Hasta La Gadget!

It’s usually disheartening to wake up and discover the wind is blowing. But if that wind is proving to be quite the money-spinner, you may feel differently about the huge white objects dotted around the horizon. And the wind. More »

We’ll readily admit that Thermaltake’s Level 10 GT case isn’t for everyone. Its exeskeleton-emulating protrusions don’t exactly blend in well with living room decors, and the company seems to like it that way. Computex 2011 has been the victim host to a whole bevy of customized Level 10 GTs, which exhibit a love for all colors in the rainbow and a fascination with the humble LED light. Underneath the aesthetic excesses, however, you’ll find a practical and very roomy case that’ll happily serve as the fashion-challenged home to your next super rig. 200mm fans spin almost inaudibly, individual hard drive enclosures make hot-swapping storage a doddle, and as you’ll see in the gallery below, all the mods feature retractable headphone hangers. What will they think of next?

Thermaltake Level 10 GT modded to the high heavens, shows off spacious interior (hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 May 2011 07:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AMOLED displays may be in relatively short supply nowadays, but Samsung is doing its best to bridge the gap. Today, the company’s Mobile Display unit announced that its 5.5th-generation AMOLED production line is now open, some two months ahead of schedule. The line uses glass substrates that are substantially larger than those found in its existing factories, allowing Samsung to increase output, while lowering costs. This increase in production comes in response to growing demand for the Galaxy S II and an AMOLED market that, according to DisplaySearch, should triple in value this year to $4.26 billion. For now, the production line is focusing on smartphone displays, since that’s where demand is growing fastest, but will eventually turn its attention to tablet PC displays, as well. The new factory assembling the displays can currently churn out about three million screens per month, but is capable of ramping that up to 30 million, at full capacity. No word yet on when it will achieve this rate, but if SMD continues to boost its output, we may even see that market surplus we’ve been hearing about.

Samsung’s new AMOLED production line should help ease smartphone display shortages originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 May 2011 07:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on March 17, 2008 by CyberNet.

Microsoft Monday

One of the bigger things that came out of Microsoft’s MIX08 event was Internet Explorer Beta 1, but there was one really interesting presentation that you probably don’t want to miss. It’s an hour and a half PowerPoint presentation that is the first-ever public look at how Microsoft Office 2007 came about after 3 years of development, and I’ve embedded the video at the end of this article for your viewing pleasure.

Microsoft Office Word 2003 had a whopping 31 toolbars in it, and Microsoft wanted to conquer the “good enough” rating that Office was frequently receiving. People couldn’t find the new features that Microsoft was adding into Office, and they knew that things had to change before it all got out of hand.

–Why a Change was Needed–

Using the menus and toolbars was a great idea when Microsoft Word was first developed. There were only a few dozen menu items, a handful of toolbars, and very little confusion. It was almost like opening up today’s WordPad, but by the time Word 2003 hit the streets there were several hundred menu items…

… and all kinds of toolbars:

Following on that track could have resulted in over 300 menu items and 50 toolbars for Word 2007! Yikes!

–Gathering Data–

Microsoft is probably king when it comes to collecting data on how their customers use their products. For example, there is the Office 2007 Customer Experience Program that you can opt-in to so that Microsoft can monitor the areas you use most in the Office suite. When designing Office 2007 they wanted to see what commands and keys were the most widely used across their applications, and so they aggregated the data into a central source:

(Click to Enlarge)

That is from just one week worth of Office 2003 data that Microsoft had collected from their users. A lot of the commands for Microsoft Word show that the arrows on the keyboard are used quite a bit, but almost across the board “paste” is the most used command. Well, that’s until you hit Outlook where “delete” is the most popular.

–Prototypes–

Microsoft has about 50GB worth of Office 2007 prototypes totaling over 25,000 images! There are about two dozen screenshots below that I’ve taken from the presentation, and many of them have aspects of Windows Longhorn (what eventually turned into Vista) in them.

Radical Changes – Microsoft of course looked at some really drastic changes that I for one am glad didn’t make their way through:

September 2003 to October 2003 – They experiment with where to put the hundreds of commands available in the different applications:

October 9 & 10, 2003 – These are the days that the Office Ribbon and the Mini Toolbar were born:

October 29 to 31, 2003 – The team wasn’t sure if the Ribbon would be able to hold all of the commands in the applications, and so they started with PowerPoint to see if they could get them all to fit:

November 2003 to May 2004 – By now it is likely that you’ve grown accustomed to the Ribbon being along the top, but they considered putting it on the side:

November 2003 – To help create a home for all of the commands available they tinkered with sliding groups located on each tab:

Winter 2003 to Summer 2004 – All of the formatting options are what take up so much room in Office, and so they tried to find a way to only show the relevant options depending on the task at hand:

–Video–

If you have an hour and a half to kill this presentation by Jensen Harris explains all of the technicalities behind each of the screenshots pictured above. If you’re like me you’ll be quite amazed at how much work they put into designing Office 2007, and it will give you a whole new appreciate for the software suite.

–How Good Is It–

Microsoft, being the stat addicts that they are, had to find out just how well Office 2007 was taking off. Was it what the customers wanted? Personally I believe that they delivered a strong product that will be well received for years to come. To get more concrete information they put a survey out there and here were the results:

As you can see a majority of users find that it is intuitive, simple, and easy to use compared to the previous versions. Congrats Microsoft, it looks like you did it!

MIX08 [via istartedsomething]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Microsoft Lets Users Test Drive Office 2007 OnlineMicrosoft Office 2007 Gets A Small FaceliftDownload Office 2007 Beta 2 Legally And FREEOffice 2003 and Office 2007 Toolbar/Ribbon Size ComparisonMicrosoft Releases An Office 2007 Video Demonstration

This is the Asus Padfone, a truly ridiculous device that seems to have been inspired by the Wizard of Oz, with a little dash of Transformers.

Although the actual design isn’t finalized, the mockup shows the concept clearly enough. You get an Android phone which slides into a dumb tablet. The phone then drives the tablet’s bigger display. The tablet itself is little more than a touchscreen with speaker and a battery.

At fist, it might seem like a smart idea: you never need to sync content between devices, and if the power runs out on your phone you can just put it inside the mothership and carry on computing.

But what of the difference between smartphone apps and tablet apps? The Padfone (awful name, by the way) will be one of the first to use Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android, which is designed to run on phones and tablets. But that doesn’t mean that apps will be designed to work on two different devices. The iOS App Store has “Universal” apps which run on both iPad and iPhone, but there aren’t so many of these, and they’re bigger in terms of required storage space.

Plus, we use tablets and phones in different ways. Sometimes I even use both my iPod Touch and iPad together. I can’t see anyone wanting to carry around a tablet and a phone when the tablet won’t work without inserting its little man behind the curtain.

Finally, the product page makes much of a single SIM for both devices, and therefore a single data plan. I can totally see the telcos going for that.

It’s a neat idea, and just the sort of thing a kid would come up with. In the real world, though, who would actually buy this thing?

Padfone product page [Asus]

See Also:

• ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Tablet Has 16 Hour Battery
• Giant Asus 'Laptop' Could Crush Desks