There are so many computer features that we’ve become accustomed to. Who hasn’t used Ctrl+F to search for text on a Web page or a document? Who hasn’t used Ctrl+C & Ctrl+V to copy and paste something? (…obviously, I’m not targeting people who have never used a computer before, or who manage to use them without a keyboard)

If you could have any of these keyboard shortcuts as a real-life (super)power, which one would you want? Vote below.

So far, the results have been interesting. Looks like most people don’t want to deal with real life.

Technology

Windows has entered a new era

The decade—indeed, the century—began with Windows 2000, which I consider the first great version of the operating system. XP was the version that brought widespread success, and people just seem to refuse to upgrade; even today, almost three quarters of the computers on the net are on XP.

Despite the dismal failure of Windows Vista, it too brought change, which was followed by the enhancements of Windows 7. Compare my desktop today to the ugly screens of a decade ago:

Apple deserves an honourable mention for the ground-breaking work they’ve done on the Mac, elevating it to a newly trendy status.

Portable media players have completely changed

A decade ago, CD players and tape-based Walkmans were still the norm for ‘portable’ audio players. The iPod, launched in 2001, entirely changed the game. (I suppose this and the iPhone were the “comeback of the decade”.) It was no longer a device that played removable media. That was followed by thousands of other portable media players, to which the public generally refers inaccurately as “MP3 players”, reflecting the popularity of the 15-year-old MP3 format that has also been notorious for illegal file sharing (see below).

Cell phones and mobile devices have become ubiquitous

These devices used to be ugly, huge and heavy objects. As we move into 2010, cell phones have become more compact (usually this means thinner and lighter) and more powerful.

In China, about 739 million people have cell phones; that’s more than there are Internet users in China (which is about 360 million).

Mobile devices have become truly powerful. The iPhone, purportedly the most popular cell phone of 2009, is one of the biggest platforms for software development. And it has a touch screen. RIM’s BlackBerry, initially launched in 1999, is the most popular smartphone among business users.

Ordinary people begin to embrace ultra-portable netbooks for lightweight computing. The move to mobile is probably the most noticeable trend in end-user gadgetry in this decade.

Illegal file sharing has emerged

I don’t personally think of torrenting itself as a major problem, and it’s difficult to sympathize with big companies when the RIAA is being stupid. At the same time, it’s pretty easy to see how having hundreds of movies, TV shows and music albums distributed through torrents can take away from earnings for content producers. (Some dispute this and argue that those who pirate movies and TV shows are those who will purchase related memorabilia or boxed sets.)

In any case, it is virtually undisputed that new technologies have made distribution of such content much easier. In the previous decade, pretty much everyone was on dial-up Internet and only the students at universities with blazing connections were able to do it (think about the controversial Napster).

The best known site for illegal content

YouTube happened

YouTube and hundreds of other video sites have revolutionized the way we watch video. What used to be distributed on tapes and discs has moved onto the Internet in a way that allows ordinary folks—not videophiles or geeks—to share their multimedia with the world.

YouTube is also the icon of the so-called Web 2.0, which is oriented on user-generated content. (Flickr deserves an honourable mention for high quality pictures, just like Vimeo for high class videos.) It has made it possible for teens with crazy personalities and high-pitched edited voices, artists who post music videos, and crazy dancers who travel the world to reach out to a vast audience. Above all, it’s a legitimate new form of entertainment.

Following the success of online video, major content producers began to license music for online distribution (think Pandora or Last.fm, not to mention Internet radio) as well as movies and TV shows (think Hulu).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Open source projects have become worthy challengers

More than a decade ago, in 1996, the Apache HTTP server became the most popular web server in use; today it has surpassed 100 million web sites served.

Mozilla Firefox, having risen out of the ashes of the Netscape browser, although not the most widely used browser in the world (it’s 2nd), is apparently used by 32% of the market analyzed by StatCounter.

While I still use Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org is also a notable alternative to the proprietary and dominant office suite, especially on non-Windows operating systems.

And then there are the programs used by geeks, like the Eclipse IDE or Aptana Studio, that are depended upon. (For all of you multimedia geeks, there are open source programs that do the job much better than their closed source counterparts; think about Handbrake, VLC…)

Businesses can now also depend on open source projects like Sugar CRM that build their revenue model around support and premium features.

