Trapped in Time

New Maven Digs

brooklynmutt:

Palin As President.

Click the pic and laugh your ass off.

Ass.  Laughed.  Off.

The good people over at FrontLine Systems have done every OS X-loving business student in the country a favor and released Solver for Office 2008.  Hell, maybe this even makes it more feasible for businesses to embrace OS X as a viable option for employees to work from (at least in some instances).

Solver is a business analysis tool that conducts linear programming and provides other useful analytics to solve complex business problems.  I wish I had this at my disposal my last semester of school when I was handling networking and distribution logistics problems.  It would have saved me the hassle of using XP machines in the lab, and working from home instead.

peterwknox:

gregbrown:

The Story of the Ribbon

A great tale on how the new Office 2007 interface came to be, including the motivating concerns, rejected solutions, intermediate prototypes, etc. Long and totally boring to anyone who isn’t specifically interested in this stuff, but it gave me quite the nerdgasm as I viewed it.

I do not like the Ribbon.

It’s interesting, I can’t stand the Ribbon as part of Office 2007, yet when you combine the ribbon with the toolbox for 2008 (OS X version), it’s a definitive upgrade.  In OS X, the Ribbon feature is connected to each open document, meaning it is always very accessible (especially if you utilize dual monitors and move documents across them).  Yet the toolbox is stand-alone and allows me to carry out most of my formatting very easily.  Perhaps I just haven’t spent enough time using 2007, but I also haven’t seen any large (Fortune 500) organizations adopt it.  In most business settings, the 2003 version is still the most practical and usable.