How about getting rid of the sound? What else does a startup sound inspire other than the sour feeling of having to restart the PC all the time?
On older builds of Vista it was impossible to get rid of this sound, but after enough complaining they added a checkbox in the Sound control panel. See this for more details.
Every once in a while, Microsoft does something right... or at least releases something cool. When I plugged in my address (which is kind of in the middle of nowhere), up popped 3 different viewing angles of my house. Pretty detailed shots too, and in one you could even see me mowing the lawn in the backyard! I had lots of fun with this one.
Actually, I think it is a threat. I use Live Local/Virtual Earth almost exclusively. Here's why (adapted from a post I wrote in a previous story that didn't get much attention):
Live Local has better controls. It was the first to add mouse wheel scroll zooming, which Google Maps has added. (I don't mind the copying, though; the more the merrier!) I can't live without the middle-click, box zooming, though. From a globe view I can zoom to my house in a few seconds with Live Local's box zooming.
Directions between arbitrary points: Right-click anywhere to select the From and To points to find directions. Google Maps requires that I type in addresses. Problem is that I don't know the address of Paradise point at Mt. Rainier National Park, and Google Maps can't seem to find it. Note that Yahoo Maps expands upon this by letting you add waypoints, but it's too slow for me.
Bird's Eye view. Images are taken from an airplane, so detail is awesome.
I can perform up to 3 simultaneous map searches. This means I can see the locations of all Safeways, libraries, and CompUSAs on the same map. Useful if you intend on going to multiple places when driving.
Live Local's direction finding seems more capable than Google's. I can find directions from Glasgow, UK to Palermo, Italy.
Live Local has better sharing features. You can create collections of places and share them on Live Local. This might be a silly example, but some friends visited Seattle recently and wanted suggestions on places to visit. I made a collection of places for them. You can add text, images, and URLs to places on a collection, and viewers of a collection can generate driving directions between any of its places (as well as any other arbitrary point). Google has auto-saving of locations (which was added after Live Local's collections), but as far as I can tell, it does not permit sharing or customization of locations.
UI is more customizable. Live Local's panels are removable, yielding more visible map area than Google Maps. You can't turn off the "example searches" pane in Google.
Of course it has downsides:
Performance is worse than Google Maps. On my 1.7 GHz 512 MB RAM laptop, Live Local causes the fan to spin up far more often than Google Maps.
Color scheme is uglier in some places (compare Tokyo road view in both Google and Live).
Google Maps' satellite view is considerably more detailed and updated in some places, including Shanghai, Pyongyang, Ho Chi Minh City. MS appears to be countering this with Bird's Eye view, but the two are just not the same.
I'm not sure all its features are supported in Firefox 1.5 and below; can someone confirm? But it does work in Firefox 2.0.
If you're interested in looking at satellite imagery, Google is the better choice. But if you want to find places and get directions to them, and share those places with people, I believe Live is far better.
Also, I failed to understand what you mean by the infinite scroll - at the bottom of the page on both was a link to more pages of pictures. Live Image had five numbers listed and Google had 10 pages listed with a next button.
What browser are you using? I tried it with Firefox 2.0 today and it had infinite scroll. Downlevel browsers will revert to the standard page-by-page view.
And their maps loads a LOT faster than google's, and work far better (no waiting for all the pictures making up a map to slowly load (for every zoom level), and then half the time having to drag it out and back because pictures some didn't load at all). It just works, and very quickly. I like the google maps controls better still, but like anything there's always some adaptation to a new interface. (No idea about map coverage for whatever countries or such, but it works very good for North America at least). The maps themselves look nicer too IMO.
Their "local" is no worse than google's (at least for where I live, I've searched for small shops and such - it finds 'em easily). There's a bunch more things I haven't had time to look at yet (expo, gallery, etc)
I disagree on performance. Live Local, like most other Live services, fails on performance when compared to Google. I can tell because my primary machine is a 1.7 GHz laptop with only 512 MB of RAM. Any slow website results in the annoying fan spinning up, and I get this far more often on Live Local than Google Maps.
With that in mind, I use Live Local almost exclusively. Here's why:
Live Local has better controls. It was the first to add mouse wheel scroll zooming, which Google Maps has added. (I don't mind the copying, though; the more the merrier!) I can't live without the middle-click, box zooming, though. From a globe view I can zoom to my house in a few seconds with Live Local's box zooming.
