The New York Times has taken a look at Microsoft Office 2007. "After a radical redesign, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are almost totally new programs. There are no more floating toolbars; very few tasks require opening dialog boxes, and even the menu bar itself is gone. (Evidently, even Microsoft saw the need for a major feature purge. 'We had some options in there that literally did nothing,' said Paul Coleman, a product manager.)"

"Francois Revol, a.k.a. mmu_man, commited this Saturday to the Haiku's source tree his GoogleFS, a project he started working on about 2 to 3 years ago. GoogleFS is basically a queries bookmark, meaning you can search Google right from your Desktop, be it Haiku or ZETA, and the results are displayed like a regular query you run nowadays."

PCLinuxOS 2007 Test 1 is now available for download. It is reviewed at Tuxmachines: "This release is all new, rebuilt from the ground up. Gcc is now version 4.1.1, Xorg is version 7.1.1, and they are using a 2.6.18 kernel. KDE is the newly tagged 3.5.6. This system is faster than ever on my hardware and what's more, it's still incredibly stable."

The Alloy Analyzer is a tool developed by MIT for analyzing models written in Alloy, a simple structural modeling language based on first-order logic. Alloy can be used to detect conceptual mistakes in the model before the coding starts. Scientific American has published an article about it.

Castle and RISC OS Open discuss there plans for the gradual unveiling of an open source RISC OS over the next twelve months. They explain their reasoning behind some of the source code restrictions in their licence. "Castle's Jack Lillingston opened the presentation with a brief run through of his company's products before outlining the shared source initiative - which is designed to get the source code to RISC OS 5 out into the open for free, and encourage third party developers to improve it. Steve then took over to explain more about how the project will be organised, and how they need donations to keep going."

Work by Microsoft's R&D group played a part in revamping Windows, a researcher said Friday, but not all the toil made it into Vista. Microsoft Research contributed to the SuperFetch effort, a feature within Vista that predicts which applications are used when, then pre-loads them so that they're instantly available. "As part of a long term set of projects, we want to teach the computer to learn from users to make the machine more proactive," says Eric Horvitz, a principal researcher with Microsoft's R&D as well as the president-elect of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. "We want to use the system's idle time to make things punchier."

Novell has begun a new element of a years-long effort to coax people away from Windows and toward Linux. It unveiled a Web site Friday that touts purported advantages that Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 has over Windows Vista. The site includes a white paper making the case, a variety of customers who have opted to use the software, and a video arguing that SLED has good usability and a built-in office suite but not Windows' lock-in and high licensing costs.

"SeaMonkey 1.1 is now available. Powered by the same engine as Firefox 2 and the upcoming Thunderbird 2, SeaMonkey 1.1 includes numerous enhancements including more visible security indicators in the browser and enhanced phishing detection for e-mail, a new tagging system for e-mail that supersedes labels, support for multi-line tooltips in web pages, and previews images in tab tooltips. Other changes include inline spell checking in the browser, an updated version of ChatZilla, and a significantly improved startup script on Linux. See the release notes for a complete list of changes."

Apple seeded developers with a new build of Mac OS X Leopard Thursday night, the first in more than a month. Leopard 9A343 is 22 builds newer than the previous seed, 9A321, and marks the 102nd build since Apple first distributed seeds of Leopard to developers at its Worldwide Developers Conference in August last year.

For independent software vendors, one of the major problems in supporting GNU/Linux is the variety of package management systems. However, if the Free Standards Group has its way, the next version of the Linux Standard Base will solve that problem by providing an application programming interface that acts as a bridge between the major package systems and software installers. Ian Murdock, CTO of the Free Standards Group, says the solution could be included in the most widely used distributions by early 2008.

"Customers and partners can sometimes make a difference. In accordance with their feedback and Mandriva's analysis of the overall advantages and drawbacks of the longer development schedule, Mandriva decided to adjust the life cycle of the consumer oriented products to a shorter 6 month period."

"Bitrock's InstallBuilder and Macrovision's Install Anywhere Enterprise edition are tools for building third-party software installers. InstallBuilder uses Qt widgets, while Install Anywhere requires a Java Virtual Machine, but both are cross-platform, multi-lingual, proprietary tools that are available in downloadable demos. Both, too require minimal expertise to use. When run in wizard mode, Install Anywhere is more basic than InstallBuilder and suffers in comparison, but, when run in Advanced Designer mode, it eclipses its rival with a huge set of options."

"The Fedora Unity Project is proud to announce the release of new ISO Re-Spins (DVD and CD Sets) of Fedora Core 6. These Re-Spin ISOs are based on Fedora Core 6 and all updates released as of January 11th, 2007. The ISO images are available for i386 and x86_64 architectures via BitTorrent starting Thursday, January 18th, 2007. PPC images will follow within the next 5 days, but will have had only limited testing."

"Did the Microsoft-Novell deal really have anything in it to promote interoperability? What's next for Samba? Should we call it "GNU/Solaris"? What's the first rule of Google? And what goes in your .burritorc file? We ask the only person who can answer all." Note that the first linked page starts playing the podcast immediately.