News has moved onto the Web

My primary news source  now is the Web. Google News is one of my frequently visited sites, as it is a fantastic aggregator of headlines. I subscribe to e-mail summaries from the Toronto Star and breaking news alerts from the New York Times. ArsTechnica and TechCrunch are my sources for technology-related news, and occasionally Mashable and Neowin. Those pesky short links in the tweets of people I follow also make for engaging news articles.

Wikipedia happened

At the beginning of this decade, I was researching in books and print encyclopedias. The conventional wisdom today of “just Google it” didn’t work so well then. And certainly there wasn’t a Wikipedia for the wealth of human knowledge that it now contains.

Today, I can near-instantly read up on the history of Wal-Mart or read up on the Beslan school hostage crisis and its media coverage. If I truly need it, Wikipedia connects with Wikisource, the free library and Wikibooks where I can read Anna Karenina online (and I wouldn’t, because Constance Garnett’s translations are really lacking).

It’s truly amazing that the sum of all human knowledge can be collaboratively archived and updated through the likes of Wikipedia. Perhaps they need your support this holiday season!

What do you think? Did I miss out on something big that happened in this decade in the world of tech? Write a comment!

(I did, however, intentionally exclude social networking—i.e. Facebook—because I don’t think it’s been revolutionary in any major way. Sure, it has connected people in new ways, but it’s still relatively fresh and more time is needed to see where it goes. Similarly, I omitted touch because it hasn’t entirely caught on yet; tablet PCs were a dismal failure a few years ago and I haven’t yet seen their widespread success. Furthermore, I omitted cloud computing because it doesn’t directly affect a large number of people. Feel free to disagree with me in the comments.)

Worldly Matters

I think September 11, 2001 marked the start of a new era of warfare and international affairs. The terrorist attacks, inasmuch as they have been abused to justify ill-advised battles, did shock the world.

I recommend you head over to the Big Picture where you’ll be dazzled by splendid photos of this decade, including commentaries on the World Trade Center attacks and war. And dozens of other things like natural disasters (remember Katrina, or the Sichuan earthquake?), the Beijing Olympics, and terrorist attacks in London.

2009 has been a fantastic year. I look forward to the future.

Happy holidays and all the best in 2010!

What happened? Why do I feel like the Internet is collapsing? Aiya!

I’m really disappointed. I’d always had uptime of over 99.96% with the first company and amazing pricing (okay, now that they’re shutting down I can reveal that I’ve been using ResellerScene). I used their reseller services to host over a dozen web sites on independent cPanel accounts.

(Begin nerdy section)
Earlier this month, they moved to new server setups; apparently the new servers are virtualized—it’s pretty obvious when WHM says the server runs on Xen. Code that had worked for years broke down because of new PHP security settings, misconfiguration of PHP as an Apache module, and file permission errors. Their help desk was really helpful because they quickly moved to PHP-CGI, which helped with permission errors and custom configuration, but which broke more things as a result of php_flag and php_value declarations in .htaccess files.
(End nerdy section)

Those were the first signs of trouble.

I didn’t immediately switch hosts. I had been a customer for more than 2 years and support was always quick and helpful. Then there were the awesome discounts I’ve been enjoying because I signed up as customer #6, before prices went up.

Today, I got a sad e-mail which began as follows:

I regret to inform you that due to financial instability, ResellerScene LLC will be going out of business. Due to the economic downturn, ResellerScene operations have greatly slowed down and it no longer seems viable for ResellerScene to continue.

I now have just over a month to migrate my dozen sites (and client sites) to some new host. Some I can move to DreamHost, but I’ll need to find another cPanel reseller service for some of the client sites.

*sigh*. Life sucks.

As for DreamHost, their services are awesome: great balance of features and price. Over the past year, I’ve been able to set up my custom-compiled PHP installation, use up gigabytes of storage and run important sites without much downtime. It’s a service I’d recommend to anyone… seriously! But I can’t get over the fact that they’ve had so many network failures in the past few days.

It’s not like DreamHost’s shutting down. Yet. But the downtime makes me wary of migrating my old sites to DreamHost, at least until they resolve these issues.

Now I have a headache. Thinking about migrating a dozen sites without breaking anything. Gotta go drink some tea… listen to some music… relax. Relax, relax, relax!

What do I do?!

I need your input. Let me know (@FrederickDing) of any (reliable!) and reasonably-priced web hosts with good reputations. Most importantly, I need to find a place where I can host client sites and provide them with control panel access.

