Archive for March, 2007

More on Office 2007

March 31, 2007 No comments

Today was to have been the last day of my Office 2007 trial but I headed over to Amazon.co.uk at the start of the week to bag both Office Home and Student 2007 and Outlook 2007. Both arrived yesterday and I set to ridding my system of all things Office before adding the new software. So the 2007 trial had to go as did Office XP and any reference to Office 97; Office XP was an upgrade. From this, you might think that I am on a five year upgrade cycle for Office and it certainly does appear that way though Office 95 was the first version that I had on a PC; it came with my then more than acceptable Dell Dimension XPS133 (Pentium 133, 16MB RAM, 1.6GB hard drive… it all looks so historical now).

Returning to the present, the 2007 installations went well and all was well on my system. Curiously, Microsoft seems to label the components of Office Home and Student “non-commercial use”. I accept that the licence is that way inclined but they could be a little more subtle than to go emblazoning the application title bars with the said wording. I suppose that it is minor irritation when you consider that you are allowed a three machine licence for what are the full versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. It must be the presence of OpenOffice on the scene that is inducing such benevolence.

Curiously, Outlook isn’t included in Office Home and Student, hence my getting the full version of the application separately. That means that there is no nefarious wording about the purpose for which it should be used. While on the subject of Outlook, my purge of previous Office versions thankfully didn’t rid my system of the PST files that I was using with Outlook 2007’s predecessors. In fact, the new version just picked up where its predecessors had left off without any further ado. As I have been getting used to the new interface, changed from Outlook 2002 but not as dramatically as the likes of Word, Excel or PowerPoint, there is certain amount of continuation from what has gone before in any case. The three-pane window is new to me as I never encountered Outlook 2003 and that may explain why it look a little time to find a few things. An example is that all calenders appear in the same place when I had expected the association between calenders and their PST files to be retained. Nevertheless, it is not at all a bad way to do things but it does throw you when you first encounter it. Its RSS feed reader is a nice touch as are the translucent pop-ups that appear when a new message arrives; that tells you the title and the sender so you can decide whether to read it without so much as having to look at it and interrupt what you are doing.

In a nutshell, all seems well with Office 2007 on my machine and I am set up go forward without the headache of an upgrade cycle since I have recommenced from a clean slate. I have heard of some problems with Office 2007 on Windows Vista but I am running Windows XP and I have had no problems so far. In fact, I plan to sit out the Vista saga for a while in order to see how things develop and, who knows, I might even not bother with Vista at all and go for Vienna, its replacement due in 2009/2010, since XP support is to continue for good while yet.

Operating Systems, Software, Windows

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Is Windows 2000 support finished?

March 30, 2007 One comment

At work, we still use Windows 2000 on our desktop and laptop PC’s. This may (or may not) surprise you but the XP upgrade seems to have been thought a premature move and Vista turned up later than might have been expected. Now that Microsoft is winding down support for Windows 2000, thoughts have started to turn to a Vista upgrade but the realisation soon dawned that a move to Vista was a major one and it now looks as if we will be on Windows 2000 for a little while yet, until 2008 at least.

I too have Windows 2000 lurking around at home as a testing platform, not a work copy I hasten to add, and software vendors increasingly are not supporting the operating system any more. Symantec is one of these with the 2006 versions of its products being the last ones to support Windows 2000. Initially, I was left with the impression that Kapersky was the same but this does not seem to be the case. While the open source community can continue their supply of productivity applications such as OpenOffice, the GIMP and so on, it is the security side that is of most concern as regards the future of Windows 2000. That said, its successors are not the prime targets for cracking but shared code could mean that it falls foul of the same exploits.

I have yet to notice it with the hardware that I am using but hardware advances may yet put paid to Windows 2000 like they did to members of the Windows 9x line, especially when you consider that the operating system dates from 1999. Then again, you may find that you don’t need the latest hardware so this might not affect you. This is not all that unreasonable given that the pace of technological progress is less frenzied these days than it was in the nineties when Windows 95 was more or less out of date by the turn of millennium. Having the gold OEM version of Windows 95 as the basis for a Windows 9x upgrade treadmill mean that my move into the world of NT-based operating systems was a clean break with a full version of my new operating system and not its upgrade edition.

Nevertheless, there remains a feeling that Windows 2000 is being cut off prematurely and that it could last a while longer with a bit of support, even if there is a late nineties feel to the thing. After all, Windows 2000 probably still supports a lot of what people want to do and without the Big Brother tendencies of Vista too.

Operating Systems, Windows

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Want comment spam on your blog?

