23 Musings

Microsoft launched Office 12 some time ago with a new file standard and extension. The XML powered standard, which results in files ending .docx, .pptx etc was touted as the cure to incompatibility woes and promising portability and better standardisation.

I'm finding none of that to be true as a user of Office 2003!

During the average day I get sent many documents and presentations to review or collaborate on and I'm finding real issues with this move by Microsoft. I can't open any documents saved in the new format in my version of Office. It's now got to the stage where many partners have upgraded to Office 12 and I'm having to request new versions of documents on a regular basis.

This has got me to thinking. The issue is only going to get worse as more people upgrade and aren't aware of the backwards compatibility issues. I believe Microsoft have made a massive mistake with this and really harmed the cause of data portability. What's even worse is that sometimes when documents are saved as a compatible version they lose some formatting and bloat in file size hugely.

Surely I can't be the only one encountering this problem and finding the frequency of occurrence rising?

I'm sitting at work right now, I'm not a developer any more (stopped that years ago apart from for personal interest and knowledge) but I've just created a Google Gadget and a Facebook App for our RSS feed! How did I do this? Dapper!

Dapper is a great online app which allows you to turn your websites data into widgets quickly and easily. They say: Dapper’s mission is to allow you to use any web based content in any way you can imagine. And by use, we mean going beyond just reading or viewing a webpage. You may want to create an RSS feed or a Google Gadget for a site, take a site’s content and put it on a map, receive an email alert when your site’s Alexa’s ranking goes below 5000, or create a mashup of your favorite band’s tour dates and a camping locations reservation website to organize your musical camping vacation. Whatever you want to do, however you want to mold the web, Dapper can help you do it.

Dapper basically scrapes data from a site and creates API streams from it. It's great! I highly recommend you try it!

Web OS is the talk of the town at the moment. From web based office packages, to applications under development using Proto and Pipes, everyone seems to want to bridge the gap between the browser and the desktop by creating applications that run inside your web browser.

Xcerion have a product which promises to move applications away from the desktop and into the cloud. It's said to be due to launch in the 3rd quarter 2007, but they're offering budding programmers the opportunity to sign up for forthcoming betas on their website.

This Information Week article has more.

Sounds interesting and like a lot of work is going into it!