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Il m’est déjà arrivé de me retrouver, installées sur mon PC, plusieurs configurations de clavier : grecque, cyrillique, chinoise, coréenne, … Pourquoi ? Parce que je suis curieux et parce que j’aime bien les langues. Par contre, je vous l’accorde, ce ne sont pas des claviers que j’utilise tous les jours ; d’ailleurs, souvent je n’ai installé ces différents claviers que pour faire une ou deux recherches sur Internet.

Aujourd’hui Google sort une nouvelle fonctionnalité sur certains de ces sites qui rend cette manipulation inutile : des claviers virtuels pour des langues non-latines, telles que le grec, le russe, l’arabe, le thaï et bien d’autres. Regardez ce que ça donne :

Petite astuce : une fois le clavier virtuel ouvert, vous pouvez utiliser votre clavier physique pour activer les touches virtuelles !

Voici la liste non exhaustive de sites Google proposant les nouveaux claviers virtuels : Google Greece,Google Finland, Google Sweden, Google Iceland, Google Poland, Google Russia, Google Ukraine, Google Saudi Arabia, Google Thailand, Google Mongolia, Google India.

Via Google Operating System]

I had already talked about it not so long ago, tomorrow (or actually today on my watch, but let’s talk PST) November 19th, we’ll be getting the new Xbox Dashboard.

Creating avatars, streaming from Netflix, buying stuff on a computer and having the Xbox download it automatically, and accessing Community Games are just a few of the new features included.

The update is as simple as it gets, but if you’d like a walkthrough, here’s Major Nelson:

We’ve been waiting for it impatiently—or at least I have. It was initially rumored for October, but Microsoft officially announced yesterday at TGS 2008 that the new Xbox 360 Dashboard will be rolling out on November 19.

It will be available in 26 countries and localized in 19 languages. As you can see from the screenshot above (and more in this Joystiq gallery), not only are we getting a completely different user interface, but the experience will change too as this new version focuses strongly on bringing you and your friends closer to the Xbox by introducing avatars and allowing more interaction among friends.

Come back in one month and 10 days (or subscribe) to find out what I think of the new Dashboard.

If you cannot seem to find your way around Office 2007 after working with the previous versions of the Microsoft suite, you're probably not the only one. Luckily, a few developers at Microsoft figured out that, as good as the new ribbon may be (believe me, it is!) a few improvements wouldn't hurt and came up with an add-on that they called Search Commands. Unfortunately, they only released this internally.

These days, however, keeping tools like this internal is not a very good idea, even if they're not perfect; especially when the news of their existence has leaked into the general public. The official version is probably a little different, but I'll say that it's for this reason that Microsoft opened the new Microsoft Office Labs.

Sure, Live Labs, Office Labs, it could all get pretty confusing, like figuring out the difference between the MSN and the Live brands, except that with the "Office" keyword we can be pretty sure that what we will see here are applications and/or features related to the Office suite and, who knows, maybe even previews of what's coming next. The first application coming out of the new Labs is the Search Commands add-on that I mentioned above.

It installs on Word, PowerPoint and Excel and appears as a tab in the Office ribbon. The tab has a Guided Help button that will get you started.

In short, what the add-on does is provide a search field, which, by the way, is accessible with the keyboard shortcut . When you start typing a name, the ribbon will show you a list of matching commands. You can click on the one you're looking for, or use the numerical keyboard shortcut next to each icon.

A couple of nice features are also available, such as spelling suggestions:

And if you're interested in locating the command that you just found in the ribbon, the very informative tooltips will help you with that:

It's also possible that the command is not located in the ribbon at all, like the Copy As Picture command above, in which case the tooltip will say so, but I don't think that deserves a screenshot.

That's it! It maybe doesn't sound as much, but it's actually a pretty useful tool for the power user, who can access all commands without ever leaving the keyboard, as well as for the beginner, who will find commands "hidden" in the new ribbon.

More importantly, the fact that this tool is publicly available and that an Office Labs web site was set up shows that Microsoft wants to be closer to the user (notice the big Feedback button in the screenshots above) and isn't afraid of following other companies such as Google, in releasing products and features in a "Lab" environment. This is how Gmail was born after all, and nobody can deny Gmail's success today, even though it still hasn't left the beta stage.

I was reading this Dr. Dobb's article about ASP.NET MVC by Dino Esposito and, when scrolling down to read the end of it, I got this window:

Now obviously, the big red X is my addition, and it's there to show what a waste of precious screen real estate is going on.

I was going to write post talking of what a shame it is that today's Web is mostly vertical. Indeed, I can safely say that, form a technical point of view, it's currently a PITA to format articles such as this one to fit in a browser window in a way I call (and I'm sure others do, too) newspaper-style, i.e. by using several columns spread horizontally. Especially if you take into account the fact that horizontal space varies from one computer to another, and all the other constraints that come from working in the heterogeneous environment that is the WWW.

Now, the above statement is true in the general case, no matter what, but before criticizing a site in particular, I decided to take a look at it on a different browser than the one that I use every day, since the latter is slightly tweaked for comfort:

As you can see, the screen real estate was not being completely wasted after all. Of course, "waste" is a relative term. I'm sure all those ads are very important to Dr. Dobb's.

