ntschutta.com

I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time getting excited about Office - sure, I use Word, Excel and PowerPoint daily but for the last, well, decade, there really hasn’t been anything to get too worked up about. That said, today I watched something that really got my attention. While I realize this isn’t the freshest of news items, the video from Channel 9 (gotta love Robert Scoble) on Office 12 has been kicking around our offices lately and to tell you the truth - it really is quite something (maybe not quite as exciting as the multi touch interface, but c’mon, this is a business application). The live preview idea is fantastic; (feels rather Ajaxy if I do say so myself!) I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done something only to hit Undo… I also really like the clean UI - it sure looks like it’s a much better approach. Bravo!

For more information, check out this overview from Microsoft as well as Jensen Harris‘ posts: The Long Road to Contextual Tabs and It’s All About Context. Say what you will about MS but they’ve got some really bright people and some of the best usability folks around - and for the first time in, well, forever, I’m actually excited about upgrading!

I’ve been a fan of A List Apart for some time now and I get really excited when my blog reader says they’ve posted something new. Today they covered a topic near and dear to my heart with a piece entitled Getting Started with Ajax which does a great job of covering the basics. Of course I was particularly pleased to see that Foundations of Ajax was listed in the Ajax Resources section! I know this may seem a bit biased, but if you’re a web designer and you don’t subscribe to ALA, you really should (and if you don’t…well, you’re in the minority - A List Apart is 22 on Technorati).

This week, Ryan and I spoke at UW La Crosse. The event was fantastic and we had a blast - special thanks to Dr. Kasi Periyasamy and the Computer Science club for inviting us down! The event was recorded and I’m hoping to post the audio (maybe even the video…we’ll see) but in the meantime, here’s the slide deck. Dori would be happy to know that nearly half (yes half) of the attendees were women!

Since some people were very interested in the links, I’m also posting both the paper and the set of links from my talk at Code Freeze. As usual, these documents are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Ryan and I were quite thrilled to see that Foundations of Ajax was Slashdotted today - here’s a link. Craig Maloney gives us an 8 out of 10 (by the way, I loved your post on Michigan drivers…sad to say you could substitute Minnesota and it’d fit perfectly!) and there were some positive reviews within the comments as well. Needless to say, we’ve spiked a tad on Amazon… Tip of the cap to Brent Ashley for being the first to fill me in (hey, I was at lunch with the lads when it was posted) and thanks to those that emailed me - I appreciate the kind words! I’m just tickled that our little book made it to the front page on Joe’s customized Google home page