Microsoft opens smiley-kids jangly guitar doc-maker to all Microsoft has opened its new Office app, Sway, to all comers. As we reported last October, Sway is a document creation and content aggregation tool. Microsoft's laying on the inspirational stuff pretty thick: it says the tool will let you “reimagine how your ideas come to life” and “create a beautiful, interactive, web-based …
Really? What makes you an expert on such things? You are so sure that only "let's do what we did on paper, but on a computer" is the only approach?
Tools like Prezi have shown there's a big market for less conventional content creation/presentation approaches. I have no idea if Sway will be used, or useful (the two aren't always linked) but I have to commend MS for trying something new. As long as they don't replace Word with it!
"Really?"
Yes, JDX, really.
"What makes you an expert on such things?"
I don't claim to be an expert, but 40+ years experience with back-end code and end-user interfaces has probably given me a couple of clues. Common sense helps.
Or put another way, you're stuck in your old ways - you've been doing things so long you can't imagine there could be another way.
And what expertise precisely does 40 years writing _back-end_ code give you when it comes to evaluating modern content creation/aggregation ideas? The majority of your "expertise" pre-dates the internet (as a mass-market thing) for crying out loud.
As for common sense? It's not very common and it doesn't mean "whatever I think is obvious".
You rather sound like a dinosaur I'm afraid. No doubt you'll win many up-votes because the Reg readership are very conservative as a rule, and love tearing down anything new.
"And what expertise precisely does 40 years writing _back-end_ code give you when it comes to evaluating modern content creation/aggregation ideas?"
What part of "end user interfaces" did you misunderstand?
"The majority of your "expertise" pre-dates the internet (as a mass-market thing) for crying out loud."
Eh? I've been making a living at this for decades. I just choose to ignore the marketards meme of the week. Marketards are always wrong, year-to-year.
"As for common sense? It's not very common and it doesn't mean "whatever I think is obvious"."
Agreed. So-called "common sense" is usually neither. But that doesn't mean my decades old observations are automagically incorrect.
"You rather sound like a dinosaur I'm afraid."
Ta! :-)
"No doubt you'll win many up-votes"
Who, honestly, gives a rat's ass about "thumbs"? The mind boggles ...
"because the Reg readership are very conservative as a rule, and love tearing down anything new."
It's not conservatism. It's pragmatics & reality. At least in this medium.
"40+ years experience with back-end code and end-user interfaces has probably given me a couple of clues"
Translation; "Why can't they put everything in a text file? We peaked at version 3.0 of vi, so why are people wasting time on anything further? Here's my command cheat-sheet, what more could anyone want?"
Translation; "Why can't they put everything in a text file? We peaked at version 3.0 of vi, so why are people wasting time on anything further? Here's my command cheat-sheet, what more could anyone want?"
Please, enough with the hyperbole - vi 3? The best version of vi is clearly vim 7, but I'd take vim 5 and up over any other text editor or IDE.
Any other text editor? Try SublimeText. Cost/benefit probably is in vim's favour, but it shows that there are alternatives.
As for IDEs, I keep hearing the "vim beats any IDE" argument, and then I see that the "project" put forward as proof is a gazillion lines of python, PHP, JavaScript or some other dynamically-typed language, where there's nothing that any tool could do to add value to the symbols in the source-code, because nothing is known until the code is executed.
I write my python and PHP projects in SublimeText; but for anything more than casual editing of my C++ and C# code, I'll end up turning to Qt Creator, Visual Studio or XCode. You'll notice I didn't mention Eclipse: that's intentional.
Yes, any other text editor. I used my words so that you can understand my thought process - let me restate it again since it was unclear - no other text editor is better at editing text than vim.
Yes, I am aware of the alternatives. Yes, I have used sublime. It's a really good knock off of many of the best features of vim. It has no features that vim does not have, and has downsides that vim does not have. Hardly compelling, even for my "projects" as you put it.
Translating Just Enough's comment: "I have absolutely zero clue about how the system works, but I'm perfectly happy fondling my iFad/Fandroid, therefore you must be stupid."
Enjoy your bliss, consumer.
Sorry, anyone who leads their argument with a measure of how many decades they have been working, and belittling anyone who disagrees, is on very shaky ground.
I've no idea whether Sway will turn out to be any good. But to dismiss it just straight off as a "yet another" is the cry of someone stuck in their ways. How many times a week do you find yourself saying this? Microsoft have no shortage of cash and I suspect the costs of developing this were tiny. They must innovate if they are to stay relevant.
Stuck in my ways?
OK. I guess I'll stop contributing to the Linux & BSD kernels.
"Microsoft have no shortage of cash and I suspect the costs of developing this were tiny. They must innovate if they are to stay relevant."
Microsoft developing anything on a "tiny" level is always irrelevant, and never innovative.
