Windows 7: RC is nearly there
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Windows, Microsoft on
The Windows 7 team is hard at work. There’s a new build almost every day (if you’ve seen 7068 online, it could be real because many Microsoft employees are using it - although as it’s a Premium rather than Ultimate edition, it probably comes from an OEM partner because everyone at Microsoft tends to use Ultimate so they get BitLocker). There are no new features going into the release candidate beyond what’s getting announced on the Engineering 7 blog (which even Microsoft employees use to find out what’s going on, because they can see a feature discussed there before they’ve heard through the grapevine that it’s been signed off). The RC is getting close, says the director of OEM worldwide marketing, Mark Croft; “the development team is making some changes but we have a high degree confidence that we’re done and we’re on a good track to final testing and ship. The Windows experience team is very focused on catching all bug reports and there are other things going on behind the curtain - fit and finish and performance tuning. At the moment we’re trying to trend those bugs down because we have a zero-bug bar for shipping milestones like RC. I’ve noticed the teams I work with going into shutdown mode; their willingness to take even text changes is gone. That’s because they’re into localisation and you know when they’re there that they’re really getting finished.”
We’re hearing the same thing from the rest of the Windows team. When we were in Redmond last week, if we had bugs to report that they hadn’t seen, they wanted all the details. But when I asked if it was worth trying to persuade anyone that the Windows-E key combination should continue to go to Libraries (the way of the future) and not My Computer (meaning that where I want to go is another click away); ‘not for Windows 7′ came the answer. ‘There isn’t time.’
The week before at MIX I asked Steven Sinofsky if they’d looked at snapping windows into place on multiple screens and he told me that given how many people at Microsoft use multiple monitors (a far higher proportion than amongst mainstream users) they would like to work on the multi-monitor experience much more but there just wasn’t time for this release. And no, it’s not as easy as just stretching the taskbar across two monitors; not everyone wants that, and what about people who have three monitors, some of them stacked vertically?
There’s plenty of driver testing going on at the same time and both the Media Center and Tablet PC teams are still working closely with partners to develop experiences - think sports scores in the Media Center interface and multi-touch interfaces on the kind of machines Asus was previewing at CES. “There are a couple of Web service-oriented things that might pop up,” agrees Crofts but that’s not down to development questions; “they’re more dependent on business development deals.” Plus the Windows ‘8′ work has already started; after chatting with us, Mark Crofts was heading off to talk to the user experience team about the next version of Windows.
-Mary
Rated: 50% (2 votes)
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Girl Geek Dining
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in People on
I used to work in the Countess of Lovelace’s town house.
The only reason I found out was the blue plaque on the fence outside. The company I was working for was a web consulting start-up, and I shared the news of our office’s auspicious history with my colleagues. Only a handful even knew who Augusta Ada Byron King was.
If I was writing the National Curriculum, I’d be making her the centerpiece of the technology lessons. There’s something inspiring in knowing that the first programmer was a woman, in a time when women of her class were expected to do very little. Her programs may not have run, but Admiral Grace Hopper’s did. Women have always been at the heart of computing and computer science – but it’s been an invisible heart.
Back when I did my engineering degree there were only two women on my course, and over 80 men. There’s something very wrong with those numbers, and it’s the way educate and the expectations we inculcate that push women away.
That’s why I’m blogging about the women who run London’s Girl Geek Dinners. Sarah Blow started the regular meetings after being one of very few women at one of London’s first Geek Dinner events. She released that there needed to be a place for women who work in technology to meet, to hear from other women, and to, well, just hang out and chill after a day in the office. She arranged sponsorship from many of the UK’s biggest technology companies, set up a web site and mailing list, and now, over three years later, there are Girl Geek Dinners all over the world.
I’ve been to a couple (yes, men are allowed, if they’re invited by a girl geek), and they’re inspiring events. I’ve heard great speakers, and met inspiring people who have given me new ideas and fresh insights. There’ve been sessions at Google, at Microsoft, and at Skype, London technology companies that have opened their doors and offered space and sponsorship. It’s a phenomenon that’s spread by word of mouth, by blog and by tweet. Each time I’ve been, there’ve been more and more women attending - women who are no longer the one or the two, but instead the many.
