Software : Office Online gets the Chrome treatment, adds commenting, footnotes and lists |
- Office Online gets the Chrome treatment, adds commenting, footnotes and lists
- Opinion: Tech's geek boy blind spot is killing good ideas
- Oracle's Larry Ellison tops list of highest-paid US CEOs: Equilar
- Redesigned icons point to new look for the next version of Android
- No more constant score checking as BBC Sport apps get real-time goal alerts
| Office Online gets the Chrome treatment, adds commenting, footnotes and lists Posted:  Microsoft has pulled on the oven gloves to bake new functionality into its Office Online suite, which was recently outed as a replacement for its cloud-based Web Apps. Spreading its productivity tentacles further following the launch of Office for iPad, the company has now made its online versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote available as Chrome Apps that can be launched from the browser's desktop-based App Launcher. As detailed in a company blog post, Word Online now allows comments to be added to documents, bringing it in line with arch-nemesis Google Docs. They're displayed in a comments panel that lets colleagues aim subtle jibes (or y'know, compliments) at each others' work, with comments indicated by margin markers.
Making a listLists aren't new in Word Online, but they're getting some improvements in the form of auto-numbering to make them more intelligent and better distinguish between old and new lists. Some simple options have been added to a context menu for starting new lists, continuing old ones, or setting the number value. Footnotes and endnotes are back with a bang, and Microsoft has restored them with a twist: a new web-first approach to make footnotes and endnotes easier to add, edit and see without leaving your place in the document. Tell Me moreExcel Online has also been kitted out with commenting functionality. Another feature brought over from Word Online, called Tell Me, lets you ask the service how to do something, which brings up answers in the form of interactive commands activated by hovering around in drop-down menus. In PowerPoint Online, the text editor has been re-engineered to make editing slides look more like the final result, according to the blog post. Performance and video playback has also been optimised to speed up advancements of slides in the editor, it says, and embedded YouTube videos can now be played back. Last but not least, OneNote Online has introduced one-click printing from within notes. Don't all rush back on it at once, now. |
| Opinion: Tech's geek boy blind spot is killing good ideas Posted:  We know that tech has woman trouble. The people running the start-ups? They're almost exclusively male. The people working in the companies? Mostly male too. The attitudes to women that we see in marketing and presentations? Frankly patronising. The problem is, the industry appears to carry on under the impression that it's a perfect microcosm of the rest of the world, and then gets surprised every time it's reminded otherwise. Anthony Rose, CTO of TV social network Beamly, is laudably honest when he explains the gender blind spot his own company was operating under in his interview with TechRadar. "When we started the company, we were super served internally with male geeky guys, essentially people like myself. And this meant we automatically leaned to engineering the utility side of Zeebox [as Beamly was then called]." But what Rose and his colleagues took a while to twig was that people like them don't watch very much TV. They were making a product all about television, meticulously geared towards people who don't like television. Cue Zeebox's female-focused rebirth as Beamly: new name, new pink-ish colour scheme, new focus on social networking, making it something like the Pinterest of prime time. According to Rose, 65% of Beamly's users are women. Which makes me wonder: if Beamly found its audience despite being pitched insistently towards a group that was never going to want it, how many more great ideas in technology are being snuffed out because the geek boy groupthink is stopping them from finding the people who actually have a use for them? While brogrammers are brogramming away to suit themselves, they're actually strangling their own chances of success. And looked at like that, it really should be obvious that the appalling record of the tech sector in attracting, employing and retaining women is one that the industry should be looking to remedy urgently and for the basest financial motives. The costs of the boys' clubThere are other reasons why we need more gender equality - there's the simple and obvious injustice of half the world having been frozen out of the industry that shapes the world we now live in, for example. But all the coding in the world is worthless if you don't know what you should be making and who you're making it for. Technology is still a bit in love with itself as a boys' club, with a macho pride in working punishing hours. But geek boy groupthink is a prison. It keeps women locked out, and that's one way in which it's disastrous. It also keeps tech firms sealed in, trapped by an idea of their audience as fundamentally like their nerdy selves which stops them from coming up with any number of good new ideas - good ideas that consumers like you and me would fall over themselves to use if only someone would invent them. Some of the biggest technology companies in the world have already learned that backslapping laddism will only get them so far. Facebook is one: after starting out as a frat boy innovation that put leching to an algorithm, its user base is now over half women and its chief operating officer is Sheryl Sandberg, queen of corporate feminism. It's time tech accepted that acting like only half the world counts means doing yourself out of half the success you could have.
