A Living Text

You have to see this link on Apple design. The source of their inspiration is obvious. Johnathan Ive is paying homage to Dieter Rams. Whatever he is doing, he needs to keep doing it!

I think that 2007 was a watershed year for the end of the Microsoft Office empire. There are so many quality tools out there now that provide viable alternatives to Office, that it is no longer necessary to have Office. The NY Times talked about it recently. The only gates to the revolution are the institutional acceptance of Office, which demands that papers and documents at schools and businesses be turned in using Word, Excel, etc. Thus, the issue of interoperability is the key ~ can documents be saved into .doc format, for example, and look ok? To me, PDF solves this issue, but professors and managers don’t all have, or know how to use, Acrobat Professional, and so the need for word processors continues.

Let me review some of the tools that I use that are free, and in some cases more aesthetically pleasing than Office.

1. Buzzword. I can’t say enough about Buzzword, I just love it. Buzzword saves to .doc, and .docx amongst other formats. It doesn’t save to PDF yet, but should soon. The interface is elegant, the font choices, although limited, are very nice, and best of all, it’s free.

2. Adobe Share. Share allows you to upload PDFs and share them with people, or embed them.

3. Google Apps. Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Page Creator and Presentation give you the free ability to do a lot of what Office does. I’m not wild about the Google interface, it looks a little cartoonish and doesn’t do all the things that Word does by a long stretch. It does export to Word, Open Office, and PDF. Again, it’s free.

4. Lovely Charts. Sort of a Visio alternative, I just signed up so I’m not sure about it yet. But I think the interface is clean (built on Flash of course). Some day perhaps it will export to Visio, but who cares? It’s an alternative.

5. OpenOffice. If you want to download a large Office alternative you can use OO. It is bulky, and not accessible online like Buzzword, but it does a lot.

6. IBM Lotus Symphony. This group of tools should be available for Macs this year, right now it is only on PCs. It’s sort of slow and a resource hog, but it gets the job done like Word does.

With all of that said, I have been using Office 2007 at work recently, and I really like it. But I wouldn’t want to pay for it at home. Microsoft ought to get radical and make it free, then we would see a true revolution. I’m also using iWork 08 at home, and I love, love, love Pages. So there are a lot of options out there, but I think we are living through the end of the Microsoft hegemony.

In the October, 2007 issue of Technology Review, a reader comments about Apple’s design philosophy:

 Several experts and writers equated operational simplicity with minimal functions, and several cited the iPod as an example of gaining simplicity by avoiding feature creep. But the history of the iPod is feature creep itself. It started out as a music player. Now it plays music, podcasts, video, and games; it can act as a stopwatch or alarm clock, show you the time in other world cities, maintain your contacts and calendar, show photos, allow you to read text files, and serve as a backup hard drive. Why does it remain simple to use? Because all the functions work the same way. The user needs to learn only one rule about the interface and can apply it to every function on the device. 

What a great week for fans of Google and Apple such as myself. I have long, long wanted to see Google Desktop for the Mac, and now it is out along with a bunch of other cool aps, including SketchUp. Now I can sync up my life across PC and Mac platforms. Plus, Desktop is my brain in terms of old files and e-mail, and lacking it really hurt me on the Mac. I know that the new OS will probably imitate all this, but so what, Google does it for free.

Also this week, Google docs got a new, more organized look for sorting through files. It helps to find things and makes that app just a little better as it keeps growing into a great tool. This is really cool.

Add to that the fact that I get to beta test FrameMaker 8 at work, and I am pretty happy software wise.

I visited the Apple store down in Short Pump yesterday (near Richmond). I brought a mouse with me that I bought about a year ago. It’s an Apple wireless mouse. Once I changed the batteries in it, the interior plate fell off and it hadn’t worked since. The guys at the genius bar hooked me up with a new Mighty Mouse - wireless and with a track ball that is super small. It’s an upgrade since they don’t make the kind that I had anymore. I didn’t expect that, I thought they would fix the old one and charge me. So that was a nice surprise.

Short Pump was a slick mall too. That was our first trip to the Richmond area. From here to there is almost nothing but trees and rivers. We went through Mineral, down that way. Short Pump is all outdoors, you walk under porticoes and the stores are inside. They had just about everything down there  including J. Crew and  Bertucci’s, which is our favorite Brick Oven pizza place.  After visiting, I’m thinking that I wouldn’t mind  living down there, except that it doesn’t accomplish the goal of getting us closer to the ocean.

Being a technical writer, I am always on the lookout for classy documentation. I am also an Apple user (for the past year). Today I Googled ‘Apple Style Guide’ and came up with the Ur document behind their documents:

The Apple Style Guide

I find Apple’s documents to be clean, functional, and easy to use. They are aesthetically pleasing to the eye. I also looked at some new and old IBM documents today, based on a remark that Edward Tuftee made about John Carroll and The Minimal Manual. The newer IBM manuas also look clean and pleasing, and incorporate some clever ways of hyperlinking.

We bought an iMac yesterday - I am so happy! I’ve wanted one for years and it was finally possible. This is my first Mac, so I have a lot to learn, but so far, so good.

I bought my wife the Coldplay live CD for her birthday and it also includes a DVD of the concert. What a great show! We saw them in Boise and it was very good. I am happy to see he and Gwyneth married, I’d like to believe it will last but that seems unrealistic in the face of all the divorce in the pop culture.