Gallery

Office "14" slips further

Posted on 28 Apr 2009 at 12:39

Simon Jones is proved right about the launch date of office "14", finds quince useful for UI design, and creates a whole new save icon.

You can explore the patterns in many ways: from an alphabetical listing, from an outline form where patterns are listed in-place, or by tag relations that group and connect patterns together to show how they relate to one another. There are even RSS feeds, so you can get alerts about newly entered patterns or comments.

If you're thinking of designing an application, a quick browse round Quince may give you some good ideas for its user interface, and if you've encountered problems over the usability of an application you've already created, Quince may be able to suggest some simple changes to its UI that would overcome the difficulties. Anyone who has even a passing interest in UI design should definitely look into Quince. It employs a fresh, modern UI design in itself and has the potential to grow into an indispensable tool for UI designers and programmers, from hobbyists to the big corporate players.

Enterprise Search & Business Intelligence

It's nearly a year since Microsoft acquired FAST, the Norwegian maker of the FAST Enterprise Search Platform (FAST ESP), and it has spent the intervening months integrating the FAST personnel and products into its own enterprise search offerings. FAST cost Microsoft more than $1.2 billion, one of the largest acquisitions it has ever made. At the FASTforward conference in Las Vegas this February, Kirk Koenigsbauer outlined the progress to date and Microsoft's roadmap for the coming months. The first product to market was the free Search Server Express, which is aimed at small and medium businesses, or departments within larger organisations, and has now been downloaded more than 100,000 times.

Koenigsbauer announced two new products, the first being FAST Search for SharePoint, which will add high-end search capabilities to the next version of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. If you don't want to wait that long, there's also a "special offering" of ESP for SharePoint that allows customers to purchase the existing ESP product and migrate to FAST Search for SharePoint when it becomes available. The second new product will be called FAST Search for Internet Business, which is aimed at companies that do business through their websites. There's still no word on exact specifications, feature sets or how much either of these products will cost.

Microsoft hopes that by marrying FAST ESP's high-end search capabilities to SharePoint's collaboration and content management features it can offer higher productivity to its customers. Certainly, as we generate more and more information, the corresponding volume of data increases at such a rate that it's becoming increasingly difficult to find what you need without assistance from technology. Many people will be interested to see whether the marriage of these two products will be successful, and whether we'll be able to see the value of that $1.2 billion investment.

At the FASTforward conference Bj?rn Olstad introduced a vision of search becoming more visual and more conversational. He demonstrated a possible future user interface using the Microsoft Surface platform, in which the search interface was practically invisible. The users simply dragged information around the surface and search results appeared in small ovals that hovered around the various objects. At no time did anyone type an explicit search term or query into a box, and all the interaction was done by pointing and dragging. Olstad assured the audience that this demonstration was live, not prepared in advance, and he encouraged us all to try it for ourselves in the exhibition area afterwards. For me, the scenario he presented seemed to be rather specialised, and I don't see many people giving up on their screen and keyboard to do all their research sitting around an electronic coffee table any time soon. For one thing, what do you do about the people sitting opposite you? All the text and videos appear upside down to them.