I first heard about XIOS (aka iCloud) about a year ago and I've been keen to have a play every since to see if finally someone would get it right.

I've wanted a portable "play and play" OS for a long time. Things like U3 and MojoPac looked like lightweight solutions but had their flaws (MojoPac still doesn't work with Vista) and going for a full VM solution like Moka5 didn't help (Internet Cafes where you can't install a USB device or incompatible host operating systems and problems getting network access from the guest OS)

Internet OSes seemed like a great idea but I've yet to find one that works well enough to deserve a return visit once I've set them up.

Well iCloud (or XIOS - I can't seem to work out what they want to call it) is the first that does a good enough job that I've been playing for a few days as I bounce around machines. In fact, I'm posting this with iCloud running and even using their Music Player to listen to BBC1xtra from the UK and test an IE app.

But nice as it is, it's still very early days. There are typos galore but on the whole it's pretty polished. And there are some pretty cool apps - Dayplan, Money Manager, Notepad and (rather bizarrely) a Balanced Scorecard app complement a collection of widgets, a desktop messenger and an internal browser instance (tabbed, supports Silverlight, Flash and anything else the host browser supports).

But there's a way to go which the development language (for you to write your own apps as a collection of XML files) doesn't quite compensate for.

No email client, the IM client won't talk to my Messenger buddies and there's no Word or Powerpoint app or a database (although these are all promised "real soon")

The other limiting factor for many is that it relies on IE. Now 90% of my time I have that available, but I also have a Mac Mini at home at the moment and would love to be able to move from one to the other seamlessly.

That leads me on to desktop sync.

In the ideal world I'd have a portable desktop I can take anywhere I happen to be working, and have the latest documents to my fingers or up to date email. In a secure, reliable manner (to allow me to work in a connected or disconnected manner) that doesn't impose limits based on if I'm on a PC or a Mac, at home in the office or at an Internet Cafe. Sadly there's no sync yet so I have to carry files on a USB key still!

Nice as it is... iCloud isn't quite my digital dream yet... it's the closest I've seen so I'll keep hoping (and Windows and OSX don't have to worry just yet!)

If you use Office 2007 (well done! Doesn't the Ribbon make life easier once you get used to using it rather than digging through menus) then you'll be happy to know that Service Pack 1 is now available to make it all even better.

The thing I noticed out of the box is that Outlook is more responsive than the initial version but I suspect I'll find more goodness the more I use it. Of course, you can always check out the Knowledge Base article for more info

You can download it here or grab some of the related service packs: Office Language Pack 2007 SP1; Office Project 2007 SP1; Office SharePoint Designer 2007 SP1 and Office Visio 2007 SP1

As someone who's always taken a fairly chaotic approach to life on the general assumption that my subconscious does a fairly good job of keeping track of stuff I'm having to get to grips with some side effects of aging, yet another country move, a job that features more metal juggling as the focus is broader and a growing family (so I want to spend less time on work).

The logical solution would be that there must be a technological solution to all this right?

Intelligent Messenger plug ins that I can fire off pithy instructions, Outlook rules that can triage my email and respond to my boss appropriately, a subsystem to make sure bills get paid on time and we always have dogfood and milk in the house.

Well, for better or worse HAL doesn't yet exist in a form where it can make my life easier so I needed to find a better solution.

My Dad had a simple rule. He would decide what to do with it when it came in - process there and then; file for follow-up (either on a specific date or within a period of time; file for reference or throw away.

Over the last few years I've peeked at the "Getting Things Done" (GTD) methodology (I first encountered it thanks to a neat utility called ActiveWords which sadly doesn't really do what it used to back then anymore) but while GTD seems to be very empowering it also takes time and practice (some folks say a year) to get fluid, and seemed to require yet more tools to learn. Which if they integrate perfectly with Outlook and Windows Mobile suits me fine, but most of them don't (or work with old versions of the software that I no longer use).

The neat thing is that I've been meaning to try to get to grips with OneNote for a while, and there's a GTD with OneNote approach so maybe I can combine the two...

Failing that... I guess I'll have to train my dog as my PA ;)

So, I recently discovered that by renaming an Open XML document to .zip allowed me to find elements within it. It turns out that there's a lot more you can do with it and following an email conversation with Doug Mahugh (our resident Open XML guru) I discovered that there's a bunch of other cool tricks you can play because you can get at the data directly.

You can edit any of the XML parts by just dragging them to the desktop, opening in IE, View Source and make changes, save, drag back into the ZIP package, and rename back to DOCX/XLSX/PPTX.

The first one of those is separation of presentation and data in spreadsheets

Create a spreadsheet with a column of random numeric data in it.  For example, type =RAND()*100 into A1, then drag the lower right corner of A1 down to A20.  Then click on Conditional Formatting and pick something you like.  Save the XLSX, open as a ZIP, and check out xl\worksheets\sheet1.xml.  The sheetData element contains all the data, and the conditionalFormatting element afterward contains the conditional formatting definition (and the range it applies to, in the sqref attribute).

This demonstrates nice clean separation of presentation and data, which occurs many places in the Open XML formats.  You can edit the sheetData or conditionalFormatting separately, or delete the conditionalFormatting (or change its range) without touching the data.

This gives you great opportunities to programmatically update the data (or presentation) from, say, a web application and then push the resulting file back to the user.

If you're working with Open XML documents from a server you're not limited to using the Microsoft platform, it's equally possible from PHP etc and most of the heavy lifting is already bundled into easy to use libraries for popular platforms.

