Browser Toolbars - NOT

Why does everyone have to jump on the browser toolbar bandwagon?

My computer just came up and notified me that there was a Java update available. That's wonderful. So I told it to go ahead and install it. And if I wasn't paying attention, I would have installed the MSN toolbar into Internet Explorer right along with installing the latest Java update.

And when AIM updates, it tries to install the AOL toolbar (and keeps trying to change my home page also).

And I also have to work to not get the Google toolbar installed. And the Yahoo toolbar. And the eBay toolbar.

I'm not saying that browser toolbars are bad. That would be like saying that software is bad. No, a useful toolbar is a performance enhancer. But I've seen browsers that have six or seven toolbars installed. And most of them had some similar if not identical features.

All I'm asking is this: Go ahead and offer the toolbar if you want. But DON'T install it by default. Remember that everyone else is trying to do the same thing.

Sure, when I'm updating AIM it's reasonable to have a chance to install the AOL toolbar. And to change my home page to aol.com. But give me credit for some intelligence and for wanting to have my browser set up the way I want it to be, not the way you do. Let me make the decision to do these things, instead of making the decision to not change them.

Let the status quo remain.

Please.

iGoogle? I don't know

Well, Google just messed up my long and carefully laid out iGoogle page. Apparently someone there in Google Labs doesn't have a very good concept of web page layout design. They just took my tabs from the top of the page and pushed them over to the left side.

Hey, I've got a lot of gadgets here that I'm using on a regular basis. I've got Gmail, and Reader, and Calendar, and Google Bookmarks. Oh, and I JUST found a real nice gadget that gives a Facebook summary (it's Facebook iPhone - I wish there was one of as good a quality for LinkedIn). On top of those, I've got the manditory weather, and "This Day in History" for fun, and the US eBird Sightings (since I'm an accidental birdwatcher).



Well, I've been using iGoogle as a nice dashboard for a long time. Almost no scrolling or anything. I had it the way I want it. I want to revert.

Well, I guess that Google labs have finally hit the big time. I thought only Microsoft put out enhanced software that was less user-friendly than the previous version.

Office 2007 - Act 5 - Outlook again

Well, I just got bitten by Microsoft Outlook. Well, actually, Microsoft Word.

We're working on a web site for consumers to be able to register for an offer. After registration, they are provided with a certificate number on what we refer to as the thank-you page, and also receive that certificate number in an email. The client has some pretty specific (and rather neat-looking, if you ignore the fact that it's red) background that looks like dirty parchment at the edges. Naturally, the email should have the same look. No problem. We've done it before.

But we didn't reckon on Office 2007. Apparently, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has changed (or eliminated) the html rendering engine in Outlook 2007, and uses Microsoft Word to do the rendering. Well, there's a whole raft of options that have been removed from the rendering engine, including putting a "background-image: url(...)" into the stylesheet.

So we tried the alternate - background="..." on the body tag. Works fine.

But not in Outlook 2003. It doesn't render that. And 2007 won't render it either if there's a "background-image: url(...)" in the stylesheet, even if it is there.

So Microsoft has completely eliminated the option of putting a background on the body in html email that will render properly in its two most recent Office-based mail clients. Apparently you can still put backgrounds on table td elements, though.

It's enough to make you want to use Thunderbird (which handled all of the above situations, even the combinations, correctly, by the way).

You know, cross-email testing is way worse than cross-browser testing.

Can we get a PC designed for typing?

I used to have a Compaq laptop named Gleep. I thought it had the best-designed keyboard. The keyboard started right at the front of the laptop - I could position my hands on it just as though they were on a standard desktop keyboard. I didn't have to keep my palms raised for fear of moving the mouse cursor or of right-clicking or left-clicking.

When I was in college (many many many moons ago) I was the unofficial chief typesetter for the student paper, and became very close friends with an IBM Selectric Typesetter named HAL. HAL had wonderful touch and feedback. Gleep was a reasonable facsimile thereof.

