July 02, 2006
Betas.
This week I've been fiddling with some betas -- Microsoft Office 12, for release in 2007, was unleashed recently, and it's surprisingly, amazingly, stable. Word, for one, has been rock-solid so far, with a more intuitive tabbed interface (no more of those horrible movable bars), faster loading, live previews in case you want to change formatting, and so on. Outlook is even better, though shortcut keys to implement GTD (which is what I did in Thunderbird) would be quite helpful. (The best thing about Word, though -- the ability to publish straight to pdf -- will apparently be dropped in the final release, but there are various workarounds, including printer driver downloads, on the net.) OneNote is the best improvement of all, finally letting you create different notebooks.
There are a few bugs, of course: something happens to mapi32.dll which makes Outlook 2003 -- and by extension, my Palm Desktop -- unusable, unless you want to use Outlook 2007 from now on. The workaround was to uninstall Office 2003 completely, and also to download the latest version of Chapura's PocketMirror.
The other bug -- granted, I have very few requirements for my documents and email, so I don't have to deal with graphics and tables and so forth -- has to do with Office 12's insistence that I download their Windows Desktop Search software. (Google Desktop works excellently for me already.) The problem is that the applications remind me of this everytime I load them up, which is quite annoying. But otherwise I'm upgrading to the basic suite once it comes out.
The other beta I've been playing with is Last.fm's beta site, right now for subscribers only.
I love the way the artist images show up next to your playlists now; the charts (not pictured above) also give you the option of easily looking at rolling charts (3 months / 6 months / 1 year).
Posted by the wily filipino at July 2, 2006 11:11 AMgood morning! my name is anna sanchez, and i'm a researcher for the NCCA/UP-ICW -sponsored website www.panitikan.com.ph. i was researching about Ernesto D. Manalo and i came across a three-year-old blog entry of yours about him. i was wondering if we can include one or two of his poems in the site-- can we have your family's permission?
kindly e-mail me at annafelicia.sanchez@gmail.com or panitikan_icw@yahoo.com. thank you very much for your time.
Posted by: ac sanchez on July 9, 2006 03:20 PMI'm absolutely convinced that a lot of Microsoft's 'productivity software' would have been light years greater in the user-friendliness and customizability department if they took their cues from the engineering of computer games.
'Serious' software doesn't HAVE to completely embrace the anarchic nature of open-source development to make me happy. It just has to have better keyboard shortcuts and some reasonable freedom to tinker without actually breaking the damn thing, much like how modding a game engine is much more reasonable than trying to redesign it.
I think those demands are reasonable, yes?
Well fine, I could also use some joystick support. I think joystick support would make Excel spreadsheets much more fun.
Posted by: Matthew Arcilla on August 16, 2006 11:00 AM