Yesterday Microsoft announced that the Office team has reached the technical preview engineering milestone for Microsoft Office 2010. We now kick-off the Technical Preview program mentioned in our June 25th posting. The big effect that this will have on the PowerPoint Team Blog is that the team can start talking publically about what we’ve been working on over the past two-plus years. As you can imagine, it is a very exciting time!
Over the next few months, the blog will showcase some of the marquee improvements we’ve made to PowerPoint 2010. The team is planning to do twice-weekly blog posts. Many of the first posts will be high-level introductions to new features like first-class video support, new distribution formats for presentations, collaborative authoring, the web-based version of PowerPoint and even broadcasting PowerPoint presentations to remote participants. Then we’ll make deep-dives into the user interfaces, programmability support and even the technical underpinnings of many of those features. Our hope is to share with you as much information about PowerPoint 2010 as possible.
To kick off these new PowerPoint 2010-focused posts, I’d like to give you a sneak peek at some of our new slide transitions. Transitions, the most basic animation type, have long been a staple of presentations. In PowerPoint 2010, based on feedback from presenters and audience members, we have made a substantial investment to our slide transition capabilities. In addition to providing a whole new set of slide transitions – with more coming after the Technical Preview – we have made existing slide transitions render faster and look more realistic. Here’s a quick look at some of the slide transitions you’ll see in PowerPoint 2010:
Over the next couple of weeks we’ll dive into the details of the newly improved Transitions tab user interface, a new class of transitions called content transitions, and even details about how the new transitions work in older versions of PowerPoint, and in the new ( yes, I said new! ) PowerPoint Viewer.
The PowerPoint team hopes that you will find these posts helpful in learning what is in store for PowerPoint 2010, and we hope that you’re as excited about this version as we are. We encourage everyone to check back often, or subscribe, to find out the latest about PowerPoint. Please give us your feedback by commenting right here in the blog!
Shawn Villaron
Group Program Manager, Microsoft Office PowerPoint
June 14, 2009
The Track List, by the way, is:
01 MUSE - Knights of Cydonia
02 OK Go - Invincible
03 The Hoosiers - Goodbye Mr A
04 Serj_Tankian - Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition-HHI.mp3
05 Throneberry - Touched
06 Divine Comedy - Thrillseeker
07 The Dresden Dolls - Let the Sunshine In
08 The Mighty Bosstones - The Impression That I Get
09 Half Man, Half Biscuit - Turn A Blind Eye
10 My Chemical Romance - Teenagers
11 TISM - He'll Never be an Ol' Man River (for about for 5 seconds)
12 Paul and Storm - The Captain's Wife's Lament
13 Lacuna Coil - Stars
14 Victims of Science - The Device Has Been Modified
15 The Stranglers - Golden Brown
- Mood:
awake - Music:all sorts of stuff
However, thinking about These Things it may well be a good plan to get this brain voodoo checked out.
Especially since I can't find any contra-indications, and I've had more than one "episode" over the years that looks rather like something unusual is going on.
There are a couple of others that I've written about but I can't find them.
Not that it's caused me any fuss over the years, but it might be nice to hold up a mirror and disover what, if anything, is going on...
*May not contain actual word of God
Seriously, I've spent all day working and researching gardening. It's sad the amount of things I have been doing wrong in my garden, but now I know what to do right, and I'm going to fix it. I hope.
So it looks like I'll be planting things ALL year next year, and even putting in some garlic in the ground this November so it will Winter and produce delicious home-grown garlic for me. Yay yummy stuff!
Seriously, you don't know how excited I am about growing a successful garden. It's just got me grinning and doing more research on one topic than I've ever done before, especially in one day.
AND, like I said, I get to fix my mistakes with THIS garden, with just enough time to plant a few more things that will produce veggies before the end of the season.
Why didn't any of you tell me about this Internet thing? and Google?
"If you liked TOOTSIE, you'll love BOYS DON'T CRY." - @wordwill
"If you liked MY GIRL, you'll love LET THE RIGHT ONE IN." - @bergopolis
"If you liked NATIONAL LAMPOON'S EUROPEAN VACATION, you'll love HOSTEL." - @raven1967
"If you liked THE INCREDIBLES, you'll love THE WOODSMAN." - @dan_hill
"If you liked HOWARD'S END, you'll love FUNNY GAMES."" - @KitMoxie
Have at it in Comments.
Via Mitz's "Plan B", where Veronica heads home "in a mard". Urban Dictionary also mentions telling people, "Stop being such a mard arse!"
(This post attempts to imitate
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
prettygoodword, a much more reliable source of nifty words. Checkit.)
This is Fleetwood- a quiet seaside town- and former fishing port- just up the coast from unquiet Blackpool. When we started out as witches our mother coven met here.
We paddled, we went round the market, we had afternoon tea.
