Monthly Archives: April 2008

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WordPerfect X4: not good at PDF, OOXML, ODF import

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I don’t envy anyone trying to sell a WordProcessor or Office Suite that is neither Microsoft Office, nor free. Corel has just released WordPerfect X4, which it is promoting as a PDF editor. Both Open Office and Microsoft Word 2007 can save in PDF format, but WordPerfect can open PDFs as well. That could be a handy feature, though PDF was conceived as an output format so arguably it is not a big deal. In any case, you may be less keen on the idea once you read online help, as opposed to the marketing blurb, which explains that WordPerfect does not preserve the formatting of most PDF documents. If it’s an honest PDF, you get something editable but possibly different:

The layout in the imported PDF may be different from the layout in the original PDF, but you can still modify text strings and create a new document without having to copy or redesign all the elements.

If the PDF contains images of text, WordPerfect uses OCR to scan the images and generate editable text. Again, that could be handy, but if you think you can use WordPerfect to open an incoming PDF, make a few changes, and send it on its way, think again.

Let me add that all my attempts to import a PDF into WordPerfect have failed. I installed the trial, and tried to open the first PDF I came across – a 20 page Forrester report. WordPerfect whirled way at 25% CPU and using over 1GB RAM (I have lots installed), eventually offering a blank document. I tried again, and it crashed. Finally, I started a new document, typed the word “Test”, and exported it to PDF. Then I tried to open it in WordPerfect – nothing. It opens fine in Acrobat. I guess something is broken in my install.

Personally I am more interested in its support for OOXML (or possibly OXML), the native format in Microsoft Office 2007 and the subject of contentious ISO standardization. WordPerfect X4 has the cheek to make itself the default editor for .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx. Again, I opened the first document I came across, which is an 8 page Q&A, very simple, no images. The good news is that it opened. The bad news: plain text became bold, paragraph spacing disappeared, and the result looked worse than the original.

Next, I tried a document with a more complex layout. This is actually a bidding card for use in Duplicate Bridge: you can find similar ones here, but in .doc format – mine was one I had amended and saved as .docx. WordPerfect opened it, but with the layout completely messed up. Graphics were lost. I tried opening the old .doc version. Better, but still not right. It spread the document over 5 pages, a shame when it is meant to be printed on two-sided A4 to make a card. Open Office on the other hand could handle the .doc version nicely; I was impressed.

That gave me an idea for a further torture test. Open the bidding card in Open Office, save in ODF format, which WordPerfect X4 is also meant to support. Now open the .odt in WordPerfect X4. It crashed.

WordPerfect X4 may have all sorts of good points as a general Office Suite, but what about this claim in the press release [PDF]:

File Format Freedom
In addition to its significant PDF enhancements, WordPerfect Office X4 now provides suitewide  compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007 files (OOXML) and Open Document Format (ODF) in WordPerfect X4. With PDF-reading software installed on more than 80% of all U.S. PCs (Source: Jupiter Research), WordPerfect Office X4 enables users to collaborate and share files more broadly and more effectively than ever before.

Hmmm.

Update

I did a bit more experimentation. It turned out that the worst case (in terms of messed up formatting) involved a document which had originally been pasted from HTML. I imagine it was a bit of a mess internally, so perhaps one should excuse WordPerfect (though users don’t understand these distinctions). I reconverted a Bidding Card document and this time WP did better. Here are some images. First, a portion of the document in Word:

Now, here’s the doc imported into WordPerfect X4. Not right, but looks fixable:

Here it is in Open Office:

Identical to the Word rendering as far as I can see. Then I saved as .odt and opened in WordPerfect X4:

 

microsoft, vista, windows

Windows Server 2008 is better than Vista, but why?

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Mark Wilson asks:

It seems that, wherever you look, Windows Server 2008 is almost universally acclaimed. And rightly so – I believe that it is a fantastic operating system release (let’s face it, Windows Server 2003 and R2 were very good too) and is packed full of features that have the potential to add significant value to solutions.

So, tell me, why are the same journalists who think Windows Server 2008 is great, still berating Windows Vista – the client version of the same operating system codebase?

The short answer is that Server 2008 delivers new features that customers wanted, whereas Vista delivers new features that Microsoft thought its customers should want. However, it seems there may be more to it than that. Maybe Server 2008 really does perform better than Vista.

According to this post, Server 2008 performs 11-17% faster than Vista SP1, running a couple of benchmarks which test typical client applications. Christian Mohn concurs:

Windows Server 2008 performs better, even with the Aero features enabled, than Vista ever did on the same hardware. To me, this a bit strange, even if a lot of services are still disabled, as the codebase is pretty much the same as Vista.

though Mohn’s example is less scientific: he never ran Vista SP1, and also moved from 32-bit to 64-bit.

Server 2008 has a “Desktop Experience” feature, which installs things like Windows Media Player, Aero GUI effects, and other fluff that doesn’t belong on a server. My assumption had been that once you installed this, Server 2008 would perform in a similar manner to Vista. Apparently this is not the case.

It seems to me there are a few possibilities. One is that Microsoft isn’t being straight with us about this “same codebase” stuff. It would be interesting to analyze the core DLLs and work out which are the same, and which are different.

The second possibility is that there’s stuff in Vista which is not part of the core, nor part of the Desktop Experience, but which slugs performance. If so, it would be great to identify it and turn it off.

The third explanation is that the testers are wrong, and that performance is actually similar. For example, maybe Vista was running a background update or backup during tests. Background processes make it hard to conduct truly rigorous performance comparisons.

