According to the Mac BU, future version of Microsoft Office for Mac will have VBA support added back in:
The Mac BU also announced it is bringing VBA-language support back to the next version of Office for Mac.
[...]
The team recognizes that VBA-language support is important to a select group of customers who rely on sharing macros across platforms.
Could this be the first true iPhone killer? Although I’ve had bad experiences with Windows Mobile devices in the past, if Microsoft pulls it’s finger out on this one and creates a competitive operating system to OS X on the iPhone, this could be the one.
Microsoft proposed a hostile take-over of Yahoo! today. At $31 a share, that’s 62% over the closing price of Yahoo! shares on Thursday. It just seems like a very bad way to compete against Google, and they’re paying over the odds for what is a struggling company.
Today Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. My personal favourites are the new language features for C#; automatic properties, extension methods, lambda expressions and anonymous types.
Stephen Fry now has a technology column with The Guardian, following on from the style of his blog which I linked to.
He talks about the value of style and substance in a digital device:
What do I think is the point of a digital device? Is it all about function? Or am I a “style over substance” kind of a guy? Well, that last question will get my hackles up every time. As if style and substance are at war! As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called stylish that does not function superbly. Don’t get me started…
This is the exact problem I find with Windows Mobile phones. Functionally, third party applications means you can get GPS navigation, instant messaging, interactive underground maps, and thousands more. But there is one fundamental problem with Windows Mobile, after six versions and seven years of development1 its still not possible to use it without a stylus.
Those of you that haven’t used a smartphone whose interface requires a stylus won’t quite understand, but its infuriating. Its almost impossible to use one accurately when walking, so you have to be either standing still or sitting down. Even then some of the buttons and scroll bars especially are still small enough to make errors fairly common.
This leads me back to the aforelinked Why Enterprise Software Sucks. I’ve yet to come across any enterprise software that manages to blend the right amounts of style and substance. In fact 99% of enterprise software is incredibly poorly designed, and I sometimes wonder how much people get paid to write this appalling rubbish.
Some people will never get it, the kind of people who wonder why the iPhone is such a success when it doesn’t even support MMS. But they’re a dwindling minority, it’s easy to forget that such software only started to become mainstream 10 to 15 years ago, and many people are still not very well educated about it. I’m hoping that as people learn more about software, they will eventually realise that usability and design can be just as important as the functionality.
Microsoft is promoting F# to be a fully supported programming language in Visual Studio.
F# offers developers many valuable and compelling features without sacrificing much runtime efficiency. F# supports type inference, pattern matching, high-order functions, and currying. F# also supports interactive execution, which means that F# programs can be run like scripts or inputted in an interactive top-level environment similar to the Python shell or Ruby’s IRB. F# also has full access to the .NET APIs and components written in other .NET languages.
Its a good day to be a .NET developer.
In a statement Mike Nash, Microsoft’s Windows product manager, said: “…maybe we were a little ambitious to think that we would need to make Windows XP available for only a year after the release of Windows Vista.”
Students will soon be able to buy Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate for £39 or $59 through The Ultimate Steal program. More information from this Microsoft press release.
The new build, dubbed SP2c, includes no fixes or feature changes, but was created simply to address the shrinking pool of product keys. XP Pro SP2c, which has been released to manufacturing, will be made available to resellers and system builders next month, said Microsoft.
Vista is a nice OS, but it really doesn’t have any major advantages over XP Professional, and Microsoft still seems quite committed to XP too.
I think the “performance and reliability” and “compatibility and reliability” updates are a sneak preview into the updates we’re going to see in Vista SP1.
I’ve installed both and so far have found that file copying speeds have indeed increased, as has the general responsiveness of Vista. One of the biggest annoyances for me was the small but significant delay when scrolling through All Programs in the Start Menu, which has thankfully been fixed with this set of updates.
Microsoft has just showcased a “new” incredible user interface that will be launched in just a couple months. If it kicks off, this will be a revolution in how people interact with computers in the future.
It’s strangly similar to a presentation given by Jeff Han a couple months ago.
Rumours are that Microsoft is releasing another edition of the XBOX 360 dubbed the XBOX 360 Elite which will include a 120GB hard drive, a HDMI video out port and will be in black.
Just when I thought I had a nice and clean installation of Windows XP, one that was stable, fast and had everything where I wanted, it starts randomly freezing up. The main problem is that it seems to do it randomly, it can freeze up because I plugged in a USB device, unplugged a USB device, tried to shut down the computer, opened My Documents even start a phone call on Skype for christs sake! I’m not trying to sound big headed, but I do know Windows reasonably well and I like to think I can fix the majority of problems it presents me. But when you get random crashes that don’t BSOD and don’t write to the Event Log, I’m completely stumped for a fix.