On our way home we stopped at John Ditchfield's glassworks at Poulton le Fylde- and got to watch him "blow" a vase. He said afterwards he'd intended it as a balloon, but changed his mind part way through. Ailz told him about collecting Murano glass rabbits - and he said those are known in the trade as "frigworks" because they're made when the glassblowers are "frigging about" in the lunchbreaks or at the end of the working day. I bought Ailz a pendant for her birthday. Ditchfield's big thing is iridescence. I adore iridescence.
Okay, I explain. Last year, Kev persuaded me to take a short holiday, say 4 days, on my own, to truly chill out. Some of you may find this laughable, but working in a university, plus doing research, is quite a stressful business,and last year I was regularly getting quite, er, 'bad' with it. However, things weren't good with Kev's mum, and the holiday didn't happen. So. This year he has suggested it again.
And it's all booked. :D :D :D
I've booked a week in a cottage not too far from Harrogate, it's got a private patio, 6 acres of private land, a 4 poster bed, a DVD player (essential!), a bathroom up in the rafters on the landing (!!!) and, well basically it's peace and quiet and loveliness for a week. Kev will come along for the Saturday and Sunday, then I'm on my own for 5 days. I may write some of my story on fairies. I may not.
:D Hoorah!!
J
No, we can’t be rude about religion and so the case for Scientology is made. People need an outlet.
The French are like secular versions of Scientologists, aren’t they? That’s why it is still appropriate to say things about the French that would have you strung up by the short and curlies if you said them about any other people.
I wonder if there are any Sciéntologistes out there and if so, who speaks to them?
1Having adherents like Tom Cruise doesn’t help them, either, it has to be said.
How much do you have to plant in a vegetable garden to reasonably feed two people for a full year?
This is something I really want to try to do next year, and having found that the community has a free compost heap means that getting the dirt will be free, just a little labor intensive.
Obviously we can't plant the meat, so I'm just talking about the veggies and tomatoes.
Any ideas?
I’m trying to get back to three strips a week. While I’m still pushed for time, I’ve been really unhappy with the flow of the strip while I pulled it back to twice a week (even if that was only intended as a temporary thing during Louisa’s first year). We’ll see.
In some bad news, Comics Buyers’ Guide has had to cut back on expenses due to the economy, and alas, alack, one of those expenses was Dork Tower. The editor says this is hopefully just a temporary thing, and given the feedback I get from the CBG staff and editors, I’m hoping so as well. Yet, for the first time in ten years, Dork Tower is exclusively a web-only strip. Or “webcomic,” as I guess the kids are saying these days.
This is a paradigm I’ve yet to get used to.
This is also a business model I need to figure out. While I’m notoriously unmotivated by money, the fact that there is now a Daughter involved and a College Fund to be funded puts a spin on things that wasn’t there five years ago.
On the plus side, while there are still massive slowdowns on the Gamespy server, at least the move to the new server is expected to be VERY soon.So hopefully the site should be super-fast and super-spiffy super soon.
One of Gmail’s most popular add-ons has made the jump from experimental widget to fully baked feature.
Tasks, a simple to-do list for Gmail, is now part of the official Gmail experience. It was previously only available from within Gmail Labs, a sandbox for Google’s engineers to publish and test out experimental Gmail features.
The Labs area of Gmail debuted over a year ago, and Tasks is the first feature to “graduate” from Labs and be incorporated into the default Gmail experience.
Since its launch in April, 2004, Gmail has grown from a bare-bones webmail client into a full-fledged platform. There’s a contact manager and fully integrated text, video and SMS chat. Anyone who wants more can plug in one of the 50-odd widgets from Labs to extend it.
The best Labs features are the ones which enable cross-talk between Gmail and other Google services, like displaying lists of Calendar items or Google Docs in the Gmail window, showing video previews in e-mails that contain YouTube links and adding auto-complete suggestions to Gmail’s search box. Of course, some Labs widgets just show pictures of your kids.
Tasks is an awesome feature. It lets you set up a number of simple to-do items, then check them off and delete them as you complete each one. For enthusiasts (like me) it’s great for keeping track not only of work items, but also personal items. Like many people, I use Gmail both at work and at home. Tasks was also recently made available as a stand-alone mobile web app, and I have a bookmark for it on my iPhone’s home screen.
Tasks is indispensable, and not just to me. Google says over 1 million Gmail users have installed it. There are tens of millions of people using the free service.
Gmail Product Director Keith Coleman tells Webmonkey that popularity was the primary factor in Tasks getting the nod. Coleman says others will follow soon. Any app being considered has to have behind it a commitment from the Gmail development team that they will continue to work on it and keep it fresh. Of course, there’s a base level of stability required as well. “We want to make sure it’s going to work perfectly for most people,” Coleman says.