I’d like to see Mark Russinovich get his teeth into this. I’m also tempted to try the Server 2008 desktop experiment myself.

internet, web authoring

Giving up on the mobile web

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Mowser, a start-up which provides a service that makes web sites mobile-friendly, is giving up. Founder Russell Beattie says:

I don’t actually believe in the “Mobile Web” anymore … anyone currently developing sites using XHTML-MP markup, no Javascript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time.

His point is that devices are adapting to enable browsing of the full web, making attempts to adapt the web to devices rather pointless. Which is pretty much what I said six months ago.

This isn’t absolute. As a mobile web user, I’ve appreciated mobile versions of sites like Google or the BBC. It soon becomes frustrating though, because so many sites are not designed to work well on mobile browsers, and never will be. Fix the mobile browser, and you get the lot.

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amazon, google, internet

Amazon’s cloud computing to surpass its retailing business?

That’s what Larry Dignan is predicting.

I’m sceptical. I like what Amazon is doing with its infrastructure services, but I’m guessing they are low margin and price-sensitive; it’s going to be difficult to pump up its value to equal the retailing side.

My hunch is that Amazon will work at bringing its retailing and cloud computing businesses together. Look at the Flexible Payments Service and DevPay:

Amazon customers can pay using the same login credentials and payment information they already have on file with us. This helps Amazon customers keep their payment information secure and removes the friction you would face if you required customers to enter their payment information before they could make a purchase.

Sounds like a bank, right? Now look at what eBay is doing with PayPal (which it is moving towards making obligatory), and Google with Google Payments – note that the new AppEngine can use Google accounts as an identity service.

Banking is highly profitable. These three giants will be fighting over how to get a small slice of more of our Internet transactions – which will be an increasing share of our total transactions.

Like eBay, Amazon already has a strong business handling the storefront and payments for third parties in its marketplace.

I’ll be surprised if things like S3 and EC2 become more important to Amazon than its retailing; but I won’t be surprised if identity and financial services become the core of its business, rather than running warehouses and shipping out goods.

Update: clearly not yet.

amazon, google, internet, web authoring

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud gets persistent storage

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An annoying feature of Amazon EC2, a service which provides virtual servers on demand, is that server instances have no persistent storage. Any data written to the virtual hard drive disappears when the instance shuts down. Developers have needed to store data elsewhere, such as in Amazon’s S3 storage service.

Amazon has now announced persistent storage. These are virtual hard drives that you can attach to EC2 instances. Another enhancement since the initial launch is static IP numbers. Early tester (and reseller) Thorsten von Eicken is enthusiastic:

The feature that really makes the storage volumes sizzle is the ability to snapshot them to S3 and then create new volumes from the snapshots. The snapshots are great for durability: once a snapshot is taken it is stored in S3 with all the reliability attributes of S3, namely redundant storage in multiple availability zones. This essentially solves the whole backup issue with one simple API call.

It’s an excellent feature which arguably should have been there from the start.

Incidentally, I don’t know why people keep comparing Amazon’s web services with Google’s App Engine. OK, they are both cloud services. But Amazon is providing infrastructure services; Google is offering an application runtime. They hardly compete at all. Google and Amazon compete in other ways: Amazon marketplace vs Google Base and Google Checkout, for example.

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internet, security

MySpace account hacked

Around two years ago, I set up a MySpace account in order to try the service. I confess I hardly ever log in, and have not done so for several months. I’m sometimes reminded that I have an account by spam friend invitations, which I ignore.

Today I was puzzled to get email notifications of several spam comments on my MySpace blog. Puzzling – I have no posts on MySpace. Except I have (or did have): when I logged in, I found about a dozen blog posts and a similar number of bulletin posts made in my name. All spam. You don’t get notification of your own posts, so it was only when comments were made that I became aware of the problem. If I had any real content in the account I would be embarrassed.

I cleaned it up and changed my password, but I’m intrigued. Did a hacker (or more likely a hacker bot) guess my password, or is MySpace just easy to hack? I suspect the latter. I doubt it was a cross-site attack, since I am never logged in.

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internet

Retail crisis: when I shop on the High Street, I feel I’ve been mugged

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Tip for a happy life: when you get home after shopping at bricks-and-mortar stores, never check the online prices for what you’ve just bought.

Last Christmas we were given a gift voucher valid at a chain of stores in the UK, and thought it was time we spent it, so took a trip to our local city centre. One of us wanted Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on DVD (£19.95) but in the end we settled on a XBox 360 game (Rayman Raving Rabbids – it’s not for me!) at £25.00.

Glanced at Amazon when we got back. The Potter film is £5.98 new or £4.25 used. The 360 game is £19.99 new or £9.99 “Like new”.

Our gift voucher has been spent mostly on propping up businesses that cannot compete with their online competition. Further, if we’d read the Amazon user reviews, we might have chosen a different game.

There are whole categories of goods where buying on the High Street is now hugely more expensive – and that’s without taking into account the travel and the hassle. I don’t mind paying a little more for the sake of supporting local shops and the community they provide, but these price differences are not sustainable.

How about the expert advice you get from a real shop, in specialist areas like electronics, computing, household goods? Frankly, and unless you are very lucky, the expertise readily available from user reviews or Google far exceeds what you are likely to receive out in town on a Saturday afternoon.

Retailing in the UK is shaky anyway, on account of tough economic conditions. I guess the online factor will accelerate the changes coming to our High Streets.

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c++, microsoft, software development

Visual C++ Feature Pack includes major MFC update

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The Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack is now available for download. It includes an update to MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes), with classes for an Office Ribbon style interface (if you can live with the legal aspect) and other new GUI controls. There is also an implementation of  the TR1 (Technical Report 1) standard (PDF), an important update to the ISO 2003 C++ standard library.