Technology Tales

Since today was to have been the last day of my Office 2007 trial, 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, so 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 with my system. Curiously, Microsoft seems to label the components of Office Home and Student “non-commercial use”. While I accept that the licence is that way inclined, they could be a little more subtle than to go emblazoning the application title bars with the said wording. Nevertheless, I suppose that it is a 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 a 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 took 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 to go forward without the headache of an upgrade cycle since I have recommenced from a clean slate. Though I have heard of some problems with Office 2007 on Windows Vista, 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 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 a good while yet.

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 with Photoshop Lightroom 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 appears 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, while I also note that the Contribute editor 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 the 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 be the impression left by Windows Vista, it gives 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, with the present level of sophistication and pricing* very much reflecting 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, while Dreamweaver is another story. Given it doesn’t fit what how I work now, 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 than 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. Thus, I wonder what will be said to Adobe on this one.