As someone who has life thanks to science, and who values the science of life, I ask you support the Ride to Conquer Cancer 2010 for scientific research to help the lives of others.

A friend of mine, who has run 5 km and 10 km marathons before, is participating in this year’s Ride to Conquer Cancer — riding 320 km on a bike! Please do what you can, and donate if you can, and most of all cheer on Astrorider! He will need your support to fundraise $10 for each kilometre of hard work.

I’ll be giving scores based on these factors:

• Web site design / usability
• Compatibility
• Converted appearance
• Embeds

In case you’re wondering, these 4 document publishing services are Docstoc, edocr, Issuu and Scribd. Of these, Scribd and Docstoc are likely the best known and the best established.

I should give a warning for those on low bandwidth connections: this is a screenshot/media-heavy post.

Web site

First impressions really matter (see Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell), so I find the appearance of the home page of such a site very important. In addition to these first impressions, I want a site that is navigable on which I can do common actions (uploading, viewing, sharing) without hunting for those functions.

edocr has, to be honest, a rather ugly start page. It doesn’t have a modern, Web 2.0 feel, nor does it feel even minutely ’slick’. If I didn’t know that it was a document publishing site, visiting the site doesn’t make it immediately obvious. Examples of documents are hidden below the fold. The home page seems, to be honest, very hideous.

edocr's home page is hideous and not modern

At least the document viewing page is usable.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Scribd has a well designed and uncluttered site. The home page makes it clear what the service is all about, and the document viewing page is neatly laid out. The common actions I would want to take on a document (sharing, viewing, commenting) are easily accessible. The only concern I have is that the area allotted to the document file itself is too small.

Scribd's beautiful home page

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Docstoc has a clean site that, although not as intuitive as Scribd’s, is still very navigable and usable. If Scribd is the YouTube of documents, then Docstoc would be blip.tv; it targets professionals and business documents as opposed to files from everyone (not that the common person can’t use it). Hence, there are links all over the site for “Premier Documents”, “Docstore”, and making money from documents.

Docstoc's clean home page

What I love most about this site is the much larger reading area on any document viewing page. Docstoc seems to be less focused on user interaction (as in comments) and much more on the original content itself, but it is exactly this that makes it easy to download files and actually use the content.

Docstoc's document pages focus on content

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Issuu takes a completely different approach, one that targets magazines and professional publications; its site reflects this niche. That’s why its site is so breathtakingly beautiful! I’ve been very impressed by Issuu’s clean, aesthetics-oriented look, and viewing a document is such an intuitive experience that this service deserves a 5/5 for its site.

Issuu has a breathtaking home page

Viewing a document on Issuu feels like flipping pages; it's beautiful

Issuu deserves to win in this category.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I understand that you didn’t come here for a review of their respective Web sites, so let’s move on to document compatibility.

Compatibility

Each service here is at a different level of compatibility.

edocr, regrettably, supports only “.txt, .doc and .pdf formats”. This severely limits its scope. However, nearly everyone nowadays, even those without Adobe Acrobat, can make a PDF out of their documents. OpenOffice.org contains integrated PDF capabilities, as does Office 2007, and free tools like PrimoPDF exist. I suppose that if you have this capability of producing PDF documents, these limited file formats might not be an issue.

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

Scribd seems to be compatible with the most formats. Their support page says that the service supports PDFs, PostScript (wow, for all those publishers), Microsoft Office files (pre-2007 .doc/.xls/.ppt as well as the newer Office XML .docx/.xlsx/.pptx), all of the OpenDocument formats, in addition to plain text and RTF files. Just about any kind of file I would think of uploading is supported.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Docstoc, unfortunately, seems to be very Microsoft Office-centric. It supports “doc, xls, ppt, pps, pdf, rtf, txt, docx, xlsx, ppts”, but none of the OpenDocument formats. That’s not so great.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Issuu seems to support the common formats. PDF files, “DOC, PPT, ODT, WPD, SXW, RTF, ODP, and SXI” are allowed; these encompass the common word processing formats from Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, StarOffice and WordPerfect in addition to the slideshows. This is not much better than Docstoc, of course, but the 100 MB limit is simply awesome; it allows for professional magazines and publications that contain a lot of high quality images.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

In any case, Scribd wins hands down in this category; no other service accepts as many formats for documents — not to mention the remarkable spreadsheet and slideshow support.