Directions between arbitrary points: Right-click anywhere to select the From and To points to find directions. Google Maps requires that I type in addresses. Problem is that I don't know the address of Coldwater Peak. Note that Yahoo Maps expands upon this by letting you add waypoints, but it's too slow for me.
Bird's Eye view. Images are taken from an airplane, so detail is awesome.
I can perform up to 3 simultaneous map searches. This means I can see the locations of all Safeways, libraries, and CompUSAs on the same map. Useful if you intend on going to multiple places when driving.
Live Local has better sharing features. You can create collections of places and share them on Live Local. This might be a silly example, but some friends visited Seattle recently and wanted suggestions on places to visit. I made a list in Live Local. You can add notes, images, and URLs to places on a collection, and viewers of a collection can generate driving directions between any of its places (as well as any other arbitrary point). Another feature is the ability to share your current view plus any places you have marked via a URL, as I've shown through various links in this post.
UI is more customizable. Live Local's panels are removable, yielding more visible map area than Google Maps.
Aside from performance Live Local is also lacking in aerial imagery. Google Maps has considerably more detail in places like Shanghai, Pyongyang, Ho Chi Minh City, etc. But when it comes to actual usefulness, I use Live Local.
Does anyone use MS' web search page? After its introduction with much noise I've never heard anything about that anymore.
I use it, although in all honesty, it's about the same as Google search for me. Results are good enough that I'm happy. However, I do like Live Image Search far more than Google Image Search. Live Image search has infinite scroll (no more clicking Next), the images are more relevant in my experience (try "Al Gore" on Live and Google), and it lists related people. It also has my favorite feature: you can add images you've found to a scratchpad. This is quite useful if you want to gather images while searching.
The project originally consisted of the "pillars of Longhorn"--Aero, Indigo, and WinFS. The first is shipping in less than what was promised (Microsoft once claimed it was a temporary theme and that improvements were forthcoming), and the last two were canceled.
1) If other A/V companies can do A/V software without kernel access, why do McAffee (or as some other slashdotter erroneously called it, McCafe) and Symantec need kernel access? Why are they so special?
In case people are wondering, yes, 64-bit Vista anti-virus software exists. See this post for details.
I would like to point out that Adobe didnot actually say anything to M$ at all about PDF in office. (M$ already has plenty of PDF support in the Mac version and why would Adobe have a problem with promotion of its own format?) but rather M$ just came up with a convenient excuse to trash PDF and claimed the possibility of a lawsuit as the reason for pulling PDF off.
Adobe wants the software giant to remove the PDF "save as" feature from its beta version of Office 2007 or to charge a fee for it, whereas Microsoft wants to offer that feature for free, said Dave Heiner, the deputy general counsel who oversees Microsoft's antitrust cases.
Adobe's response mentions fears of Microsoft "embracing and extending" PDF:
Microsoft has demonstrated a practice of using its monopoly power to undermine cross platform technologies and constrain innovation that threatens its monopolies. Microsoft's approach has been to "embrace and extend" standards that do not come from Microsoft. Adobe's concern is that Microsoft will fragment and possibly degrade existing and established standards, including PDF, while using its monopoly power to introduce Microsoft-controlled alternatives - such as XPS. The long-term impact of this kind of behavior is that consumers are ultimately left with fewer choices.
Microsoft employee Brian Jones has a blog response which claims that Microsoft works to honor PDF standards, including supporting ISO 19005-1 compliant PDF/A:
Remember we are only a producer of this stuff (not a consumer), and doing anything non-compliant would just mean that our output would be flawed and not look right. That would of course undermine all the work we've done to build this support in the first place... we want people to use it.
What's the truth behind it all? I personally agree with Brian Jones. Writing a half-baked implementation of PDF wouldn't do Microsoft any good; they'd get tons of negative publicity and no one would ever use the feature, even if it improved in the future.
The computer newbie has no trouble finding the reader but finding a GOOD and FREE pdf printer involves too much trial and error, not to mention getting one will probably not even cross their minds. I would gladly use XPS if it means I don't have to start installing extra software to read and write to the format, like I do with ASCII text documents.
XPS is a part of.NET Framework 3.0, which also comes with an XPS Document Writer printer. You can use that to print documents from any application to XPS files for free. As for reading/writing the format, just download the XPS specification. Note that the specification itself is an XPS document; viewers are available here. Also try renaming the spec from.xps to.zip, and poking around in the XML files it contains.
I see a lot of posts in this discussion that say XPS is better than PDF, because it's XML and human readable and you can manipulate it with XSLT, it's going to be submitted as a standard, etc. That just makes me think: what about SVG? It's already a standard, it's XML, human readable, XSLT, etc.
