Niklas' blog

I just finished reading “Night Fisher” by R. Kikou Johnson. I feel the author clearly has combined his own self with the main character’s – and it’s is a pro, not a con. However, the main character got on my nerves at times by simply being a by-stander in his own life.

The noir-ish feel of the book, the dark surroundings, uncertain futures, the slowness of it all, combined with the sexual undercurrent and being a late teenager on an island is grand. The use of darkness falls into place with this. I also like the way how Johnson has used overlapping captions with unclearly titled wording to portray muddled scenes and unclearness. The book made me think of Charles Burns and Jaime Hernandez.

It’s nice to see that Office 12 is now having a real name: Office 2007. Microsoft held a press-conference yesterday about the suite, the licensing deals and a bit more. They’re also saying some about FrontPage and Expression, which is interesting if you’re into that stuff. Brian Jones, a.k.a. MSXMLMAN, has posted a few interesting bits on the subject, where he points out that Groove is going to become Office Groove 2007, which will only be available under the Office Enterprise 2007-suite as well as a stand-alone application. I’m anxious to try it out. All the press materials available for Office 2007 are available here.

I like the idea of AJAX-S. If you haven’t heard about AJAX, check this. AJAX-S is a quite simple way to create really quick slide-shows for the web – and you can make them stand-alone, of course. One cool thing is that you can navigate through the slides (or through bullets!) using the arrow-buttons on your keyboard. Check the specifications, the demo and the ZIP’ed demo here.