Converted Appearance

The only way to evaluate this is to upload the same file to all of the four sites and qualitatively rank the conversions. (To make this easier for you to compare, I’ve embedded a file from each service in the Embeds section following this one.) For diversity, I tried a Microsoft Word document and a PDF document with each service.

The Word document that all of the services had trouble with

I thought that this document would convert well, but it seems fonts are an issue. The formula sheet is below.

The formula sheet PDF file

The PDF (a formula sheet with equations) was converted nearly perfectly with every service. After all, that is what the format was designed to do: preserve appearance and reproducibility for converting to other media (i.e. print).

edocr apparently uses Macromedia/Adobe FlashPaper, which is a versatile format that preserves appearance in a portable Flash (.swf) file. (Actually, all of the sites use Flash, but only FlashPaper can be saved locally or relocated to your own server.) Since it’s generated usually by printing to the software, the appearance of a document is preserved just as it would be if one printed a file to a PDF driver.

The conversions from edocr preserve the original appearance to a reasonable extent.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Scribd uses its own iPaper format, and converted the PDF perfectly (as expected) but fumbled with the Word document. I suppose that this comes only from the fact that I used a non-standard font (Adobe Garamond) in the file; embedding it also didn’t help. Aside from the fact that the typeface was switched to what looks like Bitstream Vera (or DejaVu) Sans, the overall formatting was preserved. (Take a look here.) 5/5 for the PDF and 2.5/5 for the Word document makes…

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Issuu took a long time to convert my files, but the results were beautiful. Although it didn’t use the embedded font in the Word document, it at least recognized that the font was a serif typeface, and substituted something that looks like Times. The result still stays on one page. The formula sheet was beautiful, too.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Docstoc took an unreasonable amount of time to do a little amount of work, and the result doesn’t look all that amazing. It’s okay for usual business documents (letters, contracts, and the sort) but I don’t recommend using it for anything that is more complex.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

The winner, by a close call, is Issuu. It simply produces beautiful documents.

Embeds

This isn’t an area in which I want to give ratings (for appearance), because the embedded player could change at any time. However, some are easier to embed than others (I have written a plugin for embedding Scribd documents, and WordPress 2.9 will support automatic embeds from some sources) and some make the process complicated. In any case, I’ll let you judge for yourself.

Edocr has a standard FlashPaper look. It looks like this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Docstoc has its own look, which seems professional enough.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Scribd has changed their embedded player over the years; originally they used FlashPaper as well, but since then there have been at least two generations of new designs.

Issuu has to be my personal favourite because the player is so beautiful. There are also various styles of embeds, and the one below is a non-traditional, nearly chrome-less interface.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I personally prefer Issuu’s look, followed by Scribd, but this is a matter of personal opinion. If your main intention is use on a professional site, such as for a business organization, any of the embeds will do.

Conclusion

My top two favourites are Issuu and Scribd. For general business use, Scribd is likely the best choice, since a huge variety of formats are supported (don’t waste time converting to an intermediate format) for upload and the conversion process takes seconds.

Any comments or alternative sites that I haven’t explored?

Free 2GB cloud storage

As a free user, you get 2 GB of space to start, and files in those 2 GB will be synced not only to your other computers, but also to the cloud. You can access those files anywhere you can open up a browser to the Dropbox Web site, and you can even share links to files in your Public folder to help collaboration with others.

PCs, Macs, Linux and the iPhone

The desktop software works on PCs, Macs and Linux machines; updates with great improvements come out often. For example, some of the recent versions of the software added LAN syncing, which speeds up the sharing of files between computers on the same network by connecting directly to one another instead of uploading and downloading from their servers in the cloud. Moreover, there’s now a Dropbox app for the iPhone that syncs your files on the go.

Free extra 250 MB

Try it out for free; there’s no cost to getting started. You can get a free account (2 GB) with 250 MB as a gift from me for signing up. Reliable sync and backup has never been easier.

There is reasonable hype about Office 2010, but I don’t recommend using pre-release versions — at least until a new one comes out — and I will also be uninstalling and going back to Office 2007. (I’ll note, of course, that I’m usually a bleeding edge software user who ignores the warnings that “pre-release software is unsafe for production use”. Windows 7 RC is my main machine’s operating system, I’m using the dev channel of Google Chrome, and I use pre-release versions of Firefox.)

In short, I’m not going to write any more about my experiences with the Technical Preview.