However I don’t want to spend several hours reinstalling Windows XP, only to have to do it for Windows Vista less than a month later! Repairing Windows is also a long shot, I’ve tried it before with no avail.
Fortunately, I do have another computer, an Apple Macbook which only ever crashes when I try to run Adobe Photoshop CS3 on a 18MB RAW image from my D80 with just 512MB of RAM, which will do for a month. I’m still to lazy to shell out a couple hundred to upgrade the RAM of the Macbook to 2GB, all I currently use it for is web browsing, e-mail checking and instant messenge sending.
Going from twin 19″ TFTs at work and on my desktop to a rather clostrophobic 13″ TFT on a laptop with as much memory as Saddam Hussein at his trial is going to be a challenge.
Microsoft Windows Vista isn’t even in the stores yet for us normal folk to buy, and they’ve started working on the next release of Windows codenamed Fuji. Mary Jo Foley speculates that this is only going to be an incremental upgrade to Windows Vista (ala Windows 2000 to XP), and possibly just the first service pack…
Fuji is Windows Vista R2, and may eventually be called Windows Vista Plus, or Vista 2009 or some other crap Microsoft will come up with. However, Microsoft learned its lesson from Vista: the code base is a stinking pile of crap. It took five years for Microsoft to make a comparatively minor upgrade to Windows XP. Okay, so there’s the new security model, Aero a.k.a Windows Presentation Foundation and a few interface upgrades, but this is far less than what you’d expect from Microsoft with 10,000 employees, five years and over $20 billion burning a hole in their pocket.
Since development of Longhorn was announced, we’ve lost WinFS (possibly the one thing that got me excited about Longhorn when it was announced) and PC to PC synchronisation of data, and it hasn’t implemented many wanted features, such as better user account control, a better driver management model, enforced driving signing and many more other security related details.
But the post-Vista Microsoft knows the errors of its ways, it knows that implementing a feature in Vista was too difficult, there were too many people involved on each feature, a chance affected too many other features, and so stifled innovation and frustrated developers and designers. Everything took too long, cost too much and wasn’t implemented well enough.
The next major release of Windows needs to be a complete rewrite, it needs to be redesigned with compatibility as a secondary thought, it needs to concentrate on making Vista + 1 the best operating system ever released. Here are a few free tips:
They have five years to do this, if you include the time spent developing Fuji. It’ll be a big shock to everyone, especially for developers who find their applications no-longer work. Not everyone will be happy, and Microsoft will generate a lot of bad press, but they have the money and the monopoly to ride the storm, and its what Windows needs if it wants to have a sustainable future. Its about time the Windows NT 3.1 code base got retired for something a bit more modern.
It’s now official, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 has gone gold. Currently 49% of my visitors are using IE6, while 19% are using some pre-release version of IE7. Once the balance tips into IE7s favour, I’ll be ditching IE6 support on Ejecutive and fully embracing the wonder that is IE7.
So get upgrading!
Another day, another public Windows Vista release candidate, and this time it’s RC2. This is probably as close to the RTM release as Microsofts going to release, and has the build number of 5744 (perhaps hinting at 5800 build number for the final product?)
Microsoft have set the price of the Zune to $249.99, rejecting the $99 idea mentioned previously.
And they’re even saying they don’t make money with selling the Zune, even though Apple makes a healthy profit on a compariable product.
We had to look at what was in the market and offer a competitive price,” said Scott Erickson, Microsoft’s senior director of product marketing for Zune. “We’re not going to be profitable this holiday but the Zune project is a multiyear strategy.”
It has been recently speculated that Microsoft may price the Zune at $99 to undercut Apple’s iPod and take a serious chunk out of Apple’s market dominance as quickly as possible. After that, they can then rely on revenue from their subscription based music store and regain the loss from subsidising the Zune.
While this may be their policy on the Xbox, I think it’s unlikely that Microsoft would subsidise their player to that extent without some kind of subscription tie in, either restricting the Zune’s capabilities or just disabling the player until it can be confirmed that the owner has bought a year or two long subscription and activated their Zune. The subscription wouldn’t be essential to fully enjoying using the Zune, unlike Xbox Live being a bit part of the fun in playing the Xbox.
Shell Blog has the lowdown on how to incorporate new Vista UI designs into your own applications, with the slow death of the menu bar, and the rise of the command module.
One of the first things people notice when they start using Vista is the absence of menu bars. Explorer, photo gallery, media player, and IE all don’t show menus by default and just use the so-called “command module.â€? What is up with that? Do we hate menu bars? And more importantly — what is the guidance that third-party developers are supposed to follow?