Those are the same comments people have made regarding Windows Presentation Foundation (AKA "Avalon") and XAML. Guess what? The pages in an XPS document are XAML files represented in a strict subset of WPF. In fact, the XPS viewer provided as part of.NET 3.0 is powered by WPF.
As for what differentiates it from SVG, WPF provides a higher level of elements that do not exist in SVG, namely UI controls such as DockPanel, InkCanvas, TextBox, and even 3D content via Viewport3D. The New York Times Reader is built purely using WPF. You can't do that with SVG without writing the controls from scratch (but please enlighten me if I'm wrong). Therefore, while XPS itself isn't much different from SVG, the architecture in which XPS resides reaches far beyond SVG.
There's still another argument against XPS/XAML/WPF: Why didn't Microsoft simply extend SVG? IMO it would break one point of elegance regarding WPF, which is that the XML elements correspond directly to the.NET WPF objects and follow.NET naming conventions. For example, XPS has a Path element with a Fill attribute; the.NET analog is a Path class with a Fill property of type Brush. There are other arguments as well, but I'm not too familiar with them.
Nothing like strolling into the office in the morning and finding your computer still at the shutdown screen... and what is it holding it open, pray tell? Not the IDE. Not the source control client. Not the database browser. Nope. Adobe Reader is sitting there smugly asking "are you sure you want me to shut down?" holding up the whole system from logging off. FFS, it's VIEWING TEXT - it can shutdown when I damn well ask it to.
This is fixed in Vista. In XP, applications can request that shutdown be aborted in response to the WM_QUERYENDSESSION message. In Vista, any such requests are ignored. See this for more details.
It's not that making this change was difficult from a technical standpoint; it just breaks app compat. And yes, it's about time app compat was broken for the sake of sane shutdowns.
Thanks, I'll take a read of that blog. One question I'd have for you is, how customizable is it? Just dumping a pile of functions in front of people is relatively useless unless it can be organized according to personal preference.
Not customizable at all except for a toolbar at the top which you can completely customize with your own commands. Sounds crazy? I thought so too until I read Let's Talk About Customization:
In fewer than 2% of sessions, the program was running with customized command bars.
Of the 2% of sessions with customizations present, 85% included customization of four or fewer commands.
So while this is a blow to heavy customizers, it doesn't affect most users. I was actually shocked at first thinking how bad the lack of customization would be, but then realized I haven't modified Office toolbars for years.
What do I need from my UI? Leave it as it is. I have exactly two toolbars in either Word or Excel, and use a fraction of each (if I'm that concerned about screen space, I'll customise more carefully).
In fewer than 2% of sessions, the program was running with customized command bars.
Of the 2% of sessions with customizations present, 85% included customization of four or fewer commands.
Perhaps the new UI is not so useful for you, since you know all the shortcuts and know how to customize the UI for maximal productivity, but most people do not know or do such things, myself included. You know where everything is, so the ribbon doesn't help you much. I barely know where anything is, and the ribbon makes things a lot easier to find now for me.
What it hasn't done is give anyone any compelling reasons to upgrade. Someone needs to explain precisely how this "ribbon" feature adds value. What does it say about the product as a whole when it's THE most talked-about aspect of the new version? Is the product so stagnant that the only way to get people to eye it as a purchase is to shuffle around the UI a bit?
I would agree with you if it was merely a UI shuffle, but I've used Office 2007 for several months now, and find the new UI to be considerably more usable. Aside from Outlook, I'm not a heavy user, meaning I don't create documents all day, but I do read them often and occasionally I need to make my own. The end result is that I don't know all the shortcuts, what some commands do, or even what commands I need.
The new UI makes finding such commands a lot easier. Instead of navigating 9 top-level menus and numerous submenus in Word 2003, there are instead 7 tabs in Word 2007 and very few dropdowns (I'm assuming so; I can't remember any off the top of my head) to find commands. The biggest difference is in Excel; I'm basically a noob in it but had a far less frustrating time using 2007 recently to make some quick charts and formatting it the way I wanted. Commands now also have more informative tooltips; they're like mini-documentation pages embedded in the app. Formatting previews are also useful. Sometimes you don't know how a command will format something; in 2007 you can hover over the command and get a real-time preview in your document.
For me, the major problem with 2003 is feature discoverability, and that is something 2007 addresses very well. Perhaps if you know where all the features are and their shortcuts you'll find 2007 confusing, but for non-power users like me, all the above combine wonderfully to make 2007 a lot more usable than 2003.
