Vista Dog Brood I

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Another day of dog fooding Vista. Everything ran smoothly today, and I didn't encounter any serious bugs.

I pushed the system fairly hard on a few occasions. I was late for a meeting at one point, and quickly closed the lid on my laptop, unplugged the network, unplugged the mouse and keyboard, and unplugged the monitor. I didn't even think to close Outlook. When I got to my meeting, I opened up the top and everything came on in just a few seconds. I was connected to the wireless network, and Outlook was still running correctly.

I had reported in my most recent Community Convergence about the problems I was having with Outlook. None of them recurred today. Knock on wood.

It is possible that at least some of the problems I have been having are due to problems with the Exchange beta. I've talked to several people today who also reported having recent problems with Outlook -- only they were running XP and Office XP. We were, however, all connected to the same back end, so maybe these are Exchange bugs that still need to be shaken out.

Using the tips to which I link below, I learned a little about the new Windows Explorer. The address line has changed quite a bit, but now that I am beginning to see how it works, find that it is very convenient. Due to the way it handles key strokes, it is finally beginning to approximate the power for navigating through folders that one has on the command line. It is, perhaps, not quite as powerful as the 4Dos or Bash shell, but it is much better than what we had in the XP Explorer.

Microsoft has released some simple end user type tips for Vista.

  • Here is a tip sheet
  • Here are some tips and tricks in PDF format. (Adobe Acrobat installed smoothly on my version of Vista.)

Live Writer

I'm still using Live Writer, but I do have some complaints. It does a great job of stripping out ugly HTML when I paste into it from Word, but it does not create XHTML or even cleanly formed HTML. For instance, it was leaving the closing list tag (</li>) off all but the last line in a list.

A more serious problem is that I find the print too small for my eyes. Word has a nice option to zoom in on the text, which would be much appreciated in this product. I could probably make the font larger until I published, but that is not a very good option.

There is a spell checker, but it doesn't quite have the power of the one in Word. I don't get the little red squiggly lines under misspelled words, and so I have to remember to run the spell checker before posting. Can you imagine anything so primitive?

Nevertheless, this is a good tool and I will keep using it for a time. I'm sure there are similar products out there, but I am still deep in my Microsoft dog fooding phase, and Live Writer is still in beta, so I will continue using it.