To give you some background before I go into the content here, I had just concluded a successful interview (the first of two) and was stopping by the library on my way home. The trip from there was bizarre – random acts of generosity sprung up, seriously making me wonder whether the world was conspiring to be generous, or whether it was some kind of karma day.

Act I: A mother with a stroller

I held the door open. Seems ordinary enough, right? It all started here.

A mother with three kids, one of which was in a stroller, was trying to get out the front door. Maybe that entrance wasn’t accessible, because the door wasn’t opening for them.

So before I entered, I held the door open for them, allowing her to get her stroller out.

I entered the library no wiser that this was the first act of many.

Act II: Library

I only had to check in two books, and the library has self-serve check-in machines, to which I wandered when I entered.

It’s really an easy process, but the lady overseeing check-in still had to help the patron in front of me, for whom it was probably a first-time experience.

“Yeah, that’s it. You just push here on the screen and put your books on the table.”

My usual experiences with librarians are far worse.

Act III: Viva

Viva bus at a bus terminal; credit IRT.BMT.IND (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0)

I ran across the street to catch the bus that was about to leave.

For those of you unfamiliar with this transit system, an individual with a ticket ‘validates’ the ticket on a machine before boarding the bus. That’s what I attempted to do.

The machine that takes in a ticket and validates it

I became frustrated because the machine wouldn’t take in the ticket – even after 4 or 5 tries, and even more frustrated because I was making the bus wait. I gave up, and boarded anyways through the door beside the driver. I genuinely intended to validate the ticket.

A minute or two into the ride, I asked the driver whether it was okay if I validated the ticket at my destination. His response surprised me.

“Sure… if you want.”

What the heck? Now, Viva is nicknamed “Free-va” because of the honour system on which fares work. Offenders keep their tickets without validating them – avoiding the fare – and are occasionally caught by enforcement officers.

Was this generosity, entrapment, or plain dereliction?

I fully intended to validate my ticket at the destination.

When the bus had taken me as far as it could, I got off and validated my ticket at that terminal. As the bus driver passed by – probably his coffee break – I showed the ticket casually, and he said:

“No problem, my friend.”

Whoa. What the heck.

Act IV: YRT

Staying on the theme of bus drivers, the story follows me as I transfer on to another bus. I recognized the driver when he pulled into the terminal, and he didn’t even bother to check my validated ticket, gesturing as though he knew I would always pay my fare properly.

The bus slipped out of the station and began its journey, only to be interrupted at the next red light, when the driver stopped and opened the door.

He recognized someone who was walking by, and invited her in. Probably friends or something.

They hugged, talked a bit – and though the light had turned green, I wasn’t complaining; it’s not like I had to rush. Then he gave her a transfer and she left.

Wait, what?! Did he just give her a transfer when she didn’t pay a fare?

Shock and realization occurred at the same time, when I discovered another act of generosity… or dereliction.

Epilogue

How does this kind of stuff happen? Do bus drivers decide to be really nice during the summer, and grouchy the rest of the time?

Was it karma? Or, perhaps, was it what happens when one walks out of a successful interview and notices only the good things occurring around oneself?

Deep questions to ponder. What do you think?

I’ve gotten to use it a lot more in the course of daily business, which has opened my eyes to some astounding features.

In any case, I’ve been very busy and will continue to be busy until next week, which is when I plan on publishing Part 3.

To stay updated, you can:

1. Subscribe to the RSS feed
2. Subscribe via e-mail to get new posts in your inbox
3. Keep checking back
4. Follow me on Twitter

For your convenience, sign up for e-mail updates right now.

This company is clearly harvesting WHOIS data in violation of their ICANN agreement to send official-looking “expiration notices” to domain owners, many of whom unwittingly send in payment, unaware that the “Domain Registry of Canada” is merely a company attempting the entirely unethical practice of domain slamming.

Since 2001, this company has been soliciting domain transfers under the guise of renewing the registration with the existing registrar. Of course, their prices are ridiculously expensive — $40 per year for a domain name — and that’s part of why I didn’t fall for it, since I operate my own domain registrar and I know the value of domain registration services aren’t that high.

An early example of the domain letters from 2002 is published online.

In 2003, the Federal Trade Commission settled with the sister company “Domain Registry of America” to stop their misleading business practices. The way they decided to comply was by adding a little blurb that blended into the text, one that few people seeing an official-looking letter would read.

