Blog of Alexander Mamchenkov … mammoth cave …

Just watched the screenshots of M$ Office 12 and was amazed on how great the interface has been changed. I see that M$ is pushing more and more changes in the UI both for Office 12 and Windows Vista. I wonder how much time a usual (not power) user will need to spend to get used to the new UI?

So as I think, when Win Vista and Office 12 will arrive, a user will have a nice choice of either spending lots of money on buying all these new software (+ hardware since Win Vista requires quite a lot of it) and then spend a time on getting used to new things, or just getting on of those nice Linux distros (Fedora, SuSE, Mandriva, whatever) for a much less money without any need for very powerful hardware and spend the same time getting used to the IU offered by software from Linux distro.

The first thing I thought looking at Office 12 screenshots was: \”why don\’t one move to openoffice since it I believe it will be much easier to get used to it than to new, fancy UI of Office 12?\”

Small background: some of you may notice that sometimes my family name appears as \”mamtchenkov\” and sometimes as \”mamchenkov\” (without \”t\” in the middle). This is because my (as well as my brother\’s and others\’ members of my family) passport translation. In the beginning it was with \”t\”, but when recently we changed [renewed] our passports there were no \”t\” in the family name (have something to do with English and French I beleive, although not very sure). Anyhow, I am not very used to the change myself so sometimes there is \”t\” and sometimes there is no.

Today I was playing around Google (actually Google Suggest) and found that if \”mamchen\” is entered in the input field, than Google shows only one auto completion option \”mamchenkov\” with 14,900 promissed results. After, if \”mamchenkov\” is entered, Google asks \”Did you mean: mamtchenkov\” :)

The most interesting part for me was \”Why do Google offers \’mamchenkov\’ as an auto completion option and does not offer \’mamtchenkov\’ [no metter what I enter, even \'mamtchenko\' won\'t work], but when results are displayed, it recognizes \’mamtchenkov\’ to be more correct than \’mamchenkov\’?\”.

Tricky… ;)

As some of you may know, I am staing in Cyprus which is really kinda hot [in terms of weather].

The whole summer I was dieing from the high temperature, but finally it is getting cool and what I \’ve noticed was that sometimes I am even getting freezy. This is the time of the year I like a lot, because afterwards it will start raining and that\’s what I really dislike :(

So, just caught the moment :)

After reading this nice article about remote controls and the way they suck (too many, too different, too complicated) I thought that possibly, we should end up with a separate box at home which knows all of the devices (along with their remotes), has one touchscreen remote (to use one remote for any number of any kind of equipment just by changing buttons on the touchscreen) which can control all of the user devices as well as provide some additional features like possibly:

- reorder the buttons displayed on the remote
- display only specified buttons (or better have profiling system, which adds another plus like at home, different members of family can use different profiles according to their needs and habits).
- whatever else.

I believe that this is not a very complicated thing, but I also believe that it will make life much easier.