As a sideline from my usual news I thought I’d mention about an event I recently had the opportunity to get involved in.  It was a fund raising event that was organised by a friend of mine Mr Simon Drakeley that was arranged to raise money for a charity that looks after children with cancer.

One of my other keen interests is photography and on Monday 26^th July I spent the day photographing Simon’s world record breaking attempt at flying as many different aeroplane and helicopter types as possible. Unfortunately the day didn’t go exactly as planned with heavy rain preventing a number of the fixed wing aircraft from reaching Shoreham airfield from distant parts of the country. Despite all the problems with weather, Simon still managed with the help of a number of other aircraft owners in the local area to make the mission possible. In total he managed a whooping 35 aircraft types, making him a true record breaker. The highlights of the day for me were standing beneath the Search and Rescue Seaking helicopter experiencing the full blow of their rotors whilst attempting to get photos of Simon being lowered and getting the opportunity to take a flight with Simon in an Augusta 109 which is a very impressive helicopter.

I’ll be sure to include some photos when they are ready.

For more information click here.

I’ve just spent this afternoon catching up on a few other blogs and I’ve discovered that I’m famous.  Darren Strange, the Product Manager of Office 2007 in the UK has put a video clip up on his blog that he took at DevCon in London. You can see a number of people on the clip including myself and James Matthews about half way through giving opinions of how the event is going.  I would like to mention that he caught us off guard and we were not given any time to prepare. ;)

Link to DevCon Office Rocker Article

Link to Video

There is a interesting article about competition from Linux on Small Business Server 2003 R2 published on CRN about the refocus of Microsoft and Linux Rivals on SMB Servers.

http://www.crn.com/sections/software/software.jhtml?articleId=189501056

It’s good to hear that Microsoft are still seen as the Market leaders in this segment, but I also think it is important that we remain aware of the competition.

Great quote from the article:

“Despite Linux's success in the enterprise-server space, it has yet to make a dent against Windows SBS 2003 in the SMB market, several other partners say. "Microsoft has this segment completely wrapped up, and SBS has no competition from what we have seen. There are other small-business server offerings out there, but they do not compare," said Jason Harrison, president of Harrison Technology Consulting, Nashville, N.C.”

The Inquirer has written an interesting article discussing the pros and cons of Microsoft Word 2007. It highlights some fascinating usability problems that experienced ‘Word’ enthusiast are having with the new user interface, the shortcut keys and the automation process.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32665

There is an awful lot focussing on the cons uncovered in the new Word 2007 but luckily it’s not all bad news, as a quote from the article states:

“Generally it seems Microsoft has got the trade-off right, functionality that you're looking for never seems too far away and is always quickly found, if not immediately available.

Overall we're fairly happy with these ribbon-centric interface changes and hope to get used to the various alterations to the whitespace and font handling.”

The Mini Bar, formerly known as the ‘floatie’ (luckily that got changed) is a new solution to combat the irritating command loops involved in changing simple effects in text documents like font size, type face, font colour etc.

In order to view the Mini Bar you simply have to highlight a selection of text and it will appear floating above the text as if by magic.

If you move very close to the Mini Bar like I have done in the image above it fills itself in and becomes a miniature toolbar. If you move your mouse pointer away from the edge of  the Mini Bar like in the example below it slowly fades away until it disappears.

The only annoyance I occasionally get from this feature is when I select text to read it in a document. Perhaps it’s just me, but if something is important or if I’m distracted by something else I highlight a piece of text to see where I am. On these occasion the Mini Bar can get in the way, particularly if I want to read the line above.

Overall I really like this new functionality and I have actually surprised myself by using the mouse pointer more and more to modify simple effects like changing text to bold more often than I use shortcut keys which I used to rely on in previous versions of Office.