Regarding your comment on UI shuffling, a lot of thought has gone into it. Read Jensen Harris's Office 2007 blog. He describes a lot of the studies and work that went into designing the Office 2007 UI. Excellent resource and insight, especially if you design UIs yourself.
...thus marking the first time that using XML ever made any data representation more compact.
Office 2007 saves files in the Open Packaging Conventions format, which is basically a collection of zipped files following a specified layout. This is how they achieve the space savings. Yes, this means unzip, Winzip, and built-in Windows zip will work with them.
XPS (the PDF competitor) also uses Open Packaging Conventions. You can download Windows_Vista_Product_Guide_Beta_2.xps
, rename it to.zip, and open it to see for yourself.
DirectX10 and Vista also means Microsoft will drop support for OpenGL in Windows.
Not true; see Kam VedBrat's comments on Vista and OpenGL support. To summarize, Microsoft will provide an OpenGL 1.4 implementation that sits on top of Direct3D, legacy (XP-era) OpenGL ICDs are supported but will disable Aero, and new OpenGL ICDs may be written that works with Aero.
Stop making up stuff. The full list of.NET 2.0 breaking changes is available here; at least cite examples from those if you're going to make claims that.NET 2.0 is completely incompatible with 1.0/1.1.
1) "We added 200 new keywords to the language which will nameclash with your code".
C# 2.0 maintains full source compatibility regarding keywords. The new keywords (where, yield, partial) work only under certain contexts, and can still be used as variable names. For example, where and partial work only in class definitions, i.e. public partial class Blah where T : class, and yield can only exist as yield return 4. There is no legal 1.0/1.1 code like that.
2) "We added 400 new classes to the library which will nameclash with your code".
Types you define in your assembly take precedence over those in other assemblies, so there's no compilation issue. If you want to use new classes that clash with yours, you can add a using SubstituteClassName = ClashingClassName and use the new substitute name.
3) "That function/class no longer does what it used to do".
7) "That function/class now takes a different number of parameters".
8) "That function/class is no longer compatible with that other function/class".
9) "We changed that parameter datatype to X".
Look at the breaking changes page and tell me which one of those impacts you severely. All the changes I see are to fix bugs or security issues, or remove extraneous functionality. New signatures are simply added as overloads and the old signature made obsolete where necessary. See next for why obsolete doesn't mean a break change.
4) "That function/class is no longer available".
5) "That function/class has been replaced by X".
6) "That function/class has been renamed to X".
You can find a list of obsolete APIs here. And before you respond with "see!!! all those obsolete APIs break my code!!!", they're all either obscure or unsafe parts of the API, or have been updated to take advantage of new.NET 2.0 constructs. Furthermore, they're merely marked obsolete and will only generate a warning; you can still use them if you choose.
10) "The new tool won't import your projects properly, so you have to recreate them from scratch (with absolute pathnames) (tied to the user login who created them) (and cryptically stored in the registry) (and you can't run the old tool to see what it looked like)".
That is likely a failing on your part. Visual Studio 2002/2003/2005 all generate solutions that reference projects with relative paths. None of that is stored in the registry; hell, I've been uploading my projects to a Subversion repository and working on them from a variety of locations for years without any path problems.
11) "You can only do that with our new brain-dead wizard".
12) "The tool is smarter than you are, do it the tools way".
All the wizards/tools generate.NET code; you can code everything manually if you'd like, including Winforms and ASP.NET. Even the project files are XML, and in.NET 2.0, you can compile everything without even the IDE installed. What examples do you have of stuff that requires a wizard to work?
This looks like it would be a royal pain to read and write, or to write software capable of reading or writing it. In fact, I seem to remember a simple PDF is quite a bit easier, but perhaps that's just because I didn't use any of the complex features it has.
I would argue that XPS is easier since I can manually modify it by unzipping, modifying the constituent files (XML, images, fonts), then rezipping. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but with PDF I believe at least a reader/writer program is required; the format is not human readable.
The one complex feature I see with your Glyphs example is Indices, which describes the individual glyphs required to render the string, as well as spacing between glyphs. Indices and StyleSimulations are optional, so the remaining attributes are quite simple. FontUri may look scary but remember that XPS is really a ZIP file in disquise; you could have a FontUri of "myfont.ttf" if you were so inclined. Thus, Glyphs can be as simple as:
<Glyphs Fill="#ff000000" FontUri="myfont.ttf" FontRenderingEmSize="10.7" OriginX="144" OriginY="123.84" UnicodeString="centers. A stroke with a width of 0 is treated in the same manner."/>
Furthermore, Windows Presentation Foundation provides all the necessary APIs to generate XPS documents. You never have to deal with the XML or ZIP file. And hopefully as you can see from my example, writing your own code to handle all this won't be as difficult as you make it sound.