They’ve changed it a bit now, to uppercase and bold text, but the premise of their operations is still the same.

The letter comes in an envelope that almost looks like it's from the Government of Canada; my address is redacted

The envelope is misleading. Indeed, the colour and layout of the envelope nearly exactly matches that of an official Canadian government letter, except for the return address in the top-left. And there they’ve neatly placed a maple leaf, knowing that it is associated with the country, and by extension, the government.

Even the NAME is misleading.

The letter has been changed in recent years, but still carries the same layout that I recognize from as early as 2005. The prices are ridiculous; a .net domain isn’t worth $40/year. (I know; I was selling them for $7.99 last month.)

The letter is sure to make inexperienced domain owners panic.

That letter just irritates me. Sentences like “take advantage of our best savings” when you actually pay $30 more, misleading phrases like “You must renew your domain name to retain exclusive rights”, and worst of all:

“Failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date may result in a loss of your online identity making it difficult for your customers and friends to locate you on the Web.”

It’s rare for me to say something this angry. Screw you, Domain Registry of Canada.

• Interface improvements
  • Aero Glass
  • Ribbon
  • Backstage
  • Animations tab

I’ve had about 4 days now to play with the Office 2010 Technical Preview, which, according to Ars Technica, is actually a slightly older build than the most current one, and for which testers were “hand-picked”.

I did end up installing both the 32-bit and the 64-bit editions of the software, realizing that I wanted to see whether 64-bit was stable (and it seems to be). When I discovered that Office 2010’s PDF export functionality is terribly inferior to Adobe Acrobat (more on that later), I went back to 32-bit so that the Acrobat add-in would work, but discovered to my horror that it crashes Word (but more on that later).

Let’s get started with some fresh content about interface improvements. LOW-BANDWIDTH WARNING: there are a LOT of screenshots.

Interface improvements

Indeed, Office 2010 is even prettier than Office 2007, at least in my opinion. The splash screens are now animated, as demonstrated below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On Windows 7, the titlebar blends seamlessly into the application, taking the Office 2007 look a bit further by merging it with Aero Glass. It’s a nice change.

Applications with the ribbon now integrate seamlessly into Aero Glass on Windows 7

Tip: on my blog, you can click on any image that links to the picture to see a larger version.

Some people don’t like how the colour is now white, but I don’t mind it at all. I just wish the colour schemes were actually available. In Office 2007 there was a choice between Blue, Black and Silver.

Seems the colour schemes aren't available in the Technical Preview

Ribbon, Ribbon Everywhere

The ribbon (also known as the Fluent UI) is now extended to Outlook and Publisher as well. (In Outlook 2007, messages and composing would take place in a window with the ribbon, but the application itself was ribbonless.)

Outlook 2010 has a ribbon now

Unfortunately, the ribbon seems to complicate Publisher, allocating valuable screen space (of which people have tons these days) to tools that will be used once or twice in the life of the workflow.

Too much space is dedicated to the colour schemes

More follows the jump.

Backstage area

One of the most major changes is the new Backstage view, where the Office button leads to something that covers the entire window as opposed to a menu. (The screenshot below was taken in Microsoft Word. Interestingly, new features must have been added to the .docx format, since a .docx file from Word 2007 shows an option to “convert” it to enable the 2010 features.)

The main Backstage view for Word 2010

The Backstage view enables one of the coolest UI improvements: printing. Instead of a pop-up prompt for printing and a separate option for print preview, the Print view integrates both into one beautiful and easy-to-use screen.

Printing in Word 2010 is a streamlined process

One cool thing about Backstage is that it’s colour-coordinated with the applications’ icons. Word, which has a blue icon, naturally has a blue Backstage area, whereas OneNote, for example, has a beautiful purple one.

OneNote's Backstage area is a beautiful purple

Quite unimportant indeed.

New Animations tab in PowerPoint

In PowerPoint, the animations and transitions have been separated into independent tabs, making it easier for users to add and change animations.

A new tab makes it easier to add animations

The drop-down shows neat graphical representations of the animations.

The animations dropdown has neat illustrations

More about actual feature improvements is being drafted right now; that’ll come in Part 3!

Appendix: gallery of screenshots used in this post

In this article, entitled “Harming environment is bad for business“, he pointedly attacks the companies exploiting the tar sands who launch massive campaigns to cast doubt on environmental science, and the politicians who pretend that scientists worldwide are scheming to deceive the public. You should read it.

