The first presentation was built using Keynote, which is part of iWork, Apple’s Office counterpart. Creation was really simple, the look is just amazing ( especially the transitions ), but there is one problem: I don’t have a mobile Mac at the moment, so I needed to use a friend’s MacBook to do the presentation. This is definitely a bit of a pain, considering the fact that he’s most likely not always around, and exporting to PowerPoint kills all the USPs. There is a workaround though, you can export presentations as .mov files, movies that halt on every transition and continue only after you press a key.

Second presentation, Latex Beamer producing PDFs. The ugly part is the creation, certainly. Unless you are fluid in a text editor, command line and the reading of technical documentation, this might not be your premier choice. After you’ve gracefully managed to create some slides, the output looks great and the best point about it is that any netbook will do just fine for the presentation. I used my Ubuntu-equipped machine and it worked well using the default PDF-Viewer.

Sven showed impressive to me today, a great way of tuning your PDF-only presentations by adding transitions, overview pages and other handy accessoires to finished PDF-Presentations. It’s written in python, has some dependencies ( nothing that easy_install couldn’t fix ) and works really well.

The third presentation kicked off using Google Docs. The presentation ( about Google Go ) had no style, no transitions, was built in about 10 minutes and.. worked. Nothing more, nothing less. It clearly did it’s job, yet there are, at least by now, a bunch of more pleasing ways to get the job done available.

Because a lot of people are really excited about Prezi at the moment, I decided to give it a shot. The presentations created are really different from what presentations have been in the past, it looks.. amazing, is easy to use, features a free plan. It depends on flash, which is somewhat a drawback and is, at least for me not a choice at the moment. Why? Well, first of all, there is no way to create custom styles, you are basically limited to what Prezi offers. The next problem is the lack of a free offline editor ( Google Docs is able to do that ). And of course, what you create looks create, but either I missed the feature that says “copy region from one Prezi to another” or it’s not there. Either way, without it, reuse seems impossible. Still, if you have only 3 minutes and need to deliver a stunning performance, you should go with Prezi. ( Edit: Benny just posted something about Prezi a few days ago, too )

First there is Microsoft’s ever green cash-cow, the Office Suite, selling in Germany for about 250€. This suite includes nothing that is not available for free in the OpenOffice Suite, compatibility is mostly ensured. Even worse, this Office suite fails to provide state-of-the-art functionality like wrapping text around the contour of an image. Instead of pushing this product to become even better, Microsoft seems to be happy to sell it. No need to improve it.

Same on the Operating Systems. Instead of inventing something new, useful, Microsoft seems to have decided that this is just not necessary. The eye-candy provided in Vista fails to provide some real usage advantage, and is therefore unnecessary. And while Mac OS is sold in one edition for 100€, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions are free, Vista is being sold in several stunningly expensive editions.

But Microsoft isn’t sleeping! They just lately presented the amazing new killer-app called Songsmith and the new Taskbar for Windows 7. The first one negates any use besides fun, the second doesn’t seem to be a revolution. Nothing break-through, as always, years behind.

Welcome to the browser’s section. While Firefox 3, Safari and Opera work mostly standards compliant and are kept up-to-date, Internet Explorer 7 is far away from rendering anything the way it should be rendered, and is also far from being up-to-date in any way. It seems Microsoft is just waiting here for innovations seen in other Browsers customers like and then implements them. Not what I expect from a global player.

Last but not least, it’s Microsoft communication pissing me off. Instead of presenting cool features or other breakthroughs, all the CEOs spitting out is related to Microsofts market position.

But with an attitude like this, it seems in question how long Microsoft is going to keep that. Office and some vintage Operating System won’t keep the value up. What is your opinion on Microsofts products?

The list was created in collaboration with major actors, like Microsoft, Cisco and other popular names. While not all of them are applicable to all kinds of applications, you will certainly find some that do, and this list is certainly a very good source to start reading on that topic.

Enough written, the document can be found here: Top 25 programming errors.

A Web site cannot set a cookie if the Domain attribute is in uppercase characters and has an odd number of characters in Internet Explorer 7

You can read find that bug in the Knowledge Base. This post features nothing else but this bold bug description, so here’s my question, to be answered in the comment: what do you think was the code that caused this bug looking like? Any languages ( even brainfuck! ) welcome..

Edit: I stumbled upon a video demonstrating that by getting the square root of 4 and subtracting 2 from the result, the calculator.. outputs some rather unique result. Any explanation here? Try it, works in any Windows version. Buggy times.

And there was this one thing. Imagine a system-wide menu bar featuring all your current apps, plus the one you are using most often. Of course, it’s up to you to decide what you want to place in that amazing menu-bar. You can even use a very, very hot ability to place items using the mouse called “drag and drop”. Finally, after using an application and closing it, the corresponding icon will just disappear. Unbelievable, I know. There is one other amazing ability this dreambar, as I call it, offers. The grouping of windows belonging to the same application. This is indeed something total new, something I have dreamed about for years, and now it’s finally happening. 

Well, in case you thought it sounds like the Mac OS Dock. It’s not. It’s the new taskbar in Windows 7, called “superbar”. It seems people at Redmond are a bit desperate these days, instead of being creative.. 

But let’s be serious, just for a moment. I’m really wondering where the innovation is. Even searching for “Windows 7 Innovation” doesn’t return much. There is the mentioned superbar ( wuhhzza ), some eye-candy and a multi-touch interface ( if I got that rumor right ). The multi-touch interface is a gift for hardware manufacturers, but not for people with ordinary PCs eating French Fries while surfing the web, the superbar is pretty much a bad copy of several already existing concepts and the rest? Is there still this ridiculous Flip-3D thingy that is so not boosting productivity? Oh it’s so spacy I can’t see the contents of the other windows..

Windows definitely has some fields where no one is at the moment able to compete with it, but not because of the superior technology but rather because of hardware manufacturers still keeping that platform up, and game vendors still building mainly for it, too.  

But actually, this hasn’t necessarily to be something bad. Mac OS simply is the best system when it comes to usability, consistency of an interface etc.. And Windows can only profit from … reinventing some stuff already present there. Calling it Superbar seems a bit exaggerated, but after the Zune disaster I guess it’s to polish some Egos.