I notice that it's unusual XML in that the parameters and text are all within the angle brackets. That means normal XML readers are going to have a hard time with it, which I suspect was the idea. This is not in the open standard spirit, is it?
Your comment is simply bizarre. XML allows 0 or more attributes in an element, so any XML reader that can't read that is non-standard. Plus the XML format is XAML; you could move all the attributes to elements if you wanted:
<Glyphs> <Glyphs.Fill>#ff000000</Glyphs.Fill> <Glyphs.FontUri>/Documents/1/Resources/Fonts/CA78F 0B5- 3077-43A2-8AC0-53671B1EB57C.odttf</Glyphs.Fo ntUri> <Glyphs.FontRenderingEmSize>10.6997</Glyphs.FontRe nderingEmSize> <Glyphs.StyleSimulations>None</Glyphs.StyleSimulat ions> <Glyphs.OriginX>144</Glyphs.OriginX> <Glyphs.OriginY>123.84</Glyphs.OriginY> <Glyphs.Indices>70;72;81;87;72,59;85;86,53;17;3,34;36;3,34;86,53;87;85,41;82;78,60;72,59;3;90,83; 76,26;87;75;3;68,58;3,36;90;76;71,63;87,38;75,62;3,36;82,59;73,36;3;19;3,36;76;8 6,50;3,36;87;85;72;68;87;72,58;71,63;3;76;81,61;3,36;87;75,62;72;3,36;86;68;80,9 6;72,59;3,36;80,96;68;81,62;81;72;85;17;3,34</Glyphs.Indices> <Glyphs.UnicodeString>centers. A stroke with a width of 0 is treated in the same manner. "</Glyphs.UnicodeString> </Glyphs>
Then you couple that "fact" with the fact that it only is supported in Vista and probably uses binary blobs in the XML makes it totally useless for people like me who avoid MSFT products like the plague.
Incorrect. The XPS specification is available here, and makes no mention of binary blobs inside XML files. XPS itself is binary, but simply because it's a zip file containing XML pages, images, and fonts. Want go generate an XPS document? Output a couple of text-only XML files and zip it up! In fact, try downloading the product guide, renaming to a zip file, and unzipping it.
Of course Microsoft want to to, and personally I don't think Adobe have a leg to stand on in complaining about it. The only worry with Microsoft as always is that "their" PDF won't be quite compatible with everyone elses.
At this point they have no reason to make their PDF incompatible since Microsoft doesn't make a PDF viewer. Incompatible PDFs would simply make them look bad. Plus they have their XPS format; thus it wouldn't make sense for them to expend resources on making a PDF viewer and extending PDF.
Sure, they can keep xps, it looks like a decent enough format. Just be sure to publish the spec!
Specs are available here. It includes the XPS spec itself, which describes the format of the XML files to render pages, and the packaging specs, which describes how those XML files, resources (images, fonts) are packaged together. Office 2007 uses the same packaging specs, which is really just a zip file with certain XML files describing how stuff is connected. A nice side effect is that to generate an XPS document you simply need to output XML and resources, and zip everything up.
First of all, if there's anything you dislike about Vista, complain here. It's a beta release, so there's still time to fix issues. They also have newsgroups. Device issues, software installs, UI issues, non-working games, etc.; they're all good issues to point out.
I like the new file explorer interface but from the initial feel it seems to be more about the look than the functionality of the desktop.
One of the new features I like is quick category searching via the column headers. I'm doing this from memory, but if you click on the button next to File Type, for example, you can quickly cull the current view down to all JPEGs and PNGs.
I have not installed the wireless networking yet but without my firewall, anti-spyware and anti-virus products, I'm not sure that I even want to connect the the internet.
Vista comes with a firewall and antispyware (Windows Defender). They're both in the control panel, and at least the firewall is quite configurable. I believe outbound blocking is off by default, but can be enabled. I haven't used Windows Defender to judge its usefulness.
It's just MS inventing an excuse to justify not using PDF. Come on, if you were on the verge of releasing a completely redundant format that was supposed to overtake one you were constantly using, and you needed your format to look more important, what would you do?
