I'll be honest; PowerPoint is one of those applications that I treat rather harshly. I've been put off by too many awful presentations with whooshing bullet points, dreadful clip art and perhaps even a few sound effects for good measure. As far as I'm concerned, PowerPoint is a tool for creating nightmares. Horrible, bullet point riddled nightmares.

However, after reading "The Feature Bob Invented" on Jensen Harris's Office 12 blog, I've learnt a new use for PowerPoint: Prototyping User Interfaces.

User Interface design is something of a dark art, and can be particularly difficult for programmers. Mocking up a few screens in paint is handy, but stringing them together and adding the correct hotspots can really help you visualise how it's all going to work. It's quite easy to put together a few slides with fake buttons, and I managed to get a rough prototype up and running within a few hours. Not bad for someone with “limited” art skills and a general distrust of all things PowerPoint. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it all was, and just seeing it working gave me plenty of ideas for improvements.

One of the most enlightening things you can ever see is someone trying to use the interface you've designed. Having an interactive prototype makes it much easier to see how they react to the choices in front of them. Even if you can't get to watch someone use your interface, sending your presentation to a few people to try out can still generate valuable feedback.

I highly recommend giving Jensen Harris's blog a read. It's a fascinating insight into how a large company like Microsoft designs and tests user interfaces, and shows off some of the new features of Office 12.

Read more: Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog

I've happily used Windows XP for the past four years, but I'd heard good things about Linux so I decided to give it a try last year. I now use Linux for a lot of my non-programming tasks, and although I feel parts could be improved, it's a very pleasant environment to use.

Getting Started

The first thing to do was to grab a Linux distro. I use Mepis, because it's the only LiveCD I could get working on my laptop. I highly advise using a LiveCD to start with, as it allows you to try everything out without installing anything on your hard-drive.

After clearing roughly half of my hard-drive of unused programs and Windows files, I defragmented and partitioned it. The Mepis OS centre makes partitioning your drive a straightforward affair, and the install process was quick and simple. It guides you through installing a boot loader if you want to keep your existing OS (which I did), so now when my laptop boots I get a quick menu to choose between Mepis and WinXP. The whole process took a few hours, but it was a lot simpler than I had imagined. The Mepis installer does a good job of guiding you through the steps to install.

My favourite apps

I wasn't really sure what to expect with Linux, but I've been pleasantly surprised by the high quality of the applications. My most used programs:

amaroK

I've used Winamp for years, and amaroK was a bit of a change for me. It's got plenty of great features for organising your tracks and albums, such as downloading track information and album covers. There's support for last.FM, dynamic playlists and a host of other rather nifty features.

KOffice

I don't like it as much as Office 2003, but I prefer it to OpenOffice.org. It does have an “autocomplete” feature similar to OpenOffice.org which I'm rather fond of, as it can speed up typing long words.

Gaim

Gaim is a great IM client that works on multiple platforms. It handles the popular protocols (MSN, Yahoo!, AIM/ICQ) very well, and also supports IRC and Jabber.

TaskJuggler

TaskJuggler is a project management application which moves away from the standard Gantt editor. Tasks are entered using a text editor, which can be daunting at first. It takes a while to learn the syntax, but once that's out of the way it's really quite powerful. It can generate HTML and XML reports, as well as our trusty friend the Gantt chart.

Other bits and pieces

The one thing that really convinced me to give Linux a try was the LiveCD. It's a really nice idea, and meant I could play around with all the features before clearing space and partitioning my drive. I really expected things to be a lot harder than they were, and despite a few crashes I've found the whole thing easy to install and use. It's certainly worth a look if you want to try something new. Mepis has a good community of very helpful people, and you can generally find the answer to any problems quickly.

Related Websites

• Mepis Homepage
• amaroK Homepage
• KOffice Homepage
• Gaim Homepage
• TaskJuggler Homepage

Protean IDE, an IDE for Blitz Basic has gone free today, along with a source code release. It's a shame that development fizzled out towards the end, but it was a heavy duty IDE that towered over the original Blitz editor. It's use of the .NET framework seemed to put a lot of people off, which is unfortunate because it was a nicely written piece of kit that benefitted from .NET.

One of my favourite features was the plugin engine, and although I never released any "proper" plugins, I wrote a few quick and dirty ones. Perhaps now development has ceased I'll finally get around to cleaning up and releasing something of use.

A good IDE can really improve productivity when programming, and Protean made a real difference to how I worked with Blitz (and probably kept me using it). Cheers for all your hard work over the years, Rob, and best of luck with your future endeavours!

I recently completed two weeks of jury duty, and it was certainly an eye opener. I'll admit to being a fan of CSI, so seeing how evidence is used in real court was fascinating. Naturally I didn't get a cryptic murder mystery, but what I saw was still very different to what I'm used to.

One thing I wasn't prepared for was the amount of sitting around. I brought a book, but I'd read it before the day was even halfway through. Thankfully, once you're assigned to a case things get more interesting, but it's still a pain to be sat in the lobby for six hours waiting for your name to be called.

It's definitely an experience, and even though I didn't relish the idea of being locked in a room with eleven strangers to debate matters of law, it was actually quite enjoyable.