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After toiling in obscurity for the past nine months, my new team has finally "gone public." Last summer, I left my gig in Product Planning after nearly six years to head up an Incubation team in Microsoft Office Labs. There are about 60 of us in "Labs," all focused on doing concept tests of interesting ideas focused on productivity.

Concept tests are just what they sound like: they're not quite "full blown" products, but are tools that are fleshed-out well enough for folks to use and experiment with. We hope to learn from each of these and incorporate the best ideas and learnings into our shipping products. We have a pipeline full of these and expect to make them available on officelabs.com on a regular basis.

The site went live today with a few of the team's first projects. One is an Office add-in called Search Commands that allows you to find features you need in Office using more common language and terms. We also shipped a web app called Community Clips, a collection of "how to" videos on Office that anyone can contribute to (the "community" can add its own "clips"...get it? Aren't we clever monkeys...).

So far, there's nothing directly from my team posted on the site. Yet.

My team is focused on building prototypes for mobile workers. We're specifically interested in concept-testing innovations around how the mobile phone can be an even more effective tool for folks who work away from their desk or don't even have a "desk" at all. This is area that is going through some incredibly huge and interesting changes right now as people demand to get their work done anytime, anywhere. We've got some cool things up our sleeves, but more on that later.

For now, check out the Office Labs website and try out some of the stuff we're building. We're very interested in your feedback. And if this sounds like a cool gig (it is), we're also hiring.

Binary Minded has released an add-in to my favorite utility, Quicksilver that integrates with my favorite task manager, Remember the Milk. Works like a charm, and saves a ton (a ton!) of time getting tasks into RTM. Merry Christmas to me!

2007 will go down for me as the year in which two products I was eagerly anticipating completely and utterly blew past the high expectations I had of them.

The first of those products is, of course, the iPhone. Much has been written about the industry-shaking design of this device, and now, with the year rapidly coming to a close, it's popping up on more and more "Best of 2007" lists.

Nearly 12 months ago, I sat there at the Moscone Center, slack-jawed, as Steve Jobs revealed a phone unlike any other. Six month later, holding my brand new iPhone in my hand, I couldn't help but marvel at the realization that, not only was it as good as the demos I'd seen months before, it was better. Much better. And while the hype around this thing was truly epic, it was completely deserved.

Today, I am finding myself again with the gleeful realization that yet another product I'd been watching closely may just be better than I ever thought it could be. This time, it's a car, namely, the new Nissan GT-R. 

Three years ago, Nissan rolled out the GT-R concept at the Tokyo Motor Show. It was a strange-looking beast and I quickly forgot about it. The GT-R name is legendary in car aficionado circles as one of the most capable cars ever produced. It sold only in Japan, however, and never offered a partcularly fetching design, to say the least, and the new GT-R didn't seem to be heading down a different path at all. I filed it away in that portion of my brain devoted to useless automotive trivia and moved on.

Since then, Nissan announced that the GT-R would for the first time be available in the United States. And, with much credit to their marketing department, they began to trot out semi-disguised "prototypes" at tracks like the Nurburgring and events like the Goodwood Festival of Speed. While most manufacturers shroud their cars in black vinyl and try to dodge the lenses of the automotive "spy photographers," Nissan seemed to revel in using them to get some web time for their car. By the time it was officially released in Tokyo this fall, the GT-R was a well-known commodity.

My interest grew over this time, too. As the spy photos were revealing more of the final design, I was drawn to its simple, angular forms. And when the performance specifications were finally shared, the technology was more than impressive. A twin-turbo V6, driving 473hp and 478 lb-ft. of torque through a paddle-shifting 6-speed to all four wheels. Advanced suspension, traction control, braking and steering. A unique LCD in the dash with a customizable interface designed by the computer game designers at XXXX. And on and on and on. Now Nissan had my attention.

But I also had my doubts. Too often, cars that look great on paper turn out to bring with them serious compromises. The Porsche 911 offers stellar performance and luxury, but the price of admission is north of $85,000. The Dodge Viper and Corvette Z06 outperform cars three times their price, but poor build quality and materials (not to mention the "gold chain factor") make them a risky proposition. The latest Evolution from Mitsubishi looks less like a boy racer, but is now porkier and slower than its predecessor and is likely to be a $40,000 car when properly optioned. And Subaru's new Impreza STi has been hit so hard with the ugly stick inside and out that even if it halted global warming and cost $1.99, I'm not sure I could bring myself to buy it.

And so, with my high expectations in tow, today along comes Edmunds' Inside Line with the first test figures for the GT-R: 0-60 in 3.3 seconds. 11.6 seconds and 120mph in the quarter mile. 72.9mph in the slalom, besting the $130,000 Porsche 911 Turbo and Corvette Z06. Base price? $70,000. Again, I am slack-jawed.

