MIX07, Office 2007, and Vista
Today you can start registering for MIX07. I have no idea why the early bird specials extend to March 15. That basically means we’ll sell out long before the “regular” price is ever invoked, and we’ll be too full to let the full-price people in anyway. Don’t count on getting in at full price.
Also today, Vista released to manufacturing. Office 2007 also released last week; so I am writing this blog post from my laptop running Vista and Office 2007 final versions. It beats the heck out of XP.
Funny story about Office 2007: all the artsy people who saw early versions of Office 2007 raved about the ribbon bar; “such an innovative UI!”. I have been using dogfood versions of Office 2007 for close to a year, so I got used to the ribbon bar. But I could NEVER find the menu to print a word document. Sometimes I could get it to accidentally print, but mostly I just didn’t print. I didn’t raise too much fuss, because I figured I must just be stupid. Anyway, in the last couple of months, I have been a bit more aggressive. Whenever someone raved about the ribbon bar, I said “it’s nice, but how do I print?”, secretly hoping someone would explain where to find “print” in the ribbon bar. Nobody ever told me how; but now I know they listened…
On running Word 2007 final version for a couple of days, I noticed some strange flashing in the UI. The big round button shaped thing where the Windows 3.1 era “double-click to close” button once sat, would flash and pulse. I ignored it, continuing my paperless office existence, but wondering “why do they pulse the close button?” Finally, I decided to click it. It looks like a push button rather than a “double-click” button like it was in 3.1 (that’s known to designers as an “affordance”). It looked like it afforded “push”, so I “pushed”. I CAN PRINT!!! The “close” button is now called the “Office Button” (it looks kind of like a Staples button you see on TV) and it has all of the most common functionality like printing. At first blush, it seems rude to hide all of the functionality behind the most dangerous button on the window; but I suppose that previous function (close the window and trash my data) is only embedded in old people’s brains. Kids who had the right-hand ‘x’ since Windows 95 won’t have the mental aversion. The best part: double-clicking the Office button still closes the window.