I’ve long been a proponent of UI designers making decisions about what the best way to do something is instead of just providing configuration options to the user – after all, if you are a fully trained and experienced UI designer, shouldn’t you know better than your completely untrained users? Seeing some of the discussion going around about Joel’s criticism of the Windows shutdown menu, including Arno Gourdol’s comments on the Mac OS X shutdown options and they both seem to being taking it a little bit too far.

Robert Scoble:

I’d love to know what you think? Does any of the Office 2.0 vendors have a chance to edge in on Microsoft’s market?

Edge in – sure, it’s been happening for at least the past 5 years or more. I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve sold EditLive! to companies who were replacing Word to make life more pleasant for users. Notably though, these aren’t situations in Word’s core target market – creating documents destined for print. Word has picked up a lot of market share in all kinds of weird and wonderful content creation scenarios that it wasn’t designed for and it’s picked up features to make it work quite well there. Despite that, these fringe areas are ripe for competitors to specialize in and provide solutions that fit better with the user’s intentions.

I’ve just moved my blog and email hosting over to an unmanaged VPS running Debian so I no longer have to fight an extremely outdated RedHat and an awful Plesk control panel to get stuff done. It comes as quite a surprise that I’m finding the software in the Debian stable APT archives refreshingly up to date. Still no PHP4, but I have apache 2 and Python 2.4 (as opposed to Python 2.2 previously) so I’m happy.

So Microsoft has decided to specify licensing terms for anyone who wants to develop an Office 2007 style UI. I can’t help but think that this is somewhat hypocritical considering Microsoft was the beneficiary of a rather important case against Apple regarding copying of user interface ideas. I also find it odd that Microsoft is using licensing techniques to enforce the way the ribbon and similar ideas work instead of just making the actual component implementations available to everyone thus guaranteeing that they always work the same way (including in future updates).

While a couple of people got ahead of things and announced the engineering release of EditLive! 6.0 – the marketing team completed deployment of the web site updates today and so EditLive! 6.0 final is officially available to everyone.

Now we just need to get better at updating the official Ephox Weblog instead of just our own blogs…

There’s a somewhat inevitable drawback of ideas that work out well – they continue on much longer than you anticipated. Such is the case with the mess of AppleScript, UNIX commands and Excel spreadsheet that makes up our engineering statistics tracking system. It tracks bug counts, test coverage, velocity etc over time and produces a bunch of graphs that we can look at and try and work out what they mean. It’s by no means mission critical but it is interesting to see what’s going on from day to day. The trouble is, now that we’ve come to like having those graphs, the fact that this mess of scripts can only actually run on my laptop is something of a concern.

Stupid wordpress still not supporting Atom 1.0. Stupid upgrade that overwrote my changes to make it support Atom 1.0. Yay for the cool plugin that will avoid this problem in the future. Also yay for the fact that it works out of the box with PHP 4 instead of using PHP 5 only functions for the date. Here’s hoping it gets the time zones correct.

I spent some time yesterday playing around with Venus to aggregate the various Ephox related blogs. The result is current at test.symphonious.net but will either disappear or move somewhere more official depending on how we like it. I’m keen to see what people think of it. Hopefully we can encourage a few more Ephox people to make the leap into blogging.

A while back I complained that the FireFox 2.0 installer didn’t include an actual link to the Applications folder. This morning I saw that this wasn’t just a theoretical problem, nor was it just a problem for “stupid users”. One of our engineers, who is very bright and good with computers but with no real Mac OS experience, had to install FireFox 2.0 on one of our testing Macs. He dragged the FireFox icon onto the picture of the Applications folder. The lack of text made the problem even worse – he wasn’t familiar with the Applications folder icon on OS X so didn’t realize it was meant to be representative of the destination instead of being the destination in and of itself.

I installed the final version of Office 2007 this morning and when the installer finished I was actually quite impressed – it was the first Windows install I’ve done in ages that hasn’t taken the liberty to install a shortcut in my quick launch bar. Sadly, Outlook is one of the very few programs that I actually want in my quick launch bar so I went and added it myself. I thought, I’ll have to blog that – “Thumbs Up For Office 2007 Install”.

Ephox is looking for a software engineer in our San Mateo office.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Provision of advanced technical support to prospects and clients via phone and email;
• Development of solutions to both internally and externally reported bugs including the development of automated regression tests;
• Provision of professional services including custom development and product enhancements;
• Provide quality feedback to the rest of the business for the most common use cases for our products, potential new areas and feature requests and the most common problems and problem areas clients are encountering;

Other work includes

James Robertson mentions the importance of a good authoring environment in CMS solutions.

Considering that the primary purpose of a web content management system is to help staff to write and publish content, the editor has to be front-and-foremost when it comes to selecting a product. And yet, many organisations specify little more than “the CMS must provide a web-based WYSIWYG editor”.

I also found Seth Gottlieb’s comments on the subject interesting, particularly: