CS and the City

APC Magazine has brand spanking new deets on the next version of Office for Mac. Sounds like the new version will be adopting some of the new UI features from its windows cousin (which I have used and have been blown away by) as well as the new XML file formats. Check out the full APC article on the upcoming features.

I really like the interview with Mary Starman, group product manager for Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit.

At this early stage the product is known only by its version number as ‘Office 12′. “That won’t be the name it goes to market with — we’ll have something brilliant, like the year it launches, as the name!” laughs Mary Starman

If the product manager is having this good of a time during an interview, working for the team must be quite the experience. Anyone from Microsoft for Mac interested in a co-op student next year?

My opinion doesn’t hold much clout on the grand scheme of things, but what are blogs good for if not used as a shameless outpouring of unrespected opinion. Just watch, I bet I’m on the leading edge of this thing. So this is me officially declaring that Digg has jumped the shark.

After weeks of being bombarded by “Apple does something” and “The Wii will have every feature ever” articles, after Kevin having to be un-democratic and skew the formula to benefit the lazy majority, Digg has become completely worthless.

Say Hi to Happy Days and Tom Cruise for me Digg.

AKA The only reason I will be installing Crossover Office on any future Intel Macs.  I’m not kidding, it’s that good.  Don’t bother reading this, go get yourself a copy at the Writer Homepage.

Using Windows Live Writer feels like how it must have felt to use that very first version of Microsoft Word.  All that ease of use pouring over you after years of being stuck with edit. How everything is fast and intuitive and not hidden in awkward commands or layers of documentation.  Windows Live Writer is possibly the best example of “Do one thing and do it well.”

I cannot remember being this passionate about a Microsoft product since I used Encarta to breeze through my fourth grade report on Jellyfish.

But let’s start from the beginning. The beginning being my blogs, all three of them.  One is a personal blog on a webserver running on WordPress, the second is a friend’s development blog I contribute to on Blogger (De-coded under links), and the third is CS & the City.  None of my blogs are official Microsoft Live Spaces blogs and all of them were picked up without any hassle by Writer. All I had to provide is the URL, username, and password.

With this information in hand, Writer sets out to my blog, making a connection using one of a number of supported API (According to the website, Writer supports RSD (Really Simple Discoverability), the Metaweblog API, and the Movable Type API.)  Once it has successfully connected to the blog, it writes a quick-test post and then downloads all the applicable styling information and related images so that when you write your post, you can write it in exactly the same style as it will appear in your web browser.  Of course, you can switch to a normal word processor style view, or even HTML view to fine tune the markup.  As Writer works now, however, it creates some of the cleanest markup I’ve seen from a Microsoft product (Frontpage anyone?).

I also love the fact that it picks up my categories I have set up on my WordPress blogs (although it doesn’t appear to let me add additional ones from Writer).  It also lets me change properties of a post – enabling/disabling comments and trackbacks, adding trackbacks to ping, etc.

I do have a few pinch points I need to point out though.

The sidebar has links to a number of recently written posts as well as a link to create a new post.  Unfortunately, clicking them will open up your new or existing post in a brand new window.  Word learned this lesson years ago, and Firefox has more recently taught IE a thing or two.  Tabs for posts would be a welcome addition and I can only assume it’s coming in a future version.

Spell checking is available, but it isn’t in-line like Word or Outlook.  Now that I can get this functionality in the WordPress or Blogger console with Firefox 2.0, I don’t want to give it up.  In the same vein, though Writer will automatically save draft versions of my post, it will not propagate them to my blog automatically. It gives me a button to do that (under the Publish drop down menu).

All in all, an incredibly solid product considering it’s in beta and it’s free.  I’m really looking forward to where the MS developers take it and what third-parties do with the powerful SDK.  I’ve already got myself a Flickr plug-in.

Last complaint?  It’s not available on my Mac, yet.  Come on, there was Windows Media Player for Mac! Why not a Windows Live Writer too? Especially if the developers add support for .Mac blogs.  That would be a kick in Apple’s iPants.

Today’s coding practices tip (as if this is a regular thing) comes from Michael Feathers at Artima Developer. He writes an article on the perils of playing pass the hot null in your code:

“[using null checks] …just means that you’re dealing with bad code: you’re dealing with code where people are actively making extra work for themselves and making code brittle in the process.”

Read the entire piece here. Something I’ll have to consider. I’d like to see him flesh out his argument for using null objects such as empty arrays and strings rather than nulls. I see his point that it can help handle the exceptional case graceful, but I think that nulls may have their proper place. It’s easier to check for a null than to check if a string .equals(“”).

I spent today reading up on Ant (Java Build Environment) and CruiseControl (Continuous Integration Framework). I’ve run across CruiseControl in a few past jobs, but never worked with it directly. I was actually quite surprised to find that it is an open source project as I’ve always found it to be sophisticated.

In my travels today I stumbled upon Buildix. Buildix puts Subversion, CruiseControl, and Trac on a live disc (ala Knoppix). I’m really impressed with the integration of the layers. I would love to see Apple distribute this packaged with their servers. This would definitely set them apart in terms of development environments for small and medium sized dev shops.

Found at Raible Designs