Most people by now are probably aware the IE8 beta 2 has been released. In my last post, I quickly touched on Ubiquity, and it's interesting too see that other people also believe that Accelerators (the feature formally know as Activities) goes a way to providing the same functionality, seems some people do get it.
Besides this, there are many other features that IE has been needing for a while. The biggest as far as I'm concerned is InPrivate, closely followed by the work done on performance (speed increase, memory usage etc).
Unfortunately I won't get a good chance to get my hands dirty until later today, but I'm sure looking forward to getting IE8 beta 2 running on my machine at home.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
What a tool!
I was just over at Scobleizer and stumbled across his latest post about ubiquity. Somewhere in the post, he starts to talk about people who "get it" and people who don't. Or as he puts it, passionates and non-passionates.
His rant goes on about people who won't be bothered reading the instruction manual and watch the training video, and because of this, only passionate people will use it.
Now, I think ubiquity is a nice concept rolled up into a geeky, non-usable form. Blaming users for not wanting to learn what is in effect a command line for the browser seems to be a bit off the mark. If you actually spend the time to even read the first page about ubiquity, it talks about providing the "Verbs" (actions) on context menus. This is where the future is. It provides the features you need where people don't have to remember all the possible things they can do.
So, I can understand someone which passion getting excited about ubiquity, but taking an elitest stand and saying that it's no good for anybody else is just a complete load of crap as far as I'm concerned. I think maybe a bit of critisism about the form it's been delivered in is probably a better approach to take than bagging people who prefer to use the mouse than type commands into a black window.
An example of what I think would work, is based on what is provided on the ubiquity page.
The scenario: A typo on a blog (ironic that this post probably has typos too..).. They highlight some spelling mistake on a web page and use ubiquity to highlight by typing in the highlight command. The next step is to select a larger amount of text with the highlighted part to give more context of where the mistake is. They then type into ubiquity "email too xxx".. This opens gmail and starts a new email filled with the selected text and the Send To address filled in.
How I think it should work:
Select the typo and right click. Select actions->Highlight.
Select more text and right click. Select actions->Email
This is what IE8 does through activities. The difference, it's not done in a non-user friendly way using a command line tool.
Anyway, time to stop ranting... Ubiquity is a nice tool, I just think it's not quite ready for normal users.
His rant goes on about people who won't be bothered reading the instruction manual and watch the training video, and because of this, only passionate people will use it.
Now, I think ubiquity is a nice concept rolled up into a geeky, non-usable form. Blaming users for not wanting to learn what is in effect a command line for the browser seems to be a bit off the mark. If you actually spend the time to even read the first page about ubiquity, it talks about providing the "Verbs" (actions) on context menus. This is where the future is. It provides the features you need where people don't have to remember all the possible things they can do.
So, I can understand someone which passion getting excited about ubiquity, but taking an elitest stand and saying that it's no good for anybody else is just a complete load of crap as far as I'm concerned. I think maybe a bit of critisism about the form it's been delivered in is probably a better approach to take than bagging people who prefer to use the mouse than type commands into a black window.
An example of what I think would work, is based on what is provided on the ubiquity page.
The scenario: A typo on a blog (ironic that this post probably has typos too..).. They highlight some spelling mistake on a web page and use ubiquity to highlight by typing in the highlight command. The next step is to select a larger amount of text with the highlighted part to give more context of where the mistake is. They then type into ubiquity "email too xxx".. This opens gmail and starts a new email filled with the selected text and the Send To address filled in.
How I think it should work:
Select the typo and right click. Select actions->Highlight.
Select more text and right click. Select actions->Email
This is what IE8 does through activities. The difference, it's not done in a non-user friendly way using a command line tool.
Anyway, time to stop ranting... Ubiquity is a nice tool, I just think it's not quite ready for normal users.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
WPF Datagrid CTP
Well, for anybody who managed to miss the news, Microsoft have just released the CTP for the WPF Datagrid.. It requires the .Net Framework 3.5 sp1, but that's just a small little update...
Anyways, so far the best link I've found for it is here. So take a look and have fun..
*Just a little side note.. I'm sure this is one of the last big things that people are holding out for with the adoption of WPF, though to date I've managed pretty well without it..
Anyways, so far the best link I've found for it is here. So take a look and have fun..
*Just a little side note.. I'm sure this is one of the last big things that people are holding out for with the adoption of WPF, though to date I've managed pretty well without it..
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