Take a bucket of bytes drenched in silly putty, a fistful of finger paint, a handful of glitter, three fingers of self-delusion, a jigger of derangement, and a burning desire to prance about in public screaming "lookie here!, lookie here!" and you've got the juvie version of PPT ... for a junior intern in training. On a fondleslab. What could possibly fail with that?
Have you been living under a rock for the past 20 years?
This is a Microsoft product. There will be expensive training courses, enforced de facto standardisation, lock-in, bundling, new versions that to nothing more than change the file formats. You WILL use it.
You will be creating your next CV with this when you change careers to a store greeter.
I know it's microsoft and all, but it seems to be an extension of the OneNote philosophy - and I don't recall seeing that on training courses or CVs. And thus far, all versions are backwards and forwards compatible.
Don't get me wrong, it looks terrible - and that sort of thing generally happens with the 'classic' office suit - but it looks like it comes from the quiet-death rather than the enforced-lock-in side of the MS coin.
Aside from the fact that the name itself tells me absolutely nothing about what the software is for, I just can't see what this is supposed to help me create.
Content aggregation, in a document, that I can share via the web.
Sounds like a web site to me.
WTF is a "Sway" and why would I want one? Let alone an application to make loads of them?
Content aggregation, in a document, that I can share via the web.
Sounds like a web site to me.
I think that's pretty much what they were aiming for - in the original mode of HTML, where the user agent does the rendering (rather than "web designers" trying to position everything with pixel precision by abusing CSS, or outright assaulting HTML and Javascript).
WTF is a "Sway" and why would I want one? Let alone an application to make loads of them?
It appears to me, based on the video and write-ups, that the idea is to get people away from the Wrong Idea that dominates Office and its like - WYSIWYG. Study after study has shown that giving users too much control over layout and rendering leads them to waste a huge amount of time on those things, rather than attending to content, and WYSIWYG is the ideology that endorses that design error in the user interaction model.
Originally HTML, like most document markup languages of its era and before (the RUNOFF/roff family, the GML/SGML family that HTML itself belongs to, the TEX/LATEX family), largely took the specifics of presentation away from the author and delegated them to the machine. Most of those languages split presentation/rendering duties between a device-independent kernel, responsible for things like typography and floating intrusions, and a collection of device-dependent drivers. HTML went a step further and pushed all of it to the actual user agent, so the document could be rendered in a manner appropriate for the end-user's device and preferences.
HTML has since been corrupted by the designers, of course, and the W3C is struggling to claw back even the slightest rational behavior with things like accessibility standards. (An unexpected force for good here is the proliferation of smartphones, which at least forced designers to think about different screen sizes and input methods. Though now those are all converging on just a couple of models, so that was short-lived.)
Sway seems to be another attempt to resurrect content-centered document creation. You throw content onto the "canvas" with minimal metadata to indicate intent, and then the layout engine offers some choices for how to arrange the output, and beyond that it's device-specific. This is by no means suitable for every document - with many kinds of information it's still difficult to beat linear text with headings and navigation links, and many presenters will still feel the need (justified or not) to control every pixel that appears on the screen while they talk. But there are many genres, like the elementary-school projects and ad hoc reports suggested in the video, where that's not a bad way to do things.
There's a reason why newspapers and magazines separated authoring and layout functions. Combining them into end-user software has given us decades of terrible, under-designed, over-worked documents. It'd be nice if everyone would just use POSH and LATEX, but they won't. So personally I'm happy to see Microsoft trying to wean Office junkies away from the layout game.
It's been very interesting to watch the next generation come up and see what tech they settle on. This is the generation that think that revolutions can be started in 140 characters after all.
In: Google Docs
Out: Microsoft Word (despite Office being offered for free download by the school system here)
In: Excel
Out: Sheets - apparently too laughably weak.
Dead heat: Prezi and Powerpoint
Prezi looks terrific for about ten minutes and then you run into a wall of missing function. Powerpoint is deathly dull and the templates are outdated even for old people.
I can see Sway being a nice cross for younger kids or those with tablets who don't need or can't use OneNote.
Nothing to do with the article, but check out this fantastic Daily Mail story about how computers will be 'wiped out' in 2038: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2876127/Will-computers-wiped-19-January-2038-Outdated-PC-systems-not-able-cope-time-date-experts-warn.html
This is why Britain 's getting thicker.
Prezi looks terrific for about ten minutes and then you run into a wall of missing function.
I've also heard a number of people say they can't watch a typical Prezi presentation without feeling some motion sickness. The pan-and-rotate-and-zoom effects apparently are unpleasant for a significant number of audience members. There are also accessibility issues.
Prezi can be decent in some contexts, but I think its use has to be limited.
On the other hand, I think everyone should be forced to take a course in presentation design before they're allowed to use Powerpoint. I don't know how many hideous and/or useless slides I've seen at academic conferences - and those were created by literature and rhetoric scholars. It's your own damn field, people; learn to use the techne. (Also, script and rehearse your presentation. Remember when oratory was the main focus of rhetoric? Guess what - it's back! OK, rant over.)
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