Back when my job as Salon managing editor involved overseeing our daily production, I noticed that, every spring and fall, almost without fail, our publishing system would experience a glitch of some kind on the weekend that the clocks got moved forward or back — nothing serious, mind you, but enough to throw a wrench in the works of our site updates. It wasn’t a single bug, but some sequence of related bugs, so we’d fix one and then six months later something else would happen. Eventually we got in the habit of just making sure that one of the developers kept a close eye on things when that weekend rolled around. It was prudent.

I thought of that as I read these accounts that are filtering out about the F-22 Raptors that, the speculation is, lost their bearings when they crossed the International Date Line. (Further speculation is that this was somehow connected to a software patch/upgrade related to the coming change in the date of Daylight Savings Time onset, but that’s harder to source.) The planes, en route to Japan, limped back to Hawaii instead

The F-22 costs $125 million or so and its operating system is written in 1.5 million lines of Ada code. It appears that, for all its “stealth” prowess and advanced weaponry, its soft underbelly may lie in the realm of the abstract.

It seems that this is one of the unexpected consequences of living in a world operated by software: new danger zones lie where human abstractions — borders, measurements, languages — change or conflict or fail to behave as expected. Clocks and calendars and maps are no longer just assists for human understanding; they are symbols at the heart of systems upon whose performance lives depend. I suppose this started with the first railway schedule, but with the dateline-addled F-22 it has entered a whole new realm of disconcert.
[tags]f-22, bugs, software[/tags]

Word, in the form of this Infoworld report, is beginning to trickle out from Redmond about the next Microsoft operating-system cycle. In two-and-a-half years or so, Microsoft expects to unveil Vista’s successor (code-named, apparently, “Vienna” — or maybe something else).

The report provides eerie echoes of the early days of Longhorn, as Vista was originally known. At the start of the Longhorn process in 2002 the promise was a similar 2 1/2 year delivery (see for instance this now amusing report from the WINHEC hardware conference in 2002, headlined “Longhorn slips to Late 2004”). In summer of 2003 Bill Gates and other Microsoft spokespeople began telling us about all the cool stuff Longhorn would provide. At the same time, Microsoft buckled down for what would turn out to be a year-long, all-hands-on-deck effort to tighten the security holes in Windows XP; this process resulted in XP’s “Service Pack 2” release in 2004. In 2004 Microsoft realized that the original Longhorn vision was hopelessly out of reach, and it now admits that it “rebooted” the entire development process at this point.

So that’s when Microsoft exec Ben Fathi starts the clock in looking at how long it really takes Microsoft to prepare a new edition of Windows:

Vista shipped about two-and-a-half years after XP SP 2, and Vista’s follow-up is expected to take about the same amount of time, according to Fathi. “You can think roughly two, two-and-a-half years is a reasonable time frame that our partners can depend on and can work with,” he said. “That’s a good timeframe for refresh.”

All well and good. Only when Fathi starts talking about what new stuff Vienna will have to offer users, it all sounds remarkably like what Microsoft had to say in Longhorn’s early days:

So what will be the coolest new feature in Vienna? According to Fathi, that’s still being worked out. “We’re going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe its hypervisors, I don’t know what it is,” he said. “Maybe it’s a new user interface paradigm for consumers.”

Over on Engadget they’re interpreting this talk to mean stuff like “full virtualization and a radical new user interface” and “a break in compatibility with older applications.”

But to me it all sounds like: “We’re going to do big, big things, but we don’t know exactly what they are yet.” And that is precisely what Longhorn’s leaders were saying as they marched their troops down the roads that would swallow the project’s first 2-3 years.

Lesson learned?
[tags]microsoft, software, windows, vista, vienna[/tags]

The infuriating aspects of Microsoft Word are legion, and whenever possible I prefer to write in a plain-text processor. But sometimes you have no choice but to work in Word, scratching your head over its stubborn peculiarities and gradually, over the years, acclimating yourself to its interface.

Now, as Walt Mossberg details in his column today, Microsoft is about to throw out years of tradition in Word and the rest of Office. In the new Office 2007, it seems, there are no menus. That’s right — the basic tool for controlling the screen since the early days of the Macintosh is gone, replaced by a newfangled, multifaceted toolbar called the Ribbon.

Mossberg gives it a mixed review (though he admits to “cursing it for weeks”). No doubt Microsoft has invested millions in testing it. I haven’t used it at all yet, so I could be off-base. But thinking about this change, or even just looking at the screenshots, makes my head hurt.

Maybe I’m unusual, but I have always found the dizzying array of toolbar icons in Office programs profoundly unhelpful. Icons are fine when they are small in number and used constantly (think of the stop, reload, back and forward buttons on your browser). But when you have a multitude of complex tools and features, as in Word, you never really get the hang of what all those little hierogylphs really mean. Either you wait for the “tooltip” to pop up (but why should the text have ever been relegated to this second layer?) or you go to the menu, where at least the function will be represented by an English description that has some relationship to what it does.

From now on, sorry — no more menus. Maybe there’s an option to flip the Ribbon to text descriptions, but from Mossberg’s description, it sounds like this Office is less customizable, not more, than the old one. The keyboard commands that heavy users rely on for common operations apparently are unchanged, so that’s nice. But when you need to find that odd command you only use once a year, good luck rummaging through trays of icons.

POSTSCRIPT: Harvey Motulsky writes to tell me that most of the Ribbon toolbars (though not the very first one, apparently) do have text labels on them. He points me to Jensen Harris’s blog at Microsoft which records the process of the redesign — I’ll look forward to reading that later. And, in comments, Walt Mossberg suggests I’m just showing my stripes as an “old-fashioned reporter” — no doubt guilty as charged.
[tags]microsoft, office 2007, walt mossberg, interface design[/tags]