Might it just be that this iPhone of the automotive world, widely anticipated and hyped beyond all reason, is better than most thought it would be? Than it could be? It just might be so. Said Edmunds:

Perhaps more impressive than the Nissan GT-R's brain-cell-punishing acceleration or its stellar handling is its price. At just under $70,000 it's within reach of the upper middle-class enthusiast who insists on spending disproportionate amounts of his income on a car.

Plus, it will take an average driver and hurdle them into a realm of speed they couldn't buy with a 911 Turbo. It's world-class fast and relatively cheap. And that's a hard combination to beat.

The cynic in me just doesn't know what to do with these kinds of experiences. Years and years of unmet expectations, inflated promises and marketing spin have left me guarded and wary. When someone finally rises above the challenges of cost and design and corporate politics to produce something so fundamentally 'right,' I feel almost obligated to offer my support. I own an iPhone, of course. Now I need a piggy bank to start saving for my GT-R.

I wrote about my hard disk troubles in my last post, and it's not looking good. I spoke to an entirely unhelpful Apple tech at 1-800-MY-APPLE and also the tech support folks at Other World Computing and confirmed my worst fears: replacing the iMac's hard disk ether means I pay a bunch of money to have someone do it for me, or void my warranty by doing it myself. To rub salt into the wound, if I want Apple to do it, I cannot bring my own hard drive with me (BYOHD) and must purchase one from Apple and pay their usual high component prices.

This is not good.

I'll be calling the Apple Store later today to get a quote on having them do it. I'm also toying with a "Plan B" which involves selling our brand new iMac and replacing it with a Mac Pro. Anyone know when the new desktops will be announced?

I installed Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" on my Mac Book Pro this weekend. I've had little time to play with it, mind you, since the past two days were taken up preparing for and then celebrating my son's third birthday.

I seem to have hit a snag with my iMac Leopard upgrade, though. I bought a new 24-inch, 2.8Ghz iMac about a month ago, and spec'd it from Apple with a 500GB hard drive. I then proceeded to buy a 1TB Seagate disk drive from NewEgg, with the intention to upgrade the iMac when it came time to install Leopard.

I subscribe to an upgrade strategy much like John Gruber's, and I'd been dutifully cloning my iMac to an external drive with SuperDuper for a few weeks now. Yesterday, I ran it for what should have been the last time before doubling the internal storage on the Mac. When I logged into Apple's Support site to download instructions on upgrading the HD in a new iMac, however, I was surprised to find no technical articles available.

Turns out, the disk drive in an iMac is not user-upgradable without voiding the warranty. How I missed this when I bought the machine is beyond me, and frankly, I'm feeling kind of dumb for making this mistake.

My plan for today is to talk to a Genius at our local Apple Store and see what my options are. I really don't want to go without the protection of a warranty on a brand new computer, so I'm hoping I can have Apple install the drive for me.

I knew that going with an iMac meant I was giving up expandability, but I didn't quite realize that the only thing you could touch was the RAM (now maxxed out at 4GB). Maybe I should have bought a Mac Pro after all.

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Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist. Creator of Mike and Ike, Lala Palooza and other comic series at the turn of the century, his famous "Rube Goldberg Inventions" were the product of another of his characters, Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts. Yes, "Butts." My three-year old would be much amused.

A Rube Goldberg invention was an intricate, elaborate machine created to accomplish a simple task. A commentary on the value of technology, perhaps.

His legacy lives on with an absolutely stunning video that made its way onto the intertubes today. My favorite sequence shows the contraption sending a text message to another phone, whereupon the vibrating notification sets off another sequence, presumably at an entirely different location.

Source: College Humor (Note: Much on this site is NSFW)

This video may just replace the Rube Goldberg machine from the Honda commercial, Cogs, as my alltime favorite. Click here to check that one out.

Back in the early 'aughts', I was a member of the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft (a.k.a. the "MacBU," pronounced "mac-boo"). In my nearly three years there, I lead the Product Planning efforts for Mac Office 2004, the version currently on the market. As you can imagine, I'm very excited to see the MacBU's progress on the next release highlighted in today's post on the BU's Mac Mojo blog.

The new Elements Gallery looks to be an excellent adaptation of principles from the Office 2007 Ribbon user interface, but with a unique Mac twist. The real-time previews are there, together with a tabbed interface that makes browsing through available options more discoverable. But there's also no mistaking this as anything other than a Mac OS X application.