"…ecology and economy have the same root, from the Greek 'oikos,' meaning 'home.'"

Go on, read it. Not that I’m an environmentalist. (Well… I make decisions considering the climate change, but I’m not an activist.)

Legal notice: since this isn’t a private beta, I am allowed to discuss the preview and my experiences with it. However, I am not allowed to share product keys, installer files, and documents to which I have access by virtue of the invitation. The contract that binds me with reference to the technical documentation quotes as follows:

You […] agree: (a) to refrain from disclosing or distributing the Confidential Information to any third party for five (5) years from the date of disclosure of the Confidential Information by Microsoft to Company/You; (b) to refrain from reproducing or summarizing the Confidential Information…

Thankfully, there’s a public pressroom for Office 2010 information, from which I was able to get equivalents of the stuff in the confidential documents. Here’s some information for you.

System Requirements

Office 2010 is designed to work on computers with very limited resources; after all, many businesses were concerned that they would once again need to upgrade their hardware. Office hasn’t really necessitated hardware upgrades in the past; Office 2003 ran very well on old Dell OptiPlex machines on Windows 2000, and Office 2007 ran quite well on older XP laptops.

The specific details are in the FAQs document.

Office 2010 System Requirements; click to see full image

The installers are rather compact; the Technical Preview 32-bit/64-bit installers for Office 2010 Professional are no more than 600 MB each.

64-bit editions

I’m currently on Windows 7 RC 64-bit edition, but I resolved ultimately to install the 32-bit edition of Office 2010. This is due to the following reasons:

• The 64-bit edition of Office 2010 does not support most add-ins.
  Users of software with add-ins in Office programs will find that most of them do not work with the 64-bit edition of Office 2010. Software vendors are expected to release newer 64-bit add-ins, but users must use the 32-bit edition for compatibility with older add-ins.
• One cannot upgrade Office 2007 to Office 2010 64-bit.
  According to the technical documentation, “2007 Office system cannot be upgraded to native Office 2010 64-bit.“
• I don’t work with spreadsheets greater than 2 GB in size.
  The documentation listed a number of benefits of using the 64-bit edition. The central point was being able to open large Excel spreadsheets. Since I don’t do this, the benefits of the 64-bit architecture are insignificant when it comes to Office 2010.

Screenshots of my installation will come in the next installment of these posts. That is, after I manage to install it. At the moment I’m getting the following error with the 32-bit installer, after customizing the install and even going through a few minutes of the installation progress bar.

The error I'm getting with the installer

If this persists with the 32-bit installer, I may have no choice but to try the 64-bit installation.

Update: the installer has now succeeded. More will be coming!

Finally, I've managed to install it.

Update: Part 2 is here, with screenshots and commentary on interface improvements!

VIPRE claims to be “high-performance security software” that performs better than traditional suites like Norton Antivirus. That much is very believable; after all, we all know how clunky and laggy the established ‘leaders’ in antivirus are. But my personal antivirus favourite is ESET NOD32 — and I’ve always gotten the impression that it’s fast — so I was really surprised that internal testing showed VIPRE to be even faster and more resource-efficient than NOD32.

VIPRE: Scan in Progress

At this point I wanted to see what some credible sources had to say. CNET UK had essentially the same reaction that I had when first presented with this product: “never heard of it.” But after their own use, they had this to say: “we’re pretty impressed and will continue to use it — particularly on netbooks, which don’t have much power to spare.”

Credible sources that give software positive reviews always influence me. That’s why I think (and this personal opinion isn’t influenced by the sponsorship of this post) you should try Sunbelt’s new Antivirus Software, especially if you don’t have antivirus software already. Install the 15-day trial and decide for yourself whether it’s worth using. (I would have done the same myself if I had another PC to use for testing.)

Sponsored by Sunbelt Software

To create my WordPress plugins, Simpler iPaper and Simpler CSS, using SVN has been a must; after all, the only way to release new versions of the plugins is through SVN. I also keep this site’s WordPress installation up-to-date on the development version using Subversion. Additionally, in my current efforts to develop a working solution for HDTV’s in business and organizational settings, Display UI is being developed using Subversion for version control.

You get the idea. I use it on a daily basis, and for practical purposes. I don’t claim to understand the fine details, but hopefully this post gives you an idea of how I use it and how you can, too.