They're also removing XPS exporting support from Office at Adobe's request; see this blog post. If they're taking out PDF to push usage of XPS, it wouldn't make sense to remove XPS as well. I personally think they should keep XPS, but we all know how people like you will react...
Whoops, my mistake: #39 is Windows Live Local (google earth wannabe)
I'm assuming you meant Google Maps; Microsoft doesn't have a Google Earth competitor. Anyhow, have you actually used Live Local lately? Stuff it has that Google Maps does not:
Slashdot Mirror
On older builds of Vista it was impossible to get rid of this sound, but after enough complaining they added a checkbox in the Sound control panel. See this for more details.
Actually, I think it is a threat. I use Live Local/Virtual Earth almost exclusively. Here's why (adapted from a post I wrote in a previous story that didn't get much attention):
Of course it has downsides:
If you're interested in looking at satellite imagery, Google is the better choice. But if you want to find places and get directions to them, and share those places with people, I believe Live is far better.
What browser are you using? I tried it with Firefox 2.0 today and it had infinite scroll. Downlevel browsers will revert to the standard page-by-page view.
I disagree on performance. Live Local, like most other Live services, fails on performance when compared to Google. I can tell because my primary machine is a 1.7 GHz laptop with only 512 MB of RAM. Any slow website results in the annoying fan spinning up, and I get this far more often on Live Local than Google Maps.
With that in mind, I use Live Local almost exclusively. Here's why:
Aside from performance Live Local is also lacking in aerial imagery. Google Maps has considerably more detail in places like Shanghai, Pyongyang, Ho Chi Minh City, etc. But when it comes to actual usefulness, I use Live Local.
I use it, although in all honesty, it's about the same as Google search for me. Results are good enough that I'm happy. However, I do like Live Image Search far more than Google Image Search. Live Image search has infinite scroll (no more clicking Next), the images are more relevant in my experience (try "Al Gore" on Live and Google), and it lists related people. It also has my favorite feature: you can add images you've found to a scratchpad. This is quite useful if you want to gather images while searching.
"Indigo" was not cancelled. It's the code name for what became Windows Communication Foundation, which is alive and well.
In case people are wondering, yes, 64-bit Vista anti-virus software exists. See this post for details.
Simple: Windows Presentation Foundation is positioned as the next-generation UI toolkit. XPS is a part of it.
This CNet article indicates otherwise:
Adobe's response mentions fears of Microsoft "embracing and extending" PDF:
Microsoft employee Brian Jones has a blog response which claims that Microsoft works to honor PDF standards, including supporting ISO 19005-1 compliant PDF/A:
What's the truth behind it all? I personally agree with Brian Jones. Writing a half-baked implementation of PDF wouldn't do Microsoft any good; they'd get tons of negative publicity and no one would ever use the feature, even if it improved in the future.
XPS is a part of .NET Framework 3.0, which also comes with an XPS Document Writer printer. You can use that to print documents from any application to XPS files for free. As for reading/writing the format, just download the XPS specification. Note that the specification itself is an XPS document; viewers are available here. Also try renaming the spec from .xps to .zip, and poking around in the XML files it contains.
Those are the same comments people have made regarding Windows Presentation Foundation (AKA "Avalon") and XAML. Guess what? The pages in an XPS document are XAML files represented in a strict subset of WPF. In fact, the XPS viewer provided as part of .NET 3.0 is powered by WPF.
As for what differentiates it from SVG, WPF provides a higher level of elements that do not exist in SVG, namely UI controls such as DockPanel, InkCanvas, TextBox, and even 3D content via Viewport3D. The New York Times Reader is built purely using WPF. You can't do that with SVG without writing the controls from scratch (but please enlighten me if I'm wrong). Therefore, while XPS itself isn't much different from SVG, the architecture in which XPS resides reaches far beyond SVG.
There's still another argument against XPS/XAML/WPF: Why didn't Microsoft simply extend SVG? IMO it would break one point of elegance regarding WPF, which is that the XML elements correspond directly to the .NET WPF objects and follow .NET naming conventions. For example, XPS has a Path element with a Fill attribute; the .NET analog is a Path class with a Fill property of type Brush. There are other arguments as well, but I'm not too familiar with them.
This is fixed in Vista. In XP, applications can request that shutdown be aborted in response to the WM_QUERYENDSESSION message. In Vista, any such requests are ignored. See this for more details.
It's not that making this change was difficult from a technical standpoint; it just breaks app compat. And yes, it's about time app compat was broken for the sake of sane shutdowns.
