Wednesday, July 17, 2002

Office 11 is further along than demoware #

Joshua Allen reports about Office 11: I've been using Office 11 on my machine for about 6 months now (dog food is the best food), and I can testify that what Jon saw is really there and pretty stable, and not just "demoware".  I am sure that the average Office user is not going to care too much about "supports XML" when they make the purchasing decision, and at first it seems to be no big deal (another file format?).  In fact, it is no big deal to use, because 90% of the time you have no clue you are using it.  The whole Office suite has married semistructured data and document authoring in a natural and unobtrusive manner, the way it's supposed to be.  And I'm still stumbling across really cool things that I can do "for free" as a result of this support.  Now I am just crossing my fingers that in another year, most people will see this functionality, not as a hot new feature, but as a basic level of support that they would expect of any document processing software. Truly exciting to me.  I'm still not much of a fan of Microsoft (the company and its monopolistic behavior) -- but if Microsoft delivers on this "universal canvas", I'd be thrilled.  Anyone else working on software like this?  OpenOffice?  Ximian?   Posted by Raymond Yee on 7/17/02; 2:32:03 PM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss

Amazon has released a web services interface #

I was really excited when I read the announcement of amazon's web service interface on Dave Winer's blog yesterday.  I was all set to figure out how to try this out myself when I saw that Mark Pilgrim had implemented pyAmazon (for Python).  I just had to register for an access key from amazon and try out the demo.  (Thanks, Mark!) Dave Winer pointed to Peter Drayton's comments about the amazon API.  (Peter's blog points to some discussion about groove -- which is also interesting to me since I've been thinking of building a groove tool for the "teacher's box") Jon Udell pointed out something that I didn't know about amazon's service:  that it has a RESTful manifestation (and not just SOAP).  Look the sample URL that Jon points to (which takes the XML produced by amazon and processes it via the XSLT service)  I share Jon's disappointment that only three reader reviews are returned from the amazon service right now.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 7/17/02; 2:25:42 PM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss

It's tough to keep blogging when you're busy, eh? #

I really appreciate the fact that others keep blogging even when they are busy.  What are some habits you follow to keep blogging?  Do you blog at a certain time of day?  Do you consciously think in the morning (or the evening) like a columnist...."Hmm, what am I going to write today or tomorrow and plan out your blog entries?"  Are you more reactive to the news of the day or what other people are writing? I hope to make daily blogging more of a discipline, something that combines a plan of what I will write (regardless of what else may be happening) and also an openness to what I'm reading elsewhere.  It sounds so basic -- but at times, I find myself only reacting to what others write and at other times, just pushing ahead with what I want to write with blinkers on.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 7/17/02; 11:39:28 AM from the Personal Notes dept. Discuss