Girl Geek Dinners are a wonderful idea, and one that needs to be spread to every city and to every town. Technology isn’t just a place where women should be, it’s a place where they should be leading. Women were the first to build this IT-powered world – and it’s one that needs them working to inspire and educate and inform, turning the invisible heart into to the visible again.
–Simon
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Win 7, IE 8: features by the numbers
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Beta, Web browser, Windows, Internet, Microsoft on
Windows and IE get the features that people use; that’s good if you’re in the majority.
In early betas of Internet Explorer 8, when you typed a search into the address bar rather than the search box, the list of results you got was five URLs from your history and five URLs from your RSS feeds. Less than 1% of the IE8 beta testers ever clicked on those RSS results and most people said what they wanted was URLs they’d typed in - so the shipping version of IE 8 doesn’t give you RSS results when you search in the address bar, just ten results from your history. ..
Well, actually, it does, but only if you dig into the options and turn RSS results back on. There’s some confusion in the IE team about this. Depending on who you ask you’ll be told it’s relegated to an option and off by default or it’s gone completely because having everything be an option increases complexity and the number of combinations you have to test. The ‘ordering pizza for 150 million people’ analogy that Dean Hachamovitch is applying to simplifying Internet Explorer and Steven Sinosfky is applying to simplifying Windows comes from a boss they once both reported to and it’s true that you can’t have all the features and only the features that suit everyone, and that if everything is an option there will be many users who never figure out the right options for them. (And that the more combinations you have to test, the longer it takes to ship.)
If RSS results from the address bar had gone away, that would be bad news for 1% of IE 8 users, which is quite a large number of people - except, of course, it’s not really 1% of everyone who uses IE. It’s 1% of everyone in the beta test group, Paul Cutsinger of the IE team told me, and “it would drop way down in the mainstream population”. Beta users are different; we’re actually prepared to use beta software for a start. “They’re early adopters, they tend to be power users, they tend to have more tolerance for problems that show up - but they also complain more!” Dev teams at Microsoft have to compare what they see from beta users with what they see in usability labs and in other tests. They have to filter out the biases from internal Microsoft users as well; nearly half of all Windows user have between six and nine windows open at once but most Microsoft employees have 20, 30 or 50 windows open at the same time.
Balancing that out is a difficult problem and I’m not sure Microsoft always gets it right. In the M3 and beta builds of Windows 7, Win+E opens the Explorer pointing at your document Libraries; in RC it will go back to opening My Computer, so that wherever you want to go is a click away. I should start by saying I’m a huge fan of libraries - I’ve been waiting for years for an easy way to search all my documents without having to remember which drive the one I want is most likely to be on. But most people who open Explorer are going to be looking for a document - at least most of the people who will use the final version of Windows 7. Beta users are implicitly more technical folk so a higher percentage of them will be going to a variety of places and so they want My Computer; but users will want documents more often than they’ll want multiple drives. Libraries are the way that we’re ‘intended’ to get at the majority of our files so having them as the default target of Ctrl-E made huge sense to me, both for immediate use and as the way going forward. If Libraries become as widely used as Microsoft must hope, not having them be what you see first every time will come to seem a confusing thing in a few years time.
And that’s the other problem with relying on users voting with their mice, even if you manage to remove the bias of early adopters, technical experts and other oddities. If what you want to do isn’t already a feature, how can Microsoft see in the statistics that it’s what you want to do? And if there’s a visionary feature that may not become part of the way you work until you’ve used it for a while, should Microsoft give up on it because the usage isn’t there at first? At the MIX conference this week, Senior User Experience Designer Stephan Hoefnagels claimed that the taskbar in the 1985 release of Windows 1 predated the Apple Dock by 15 years. If you want to take credit for a feature, you have to have the courage of your convictions and make it prominent - not hide it away behind the old way of working, even if it doesn’t win a popularity contest on the first day.
