Here's a really really good thing about Word 2007. You can write a blog post, and then press 'Publish' and then it gets published on your blog. No more mincing around with the online editor thing which doesn't quite work as you expect it would.
By the way, Hello Waveforms by William Orbit is a really good album.
I had a high spending weekend of new toys. First off was Office 2007 Ultimate which I found on my work website for £40. I work in a university and so you get special education rates. I'm writing this on Word 2007 and so far it is a considerable improvement on 2003 Pro. Its better because a serious amount of thought and time have been put into the software. It will be interesting to see if the new iteration of Word is as lazy and as buggy as the last time round.
The second new toy is an ipod classic 120gb (black). One of my first posts was a huge rant against Apple. Indeed I went over that ground last week when I brought the old ipod out of retirement and even though I had newer headphones the socket was still broken. Sadly the battery on the venerable Creative Vision: M started going after 2 year's of heavy use. On average I'd say I used the Creative for about 9 hours a week. A replacement needed to be found, and I went for the Creative Zen 32gb. A flash player with a tiny profile and that it was the dog's bollocks for about two weeks, and then noticed that the battery life was utterly useless. I was struggling to get 6 hours out of one charge. What was so frustrating was that technically the machine was very good, but there were shortcomings other than the battery that just made it unacceptable. It did only cost £150 but sadly there was a reason for this.
That went back to Amazon on Friday, and yesterday I bought the new ipod.
I'm very pleased with myself… and why?
Because the ipod is very good. The sound quality in particular is excellent. Don't get me wrong, the Vision: M had very good sound. Its just the ipod sounds better. Crisper and more defined perhaps. I'll miss the navigation on the Vision M. It really is superior to that of the ipod. As well as having listed everything alphabetically, there is also an ABC sidebar where you select which letter it is you're searching for and off you go. On the other hand itunes has a joined up approach to handling the filenames/ID3 and Coverflow is just superb. The Vision had album art but it never really worked properly but then you could customise the themes and put on a wallpaper. What it comes down to is that Creative discontinued and refused to update the Vision, switched to flash players but somehow neglected to really push their tech forward. After all they invented the user interface that Apple then pinched from (and paid for in the courts).
Apple meanwhile have itunes which for me is the killer app. I don't particularly like the clickwheel but the package as a whole is excellent. The Classic feels great too.