Labs has been such a success, Google is extending the idea to Calendar as well. Starting Tuesday, Google Calendar users will see a new page in their settings called Labs. Just like in Gmail, there will be some experimental features you can turn on. It’s been seeded with a few selections from Google Calendar engineers, like a World Clock, and one I like called Next Meeting, which tells you how much time you can waste playing Kingdom of Loathing (or nuking wiki spam) before your next conference call.
There’s also a new Calendar API for creating custom Calendar enhancements. This is primarily of use to those with Google Apps Premium Edition inside their companies. People can create custom fields for things like notes about which conference rooms have projectors.
See Also:
Why anybody would celebrate this particular event is quite beyond me.
EDIT: fixed. Odd, it looked fine in the preview...
Congrats Jeff! Hope it's a bestseller!
You can buy Jeff's ...
Amazon sell some really weird stuff; for example, tins of uranium ore.
No, that's not the scary bit.
The scary bit is that customers who bought this item (the aforementioned uranium ore) also bought copies of Halting State and Volume Four of Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming (insofar as extracts are available for purchase). I seem to recall writing about that here.
I think I'm going to go and hide under the bed now. (Yes, the bedroom is circular; not a right angle in it!)
On the Sounder Train
Dear Reader,
Work continues to be a succession of crazy deadlines. Our current round of corporate videos required my working until about 10:30 Friday night, and some small edits and corrections on Saturday morning. To clear my head I went for a walk.
In the process of wandering the neighbourhood in pursuit of a pipe rack at no less than nineteen assorted yard sales, garage sales, and estate sales (a pursuit in which I was wholly unsuccessful) I became rather too warm. The temperature was upwards of 85°, and at some point I became dehydrated and simply stopped perspiring.
While the condition did not go as far as heat stroke, I was plainly not doing well by the time I arrived back home. I drank a large amount of liquid refreshment and, fortified by a "MythBusters" marathon on the televisionary engine, I slept on the couch much of Saturday afternoon.
Fully recovered by Sunday, after Mass Francine and I constructed another section of back yard fence.
Work has continued on various Cruenti Dei projects, including Turn 12, a Renaissance Rules expansion, and background for a new continent or two. Francine found a fantastic application called NoteBook by a company called Circus Ponies. It has proved indispensable in the writing process of these new books.
I continue to re-read The Lord of the Rings. What astonishes me about these books is how much I missed on previous readings. In details great and small these are proving extremely Catholic books. Some of the details - as small as odd phrasings that in previous readings I simply glossed over - have changed my understandings of characters and even events.
Of course, it might simply be that I'm more aware at 42 than I was at 12, or even at 30.
One particular detail struck me so forcefully that I searched the very internets for confirmation of my observation, finding it in Paul Kocher's book Master of Middle-Earth. It is just this: that every event in The Lord of the Rings is told from the perspective of the smallest person.
Depending on the chapter, this is Frodo, or Pippin, or even Gimli.
This is a detail easily overlooked - indeed, I overlooked it the previous twenty or so times I've read the books - and yet it completely colours the narrative.
For those of you in the area, I'd like to re-extend my invitation, found here.
Page Summary
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unshelved_comic : Unshelved strip for Tuesday, July 14, 2009 [+0] - powerpointteam : Introducing PowerPoint 2010 [+0]
- daily_nemi : Nemi cartoon for Tuesday, 14 Jul 2009 [+0]
- ed_fortune : (no subject) [+0]
- jfargo : My Wife Said To Blog This [+1]
- bytepilot : Still alive, still running, all systems nominal... [+0]
- atlasgames : Magi of Hermes Preview [+0]
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dianawynnejones :: spellcoats : (no subject) [+31] - jfargo : Wow [+4]
- kungfumonkeyrss : #netflixfkdup [+0]
- atlasgames : Sub Rosa #5 Released! [+0]
- packbat : Word of the Day: Mardy [+0]
- freakonomics : Give Me Your Odd Pairs [+0]
- poliphilo : A Day Out On The Fylde Coast [+5]
- dragonzgrace : (no subject) [+3]
- freakonomics : Bring Your Questions for Baseball Sage Buster Olney [+0]
- badgersandjam : Aircon, etc. [+0]
- caddyman : Diuretics [+2]
- jfargo : Garden Question [+14]
- freakonomics : Lesser of Two Evils? [+0]
- dorktowerfeed : Muskrat Ramblings: Updates and Down the Line [+5]
- monkeybites_rss : Gmail Tasks Leaves Labs, Becomes Real Feature [+0]
- thomryng : The Bastille or Something [+11]
- lproven : Content! [+0]
- caddyman : Insane Fuds [+15]
- freakonomics : Your Tax Dollars at Work (Seriously) [+0]
- waiterrant : Excellent Book! Go Buy! [+0]
- charlies_diary : Scared now. [+0]
- thomryng : Weekend, Writing, and the Lord of the Rings [+1]
- freakonomics : Securitizing Teens [+0]