Eurogamer has some great video coverage of the recent E3 conference held in Los Angeles. The interview of the Europe and UK Xbox heads is well worth a look. They seem very smug, and talk about Sony very distainfully. No wonder, given all the mistakes Sony has made.
[via Digg]
I just saw this on digg. A river over a river. Cool!
It’s in Germany, and spans the former East/West border. It was built as part of the reunification project, for 500 euros.
Ars Technica have the story that in a recent poll commissioned by Japanese entertainment magazine Famitsu, 88% of respondents think that the PlayStation 3 will be too expensive and 69% of people said that they were looking forward to the release of the Nintendo Wii.
So it seems, that in Japan at least, Nintendo are winning the next-generation console war, where both Sony and Nintendo have been battling for supremacy.
It’s interesting that in the Ars Technica story which shows the top ten waited-for games according to the survey, there is only one Xbox 360 title. It is, admittedly, Halo 3, but it is also at the bottom of the list. The original Xbox didn’t do too well in Japan either, with the domination of the PS2.
IEblog have said that in Windows Vista, Windows Internet Explorer will be called Windows Internet Explorer 7+, to make the distinction between the Windows XP and Windows Vista versions of IE7.
The features in IE7+ that won’t feature in the standalone XP version include:
… not forgetting all of the other Vista-IE integrations there will be in the final version.
On the IEblog, people have left comments saying what they think of the new name change. A lot of people just expressed their dislike for the name, but someone made a good point that people will get confused. Saying ‘Requires IE7+’ might leave people confused as to whether that means ‘requires IE7 or greater’ or ‘requires IE7 included in Vista’.
Smart naming choice? Only time will tell.
Nintendo have announced that the Nintendo Wii console will cost 25,000 Yen in Japan (that’s roughly equivalent to £119, or $220).
That does seem very cheap, especially considering that the DS Lite costs 16,800 Yen (£80/$150). Will the low price convince potential PS3/Xbox 360 buyers to buy the Wii? Having said that, Nintendo have said that unlike the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, the Wii will be focused on games-only, and won’t include media features like the Xbox 360’s Media Centre Extender.
Only time will tell who will win the next-generation console war, with Microsoft’s console already released, the Sony PS3 coming in November and the Wii also coming soon.
Google have taken a fairly major step now towards supporting alternative platforms, by releasing their Picasa photo management software for Linux.
Google have only one other product that runs on Linux at the moment (correct me if I’m wrong here), which is the Google Toolbar for Firefox.
They haven’t completely rewritten Picasa for Linux, but have tweaked it to make it work with Wine. Wine is a piece of software that allows you to run simple and older Windows applications quite well under Linux (it works with Paint Shop Pro 4, for example).
Does this mean that Google are becoming more and more distant from Microsoft by supporting platforms other than Windows? Recently, we have seen quite a rift appear between Google and Microsoft; over the IE/MSN Search issue and also I doubt Microsoft are happy about the Google/Dell bundling now going on.
Or maybe Google are just being nice and making the Linux desktop a nicer platform to be on? According to Google, if this release goes well, they are planning to move some of their other applications to Linux as well. Personally, I’d like to see Google Desktop on Linux.
If you’re interested, download Picasa for Linux and check out the message boards. And if you’re interested in Linux…
A friend asked me today what MP3 player he should buy. He has a budget of around £150, and apparently has an ‘irrational objection to Apple’. So, I thought I’d post my answer here.
Sansa e260 4GB - £144.99
This seems to be the iPod Nano competitor that everyone’s talking about. It offers a good feature set, according to the product manual:
In the US, an FM radio with recording is added to the feature set. But for some reason, not in Europe. Even without this feature, it is an impressive set of capabilities, offering features not found in its rival, the Nano. The killer features for me are the ability to expand the memory with MicroSD cards, as this offers a very cheap way to upgrade the capacity now that flash memory prices are so low, and the support for PlayForSure subscription services. This support means that it matters less that the Sansa doesn’t work with iTunes, and that it will be compatible with the new URGE service from MTV and Microsoft. All in all it makes a very good choice for a budget mp3 player, especially if you do have an ‘irrational objection to Apple’.
