Global Nerdy

I (briefly) installed a trial of Office 2007 on my work box, to get a glimpse of the future (since it appears that my business unit is in upgrade Siberia, it’ll be years before we see IT put it on our machines). While the wisdom of completely changing Office’s UI to the new “ribbon” device is debatable, I actually had no show stopping issues with Word, PowerPoint, or Excel.

Outlook, on the other hand, was a totally different issue.

I thought it might just be the poky Pentium M in my ThinkPad, but Outlook 2007 was significantly slower than its predecessor. So much so, I cracked about 30 days into the 90 day trial and uninstalled whole suite. It would appear I’m not alone in this experience:

The problem — which is absolutely inexcusable — is that Office 2007 (Outlook, specifically) crawls, even on this superfast machine. The hard-drive is also constantly in motion, slowing things down even more. I’m not alone in these observations. You can read other Office 2007 horror stories here and here. Despite a small .PST file — I reduced mine from close to a gig to less than 150 MB — my Intel Centrino Duo-driven notebook chugs along like a 386 trying to run an application originally written for a mainframe system. Even such tasks as composing a simple email are delayed by a few seconds before my typed words ultimately appear on the screen (and send / receives and related activities take an eternity).

The curious thing is that nothing very significant seems to have changed with Outlook 2007. Certainly nothing of the magnitude of the UI overhaul that the rest of the Office suite got, or the changes that Outlook 2003 delivered (such as the vertical right-hand reading pane). This makes the crummy performance particularly unacceptable.

I open Word, PowerPoint, and Excel to do specific things, but Outlook’s always open. Next to the browser and IM clients, it’s one of the indispensible tools of my workday. If Outlook 2007 really performs this badly for everyone else, Microsoft is going to have a big mess on their hands once customers start rolling this thing out in a big way.

Source: SpendMatters: Vista, Office and Outlook 2007 are a Nightmare

Click to see the comic on its original page.

A number of my (ahem) file sharing enthisiast friends tend to favour the RAR compression format over ZIP, since the “word on the street” is that it makes for smaller files. This is particularly handy for all sorts of uses, from creating archives of version-control repositories of your code to say, passing around copies of the leaked Arcade Fire album, Neon Bible.

Jeff Atwood, author of the “you must read this if you code” blog Coding Horror, has gone beyond accepting the prevailing wisdom and done the legwork. He took the data from a page benchmarking a large number of file compression tools, fed the data into Excel and produced some charts which make it easier to interpret. The practical upshot of all this is that your best bang-for-the-buck compression tools in terms of output size (smaller is better) and speed (faster is better) are WinRAR and SBC (which neither he nor I had heard of before). He writes:

RAR offers a nearly perfect blend of compression efficiency and speed across all modern compression formats. And WinRAR is an exemplary GUI implementation of RAR. It’s almost a no-brainer. Except in cases where backwards compatibility trumps all other concerns, we should abandon the archaic ZIP format– and switch to the power and flexibility of WinRAR.

(Before you start complaining that recipients won’t be able to uncompress RAR files: you can create self-extracting RAR file for Windows with a sub-100K overhead, StuffIt Expander does just fine uncompressing them on the Mac, and if you’re on Linux, you should have the chops to locate the RAR unarchiver for your particular distro.)

Don’t you think that the photo below screams “Caption contest!”?

More photos here.

(I was strongly tempted to reference the Pussycat Dolls song and give this post the title Don’t You Wish Your Mac Did Screencasts Like the PC?. That damned song seems to have crept into every movie or trailer I’ve seen in the past week.)

You’d think that with its serious “creative cred” that someone would’ve developed a killer screencasting application for the Mac, but I agree with the folks over at 37 Signals: there just isn’t one. The 37 Signals folk are pretty hard-core Mac fans — it’s reflected in both their design aesthetic as well as the preferred platform of Ruby on Rails developers (RoR was developed by 37 Signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson) — so it’s pretty safe to assume that they’ve hunted high and low for a reasonable scrrencasting app that runs on their platform of choice.

