September 15th, 2008
Chris Hawley
At work I spent a reasonably large amount of time dealing with email or instant messaging with co-workers, all of which is accomplished through Microsoft products – Outlook for email and Office Communicator for IM.
By default both of these are the 2003 versions, and there’s always been a number of things that have annoyed me. So when a co-worker recently pointed me in the direction of the internal pilots for newer versions of both of these, I set about installing them.
The first, and most noticeable difference, is obviously the appearance. Office 2007 has famously done away with conventional menus and toolbars in favour of the ribbons, although seemingly not across all applications in all circumstances as Outlook only uses them when editing individual items (be they emails, calendar entries or tasks). Office Communicator 2007 also has a UI change, heading towards the Microsoft Live Messenger style, which is probably better than ribbons as there’s not really much scope for them in an IM application. Aside from the obvious niggle that neither of these applications now fit with the rest of the look and feel of my operating systems, the interfaces are actually usable and the ribbon makes a lot of sense.
Moving on from the initial visual impressions and onto the new features, a number of the things that annoyed me appear to have been fixed (such as only being able to search for contacts in communicator in ‘Surname, Firstname’ form – although it doesn’t yet go as far as working by mailid) and there are a number of new features that I like (such as being able to view other people’s calendars in overlay mode with your own).
Communicator 2007 also now stores the conversation logs in a folder in Outlook, making it much easier to find the conversation you had with someone last week compared to the previous implementation we had involving a (often broken) web interface, and also offers an easy way to view previous logs when a conversation has been resumed.
The addition of document previews and image resizing in emails within Outlook is good too, allowing for a quicker look at the contents of attachments without having to load other applications – although it appears we are yet to acquire previewers for PDF files.
I’ve yet to use the other applications properly – having only viewed a couple of Word documents briefly, but if my experience with the editor in Outlook is anything to go by they’re certainly quite usable. The popup formatting element when you select text, for example, is very useful for quickly editing documents.
So far the only downside I’ve discovered, is that they might use slightly more RAM, which can be somewhat of an issue given my machine needs more memory at the best of times when running the variety of other applications that I need to do my job at times.
All in all, Office 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 are a good improvement over their predecessors and I’m happy with them so far.
Posted in Technology
Tags: microsoft, office 2007, office communicator, outlook
September 4th, 2008
Chris Hawley
So, google took a step into the browser market this week with the announcement (and subsequent launch) of Chrome, their webkit based browser. This has been widely blogged about as an interesting move, for various reasons.
Of course, the technology is the first one, with the process-per-tab model being there to stop it from crashing horribly when one tab is dealing with a website that decides to go off on one. A nice idea indeed, as is the idea of jailing off plugins in a similar way (I’ve got pissed off with Flash taking down Firefox at work now, so am currently running with Flashblock enabled to stop this). In a strange turn of events, Microsoft actually got there first with the process-per-tab idea with IE8, so I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Firefox and other browsers look into it.
The main thing, however, that caught my attention was the idea that they’d get much of the market share. As much as we hate it, Internet Explorer has the majority of this, and in the corporate environment things aren’t too likely to change any time soon (especially not with webapps still being deployed that make use of activex controls and broken rendering). This leaves us with Firefox in a comfortable second, albeit miles behind, then Opera, Safari and some other browsers (I’ve not researched this, I’m just going on what makes sense). So where would Chrome fit in?
To my mind, there are two groups of users when it comes to browsers – those who are stuck in their ways using IE, and those who are happy to switch. Obviously the first group is a lost cause, so lets look at the second. This savvy group has already abandoned IE for some other platform, be it Opera or Firefox. To my mind (and at least in my own experience), they’ve likely got whichever browser they picked configured how they wanted; with the extensions and plugins they want installed and set up. Everything just works.
So, how do Google then get these users to move to Chrome? It’s an interesting puzzle. So far (having not used it myself due to the lack of Linux build) people seem impressed with the speed, but miss their extensions (especially an adblock one – which I’m sure google would love to implement) and have found that it is possible to crash the whole thing. Convicing these users to move over is clearly going to take more than a bit of a speed improvement over Firefox. People will want their extensions, and this provides an interesting technological problem for Chrome if it wants to stick with the jailing that they seem to have happily advertised everywhere in their documentation.
Of course, it’s still very early days, and I’ve yet to use it – so will reserve judgement on how well it works until I have – but it’ll be interesting to see how it does in the marketplace.
Posted in Technology
Tags: chrome, firefox, google, internet explorer, opera, safari, web browser, webkit
September 3rd, 2008
Chris Hawley
So, a year ago I started my work – leaving behind the long hours of doing nothing that I had previously enjoyed up until that point. The time until now has seemingly flown by, and it seems strange to think about doing nothing for quite as much time as I previously did.
In the year since I started work I’ve experienced a wide variety of aspects of the business, doing development work for three separate groups – each with their own individual quirks and ways of doing things. I’ve also spent time in the US with the training programme, where I learnt a whole host of new skills, and expanded upon some existing ones. Finally, I’ve also got to know a whole host of other people and have thoroughly enjoyed myself throughout the whole thing.
Going from doing nothing to working an average of forty five hours a week was a bit of a jump, but now it seems like the norm. Sure I’m not averaging a huge amount of sleep during the week, but I’ve got the weekend to relax and get stuff done in, so I don’t actually feel like I’m missing too much – especially as I still find time to see my friends and do things outside of work. Of course, some days drag and it seems like it takes forever to get to 6:30 (when I usually leave) but then there are those that fly by and I find myself confused when the automated e-mails just after market close start arriving.
All in all I’m still enjoying work, and I’m glad that I can say that. It’ll be interesting to see where I am in a year’s time, and what I’m doing, especially given the rapid nature of the industry and the change that the dynamic economic climate often results in.
Posted in Work
Tags: one year in, work life balance