Anyway, let me sit down with a bag of Dorritos and give your questions the answers they deserve …

1) No, you can’t turn off the live preview stuff. And to tell the truth, it annoys me too. Various people have various reactions to it, but I’ve found myself at times thinking “don’t show me what I’m thinking, I just want to think in peace right now!”

2) I’m not familiar with many details of the PDF rendering, but I think it’s fair to say that’s in early beta and will change/improve quite a bit before release. The PDFs you can create right now are pretty bloated, but I’ve heard that’s going to be a lot better at RTM. So … no definitive answers on PDFs right now. Meanwhile, though, a guy like you (or anyone in publishing or typesetting these days) ought to check out XPS, which is also supported.

3) Yes, the context menu. Yes, the Canon Cat. I’m with Jef on the keyboard, but we lost that one. Big time.

4) Little R me. (Mo, that’s a joke!)

You know, there are people who will wonder what type of a relationship includes a “dogboy.” And I don’t think we can come up with an explanation nearly as good as the speculation, so let’s not explain.

I’ve got to say, I’m quite impressed. I can see some things that would drive me bonkers (personally), but I’ve spent the last several years wondering when the hell MS would do something to make the UI more efficient and more user-friendly. Again, it’s a little splashy for my personal taste, but it’s quite obvious that you guys have put a lot of thought into some new ideas, not just XP-ifying an old bloaty interface or something.

The live preview thing is keen. I do have some questions and thoughts, though (if I may be so bold to post them here):

1) can you turn off the live preview stuff? It’s neat, but all that wiggling if you know what you want to do (you know, I just want 12pt. Garamond, I don’t need the underlying screen movement) could get kind of hard on the eyeballs. Admittedly, I’m thinking from a typesetting standpoint, which is not quite what Word is built for. Nonetheless, I think this still applies to the average user’s formatting tendencies - a typical user in some stuffy office will have five or six things they do all the time and will simply want to do them and keep moving rather than see what it’ll look like when they’re done.

2) Does it generate a good PDF? I ask this on behalf of Adams Press - if we can start getting good PDFs (PDFx1a would be ideal) from authors, we could start telling them how to set their own books in software they’re much more comfortable using. Honestly, whether you’re a Quark fan or an InDesign fan, try telling someone with a 30-day trial of either how to set up a master page with running feet and folios over the phone. You can always print to Distiller if you have it, but it would be VERY nice indeed if there was either a built-in or an add-on feature that would allow the average Schmoe to create a print-ready PDF with good colorspace and resolution control. As the line blurs more and more between digital and offset printing, more and more people are going to expect to be able to create output-ready documents that they can send to a real print shop.

3) I think the context menu over highlighted text is pretty keen. If I had to guess, I’d say someone was reading their Jef Raskin. He goes on about this at some (frankly tedious) length as it pertains to the Canon Cat. Granted, this is shinier and not as keyboard-based as he seemed to think everything ought to be, but the underlying concept is the same. Highlight some text, get contextual options immediately. Nice.

4) Can you score me a copy?

Okay, ignore that last one. I’m just very impressed. Don’t tell anyone at my completely open-source and Linux-based office. But even on that front, this is going to make the OpenOffice folks work for their dinner! Or their t-shirts. Or whatever they get for doing that stuff. Who knows?

Anyway, it’s very nice. At risk of tempering my own compliments, what does it eat in terms of system resources? Seems like something like this could get pretty big pretty quickly, and I notice that the mousing in the video is very, er, deliberate. I’m assuming that it’s because it’s a beta version and they don’t want to bork it, but if all the shiny stuff bogs down the actual function that would drive a lot of people batty. And further necessitate the ability to turn things off if need be.

Just thinking out loud and asking questions, though - while my gut tells me to gripe about the shiny stuff, I must admit that I have little to offer as alternative. It’s very nice, seems to be fairly well thought out and customizable enough, and overall a tremendous improvement over the last version. Tabs is good, as we say around the water cooler.

I won’t ask when the release date is (I know that’s a tense subject this week!). But I’m very interested in talking more sometime with you about all of this stuff - it’s completely fascinating to me. Not just the UI stuff but the MS culture, too. And I’m not just asking so I can bitch about it - it really seems to be creating some very cool stuff. After the wedding sometime - you’ve got plenty to think about for now!

your former Dogboy (wow, I still have muscle memory for the word “dogboy” - now THERE’S a wasted synapse!)