PDC05: Vista and Office 12
September 14, 2005 06:59 PM • 0 comments
Phew! The first day at the PDC was really busy, starting with a long (very long) double-keynote from Bill Gates and Jim Allchin. I guess it’s what you expect with these events, but the speakers themselves weren’t particularly engaging, but the demos really made up for it.
First up was a combined Vista and Office 12 demo – Microsoft are really keen to promote these together, hoping corporate customers will look at buying both together as part of a long overdue upgrade cycle, and they are the focus of a lot of the sessions here. Visual Studio 2005 in comparison is assumed to be the platform of choice, even though it hasn’t even been released yet.
The Vista demo was impressive, with lots of nice eye candy and a few changes since Beta 1 was released. Beta 2 is a few months off it seems, but the sidebar is back, RSS is everywhere, search is everywhere and IE has of course finally embraced tabs. There’s actually a really nice feature in IE7 that shows the scaled contents of all open tabs in a window, making it easy to navigate between them or close those you no longer need. If you have the habit as I do of steadily building up a collection of tabs over a long browsing session, this is going to be really useful.
Of course a lot of these features aren’t new, at least when you consider non-Microsoft software. Search everywhere looks exactly like Apple’s spotlight technology, as does a new app switching feature (alt-tab now shows live previews of all open windows, a lot like Exposé). Where Microsoft excels though, is improving work others have started. The film producer Julia Philips had a saying, “If you can’t be best, be first. If you can’t be first, be best,” which seems pretty appropriate.
Having heard some positive things about Office 12 on various blogs before the conference, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Office has had more features than sense for the past 8 years, and Office 97 was the last upgrade to really mean anything. The new version (due next summer I think) has loads of new features of course, but much more important is the new UI, which tries to make all that power more accessible.
Seven or eight tabs now appear where the old toolbars were, and each tab has a number of groups of three or four buttons. It’s a little hard to describe, but it really looks a lot like the old interface, except the grouping of related items really makes a big difference. By reducing the number of items the user has to choose between, it becomes easier to conceptualize and navigate around a complex interface. The hierarchy allows you to ignore anything you’re not interested in and go directly to what you need. This is a pretty common UI approach – my running copy of iTunes for example, has fourteen buttons on the main window, but you wouldn’t realise it at first. There’s one section to move between tracks, another to search, another to manage playlists, and so on. It seems a small change, but it makes a big difference in managing the complexity of features that modern software offers. Office 12 also uses larger icons for key buttons which makes them easier to distinguish and provides mini “landmarks” to use when scanning a toolbar with a number of button groups.
Overall, there’s a real feeling of the quality of these products, even though they haven’t left (or for Office even reached) an initial beta. The first public release of Office will be in a few months time, and I’ll definitely be getting a copy and having a closer look.