The closest candidate is Snapz Pro, written by Ambrosia Software, creator of some really great Mac games and utilities. I use Snapz, which is probably the best screen-grabbing utility I’ve ever used as well as WireTap Pro, which is equally excellent as an audio capture tool.

The pro version of Snapz does a decent job of capturing screen movies, but therein lies the problem: there’s a difference between “capturing movies of the screen” and “producing a screencast”. When it comes to producing a screencast, the editing process tends to take up far more time than the recording prcoess, and that’s where Snapz Pro falls short. To do editing, you’ve got to go to iMovie, and to produce title cards, you’ve got to fire up your favorite image-editing software, and so on. There’s a lot of “legwork” involved. As the 37 Signals people put it:

Here’s what I’d like to see. Basic screen video capture with a few simple compression options, audio recording, caption/graphic overlay support, simple video editing (cut, duplicate, slow down, just the basics), and export to Quicktime or Flash. All wrapped up in a nice UI too, of course. The biggest downfall of the current options is editing — there’s no way to preview the screencast you just created, overlay some captions, intro and outro text, and cut out some of the dead video).

Can I get an amen? Better yet, can I get a product?

I’ll agree that using separate tools is probably the better way to go if you’re producing a film, but if you’re trying to quickly produce a screencast (or several screencasts) demonstrating a UI for your customers with voice-over narration that also lets me do a little editing, make titles and throw in some transitions, I want a tool that’s a little more monolithic, a tool that — dare I say it? — takes a more “Microsoft Office-y” approach like the 37 Signals people suggest. That tool is Camtasia Studio.

Camtasia Studio supports all sorts of output formats, from QuickTime and Windows Media to what seems to be the preferred format these days — Flash video with an integrated player, a la YouTube. Adding titles, transisitons and text captioning is easy, and there’s a pretty decent edit suite in there too. For the videos you output in Flash, there’s the option of adding interactive “call-outs” (highlighted areas of the movie) and “hot spots” which when clicked take the user to a predetermined point in the movie or a web page. I’ve already used it to create a couple of screencasts for use by Tucows’ sales team, and they love the results. I’ve already committed to creating some screencast tutorials for end users for some of our Tucows services. And yes, they’ve got a version that runs under Vista — I run it on “The Taint”, the Acer laptop sent to me as part of a Vista promo. Call me a happy (and completely unsolicited) user of Camtasia Studio.

So c’mon, Mac developers — where’s the Mac equivalent of Camtasia?

In additon to fending off challenges to Office from Google, a lot of people (myself included) think that Microsoft’s facing a challenge to their platform dominance from the internet. If you buy the World of Ends-style idea that “the internet is a platform that nobody owns,” that’s a pretty big, amorphous blob for the guys in Redmond to wrestle.

A lot of startups today are creating software that doesn’t target a specific operating system. They’re developing software to run on the internet; on stacks of free and open software (ie, LAMP), and using browsers’ HTML and JavaScript rendering capabilities to be the client side of their applications. In another era, they might have been developing Windows software, writing to the Windows API, and delivering their apps as Windows binaries. So what’s Microsoft to do to keep developers focused on platforms they control? Robert “Scobleizer” Scoble thinks he’s seeing the patterns in Microsoft’s tea leaves:

Adam Sohn (he was the PR guy in our group when I started at Microsoft) is quoted on Redmond Developer saying that Microsoft is preparing a Live Development Platform. Ahh, an API that’ll do it all? Hmmm. I’m worried about the boil-the-ocean approach.

Scoble’s concern is that web developers like (or are at least used to) their pieces loosely joined; trying to create an all-singing, all-dancing API runs counter to that. Microsoft, on the other hand, has built their fortune around making developers productive, so it would be a mistake to underestimate their ability to understand the needs of mainstream programmers.

One thing’s for sure, it’ll be interesting to hear what Microsoft has to say at Mix this year.

Source: Microsoft trial balloons Web strategy? « Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger