I've loaded IE7b2 (which I'm using for this post), WMP11 preview, and Office 2007 b2. Here's my take so far:
IE7b2 is still buggy, and Microsoft continues to skirt full support of CSS. Still. I gues they forgot about DTDs in their rush to... what? I'm not sure. Occassionally it crashes on me... but the new google toolbar (with bookmarks) appears to work... but run a separate instance of itself for every tab. Also, the toolbar refuses to load until I've loaded a page. It seems to me that this is because each tab is separate instance of the IE... but all of them crash across all open windows - so they definitely aren't isolated instances and must run in the same process tree. Oh well, at least they resurected the IE team for Vista (I'm sure it will be disbanded as soon as Vista ships).
WMP11. What can I say? They forgot podcasting. WTF? Paul Thurott may hail the interface as modern and iTunes as a clunky database app, but I prefer my music in a spreadsheet like grid. Now my video, that's another story - besides iTunes DOES a thumbnail view of videos. I'm sure in later versions iTunes will clean up the interface inconsistencies and allow that same view everywhere. If we're real lucky, Apple will fix its shitty iTunes performance on the PC.
Office 2007. Oooh. Shiny. I love the new ribbon UI. Exposing what you want is cool.... oooh and the minitoolbar. I thought I was going to swoon when I saw it. I can't wait to see this in the baseline. I was really getting tired of the 50 toolbar shuffle, and the newbs who scattered their toolbars everywhere and never cleaned it up! Ahhh. Outlook, though it uses the old UI, did add a category indicator to the 2-line view and a new task pane.
I've got SharePoint Portal 2007 b2 iso and the new FrontPage replacement. I'll give my thoughts on those later after I've played with them a bit.
posted @ Thursday, May 25, 2006 6:44 PM