Seen and Noted

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A few things to note: 

  1. A very cool white-board demo you have to see.  Posted on Nils van Boxsel's blog (who has a lot of interesting things up on his blog).
  2. I noticed that Adobe has announced a new project called 'Mars'.  It seems to be essentially a PDF replacement using XML, SVG and ZIP:  "Mars documents can be created by using XML components representing pages and the overall document structure and then combining them in a Zip package using off-the-shelf XML and ZIP tools".   Sound familiar?  Normally I wouldn't comment on such things, but given the never ending questions we get about XPS being a 'me too' document format, and how much we have educated the industry about the benefits of a document format 'really' being built using open standards like XML and ZIP - it is nice to see such a pure validation of our approach.  All of us in Bldg 2 are deeply flattered.
  3. We announced a few weeks back about XPS going to a standards body.  There were some articles in the last week or so quoting a Microsoft executive that said we were not doing that.  That was not accurate - he was ill-informed.  We are still planning on taking XPS to a standards body.
  4. Retail Packaging for Windows Vista and Office 2007 has been revealed.  Check it out at the Windows Vista Blog.  Looks very cool.

- Andy

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 01, 2006
    Take a look at my WPF version of that whiteboard app: http://chriscavanagh.wordpress.com/2006/10/23/wpf-2d-physicsThe design part is still a work in progress, but the physics are done and look pretty nifty!
  • Anonymous
    November 01, 2006
    I am glad Office is using ZIP and XML, but you do realize that Office is not the first to do it.  Apps like MindManager and OpenOffice were using it before MS Office.  In a way, MS Office validated the approach for them.
  • Anonymous
    November 02, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    November 02, 2006
    Just a quick note that Mars is NOT a replacement for PDF...It is an alternate representation of the PDF data structures in a format based on open standards such as XML, ZIP, OTF, ICC, etc.
  • Anonymous
    November 03, 2006
    I have a question for XPS printer. It looks XPS printer are included Vistar and Ofiice 2007, but I want to use XPS printer on Windows 2003, where can I get XPS Printer without using Office 2007?Thank youWideDQ