-Mary
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
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Making your mark through user experience
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Navigation, People, Applications, Web browser, Microsoft on
Good design isn’t just for those fancy marketing advertising sites. It’s an important part of how you relate to your users – and how they work with your applications and services. A SAP line of business service needs just as much design as an ecommerce web site. Internal users need to love the applications they use just as much as they love eBay or LiveJournal or IT Pro…
Here at MIX09 Microsoft is evangelising user experience to designers and developers from all over the world. Microsoft Research’s Bill Buxton has provided dynamic and entertaining keynotes, and his ideas are showing up in the next generation of design tools that previewed here in Las Vegas this week. But the most interesting and inspiring keynote wasn’t the Silverlight 3 extravaganza, or the unveiling of Internet Explorer 8. Instead it was one woman standing on stage talking about prescription medicines.
I was tempted to save this story for Ada Lovelace Day next week, but Deborah Adler’s work with redesigning the prescription label shows just how good design can make people’s lives easier (and even save them), while also changing the public’s perception of a business.
It all started when her grandmother accidentally took some of her grandfather’s medicine. It’s not difficult for that to happen, as the standard packaging for pharmacy medicines all look the same: little orange plastic jars with badly printed labels. Adler was working on her master’s design thesis at the time, and took on redesigning the packaging as a task.
She used information architecture principles to redesign the labels, and came up with a packaging design that made it easier to view important information. The result was a clearer, safer view that could be personalized to avoid confusion, and which prioritised key pieces of information – the drug, the dose, and when it should be taken.
Of course that was just a college project, but Adler believed in what she was doing and felt that things should go a lot further than just being shelved in a college library. She took her ideas to regulatory bodies and to many of the large US pharmacy chains.
She ended up working with Target, where her ideas were refined, using more user research and industrial design. The resulting Clear RX system had redesigned packaging, with Adler’s new clear labels, as well as a new set of documentation to go along with the pill bottles – and the bottle included a magnifying lens to make the text even clearer.
Clear RX has now won many awards, and has also changed the perception of Target’s pharmacy – significantly increasing its market share. A new user experience has ended up not only saving lives, but adding business value.
Adler’s rules for design are a good set of guidelines for anyone designing an application, or a service:
1.Having a love affair with the customer and digging into their needs
2.Solve those needs humanly and humanely
Having a love affair with your users may seem a little odd, but it’s all about making a connection to your users and understanding what they need and how they need it.
Simon
At MIX09 in Las Vegas
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Make Adobe Acrobat Pro deactivate
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, Adobe on
You can have Adobe Acrobat Pro on two PCs with the same licence; handy for taking work home. But if you’re switching to another PC, you’ll want to deactivate Acrobat on the old PC. This is supposed to be ‘automatic and transparent’ says the help, though not so automatic that you can do it by uninstalling (as far as I can see). Instead you choose Help >Deactivate. Except Deactivate isn’t on my Help menu.
To make it appear, it seems you have to open the Acrobat Pro help file from the Help menu. When you go back to the Help menu, the Deactivate item will appear and you can run it. When it finishes, Acrobat Pro helpfully closes itself (because you can’t use it any more).
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
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It was 20 years ago today…
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Cloud, People, Web browser, Server, Internet on
Tim Berners-Lee may not have been Sergeant Pepper, but his work at CERN has left the world with a vital and powerful communications tool.
CERN has chosen to mark today to commemorate the approval of the initial project that two years later became the public web. It’s been surprising to think just how quickly the Web became the stuff of everyday life, and the place (the cyberspace?) where millions of us work.
I’ve been using the web since a few days after the first public web server went live, with my first access through a university terminal and a little text browser. It was a year or so later that I sneaked into the old SCO offices in Watford on a Sunday afternoon to be shown the the glowing grey pixels of the first release of the Mosaic browser.
