now.
how much for 1,000 KB?
A: 2 cents
Right, we are now into whole cents, but we are still a long long way from whole dollars.
how much for 10,000 KB?
A: 20 cents
Ok, how much for 100,000 KB?
A: 200 cents
So 200 cents is 2 dollars, so if I used that 100,000 KB, it should cost me 2 dollars - OK?
A: sure
2 dollars - cool.
So when I use less that half that amount of KB you have in fact charged me a whopping 71 dollars!
The reason is that quoting
Your actual charges are
If you see written down in your prices dollarsign 0 point 0 0 2 you need to tell customers it is '.002 dollars'.
If you call it
Unless like me you bought your new shuffle at Bestbuy (Canada) where in their infinite wisdom they have wrapped Apple's excellent OOBE (Out Of Box Experience) in an infernal clamshell.
If they did it for security it is madness since they were all locked up in a cabnet and I wasn't allowed to walk around the store with mine until I paid for it.
I spent half an hour in the car trying to tear it open and bend my house-key in the process.
He's not suggesting to get rid of switch user functionality - just that it would be available from the one generic option to get to the login window.
Not with a Shuffle - or probably Nano...
Doesn't come with a CD.
interviewer: Kevin Phillips Bong, You polled no votes at all. Not a sausage. Bugger all. Are you at all disappointed with this performance?
Bong: Not at all. As I always say: Climb every mountain Ford every stream, Follow every by-way, Till you find your dream.
(Sings)
A dream that will last
All the love you can give
Every day of your life
For as long as you live.
All together now!
Climb every mountain
Ford every stream...
Also except as in:
Effect == verb "Effect a change in your face"
verb [ trans. ] (often be effected) cause (something) to happen; bring about : nature always effected a cure | budget cuts that were quietly effected over four years.
Wow this is OT. Parent got modded Informative?
YES! Thank god they fixed that :-D
For a lot of tasks I prefer LaTex, but here are some things I've used that weren't on your list, and these aren't crazy way out minority user features:
Tables (and their formatting)
Styles
Equations
indentation
Hyperlinks
headers
footers
watermarks
embedded objects from other apps
Document metadata (author etc.)
Columns
Margins
Page orientation
Borders
line Spacing
Table of contents
End notes
Add comments
Track changes
Now putting all of those features, plus the ones in your list, and some power features for people like Mail Merge etc. and you've got a complicated UI.
The new version tries to make all those features more accessible by ditching the pure toolbar and menu models that had collapsed under that feature weight.
Office 12 is easier to use than Open office, AND it has more features.
Now when I DO have trouble is when this gets switched into a vertical visual like the zoomed version of the iTunes equilizer - I can never remember which does which and from memory it doesn't even show you the icon when you put your mouse over...
Because we are talking about a global increase, the changes to the world climate from a change of a few degrees are likely to be catastrophic.
Why wasn't that mentioned in the article summary?
Take a look through the other religion and science articles from this "news source" and you'll get a pretty good idea where they are coming from!
The fundamentalist Christian right.
The reason for this is apparently due to the fact that for some reason cell providers decided to make cell numbers indistinguishable from normal land-line number.
By law it is then impossible to charge people to call that number if they can't tell if or what they will be charged.
I guess that they could start introducing a new set of distinguishable cell numbers, but the current model is probably too entrenched by now - and must have it's own advantages.
As in your parent post, you should read Jenson Harris' blog.
Until you've read the meat of that you really can't comment to intelligently on what their goals are for the massive user interface changes in Office 12.
This is a real risky move for MS to move away from menus, and if you read the blog you can see that every decision they have made is carefully reasoned and then tested with users in the lab. They can't afford not to.
They have also been conducting tests examining learning time and impact for new users - to measure the obvious confusion that will be caused by the change.
The Office usability team have no problem with menus in general (or toolbars as long as they have text labels). They are trying to address a different problem - the fact that Office's rich and deep functionality has out grown those interface models. There is so much in the product that people can't find it all and there is nowhere to put new and useful functionality.
(You can argue that Office just has too much functionality - which is probably true for some classes of user - but that is another argument!)
This isn't about UI issues from the last 20 years. This is about issues for the largest and most complicated applications the world has ever seen being used by "every day" users, and how to expose only the functionality that they need when they need it.
Ribbons are just toolbars on steroids, plus _CONTEXT_
Why present the user with a table menu and all of it's functionality when you aren't working with tables?
Time will tell if the ribbon solves these problems, or just causes more, but your arm chair judgements of their worthlessness based on your "20 years" of reading usability studies is pretty weak if you don't even seem to know they problems they are trying to solve.
Ribbons are better seen as toolbars on steroids.
Each ribbon is accessed via a tab, hence your confusion.
You can get second mouse button functionality by touching two fingers on the track pad and clicking.
Once you get used to it,, it makes second mouse buttons seem primitive.
KDE apps can dynamically link to KHTML / Konq components, and GNOME apps can do the same with the GNOME HTML component.
OS X is in no way "immune" to that kind of attack, and a user can still find themselves hit, their friends hit, and all of their personal files deleted.
What OS X DOES have is protection against the virus digging deep into the system because of OS X's clean authenticate to administrator model. However, most of the damage can already be done with user privileges.
In the case of office they have so many features that there are over 30 toolbars, and many of the newer features weren't even being included in the toolbars because they were becoming too overloaded.
The ribbon is an attempt to hierarchically deal with that chaos - for a program with very rich, very deep functionality.
Also, standard toolbars are very small, and often contain a large number of farly arbitrary symbols which most users don't understand. The ribbon is designed to scale, so that when possible (most of the time) it displays labels.
Also, with 30 toolbars, you can't keep them all within easy access on the screen because you have no screen space left for your document view. The ribbon provides a way to navigate the new replacement for "toolbars / menus"
Finally, the ribbon also allows live previewing of results in your document breaking the 'menu-select-apply-check results' cycle that can be a huge pain in the ass.
The OS X implementation of toolbars is pretty good, but won't scale well. Great for simple apps though.
Of course you might reply that e.g.. MS Word has too many features. Well for some people that is probably true - stick with Office 97.
On the other hand, the ribbon (in testing) is letting people find functionality they wanted, but never knew was there.
Watch some of the demo's of the Ribbon. It is working towards solving some very real problems that cannot be solved with toolbars. Sounds like innovation to me, but time will tell if it really works well.
For example one of the interviews with the vista audio engine guys they talk about how Mac OSX has been a long way in front and how they are inspired by great compeditors.
They have an OS X box on the wall
And if you look at the MS Office user interface work, you can't claim that isn't innovative work
Finally if you actually watched the linked video you'd see they actually talk in depth about the flaws in the windows architecture and how they are trying to move forwards.
Yes I'm being a smart ass, but seriously, what are the castrations? Are you just pissed at the one buffer - one file model they've introduced?