Newsgroup: it.comp.macintosh
Titolo: Dettagli su Office 2007

<
http://www.apcstart.com/site/dflynn/2006/09/1511/exclusive-first-detail
s-of-office-2007-for-mac-all-new-ui>
EXCLUSIVE: first details of Office 2007 for Mac. All new UI.
18 SEPTEMBER 2006 DAVID FLYNN
Microsoft's next-gen Office suite for the Mac is being given a
top-to-toe refit in readiness for its debut in the third quarter of
2007. On the surface is a revised interface which borrows ideas from the
Office 2007 for Windows 'ribbon' and has already been radically changed
due to user feedback. The new versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint
will all adopt the native XML file formats of their Windows siblings.
And, the program is of course being rebuilt as an Intel-friendly
Universal Binary application. As is convention for the Office family, at
this early stage the product is known only by its version number as
'Office 12?. "That won't be the name it goes to market with - we'll have
something brilliant, like the year it launches, as the name!" laughs
Mary Starman, group product manager for Microsoft's Macintosh Business
Unit (MacBU). "Typically we release about 6-8 months after Windows
Office, and they've announced general availability in the January
timeframe, so we would be 6-8 months after that." If her timetable holds
firm, the program that will likely be christened as 'Office 2007? will
touch down between July and September of 2007 - around three and a half
years since the arrival of Office 2004 in March of that year.
Microsoft's 130-odd Mac developers have already reached the halfway mark
in their marathon march, Last month, they completed the transition to
Apple's Xcode, which forms the basis for the Universal binaries that are
compatible with new Intel-based Macs as well as older PowerPC machines.
"This was a huge milestone for us" Starman says with equal parts pride
and relief. "We had to move from the CodeWare compiler, we were dealing
with millions of lines of code and we still had old code that was
written in Assembly, so it's been a long process to switch everything
over and for our developers to learn the new tools. Everyone has been
working very hard on the transition, it's been literally all hands on
deck". Being able to sidestep the Rosetta translation layer which
enables Power PC applications to run under the Intel architecture should
in itself deliver a significant speed boost to Office 12. "We haven't
been able to do any benchmark tests because we're not at code complete,
so it's pretty hard to do performance tuning yet, but it should end up
being quite a bit faster" Starman predicts. The next milestone in the
road to Office 12 will be when the new UI and features are finally baked
into the suite and it's declared 'code complete', which Starman says is
"normally about six months before release". While Office 12 will likely
see three major beta releases there are currently no plans for a
widespread public beta program as has been done with Office 2007 for
Windows. "Being such a small group we tend to do a smaller beta program
with just a handful of corporate customers around the world. We'll
usually refresh the build they have about three times, but it's not
likely for this release that we'll do a broad public beta where everyone
can go and muck around." Of course, Mac users are already having their
say about the next version of Office. "We get a lot of people asking
'Are you going to do that ribbon thing?'" says Starman, in relation to
the innovative yet controversial ribbon interface of Office 2007 for
Windows, which was aimed at removing the reliance on deeply-nested menus
and making existing features more 'discoverable'. "We will be doing a UI
refresh" Starman confirms, "but it won't be exactly like you see in
Office 2007. It just wouldn't make sense. Apple has got their own very
specific set of user interface guidelines and we try to first and
foremost to follow those guidelines. If we can innovate on top of that
and do some interesting things to make sure that the interface is really
discoverable for the Mac user, then we'll look at doing that. We can get
some ideas (from the ribbon) but it still has to fit within Apple's UI
guideline, that's what a Mac user wants to see" Starman says. "There's
also a lot of speculation in the Apple developer community about the UI
changes that will come in Leopard, too, and what are we all going to
have do when we see those changes." Design and usability testing on the
Office 12 interface is already underway in the MacBU labs at Redmond and
Cupertino, and the team has already made one trip back to the drawing
board based on user feedback. "We have usability experts and usability
labs at both of our campuses, and we're spending a lot of time bringing
people through for each iteration of the UI. That's part of why it's
changing so much right now" explains Starman. "We had what we thought
was going to be this perfect UI solution, and the first time we put it
in the labs, no-one understood it! It was so different they were
completely confused! We just finished up another round of usability
testing on the new UI yesterday, and the program manager said the
difference is like night and day". Perhaps the most vital issue for any
version of Office is compatibility with previous editions. This holds
doubly true on the Mac platform, where people sharing files with Windows
users expect total fidelity in formatting, formula and other document
deal-breakers. "One of the big things we're working on for the next
version of Office is picking up the new XML file formats of Office 2007
for windows" says Starman. "As (the Office for Windows team) get through
chunks we port things over, but we won't be able to do our final testing
on file formats and compatibility until they release office 2007? she
offers to account in part for the long wait to the next Mac release of
Office. However, the Mac team isn't concerned that the ability of
Intel-based Macs to run Windows, and thus the Windows version of Office,
might eat into their market. "Mac customers would prefer to run a native
version of Office on their Mac" says Sheridan Jones, Lead Marketing
Manager for the MacBU "We don't expect and I don't think Apple expects
lots of their customers and our customers to be running the Windows
version of Office on their Mac." "But BootCamp and Parallels open up a
lot of opportunities for people to run some of the applications that
we're not able to port over, if they need Access or Project for
example." David Flynn met with the MacBU team during his visit to
Seattle for Microsoft's 2006 Hardware Launch as a guest of Microsoft.
-- 
Ci sono 10 tipi di persone: quelle che capiscono il
sistema binario e quelle che non lo capiscono.

 guideline, 
Pheeew... :)
Pero' e' un bel confronto. Vincera' la tendenza a fornire un look&feel
omogeneo su piattaforme diverse oppure si adatteranno di volta in volta al
look&feel della piattaforma?
-- 
"We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl -
year after year"

 written in Assembly
Cio' significa che c'e' ancora dentro roba che potrebbe funzionare su
un 68040? Evviva, alla faccia dell'efficienza.
[CUTTONE]
Quindi Office diventa UB e avra' un interfaccia pessima  come quella di
office per Vista? o meglio: che non sara' integrata per niente con la
GUI di OSX?
L'unica cosa buona sara' che i file saranno in .xml.
Ciao Jack

 GUI di OSX?
Mi pare abbiano detto appunto il contrario...


 Mi pare abbiano detto appunto il contrario...
puo' essere (speriamo!), lessi velocemente e non tutto :P
-- 
Yoda of Borg am I! Assimilated shall you be! Futile resistance is, hmm?