I understand that a lot of people want laptops to be thinner and lighter. But a lot of companies (like the one I work for) are providing laptops to their employees as their primary computer. It's a great idea. My current laptop cuts the mustard in a lot of areas - plenty of ram, dual core, more than enough disk - but it's an absolute pain to type on. I bought a USB hub just so I can plug a mouse, keyboard, and docking station into it and still have a port or two free so that I can plug a thumb drive into it at the same time. I carry another mouse and mouse pad around in my laptop case.

Hey, let's start bugging the manufacturers to give us something useable as a keyboard. Compaq did it right with a lot of quality (though maybe that's why you don't see a Compaq computer any more). To hell with better EPA standards, let's lobby for decent laptop keyboards!

The Large Hadron Collider

I've been a pocket fan of quantum mechanics ever since high school chemistry class. Granted, I haven't kept up on all of the intricacies, but any profession that uses words like "boson" and "quark" as part of its core vocabulary is something worth looking into.

So I've kept my eye on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that they're building at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). (Yeah, that't the same joint that Dan Brown wrote about in "Angels and Demons". And yeah, Dan Brown wrote "The DaVinci Code").

Anyway, I'm glad to see that they finally got that monster working. It's a shame that the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Texas never really got off the ground. We could have been worrying about black holes eating the whole earth years ago.

But that's all just a preamble to this absolutely neat, cool, groovy (am I dating myself yet) video on YouTube put together by Kate McAlpine, a Michigan State University graduate. Apparently she asked for (and got) permission to film some of the scenes on-site at CERN. And it's fabulous fun, and maybe even a little educational (even though it is rap).

So without further ado, here's the "Large Hadron Rap" (courtesy of YouTube).

Office 2007 - Act 4 - Serendipity (and some Outlook)

I just got some email that Outlook 2007 indicates might be a "phishing" email. Not wanting to get hooked (sorry!) I tried my usual approach to check up on this, which is to look at the Internet headers to see where the message was actually sent from. Gol darn it. Where's the new equivalent of the menu View -> Options?

I can't find the dang thing anywhere. But - I did notice something in the Editor Options (found at the bottom of the Office Button dialog on the message itself). There's a Color Scheme dropdown in the Popular tab. And when I go back to Excel, I find the same thing there. The dropdown's got three entries - Blue, Silver, and Black. Hey! Silver looks like Steel. Great! And Black is exactly that. Some Goth kid is going to be very happy.

What's interesting, though, is that I can't find any equivalent setting in the main Outlook window. (That's the one that still looks almost like the older Outlook version.)

And I still can't look at the Internet headers.

Well, my good friend the desktop technician came through again. (I'm starting to owe him big time.) It's in the Message tab of the ribbon bar in the Options section. That's the box that has "Categorize", "Follow Up", and "Mark as Unread" in it.

And there's this tiny (well, relatively small) icon in the lower right corner that looks like a square with an arrow pointing down and to the right. Apparently that's called a Dialog Box Launcher. (Too bad it looks kinda like the lower right corner of most windows. I think that's why I ignored it - I didn't need to make the ribbon box any bigger.) Click on it, and up pops a dialog box. Click on any of the and up pops a dialog box. And there it is - Internet headers.

You know, this might be the first version of Office that I need to read the instructions for.

Office 2007 - Interlude

Now that I've gotten used to some of the differences, I don't have many significant objections to the UI changes in Office 2007 other than the fact that they were made at all. Of course, I've only worked with Excel so far. And I've tweaked the UI to look much more like the old Office that I'm used to.

And I've found a few things I like. I'm especially in favor of the zoom control in the lower right corner of the Excel status bar.

But...

There's still a tiny annoyance. The window control buttons - you know, those (usually) three little buttons in the upper right corner of the title bar that let you minimize, maximize, and close the window - look like they are greyed out. To me that means disabled. C'mon, let's not have to unlearn all of the visual hints we've come to take for granted. (The buttons in a MDI child window look fine.)

Oh, and everything is Blue. Does Microsoft have something invested in sky blue? Or is it robin's-egg blue? What happened to good old Steel?