March 29, 2007 No comments

This is an observation that surprised me: a title on one of my blog posts was helping to drive my Akismet counter a bit wild as the thing was busying itself detecting and quarantining the rubbish. Since changing the offending title, things have calmed down a bit. For me , that’s food for thought…

Web 2.0, Web Development, Web Tools

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Adobe CS3 Launch

March 28, 2007 No comments

Last night, I sat through part of Adobe’s CS3 launch and must admit that I came away intrigued. Products from the Macromedia stable have been very much brought under the Adobe umbrella and progressed to boot. One of these that attracts my interest in Dreamweaver and Adobe is promoting its AJAX capabilities (using the Spry library), its browser compatibility checking facility and integration with Photoshop, among other things. Dreamweaver’s CSS support also gets taken forward. In addition, Dreamweaver can now integrate with Adobe Bridge and Adobe Device Central. The latter allows you to preview how your site might look on a plethora of WAP-enabled mobile phones while the latter, unless I have been missing something, seems to have become a media manager supporting all of CS3 and not just Photoshop.

Speaking of Photoshop, this now gets such new features as smart filters, I think of these as adjustment layers for things like sharpening, monochrome conversion and much more. Raw image processing now has a non-destructive element and Photoshop Lightroom is being touted as a companion for the main Photoshop. Speaking of new additions to the Photoshop family, there is a new Extended edition for those working with digital imaging with a 3D aspect and this is targeted at scientists, engineers, medical professionals and others. It seems that data analysis and interpretation is becoming part of the Photoshop remit now as well.

Dreamweaver and Photoshop are the components of the suite in which I have most interest but I also note that Contribute now has blogging capabilities; it would be interesting to see how these work, especially given Word 2007’s support for blogging tools like WordPress and Blogger. Another member of note is Version Cue, adding version control to the mix and making CS3 more like a group of platforms than collections of applications.

Unsurprisingly, the changes are rung out for the rest of the suite with integration being a major theme and this very much encompasses Flash too. The sight of an image selection being copied straight into Dreamweaver was wondrous in its own way and rendering of Photoshop files into 3D images was also something to behold. The latter was used to demonstrate the optimisations that have been added for the Mac platform, a major selling point apparently.

I suppose that the outstanding question is this: do I buy into all of this? It’s a good question because the computer enthusiast seems to be getting something of a sidelining lately. And that seems to the impression left by Windows Vista in its giving the appearance that Microsoft is trying to be system administrator to the world. There is no doubt but CS3 is very grown up now and centred around work flows and processes. These have always been professional tools and the present level of sophistication and pricing* very much reflects this. That said, enthusiasts like me have been known to use them too, at least for learning purposes. The latter point may yet cause me to get my hands on Photoshop CS3 with its powerful tools for digital imaging but Dreamweaver is another story. It doesn’t fit what how I work now so this is an upgrade that I may give a miss, as impressive as it looks. For a learning experience, I might download a demo but that would a separate matter from updating my web presence. This time next month may tell a tale…

*Pricing remains the bugbear for the U.K. market that it always has been. At the present exchange rates, we should be getting a much better deal on Adobe products that we do. For instance, Amazon.com has the Web Premium CS3 suite from Macromedia Studio 8 priced at $493.99 while it is £513.99 on Amazon.co.uk. Using the exchange rate current as I write this, £1 buying $1.96605, the U.K. price is a whopping $1010.53 in U.S. terms. To me, this looks like price gouging and Microsoft has been slated for this too. I wonder what will be said to Adobe on this one.

Graphics, Mac, Software, Web Development, Web Tools, Windows

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Post popularity plug-in

March 27, 2007 No comments

I found this WordPress plug-in called Popularity Contest while looking for something else, always the best way to find things. Come to think of it, I can’t remember what I was looking for. Anyway, the plug-in polls the popularity of your posts, a very useful piece of information, not that it should deflect from writing about those things about you want to write…

Web 2.0, Web Development, Web Tools

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Turning off WordPress’ visual editor

March 27, 2007 No comments

I was doing sometime that required custom XHTML and got sick 0f the way in which the Visual Editor was mangling my code so I went and turned it off. It’s not in the obvious place where I would expect it.Apparently, it’s a per user setting so you find the relevant tick box (check box in the U.S.) on the Your Profile page in the Users section on your administration dashboard. I would have expected it under Options > Writing but I suppose that they wanted to leave to choice to users without having some jobsworth administrator getting carried away with their limited authority. Speaking of Options > Writing, that’s where you can make the editing box bigger. Now, that might be another user setting… It’s hardly consistent, is it?

Web 2.0, Web Development

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