Not customizable at all except for a toolbar at the top which you can completely customize with your own commands. Sounds crazy? I thought so too until I read Let's Talk About Customization:
So while this is a blow to heavy customizers, it doesn't affect most users. I was actually shocked at first thinking how bad the lack of customization would be, but then realized I haven't modified Office toolbars for years.
Jensen Harris (Office 2007 developer) talks about this in Let's Talk About Customization. From his post:
Perhaps the new UI is not so useful for you, since you know all the shortcuts and know how to customize the UI for maximal productivity, but most people do not know or do such things, myself included. You know where everything is, so the ribbon doesn't help you much. I barely know where anything is, and the ribbon makes things a lot easier to find now for me.
I would agree with you if it was merely a UI shuffle, but I've used Office 2007 for several months now, and find the new UI to be considerably more usable. Aside from Outlook, I'm not a heavy user, meaning I don't create documents all day, but I do read them often and occasionally I need to make my own. The end result is that I don't know all the shortcuts, what some commands do, or even what commands I need.
The new UI makes finding such commands a lot easier. Instead of navigating 9 top-level menus and numerous submenus in Word 2003, there are instead 7 tabs in Word 2007 and very few dropdowns (I'm assuming so; I can't remember any off the top of my head) to find commands. The biggest difference is in Excel; I'm basically a noob in it but had a far less frustrating time using 2007 recently to make some quick charts and formatting it the way I wanted. Commands now also have more informative tooltips; they're like mini-documentation pages embedded in the app. Formatting previews are also useful. Sometimes you don't know how a command will format something; in 2007 you can hover over the command and get a real-time preview in your document.
For me, the major problem with 2003 is feature discoverability, and that is something 2007 addresses very well. Perhaps if you know where all the features are and their shortcuts you'll find 2007 confusing, but for non-power users like me, all the above combine wonderfully to make 2007 a lot more usable than 2003.
Regarding your comment on UI shuffling, a lot of thought has gone into it. Read Jensen Harris's Office 2007 blog. He describes a lot of the studies and work that went into designing the Office 2007 UI. Excellent resource and insight, especially if you design UIs yourself.
Office 2007 saves files in the Open Packaging Conventions format, which is basically a collection of zipped files following a specified layout. This is how they achieve the space savings. Yes, this means unzip, Winzip, and built-in Windows zip will work with them.
XPS (the PDF competitor) also uses Open Packaging Conventions. You can download Windows_Vista_Product_Guide_Beta_2.xps , rename it to .zip, and open it to see for yourself.
Not true; see Kam VedBrat's comments on Vista and OpenGL support. To summarize, Microsoft will provide an OpenGL 1.4 implementation that sits on top of Direct3D, legacy (XP-era) OpenGL ICDs are supported but will disable Aero, and new OpenGL ICDs may be written that works with Aero.
Stop making up stuff. The full list of .NET 2.0 breaking changes is available here; at least cite examples from those if you're going to make claims that .NET 2.0 is completely incompatible with 1.0/1.1.
C# 2.0 maintains full source compatibility regarding keywords. The new keywords (where, yield, partial) work only under certain contexts, and can still be used as variable names. For example, where and partial work only in class definitions, i.e. public partial class Blah where T : class, and yield can only exist as yield return 4. There is no legal 1.0/1.1 code like that.
Types you define in your assembly take precedence over those in other assemblies, so there's no compilation issue. If you want to use new classes that clash with yours, you can add a using SubstituteClassName = ClashingClassName and use the new substitute name.
Look at the breaking changes page and tell me which one of those impacts you severely. All the changes I see are to fix bugs or security issues, or remove extraneous functionality. New signatures are simply added as overloads and the old signature made obsolete where necessary. See next for why obsolete doesn't mean a break change.
You can find a list of obsolete APIs here. And before you respond with "see!!! all those obsolete APIs break my code!!!", they're all either obscure or unsafe parts of the API, or have been updated to take advantage of new .NET 2.0 constructs. Furthermore, they're merely marked obsolete and will only generate a warning; you can still use them if you choose.
That is likely a failing on your part. Visual Studio 2002/2003/2005 all generate solutions that reference projects with relative paths. None of that is stored in the registry; hell, I've been uploading my projects to a Subversion repository and working on them from a variety of locations for years without any path problems.
All the wizards/tools generate .NET code; you can code everything manually if you'd like, including Winforms and ASP.NET. Even the project files are XML, and in .NET 2.0, you can compile everything without even the IDE installed. What examples do you have of stuff that requires a wizard to work?