Office 2007 - Act 3 - Visio

The journey continues. I tried to open a Visio document. Sure enough, it opens fine. Then a little dialog opens up indicating that Windows Installer, then Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, were configuring Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007. It runs for about 15 seconds, and disappears.

Fine, I've seen that happen before, in a couple of my previous lives, with a couple or three previous Office incarnations.

But now I click on my Visio diagram, and it "thunks" at me. Thunk - you know that pseudo-beep that is so pleasantly annoying when you click on the main window when there's a dialog open, that is supposed to inform you that you can't do what you want? Yeah, Visio is thunking me.

I try a few things. I click on the Visio icon in the taskbar. Voila! Now the window shows the Active color set. I click on the scrollbar and "thunk". Apparently all clicking on the taskbar does is alternate between the Active and Inactive color schemes. I can't do another thing with the window - not even move it. Right-clicking on the taskbar icon doesn't do anything special either - no context menu, just makes the window look like it is active. Liar.

I close everything else down, trying to find the hidden dialog box. No luck. I open up "Task Manager". I don't see anything unrecognizable in the process list. I select it in the Applications tab and click on "Switch To" - thunk. I click on my "Show Desktop" quick-link. Everything disappears, including Visio. Click again, it's back.

I got it. It's unresponsive. Well, at least "End Task" works.

My buddy the desktop technician got involved at this point. All it took to fix me up was an install of the next version of Visio - I had been using Visio 2000, now I'm on Visio 2003.

Office 2007 - Act 2 - Excel

I just received a corporate deployment of Office 2007 (see my comments in an earlier post). Email is working just fine. But now I need to make some extensive changes to an Excel spreadsheet.

I double-click on the file, and it opens up just fine. But - my first thought is: Where are the menu items? My second thought is: Why are they eating up all of my screen real estate?

I managed to get through the necessary updates I needed to make to a document by pretending that the tabs on the ribbon bar were actually menu items. The first real problem occurred when I wanted to do a "Save As". I couldn't find it anywhere! I finally customized the Quick Access Toolbar and added "Save As" to it so that I could use it.

I later discovered that the "button" in the upper left concealed all (and more) of the actions that used to be found in the "File" menu, and also hides access to "Excel Options" - and I thought it was just an oversized move/close button like most other windows. I also discovered that by double-clicking on the ribbon bar tab, I can hide the contents of the ribbon itself until I click on the top tab. With those two discoveries, my major problems so far have been solved (or at least worked around).

I managed to find what will probably be a very important setting for the near future. In the Excel Options, under the Save entry, I can specify that I want to "Save files in this format" and am able to choose "Excel 97-2003 Workbook". That's definitely going to be useful since I'm one of the early corporate deployments - a corporate beta tester, if you want - and will need to ensure compatibility with the rest of my deparment.

Now I'm curious though. Outlook's main window, while it had a little different shading and color in portions of the window which had none before, didn't seem to be overly changed - no ribbon bar at least. But the designers of Excel jumped in feet-first to the new paradigm. Once again Microsoft is consistent in its inconsistencies.

Office 2007 - Act 1 - Outlook

I got my first look at Office 2007 today. I'm part of a corporate "Pilot Program" for rolling out new software releases. I interpret that as being a beta tester of sorts.

The install process went through just fine (thanks much to the infrastructure people that put it together) with only the minor annoyances of having to shut down Outlook 2003 during the install - actually having to shut it down AND unplug my iPaq since I keep it synchronized - and having to reboot after it was done.

After the restart, I started up Outlook and it came up and ran. Good enough. No problems.

I opened up a Word document and made a note for myself. Well, it looked a little unfamiliar but no problems, and I wasn't doing anything fancy. Still good. No problems.

I put my iPaq in its dock, and ran into the first issue. ActiveSync complained about a missing converter component "RICHINK.DLL", and also indicated that it needed attention in trying to synchronize the Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks. But how? Other than advising me to disconnect and reconnect my device, no other advice was given.

After a quick discussion with one of the desktop technicians, I downloaded and installed the latest and greatest version of ActiveSync. That handled all of the issues very nicely, and I've gotten back to a working desktop/pda combination.