Now, I like the Gallery, but I'm guessing that the embedded toolbar is actually going to be the most striking change Mac Office users will notice. Whereas previous versions of Mac Office applications displayed a single set of toolbars that was shared across all of the open document windows, the MacBU is now following the Apple Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) for Mac OS X and providing a separate toolbar inside of each document window.

Interestingly, this is something we considered doing for Office 2004 as long ago as 2001.

Fig. 1: PowerPoint 2004's Floating Toolbar

The arguments for and against the use of embedded toolbars are pretty straightforward. A single set of toolbars has the advantage of taking up a set amount of screen real estate, regardless of how many documents the user has open (see Fig. 1). This is especially important when screen resolution is low and every pixel is precious.

In addition, the consistent placement of the toolbars on the screen allows users to develop "muscle memory" for toolbar button location, regardless of where the document window is placed. It's not quite a perfect application of Fitt's Law (à la Mac OS X's screen corners for Expose), but the concept is similar. By comparison, with a toolbar in each window, button targets move depending on the window coordinates and its dimensions. There is additional cognition needed to find and then hit these moving buttons.

Simply put, this slows things down and mouse-driven tasks can take longer to complete. We're talking about a few seconds -- or even fractions of a second -- here, but the effect in the end is that people get frustrated from having to constantly look for the application controls and may break their train of thought (an important consideration when your application is used for the creation of content).

Fig. 2: PowerPoint 2008's Embedded Toolbar

During the planning phases for Office 2004 back in 2001-2, we debated this issue for some time. On top of the design argument outlined above, we had development costs to contend with, as well. Time invested in changing the UI would take away from other feature work we might want to do. We had to be sure that the payoff would justify cutting other features to fit it into the schedule. To help us figure this out, we built mock-ups of Office using an embedded toolbar even back then, just to see what it might look like.

In the end, the argument for floating toolbars won out and Office 2004 continued with the toolbar architecture customers had seen in Office for over a decade. The critical factor then was screen real estate.

Remember, this was a time when Apple's newest iBooks shipped with screens capable of only 800 x 600, a 17" Studio Display was $1,000 and most Macs capable of running OS X were sporting resolutions of 1024 x 768 or less. Deduct 100 - 200 vertical pixels for the menu bar, window borders and Mac OS X's plump, new dock and it's clear to see that an embedded toolbar could squeeze the available document workspace to a thin, narrow slit. Hardly ideal conditions for document authoring and editing.

Fast-forward to 2007. New MacBooks ship with a native resolution of 1280 x 800, a 33% increase in the vertical dimension. Most new iMacs ship with twice the number of pixels of those early G3 iBooks and external flat-panels with 1200 vertical pixels and 20" of viewing space cost less than $400. Hardware advances clearly have made embedded toolbars more viable.

But something else changed over the past six years, too: Mac applications. Mac OS X apps in 2001 were all over the map in their look and feel. Many were simply ports of Mac OS 8/9 apps with their user interfaces rebuilt using Aqua controls. Very few had yet adopted Apple's Mac OS X HIG and even fewer new-from-the-ground-up apps were in the market. Worse yet, the HIG was evolving like any new technology, with developers and designers still figuring out the best bits to use as well as the ones to ignore (drawers, anyone?).

The Mac OS X application landscape today is much more stable than it was in those early days. The clunkiness of ported Classic apps has given way to a wide variety of elegant and beautiful products. Apple's own UI tools and APIs have improved, as well, allowing an even larger percentage of developers to create functional products that look and work well, too.

Red Sweater Software's MarsEdit blog editor	HandBrake DVD Ripping App	MetaQuark's AppFresh software updater

Better tools and shared learning across the Mac developer community for what works and what doesn't has driven greater consistency in application design over the past six years, too. Products as varied in their function as MarsEdit, HandBrake and AppFresh all sport similar and now-familiar UI elements. Whereas an Office 2004 with embedded toolbars would have been among the first applications at the time incorporating that design, Office 2008 without them would be equally out of place.

I was among those in the MacBU who hoped we could adopt embedded toolbars for Office 2004. But it was clear in those early years of Mac OS X that it was simply too soon to change the way the product millions of people used everyday looked and worked.

Not only has the hardware, the platform and the Mac applications ecosystem evolved to make this more viable now, it's clear from Nadyne's post that the MacBU has put the time to good use. They appear to have been able to take a much more holistic approach to the entire issue, blending the goodness of the Office 2007 Ribbon with Apple's HIG and some of MacBU's own user interface innovation. They've done more than simply duct tape the current toolbars to the top border of the doc windows.

The proof will be in the actual use of Office, and I'll hold my final judgement until I get a chance to play with it myself. But I like the design direction the 2008 version is taking and now, it finally seems right for this extensive update.