This looks like it would be a royal pain to read and write, or to write software capable of reading or writing it. In fact, I seem to remember a simple PDF is quite a bit easier, but perhaps that's just because I didn't use any of the complex features it has.
I would argue that XPS is easier since I can manually modify it by unzipping, modifying the constituent files (XML, images, fonts), then rezipping. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but with PDF I believe at least a reader/writer program is required; the format is not human readable.
The one complex feature I see with your Glyphs example is Indices, which describes the individual glyphs required to render the string, as well as spacing between glyphs. Indices and StyleSimulations are optional, so the remaining attributes are quite simple. FontUri may look scary but remember that XPS is really a ZIP file in disquise; you could have a FontUri of "myfont.ttf" if you were so inclined. Thus, Glyphs can be as simple as:
Furthermore, Windows Presentation Foundation provides all the necessary APIs to generate XPS documents. You never have to deal with the XML or ZIP file. And hopefully as you can see from my example, writing your own code to handle all this won't be as difficult as you make it sound.
I notice that it's unusual XML in that the parameters and text are all within the angle brackets. That means normal XML readers are going to have a hard time with it, which I suspect was the idea. This is not in the open standard spirit, is it?
Your comment is simply bizarre. XML allows 0 or more attributes in an element, so any XML reader that can't read that is non-standard. Plus the XML format is XAML; you could move all the attributes to elements if you wanted:
Then you couple that "fact" with the fact that it only is supported in Vista and probably uses binary blobs in the XML makes it totally useless for people like me who avoid MSFT products like the plague.
Incorrect. The XPS specification is available here, and makes no mention of binary blobs inside XML files. XPS itself is binary, but simply because it's a zip file containing XML pages, images, and fonts. Want go generate an XPS document? Output a couple of text-only XML files and zip it up! In fact, try downloading the product guide, renaming to a zip file, and unzipping it.
Of course Microsoft want to to, and personally I don't think Adobe have a leg to stand on in complaining about it. The only worry with Microsoft as always is that "their" PDF won't be quite compatible with everyone elses.
At this point they have no reason to make their PDF incompatible since Microsoft doesn't make a PDF viewer. Incompatible PDFs would simply make them look bad. Plus they have their XPS format; thus it wouldn't make sense for them to expend resources on making a PDF viewer and extending PDF.
Sure, they can keep xps, it looks like a decent enough format. Just be sure to publish the spec!
Specs are available here. It includes the XPS spec itself, which describes the format of the XML files to render pages, and the packaging specs, which describes how those XML files, resources (images, fonts) are packaged together. Office 2007 uses the same packaging specs, which is really just a zip file with certain XML files describing how stuff is connected. A nice side effect is that to generate an XPS document you simply need to output XML and resources, and zip everything up.
First of all, if there's anything you dislike about Vista, complain here. It's a beta release, so there's still time to fix issues. They also have newsgroups. Device issues, software installs, UI issues, non-working games, etc.; they're all good issues to point out.
I like the new file explorer interface but from the initial feel it seems to be more about the look than the functionality of the desktop.
One of the new features I like is quick category searching via the column headers. I'm doing this from memory, but if you click on the button next to File Type, for example, you can quickly cull the current view down to all JPEGs and PNGs.
I have not installed the wireless networking yet but without my firewall, anti-spyware and anti-virus products, I'm not sure that I even want to connect the the internet.
Vista comes with a firewall and antispyware (Windows Defender). They're both in the control panel, and at least the firewall is quite configurable. I believe outbound blocking is off by default, but can be enabled. I haven't used Windows Defender to judge its usefulness.
It's just MS inventing an excuse to justify not using PDF. Come on, if you were on the verge of releasing a completely redundant format that was supposed to overtake one you were constantly using, and you needed your format to look more important, what would you do?
They're also removing XPS exporting support from Office at Adobe's request; see this blog post. If they're taking out PDF to push usage of XPS, it wouldn't make sense to remove XPS as well. I personally think they should keep XPS, but we all know how people like you will react...
Whoops, my mistake: #39 is Windows Live Local (google earth wannabe)
I'm assuming you meant Google Maps; Microsoft doesn't have a Google Earth competitor. Anyhow, have you actually used Live Local lately? Stuff it has that Google Maps does not:
Google Maps has the benefit of speed, but Live Local beats it in features. So it may be a google maps wannabe, but a very good one at that.