Again, more news from the PDC. Microsoft senior vice president Steven Sinofsky took the stage Wednesday to discuss Office 12, which he said would hit Beta 1 within a “couple months.” Betas of the Open Office XML format schemes are available starting today. Also, more screenshots of Vista build 5219 can be found here, shots of IE7 here. MS also announced a developer’s toolbar for IE 6 and 7. The toolbar would allow the developer to see how pages would look in various screen resolutions, validate HTML and CSS code, and perform numerous other functions that Web designers would find useful. You can read transcripts of the various keynotes here.
Why is there no link for the Open Office XML schema? Everything else has a link!
And could someone eenlighten me – is this the schema that OpenOffice.org uses, or the new “open” XML schema that Microsoft Office will be using?
Oh, and forgot to add; Going by the screenshots, IE7 is going to be very impressively ugly.
I thought it was quite simple – nice neutral colours for backgrounds, and then something that stands out more for buttons. This makes it a lot easier for the user to see what they can interact with in the interface, and is less of an eyesore. You’d have thought one of the richest companies in the world could afford some decent UI designers!
You’d have thought that someone commenting on OS News would know what beta stands for.
I’m not sure what you mean by “ is this the schema that OpenOffice.org uses, or the new “open” XML schema that Microsoft Office will be using?.” There are already fully documented XML exports in Office XP but Office 12 will use new XML schemas as default. And AFAIK OO uses OASIS schemas.
It’s a preview of the Office 12 XML Schemas.
It’s located here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=22&p=6&SrcDisplayLa…
For the 1,000,000 time: The UI in these Vista betas is NOT final. Aero Glass has yet to be seen. Lets wait till then to bash the UI.
Why were previous stories about sparkle and acrillic removed with the links to the channel9 movie? Call me crazy but ms really showed off the goods on that one, and proved that vista is more than a couple bells and whistles added to xp.
It would have been more polite to point out that the Developer Toolbar for IE was a re-issue, IE-compatible, of the Firefox Developer Toolbar (one of the best Extensions out there, really fantastic).
And note that I’m not whining about “MS is copying”: I expect them to, it’s not a surprise: good stuff gets copied sooner or later (hopefully). Only they could be a little bit less pompous and self-important when doing so…
I laughed when I read that they will have CSS validation n the Dev TB.
Im sorry, but when they do not even have a standard CSS implementation in IE 6, how is a validator going to help you?
They’ll probably validate against the “quirks” engine of IE6/7… it could actually be useful, if you think of it: develop in a standards compliant browser, then run the IE “validator” and check for IE specific quirks/errors/horrors 🙂
It goes without mentioning that they copied of OS X.
So?
We can now officially establish the fact everybody copies everybody. Who cares about the claim to fame of “being first”. MS are the biggest OS maker in the world so of cause they will get the biggest bashing. Trust me if Linux or Apple make it to 90% another underground OS group will start up and end up bashing that OS and the cycle will carry on.
At end of day all these seperate OSes must learn to talk and connect to each other very well. Its not about indivuality its about connecting. The market needs more interconnecting technologies accross platform. There will never be a winner, MS won for a while but now they are being challenged by Linux and Apple which is a good thing because it makes MS get off their contempt state and start improving their OS.
We all know Linux and Apple’s systems are far superior and when they are more central then maybe the computer revolution will take off. But whether its by copying or not, at least MS are trying.
PS. I am not a windows user
Can you please not insult Apple by saying that hideous monstrosity known as Vista bares any resemblance to OS X?
Btw, when are they going to fix the IE7 UI? It looks like ass. Not that I use IE, but anyway…
“Can you please not insult Apple by saying that hideous monstrosity known as Vista bares any resemblance to OS X?”
hehe!
Typical Microsoft. Copy Apple’s brushed metal look, but instead of a classy homage to Apple, its a tacky and ugly version. Some kind of Bizzaro version of Apple’s brushed metal. They can’t even copy ideas without screwing it up.
Brushed metal? where? it’s just a dark gray gradient. There is no brushed metal, there are no stripes, there are no colored “crystal-like” blobs for buttons. So where is the ripoff?
Uhm.. well.. it has grey, and blue.. and some bright colors. Direct OS X rip off!
And it has context menus. Clearly Apple showed us that a second mouse button can be very valuable and wouldn’t you know it. Vista already supports left mouse button. I mean, how low can they go?
I really don’t understand what the big deal is about being able to put the windows at an angle, as is seen in the last Vista screen shot. How can that in any way help productivity? How can it do anything but require a complicated mouse jesture in order to render a window less, not more, visible. To get three windows on the screen to be visible by using this method, they would be so scewed that it wouldn’t matter that you could see them because you would barely be able to see what they contain. Can anyone enlighten me as to the perpose of this?
PS I am an XP user who rather likes the Windows envirvonment, but I can’t say that Vista looks very good. However, I’ve yet to install it (I have the beta ISO, legally, but no DVD-R’s at the moment). However, the new sidebar looks handy if they pare down the graphics a bit, and I like the icons that pop up when you run the mouse over the task bar, those will be great when you have multiple documents, web pages, etc up.
Can anyone enlighten me as to the perpose of this?
The screenshot doesn’t properly explain what it does. This is an alternative to the alt+tab, basically. When pressing alt+space, the windows get skewed in 3D, and you can cycle through them. Each window moves forward, as if using alt+tab now.
Why doesn’t MS provide a “Live CD” that they can give a away for free, just to showcase the Windows product ? – More people would be likely to try it.
I’m interested in looking at it, however, I don’t really want to tie up a PC resource just to evaluate it!
Another reason to go with Linux I guess…
Because they don’t need to. People will get it bundled with their boxes and the techies will buy it. Microsoft gets attention because everyone depends on them, to some extent.
Why doesn’t MS provide a “Live CD” that they can give a away for free, just to showcase the Windows product ? – More people would be likely to try it.
Do we really want a M$ beercoaster monopoly?
Fix the freaking rendering engine of the IE make it W3C compliant, than add new features…
they still do not seem to get it, what developers really need is a standards compliant browser…
Developers need it, but users don’t give a shit as long as the page is rendered correctly in IE.
http://rixstep.com/1/20050915,02.html
That site is a joke, why do some of you insist on posting it?