This week, Microsoft released a whole slew of Beta 2 versions of their upcoming releases for Windows, Office, IE and WinFX. I’ve decided to take the plunge with one of my machines: I’ve installed all the betas except Vista. I’ve also decided to spend my spare programming cycles hitting the curve. The curve is doing a pretty good job of hitting me back, something I’ll post more on.
Herewith some quick (real quick) observations on some of the new beta stuff:
Office 2007
This one is game changing. I’ve been reading Jensen Harris’ blog on the new UI for as long as he’s been blogging. It’s a very good blog; Jensen really tells a great story about the new UI, the effort and deep thinking that went in to its design, and it totally shows. I’ve not done anything crazy in the big three (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) that got the makeover, just basically starting and revving the engine stuff. They all seem really solid, especially when compared to the other betas I’ve downloaded. The Ribbon is sweet and fun and sparkly, but I think the thing that will make this version last years is the time they took in making it easy for schlubs like me to make nice looking documents. The editing experience in Word is amazing. (I’m posting this from Word 2007, BTW)
Outlook 2007
I’m not brave enough to let my email get taken over by a beta, and I’m glad I didn’t. Outlook 07 seems kinda flaky. I’m not a big Outlook user – I use it for email mostly – so I don’t really know how to put it through its paces. One of the big changes is the support for RSS. I decided to use Outlook as my blog reader, since the machine on which I’m doing this isn’t my main machine, and hence doesn’t have my favourite RSS reader. Um, no. Tried it, but it isn’t up to the task. The experience shouldn’t be like email, sorry. One of the biggest things missing is the fact that when I get behind on the blog reading, I can right-click on the top level folder and mark all as read. Outlook won’t let me.
IE 7
Sorry, Firefox is still better. The IE team is doing a great job on rendering issues for CSS and that’s appreciated by the young, inexperienced web designer standards zealot in me, but as a user, IE just doesn’t do it for me. They didn’t get tabs right, IMO. And clicking links from Google Deskbar opens new browser windows, not tabs. Once I switched to Firefox, I got used to having all my browsing in one window, so my taskbar isn’t so cluttered. IE 7 brings me back to having a ton of windows open, some with multiple tabs, some without. I realize this is a beta, and I’ll be willing to try again when they RTM, but they haven’t convinced me yet.
WinFX
This one is tough to gauge, because I haven’t gotten over the curve yet, but I’ve run into some really rough edges on the WPF APIs. They deserve separate posts, so I won’t go into them here. But I can see that WPF is something really great. I haven’t played much with WCF – I just can’t get excited about Web Services – or WinWF (lame name!), but Workflow looks really promising and I may get into it later. Right now I’m focusing on WPF. The only thing I can definitively say is that Cider, the VS extensions for WPF, really, really suck. I wish there was a way to say “Just open in XAML mode, thank you” but I haven’t found it.
Hopefully this post works. 😉
…Um, it didn’t. Word couldn’t contact my blog for some reason (the reasons they gave weren’t true). Oh well, I know that it’s a late feature, so I’m holding judgement on the blogging feature.