I still look forward to a future Web where features like CSS3's multi-column layout are implemented correctly across browsers and platforms. But then again, we all know I'm an optimist.

This is the fourth in an open series of posts to introduce my dear readers to my favorite TED presentations.

I love reading.

I'm a little picky on what I read, because I like the books I read to be like escape pods out of my current reality into worlds, situations and stories I'm unlikely to be in. That's why the books I enjoy the most are generally fiction.

The one thing I do not like about reading, though, is books.

Books are so fifteenth century! All that tree-cutting that they require, and inks and stuff... And they weigh a ton... And they use up space...

Unfortunately the technology to replace books by something more convenient doesn't seem to be here yet.

I believe that in the near future paper books will be produced in much smaller quantities in the developed world. Most printed material will be replaced by some sort of digital equivalent (not the Kindle, though.)

My view of the future of books will be a subject for a post in the future. For now, I give you a couple of TED videos that are right in synch with it.

The first video is of Erin McKean. A lexicographer that talks about her view of words and dictionaries and how today's technology: computers and the Internet, can already change books and languages.

Before the video and putting book-stuff aside, I particularly relate to this quote:

This is a little-known technological fact about the Internet: that the Internet is actually made up of words and enthusiasm.

I said above that the technology to phase out paper books is not yet here. Sure, there's the Kindle I mentioned before or the slightly-nicer-but-not-yet-there Sony Reader Digital Book, and you can read on PDAs or the iPhone and other such devices. But none of them is quite there yet. They're either not ergonomic enough, or too heavy, or too light, or too small, or too big, or... you get the picture.

People are working on making this happen though. Here's a Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo by Blaise Aguera y Arcas. I guess he's actually demoing Seadragon, the technology behind Photosynth, rather than the latter itself. But Photosynth has the advantage of being publicly available, while you cannot run the other demos he shows.

Imagine technology like that on a device about the size of a paperback. A single color screen with no buttons, just thick enough to hold comfortably. Extended battery life... But well, as I said, this is matter for a later post.

Have a great week.

This is the first in an irregular series of posts where I bring you nice surprises I've found while browsing the Internet.

I found today's surprises in my RSS aggregator just waiting to be shared with the rest of the world*.

Both of today's surprises come from totally different sources, but they do have one thing in common: innovation. Both concern technology that is not yet available, but that's totally awesome. They actually have a second thing in common which I discovered just before writing this post, but I'll let you watch the videos first to see how keen your eye is.

So, today's first surprise comes from the O'Reilly Radar post entitled Context Aware Image Re-Sizing. How cool does that sound? If you're not convinced, I'll let you see the video then:

Now what do you think? One of the things I'd really like to do with my blog is enable a FlowDocument-like experience for reading my posts. Unfortunately, you can resize and reflow text as much as you like, images will always be a problem; well, until technology like the above is widely available, of course.

The second surprise is called LucidTouch and I found it through Engadget. The name by itself is not very compelling to me, but take a look at this demo:

I've always wanted an "Origami" PC because I feel that in the future we'll probably all have one of those in our bags most of the time. If technology like LucidTouch actually gets into devices like UMPCs, I'm sure my feeling will become a prediction.

So, did you figure out what else these two technologies have in common?

Well, even though the second one is said to come from Microsoft Research on Engadget, really only one of five researchers works there**. The other four work at MERL, where the two researchers of the image resizing application also work.

MERL?

Yes, MERL: Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab, the American branch of Mitsubishi's R&D. If you've never heard about them, you might want to take a look at their impressive project list.

Well, that's all for today, but the Web is host to plenty of secrets, so expect more Surprise bags in the future.

* Yes, I know that if I found them in my aggregator and if they're already on the Internet, they have already been shared with the rest of the world. That unfortunately is not true when I'm talking about "the world," because when I say it I'm obviously talking about the only world that matters: the one that revolves around me.

** I am not at all implying that because only one researcher comes from MSR they've had lesser impact or influence on the development of the technology, I just want to bring more attention to Mitsubishi to make the link between both videos.

Que vous utilisiez Internet Explorer en tant que navigateur principal ou simplement comme un dernier recours, si vous avez déjà utilisé Firefox, sa fonctionnalité de recherche vous manque probablement lorsque vous “travaillez” sous IE.

Plus maintenant ! La IE team a publié sur leur blog une liste de Must Have Add-Ons for IE7 (add-ons indispensables pour IE7, mais ils marchent aussi avec les versions précédentes ) et parmi eux se trouve Inline Search, un add-on qui remplace Ctrl+F (mais pas Edit > Find on this Page) avec une barre à outils avec la même fonctionnalité de Firefox.

Voici une courte vidéo démontrant l’add-on. Je suis désolé pour la qualité. J’ai fait un version AVI de très bonne qualité mais qui faisait 1,19 Go, donc j’ai dû garder la version WMV de 965 Ko. Pour économiser ma bande passante et pour tester Soapbox, j’ai décidé de uploader la vidéo sur ce nouveau site de Microsoft :

Cliquez ici si vous ne voyez pas la vidéo ci-dessus.