Office 2007 -- A 5 Minute Review

OK so I'll admit my work has gotten pretty heavy lately which slowed my testing of Office 2007. While I will hopefully use it for a few more tests through out the month, there's quite a few things that you can immediately see in the first few minutes of the installation.

The obvious changes are to the UI itself. Now keep in mind, in order to keep my review totally unbiased I don't read any prior articles or the company line about what they like to call stuff :P So take everything in here with a grain of salt. In fact take it with a full bottle of salt.

The old UI schema which centered around basic toolbars and a fairly static menu has been replaced by a series of smart panels. These panels are more like discrete groupings of commands/options grouped by function. I find this fairly useful though the amount of interface real estate that it occupies might seem a bit heavy.

The menu bar is replaced by context areas. Hitting alt for instance will not bring up a "legacy" mode menubar, but rather shows you the alpha-char shortcuts for the new context menus. I'll be looking at ways to reshape this UI to a more "legacy" mode but for now that has been an oddity to me.

Stability wise the beta preview has been good. Very few issues opening, closing and transitioning. The functional smart panels are also intuitive for the tech savvy, but I tend to wonder how less experienced users are going to make the transition.

Much like with Vista, I see some things moving in a good direction but there's the question of, is this product going to provide a good transition or is it really meant to be a users "first" experience? Hopefully I'll have more to say as I get to test Office 2007 more.

Are Theaters Dead?

Let's face it, who wants to go to a theater where there are the ever present cliches of the screaming baby, the talker, the kicker and the spill guy. Amid increasing costs, lack luster movie released and the overall disdain for uncomfortable chairs and unhealthy snacks, the mystique of the theater is steadily waining.

With the technology of home theaters becoming more affordable, is the brick and mortar theater doomed to a population of teens looking to cop a feel and Pee-wee Herman inspired autoerotics? The thought itself is scary but also logical in a weird, science fictiony sort of way.

Technology to me is the greatest double-edged sword around. On the one hand it has enabled us to stay in touch with people across the globe. In the same instant though it's bred a culture devoid of real desire to interact with one another directly (I'm not even going to mention sex here). Will we some day become a species which only talks to one another and interacts solely on a virtual plane? I for one will be very scared when all we do with our lives is play a great big game of World of Worldcraft.

Vista -- A Short Look

So like a lot of other folks I also downloaded Vista Beta 2 (granted had I subscribed to MSDN earlier this year I would have been able to eval Beta 1, but I digress).

Initially my view was not so great, during the first day of availability I found the ISO I had attempted to download wouldn't load :\ into my VMWare session. Once I had a clean ISO though I reinstalled and all was well for the most part.

Due to the nature of VMWare the installation was somewhat troublesome as it ran at 800x600 resolution since Vista couldn't match up the display adapter. Once installed however a quick load of the VMWare Tools resolved the issues with the Video and LAN drivers. Audio drivers still appear to be at a loss but I'm sure I can find a workaround.

One of the things about the revised interface of Vista which I think may be off-putting to new users is that familiar reference menus such as the proverbial File, Edit and so forth are not typically on by default. Most of the internal Windows tools use a very spartan interface. While I can understand the reason for this, I found that some of the placement of menus and icons to be rather unproductive. From a support standpoint I can imagine this to be a nightmare.

Smaller quirks also exist. If you look at the Windows button (or what normally is the Start button) you'll notice the menus are again streamlined. However rather oddly to me, the lower right field consists of a 3-item cluster which I'll refer to as the Suspend/Lock/Shutdown trio. The catch here is that the two prominent buttons are the Suspend and Lock, the Shutdown panel is actually a very small Right-arrow subpanel. Thus far I haven't seen any option using the Vista theme and desktop appearance to change that.

Sometimes the user protection system which requires you to manually verify changes gets a little too annoying. As an example creating folders under the Programs folder to organize your apps requires 2-verifications with default User permissions.

Visually I was unable to test Aero due to limitations stemming from testing in a VMWare session, but overall the interface changes aren't so bad that a good IT admin won't be able to adapt, but I worry for newer users or folks who are just now becoming familiar with the WinXP theme style.

In some ways I can understand the attempts to streamlining the UI but in some ways I find it a good way for confusion to form for end-users. Context menus don't always seem to be pop up when I expect and every once in a while a context help bubble will seem to give TOO much information, to the point that the panel is occluding a good portion of the UI itself.

All in all I'd imagine users familiar with Windows will not have a hard time of the change but menu navigation may take some adjustments early on.

A word about value (HL2:Epi 1)

So take an engine that should have been released earlier. Update it, add content to an already enjoyable storyline and what do you have? You get the first of three episodes being released for HL2.

Now I will preface, I've been busy so I haven't had a chance to tear through the game and finish in the requisite 4 hours, but I can give you my first impressions. The game is polished to be sure, improvements that we've already seen in Lost Coast, CSS and other mods such as the HDR options are used to good affect in E1. Having a side kick along, though sometimes feeling stiffling adds a nice dimension for what was mostly a pure single-player title. Puzzles are interesting, enemies moderate, but most of all the whole package, while not mindblowing is fun.

A lot of folks have taken exception to relatively short play-time offered by this first episode. While I can understand their frustration I tend to look at it more as a question of did you get your moneys worth. In all fairness there have been games at launch that charged $50 for 20 hours of gameplay, but the catch is, if that 20 hours of is boring, ploding and fairly unimaginative really are you getting your money's worth?

I for one am happy with what I've gotten out of HL2:E1, a tightly created title which extends an already very enjoyable Single Player experience.