So what is version control? Simply put, it’s a way of keeping track of the changes made to files. It’s often impractical to make manual backups of a file before every set of changes to it, so version control systems like CVS and SVN emerged to help people — especially developers and programmers — keep track of their files, share changes with team members, and prevent stupid mistakes.

Accidentally deleted your code? Revert your changes. Came up with an ingenious way (that works) to do something? Commit your changes. Need to get the latest revision of all the files? Update the working copy.

Perhaps the most practical application of systems like Subversion is in team development. When three or more people are working on the same set of files, it’s useful to be able to merge the changes seamlessly, see the changes others have made, or even work separately on branches (kind of like forks) and tags (usually released versions that are being maintained).

I did write that I don’t claim to understand the fine details. If you really want to understand Subversion, I highly recommend this book by members of the development team: Version Control with Subversion, or the book online.

Let’s talk about how to use it. Hard-core programmers often choose to use the command line tools, where they type commands like svn up to update the files. Beginners will be glad to know that there are implementations with GUI’s, like RapidSVN and TortoiseSVN. Eclipse users may use Subversive or Subclipse, “team providers” that let coders easily perform version control tasks inside the IDE.

Subversion tasks can be done in Windows Explorer

Assuming that you’re using the command line binaries — which you can get from the Subversion site, and I recommend official CollabNet builds where possible — most of the basic tasks are rather easy.

Instead of right-clicking and picking options from a menu, tasks are done by typing commands.

First of all, a ‘repository’ is a hosted location containing all of the code, revisions and metadata. Often, one can access a repository via HTTP, as in the case of WordPress, which is found at http://core.svn.wordpress.org/ .

To ‘checkout’ a repository means to make a local copy (known as a ‘working copy’) of the contents. That’s what we have to do first when working with an established project: get the code from the repository.

To do so, type the following at an open shell (on Linux/Mac OS X) or command prompt: (don’t type the ‘$’ — that’s just what you should see at the start of every command line in Bash)

$ svn checkout http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/ wordpress/

Windows users would do the same, but at a command prompt — again, without the dollar sign.

That command invokes the svn executable and tells it to checkout the WordPress trunk directory to the local folder wordpress.

Once you’ve done that, you’ve got a working copy, which you can update to the latest at any time after making sure your current directory is the working copy

$ cd wordpress
$ svn update

svn update can be shortened to svn up.

Now go ahead and delete the index.php file in the working copy. It’s conceivable that one might accidentally do this at some point. (On Linux/Mac OS X, one would type rm index.php, whereas on Windows, the del command is used instead.)

No worries. You have an option here: revert or update. Reverting will simply undo your local changes to the last downloaded revision, while updating will fetch the newest version of the deleted index.php file from the repository. Go ahead, get it back!

$ svn revert index.php

What about making some changes to the files and committing them to the repository? In these examples, we’ve been using WordPress, to which anonymous users don’t have write access. I’ll still show you how a change is committed, regardless.

After making your change, type the following (where filename is, obviously, the actual filename).

$ svn commit filename

This usually opens up the system default editor (often vim on Unix systems), into which one enters a log message; that’s used as the log message when you save and quit the editor. In case you’re on Windows or some weird Linux distribution, this might not work for you, so you’ll have to specify another flag.

$ svn commit --message="Change summary" filename
Sending        filename
Transmitting file data .
Committed revision 1234.

(Here the dollar sign is useful to indicate lines of user input vs. lines of output — the second to fourth lines are output, without the dollar sign.)

By this point you’ve done the most common tasks with Subversion: committing and updating. What about adding new files to the repository? After all, you’ll have to do that at some point.

After, for example, creating the file asdf.txt inside the working copy, we only need to make Subversion aware of its existence. Type the following command, and you’ll get the desired result.

$ svn add asdf.txt
A        asdf.txt

To remove the file, it’s best that the removal is done through the Subversion executable, since it needs to keep track of all the files and could be confused if it can’t find the file. (Here I’m using the --force flag because the change hasn’t been committed.)

$ svn rm --force asdf.txt
D        asdf.txt

That’s as much as most beginners need to know about Subversion. Of course, I make use of properties all the time, occasionally tag releases, and sometimes lock and unlock files.

If you want to learn more about the specifics of Subversion, try reading the book I mentioned online. It’s an excellent resource, and can be complemented by other books such as Practical Subversion, Second Edition

… that was a long post. I hope it enriched your knowledge.