It seems that Google are taking more steps to try and get their software anywhere they can.
Google have signed a deal with Dell to have Google software, including the Google Toolbar pre-installed on new Dell machines before they leave the factory. The deal also sets up a customised Dell/Google homepage (have a look here), which looks like a Dell-themed version of the current Personalised Google homepage service, with easy access links to Dell pages at the top.
It seems a bit like Google are trying to get a further foothold into the search market by using one of the most popular PC manufacturers to get their search engine and products used.
This move comes just after Google complained about Microsoft planning to set MSN Search as the default search engine in its upcoming Internet Explorer 7 browser, despite the fact that Google is already the default search engine on Mozilla Firefox and has a programme to bundle Google Toolbar with Firefox.
So Google want you to have choice… just so long as you choose Google.
The whole suite
I am extremely impressed. The Ribbon (a new UI feature, instead of conventional menu and toolbars. See this video for a demo) is absolutely fantastic, and has no learning curve at all, which is very important given that Office is a program used by millions of only just computer literate people around the world who don’t like changes to their software. The improvement that it gives to ease of use cannot be underestimated, and it works entirely intuitively. The only problem I anticipate is that the Ribbon is inexplicably not used in all of the office programs. Perhaps the developers felt that it would provide unnecessary complexity in programs such as Outlook, when there are a limited number of options which need to be performed regularly, but in programs such as Publisher I think it would provide a significant advantage. If it were down to me, I would have it in all programs to provide consistency, with the option for users and sysadmins to turn off the ribbon in programs such as Outlook if they preferred the old-fashioned UI.
Word – a case study
My favourite program with, in my opinion, the most improvement on an already strong product is Word. It is truly a joy to use. It looks signiifcantly better than previous versions, as can be seen from the screenshots, and the ribbon has an incredible effect. This is because it makes normally more complex operations so easy to perform. For example, setting up a mail merge is trivial with the new program, with just a few clicks needed, making it a simple operation rather than requiring advanced experience or some training.
The visual appearance of documents is much improved. This is partly because of the great new ClearType font (Calibri), which has replaced Times New Roman as the default for the body text of documents, but also because of the ease of use with which different styles can be applied to the text. It is possible to preview the effect of these styles by simply hovering the cursor over the style option in the ribbon. The changes mean that, although it was possible for advanced users to create great looking documents before the ribbon, it will now be within the reach of every user. The days of drab Times New Roman documents are over.
Apart from the ribbon and the styles, there are lots of other nice features. On the usability front, the status bar now contains some useful information, such as the word count, as well as a zoom bar, which is effective (although I miss the ability to type ‘whole’ into the zoom box on the toolbar, and view whole page immediately. Other features include the ability to easily export to PDF, and an improved file menu. One feature which has the potential to be very popular is the ability to use Word to do a blog post. This is great, but unfortunately it doesn’t work for Wordpress at the moment, as it time stamps posts as written at some point in 1999, and I haven’t managed to properly get pictures uploaded yet. I am sure that this problem will be solved before release, and by adding the feature Microsoft have probably endeared themselves to thousands of bloggers, getting themselves some good press.
Conclusions
Will the release be a success? A resounding yes. It provides a significant advance in features (which makes the tech savvy users happy), whilst improving in usability to make those features visible and, crucially, usable to even the most inexperienced or inept. And even at this Beta 2 stage, it is a highly polished and stable product. I have not had any stability issues with the release, and the only bug I have found is not really even a bug, but a design oversight. Office 2007 is the office suite for 2007, and has really pulled away from OpenOffice.org, it’s nearest competitor. I think that this release justifies the future cost. For the moment though, the beta is free (although it expires on the 31/01/07). Grab it now, and then you’ll know what I’m raving about. Incidentally, if you’re worried about performance issues, it runs at a perfectly respectable speed on my 1.7 ghz Pentium M laptop with 512 ram.
[PS, I wrote this post in Word, and put some cool screenshots, with some great effects in it. I tried to get them up here, but failed. However, you can download a PDF of the post here. Do that, it looks absolutely mint!]
I’ve managed to get my hands on a copy of Office 2007 Beta 2, so here are some preliminary screenshots:
