Digital Home Thoughts: Windows Vista Lab 2007: Day Two

Session 5: The Photography of Art Wolfe (Art Wolfe)
I've never heard of Art Wolfe before, but I could certainly appreciate his photography. I believe some of his work is part of Windows Vista in the form of desktop backgrounds – we were given a large coffee-table book of his work, and it's nothing short of gorgeous. He also personalized it for me, which was nice. Based on the number of people working on their laptops while Wolfe was presenting, it seems photography isn't everyone's "thing". Some people in the room doubtless get more excited about CPU L2 cache level than a great photo. ;-)


Figure 8: Art Wolfe presenting some of his photos to us.

Session 6: Office 2007 (Jared Andersen)
Office is a product that most heavy computer users live inside, so it's a strong button-pushing issue for most of us in the room. Outlook is my top application in terms of day to day use, so his opening comments about the way it has been improved in 2007 definitely got my attention.

Andersen happens to be a product manager for PowerPoint, so when he kicked into the demonstration of PowerPoint 2007, he held my attention. I'm a very visual person, and the complete lack of visual design tools inside PowerPoint has always been a pain point with me – the nicest thing you could do to text was give it a crappy-looking shadow. Prior to PowerPoint 2007, Microsoft's answer to getting creative was "Go use Photoshop", which of course most people did not, and could not, do. With PowerPoint 2007, they seem to finally acknowledge that people need simple, effective tools to add creative touches to their presentations – and professional templates, fonts, and colour palettes

I asked about why the file format has been changed, and was told that the new Office 2007 format is XML-based and has been submitted for ISO approval – meaning that once it's been accepted, it will likely not change for quite some time. It's also ZIP compressed, which will result in roughly 50% savings in file size with most Word and Excel documents. When a Word 2003 or XP user (not sure about 2000 or earlier versions) tried to open a Word 2007 document, he'll be prompted to download an update from Office Update that will bring 2007 compatibility into the program. That scenario breaks if the user doesn't happen to have Internet connectivity at that moment however, so I remain a bit skeptical about how smoothly this process will really go.

Vista Lab Summary
I've been attending these labs for a few years now, and I have to admit that it's only been the last few months that Vista has seemed "real" to me. So much of Vista was based on features that appeared only on paper, and my experience using early betas left me longing for Windows XP. But in between beta 1 and RTM, Microsoft has done a serious amount of polishing, tweaking, and enhancing to Vista – and I truly find it a joy to use. The Vista lab was a great experience, and in particular I enjoyed hearing from Microsoft partners who were preparing hardware for Vista. I would have enjoyed hearing from software partners who could talk about how Vista is a better platform for their software than previous versions of Windows – maybe next event!

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. Vista is definitely the best version of Windows yet from what Jason can tell so far.