Office 12 to support PDF natively

Oh, the Office 12 team just announced native PDF support. That’s big.

[Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

I agree. It sucks to be Adobe right now though as a huge chunk of their PDF related profit just went out the door but they really should have seen it coming and I’m sure they’ll survive – they have enough going on around PDF that the Word document to PDF side of it won’t be a major set back for them.

Ah Scoble, you’re just digging yourself deeper and deeper. The cynical part of me wants to point out how unsurprising it is that a Microsoft employee doesn’t understand why an application isn’t a spec and why precise specifications are so important for avoiding vendor lock-in.

But what Dave did was give me an application. It works. And, as a user, I wonder “if the format is so crappy, how did Dave get it to work in his own application?”

I spoke a little while back about Feedburner vs Blogbeat. I wish I’d taken more time to give constructive advice to the Feedburner team about what they could improve because as is so often the case these days, they picked up on my entry and Matt Shobe responded in the comments. One of the things he commented about was being able to redirect your feed so users don’t have to update their subscriptions:

Robert Scoble takes James Robertson to task for criticizing OPML in response to Scoble’s feature request. Mostly I agree with Scoble, when a user asks for a feature you shouldn’t give them a rant about why the specific technology they’re talking about is crap, you should give them your considered, professional opinion and recommendation. Hopefully that means identifying their problems and providing a solution but it might mean just telling them that their proposed solution won’t work and you don’t have an alternative.

As soon as I saw the new Office 12 interface I questioned why you would add modes to a user interface when modes are so frowned on in usability – particularly by Jef Raskin. I was immediately banging my head against the table with the thought that to do anything in the new Office I’d have to figure out which mode the functionality was hidden under instead of just working with the menu categories that I was used to (no better than the ribbon modes but at least I’m used to them). Then I watched Scoble’s video about the new office interface and felt a little better – hey, they’ve got a ton of user data to back them up, people do seem to work in different modes with Word and now the user interface matches the user model. Something just kept bugging me about it though.

I’ve been playing around with the beta of BlogBeat and recently switched on FeedBurner for my feeds (just the free version). Both systems attempt to show who’s reading your blog and provide some statistics about them. FeedBurner does this by looking at the number of people viewing your RSS feed and BlogBeat does it by looking at the number of people looking at your web site.

In the end, you have to realize that the actual numbers are irrelevant because both these methods are really quite inadequate. What they do show however, is trends and comparatives. You can’t say with any real degree of certainty that 100 people read your blog, but you can say with certainty that more people read your blog today than yesterday or that Wednesday is the most popular day. It’s because of this that I much prefer Blogbeat to FeedBurner, even though I suspect that FeedBurner’s number are likely to be more numerically accurate.  With BlogBeat I can see what links people are clicking on around my website, not just what entries they clicked through to. I can see the window size people use when they access my blog – though I wish that were easier to visualize – and the service has a lot of potential to pull out other data about what readers are accessing on the site, more so than just how many people are reading.

I said I couldn’t be bothered setting up my feeds to use FeedBurner.  I lied, curiosity got the better of me and my feeds to go through FeedBurner.  The URLs haven’t changed, there’s just a redirect in place that flicks things over to FeedBurner.  If for some reason you have trouble with my feeds please let me know and if you really object I can give you the non-redirected feed URL that FeedBurner uses to get my feed.

I’ve been playing with the new BlogBeat beta (as best I can tell, you get invited to the beta by complaining that you’re not in the beta) and it’s interesting to see the traffic patterns with my current very sporadic posting schedule.  The big thing I notice is that pretty much every time I write a post, despite the fact that I publish full text feeds, I see a big boost to my readership. These obviously aren’t people who check my homepage regularly since they wouldn’t know to check the page when I post so they must be RSS readers that have clicked through (BlogBeat doesn’t pick up on RSS readership, at least with the way I’ve set it up).

At some point Eclipse seems to have decided that I shouldn’t be doing J2EE development and randomly turned off some of it’s J2EE related features like being able to Run as server or create a new Webapp project. I suspect a software update went bad and it’s screwed over it’s configuration.

Sadly, with the massive number of plugins and crap that makes up an Eclipse install it’s nearly impossible to sort out if one particular plugin got corrupted, if it’s a configuration setting some that got corrupted or if the whole thing is foobar.  The log file for the workspace is particularly unhelpful just reporting that classes are missing – that’s great, where were you expecting to find them though? Which plugin provides that particular class and which plugin is requesting that particular class? Then on a subsequent run it just reports that the plugin is already loaded so it doesn’t need to load again – sadly, the plugin isn’t loaded and none of the functionality it provides is available.

It’s a little bit scary to look at the number of browsers I have in my dock and regularly use.  Mostly this comes about because of the need to test on all the different browsers but still. I have a similar range of browsers on my Windows box at work (it adds Mozilla and Opera to the mix but obviously takes out Camino, Safari and OmniWeb).

In case you don’t recognize the icons, the browsers pictured from top to bottom are: Camino, Safari, Safari (built from CVS), Firefox, Deer Park (Alpha of Firefox 1.5, needs to be upgraded to the beta still, but last week was too hectic to be testing browser betas), OmniWeb and IE.

There’s a lot of talk going around about Sparkle, Microsoft’s new UI design tool set, but I’ve been scared that this is the end of good user interface design since the second paragraph I read about it:

It’s the rise of the graphic designer!

(from Scoble’s blog)

At which point in time did we start letting graphic designers design user interfaces?  What happened to all the user interface designers?  You know, the ones that think about how to make software intuitive and user friendly, efficient and productive as opposed to flashy and cool looking.

I’ve really come to hate bookstores.  I don’t want to buy books online because I like to peruse them a little before I fork out a hundred bucks to make sure it’s really want I want.  The back cover blurb is only accurate on the good books so you’ve got no idea whether you should trust it or not.  When I walk into a brick and mortar book store though they never have what I want.  I was in Borders this afternoon and their computer section seems to have dramatically shrunk and now has “feature shelves” where instead of being full of books they feature just two books on the shelf, most likely to cover up the fact that they don’t have enough stock to actually fill the shelves.