More to follow...

So you know all the good stuff about Office 2007. The performance improvements, the Ribbon UI (which I'm really learning to love) and of course the advantages of the new OpenXML based file format.

Now normally there's not much to interest me in the bits and bytes of a file format (well, not in the last few years where I've tried to take a bigger picture view of the world) but because of the structure of the new .docx format there's some cool things you can do.

First part of the trick is knowing that by changing the file extension from .docx to .zip you can expand the file/directory structure using WinZIP or directly in Vista. You can then navigate the content and find just the bits you need.

The cool bit is how easy it is to get at any images included in the document, helpfully presented in order in the \word\media directory so if someone sends you a file and you just want the images... it's easy to get at 'em.

What else you can do... well it's up to your imagination...

There have been a few shared desktop applications available for a while. Sadly they're either slow or expensive (or both) and not viable for small ad hoc project teams.

Well, help is at hand. Codename "Tahiti" from Microsoft has just gone into pre-beta and is open to all (provided you're quick) for free. The official beta is scheduled for late May and more people will be able to join up to play.

Teams of up to 15 people may use it to share applications like Notepad or Word (and if you have change tracking on in Word then Tahiti records who changed what) as well as screenshots that participants can see but not change.

Anyone with a LiveID can join into a session, but the organizer can control who is invited and who actually gets access to the session so you don't have to worry about eavesdroppers. Unhelpful attendees can also be forcibly ejected at any time (and blocked from trying to return!)

I've been using Office 2007 through a couple of beta versions, and now for real and despite some early hiccups I'm hooked. At home on Storms machine I still have to revert to Office 2003 and I find it really disorientating.

Outlook is probably the apps that's had the most obvious changes in ramping up the smarts that I use every day but the ribbon and smart mini-toolbars in Word really are intuitive and make it much easier to find functionality that was often hidden behind layers of menus. The great thing is the old keystrokes you knew and loved still work so keyboard power users won't be thrown off their stroke.

While it's not the productivity app of my dreams I did enjoy flipping through The Enchanted Office (or "Once Upon A User Interface") today.

I don't think I'm going to dream about productivity gains tonight, but I might just roll Office 12 out to Storms machine...

I'm really glad that so many sites are delivering their information as RSS feeds. But I do hate the "abstract" approach if it's not done right. Some sites (eg A VC) are generous with their content and it's a pleasure to read them in aggregate. Others (eg TheInquirer) don't even give you enough of a taste of the story so using RSS gives you no benefit as you still have to click through.

What really makes RSS use worthwhile though is a good reader. I've tried using IE7 and I've played with viewing them in Outlook 2007 - while both are good platforms (and share the underlying Vista RSS Platform) they lack a certain usability.

RikReader also sits on top of the Vista RSS Platform but pushes the display up to a full screen experience utilising the goodness of WPF to make it visually very pleasing.

Similar to the beta New York Times Reader this is an example of the way user interfaces are going to improve our ability to view information in a pleasing way. Now all I need is an ePaper page which I can fold up and put in my pocket that runs Vista that auto-syncs this content ;)

Found this today... pretty awesome list of free software from Microsoft. Some of it supported and some of it unofficial but all of it pretty amazing.

I knew of a very small percentage of these ... and wish I'd known about a lot more before!

About the only thing I did know about that's not on the list is the free OfficeLive platform.

Many years ago I worked somewhere that used cc:Mail as a corporate standard. I didn't especially enjoy the experience. Even after using Volvos Memo on a mainframe (yes, Volvo once developed an email system)!

Then they got the Lotus Notes bug. Productivity went down for about a month after the roll-out as people tried to fight with the (oh so powerful) UI to actually get anything (eg reading email) done. Luckily there was a connector available so I could use MS Mail to do the basics.

Then a small rebellion led by a few of us (and thankfully supported by our local IT folks and management) saw us migrate to Exchange (which shortly afterwards was rolled out company wide thanks to our acquisition by a nimbler, more profitable and dare I say better communicating company).

Not long after that I joined a company using GroupWise. Luckily for my sanity an Outlook connector existed for that and until our Exchange revolution there I was able to stay sane.

Fast forward another 6 or 7 years during which time I've been outside the normal corporate environment (using a third party hosted Exchange service for email though) and I'm getting to grips with what Exchange, Sharepoint and the Office Communication Server now offer (interestingly enough Ray Ozzie, the man behind Notes is now the Chief Architect here at Microsoft - and I think MS has learnt a lot from Lotus and IBM on how not to build groupware and how to get it right from Ozzies subsequent efforts with Groove) and I'm more impressed each day with how easy it makes life.

At Microsoft they don't just sell the platform and clients, the business is run on the latest versions of the products (and there are even some 'spin off' solutions such as OfficeLive that go to prove how capable and scalable these tools are) and the teams developing the products use them daily.

So, how is Notes fairing in the meantime? Version 6 (released in 2002) featured over a thousand new and improved features and opened up some brave new worlds for IBM (XML support, Linux etc). But you have to wonder if the enthusiasm for the product was waning within IBM as version 7 (released in 2005) revealed only a hundred new features. Given that level of support I wonder if 2007 will see version 8 with tens of new or improved features! Can't see me recommending it any time soon!

In the meantime Exchange, Sharepoint and the Office System (including the Groove collaboration tools) in their 2007 variants are evolving and innovating was as much (if not more) vigor as they were in 2000 (and with clients like Evolution, Entourage and Pocket Outlook the support if available anywhere you need it).