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| Oracle's Larry Ellison tops list of highest-paid US CEOs: Equilar Posted:  Oracle Founder and CEO Larry Ellison earned $78.4 million in 2013 and was the highest-paid CEO among the 100 largest U.S. publicly-traded companies, according to a report commissioned by The New York Times and conducted by Equilar Data. Ellison's 2013Despite a compensation decrease of approximately $18 million from 2012, Ellison retains his position atop the annual list. He has ranked among the top three highest-paid CEOs listed in the report for the past seven years. The Redwood-Calif.-based company missed sales projections in 2013, despite increased profit, due in part to missed software license sales and cloud subscriptions. Oracle reported earnings of $17.6 billion on $37.2 billion in revenue. Ellison is rumored to be worth approximately $48.2 billion. Other notable mentionsCisco CEO John Chambers ranks 11th on the list at $21 million in compensation. HP's CEO Margaret Whitman ranks 30th at $17.6 million. The lowest-paid CEO on the list is Larry Page at Google with $1 in 2013 compensation. To measure CEO compensation, The New York Times commissioned Equilar to compile and analyze pay data from corporate filings. Data includes information for the chief executives at the 100 largest publicly traded companies as measured by revenue. Did Remini Street violate an Oracle copyright for enterprise resource planning software? |
| Redesigned icons point to new look for the next version of Android Posted:  What will the next major Android update be? Android 5.0? Android 4.5? Another number picked at random? Regardless, this alleged leaked image reportedly shows what the next version of Android's icons will look like, according to Android Police. Like Apple's iOS 7 update, the next Android update looks like it will include an aesthetic overhaul to the Google OS, with a visual style reportedly being referred to internally at Google as "Moonshine." The icons themselves are largely flatter, and in many cases they've been altered to more closely resemble the icons that Google uses for the same services outside of the Android ecosystem (i.e. on the web). Drink upThe alleged leaked screenshot shows new icons for Google Play Music, Books, Movies and Games, as well as Android's Google+, Calendar, People, Chrome, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Hangouts, Camera and Google Play Store apps. Some of these icons are nearly identical to Google's current web icons, while others differ greatly both from the web versions and from the existing Android versions.
This suggests that Google may be planning to update its apps aesthetic elsewhere too, not just on Android devices. The notion was given further credence by the presence of the new Calendar, YouTube and Maps icons on a closed-doors Google Partners website (screenshot above). Whatever the next version of Android is, it's clear changes are coming.
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| No more constant score checking as BBC Sport apps get real-time goal alerts Posted:  The BBC Sport apps for iOS and Android have been given a rather notable update for football fans tracking their club's fortunes during the final nail-biting weeks of the season. The apps now have the added bonus of real-time goal notifications for 150 domestic teams, allowing users to pick which they want to follow. The notifications, which take inspiration from the BBC News Breaking News updates, can also notify fans of kick-offs, half-time scores and full-time results as they happen depending on which are subscribed to. The BBC says it plans to add more alerts as time goes on, which would presumably include notable incidents like penalties, red cards. Put the phone down!The introduction of notifications will be much appreciated by football fans who find themselves glued to their smartphones when away from the home. The BBC says 71 per cent of its traffic on weekends comes through the mobile app as users continually refresh the app to check on sporting events. The knowledge that a timely alert will arrive when a goal is scored or the final whistle is blown may ease some of those sideways glances from family members when constantly viewing the app. Those with a Samsung Gear smartwatch may also enjoy the new functionality. |
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