It was only a year or so later that Mary and I wrote a round up of all the web browsers then available. It’s hard to imagine in these days of IE, Mozilla, Chrome and Safari that there more than 20 different browsers - a pre-Cambrian explosion of the Web. Shortly after that I moved to Bath, to help found UK Online, one of the first web-based content services - a direct ancestor of the CMS systems that power IT Pro…
Time flies, and the Web has become all pervasive - on our phones, our TVs, even baked into the hardware in our homes. We work using web-based cloud services, and we shop and talk all across the Web.
So, in a flash of historical perspective, here is a picture of the first web server. It’s Tim Berners-Lee’s original NeXT Cube, now in a case in CERN’s small museum. And the sticker? “Do Not Power Down. This Is A Server.”
–Simon
(In Silicon Valley)
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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ScreenCams made easy (for fun and profit)
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Cloud, visualisation, Applications, Windows on
DEMO09’s consumer focus slid over into the business world in more than one place. We’ve already looked at AppZero’s cloud computing tools - but there was one area of business computing that got quite a lot of attention: the screencam.
Often thought of as a training tool, screencams let you capture what’s on screen - with narration and captions where necessary. There are plenty of screencam tools out there, but they’re expensive and awkward to use. The result is that something that could be a quick and useful collaboration tool is relegated to specialised projects and careful authoring.
Two products unveiled at DEMO are aiming to change all that. The first, Pixetell, lets you quickly voice annotate content that’s sent by email. While its annotations aren’t the full screencam experience, they mean that you can quickly describe what needs to be done to a document or a diagram, without having to spend time writing long involved descriptions.
The second, Citrix’s GoView, is much more the traditional screencam - but this time with built-in sharing. You sign up for the free service, download a small application, and you can quickly capture all your on-screen actions, along with your narration. The resulting movie can be edited online, and then hosted on the GoView service. All you need to do is email or embed a link, and everyone who needs to see the screencam is able to view it in a Flash player.
There’s a lot of scope for this type of tool. Support staff can get a view of just what a user’s doing when a repeatable problem reoccurs, while instructions for a new application can be enhanced with real-world screencams showing just how users can get the most from their new tool. They can even become a tool for sharing results and showing how Excel spreadsheets can be explored.
Bringing screencams out of the training ghetto is an important move. It means that a useful tool is now ready for prime time, and for a much wider class of user. There’s a lot of promise here, and a lot that can be done - and (we suspect) much more than we’ve thought about…
–Simon
Rated: 40% (1 votes)
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D2C - evaporating your data centre
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Cloud, virtualisation, Applications, Storage, Server on
We’ve all heard of P2V - taking a physical server and making it virtual. Now it’s time to start thinking about D2C.
Mary and I have just finished an intense couple of days at the DEMO09 event in Palm Springs, where 39 companies had 6 minutes each to unveil a new product. Most were consumer technologies, but there were a few for the IT Pro readership, with one of the most interesting being AppZero’s.
Getting applications to run in the cloud can be an issue. Most cloud services are proprietary, and where there’s scope for you to build and run your own cloud servers, you’re often limited to working through unwieldy and complex web interfaces. Even Amazon’s AWS isn’t that easy to use.
That’s where AppZero’s tools come into play. They can take an existing set of servers and replicate them straight into Amazon’s cloud. First servers are converted into virtual application appliances - whether Windows, Solaris, or Linux. There’s not much overhead - AppZero claims less than 3% - and once wrapped as a single VAA file it’s easy to move them just anywhere - whether it’s around your data centre or up into the cloud. Instead of configuring applications and operating systems, a move is as simple as a file copy.
There’s a control panel to help manage and set up cloud servers for your application appliances - helping you avoid the hard work in setting up EC2 servers. It’s not perfect yet (the DEMO09 version was a beta), and there’s no way of specifying Amazon’s European servers rather than the US network. However, there’s a lot of promise in the service, taking a Datacenter to the Cloud, making D2C reality.
Something to look out for!
–Simon
(in Palm Springs)
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
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