I’m delighted to hand over the authorship of Vista Office to Colbert Low who will start blogging here shortly.

Colbert has had a varied career in technology writing for various websites. He is perhaps best known for authoring the gadget blog at Weblog Empire and moving that across to b5media.

I’m pleased to welcome Colbert into the Syntagma Media team.

Microsoft’s IEblog has posted about the release of the “real” Beta 2 version of IE7 for Windows XP SP2. They say:

“This evening we released IE7 Beta 2 at http://www.microsoft.com/ie. This release is not the preview or the update to the preview, but the real Beta 2 of IE7 for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and Windows XP 64-bit Edition. Simply: please try it.

“We acted on a lot of the feedback and bug reports from the previous public releases. In particular, I feel good about changes we made based on reports from web developers around some CSS behaviors, application compatibility feedback, reliability data (yes, we do analyze the information that comes when you click “Send Error Report”), and user experience feedback. People on the team will post additional details about changes over the next few days.”

The way Windows Vista is disappearing over the horizon, we’re going to need an XP version sooner rather than later.

An example of the Segoe UI Font.

A European agency has thrown out Microsoft’s registration of the new font that has become a central feature of Windows Vista and Office 12.

The European Union’s Trademark and Design Office, is claiming that Microsoft’s new font for Windows Vista and Office 2007 is a copy of Frutiger Next, a design by Linotype, a German type company. The agency says that Segoe’s letterforms “differ only in minor details” from Frutiger. The three judges in the case noted that Microsoft disputed the documentation of Druckmaschinen’s fonts but “does not contest the claim of the Applicant that they should be considered identical.”

Microsoft has applied for at least eight design registrations in January 2004 for different weights of Segoe UI, its user interface font. However, Linotype’s parent company, Heidelberger Druckmaschinen, has appealed against the move.

Jensen Harris, a Microsoft program manager, has blogged:”We’re not just introducing a new UI in Office 12 — we’re also introducing a new UI font. It was conceived, designed, and totally optimized for ClearType,” a technology that smooths fonts on LCD screens. It will be turned on by default for the first time in Windows Vista.

The firewall built into Windows Vista will not automatically block outgoing traffic, which is much appreciated by security software developer ZoneLabs.

ZDNet Australia reports: “When Microsoft updated Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2) in August 2004, for the first time Windows included a firewall that was switched on by default. In Windows Vista, the firewall will be capable of blocking both outgoing and incoming traffic but Microsoft has not explained why the outgoing function will, by default, be inactive.”

Microsoft says, Windows Vista is able to protect against incoming attacks but users will have to “selectively configure the firewall” to stop unauthorized applications connecting to the Internet.

Michael Warrilow, Director of Hydrasight, said that one reason could be that predicting the behavior of applications is very difficult. “The firewall is to protect against inbound attacks — instead of protecting the rest of the world from you. Also, the behavior of applications is more difficult to predict for outbound traffic.”

One company that is rather pleased about Microsoft’s decision is Zone Labs, which is probably best known for its ZoneAlarm firewall application.

Zone Labs, Laura Yecies, told ZDNet Australia that Vista’s firewall will lack some key features that come as standard on the free version of ZoneAlarm. “It is not final but it certainly doesn’t have the behavioral capabilities [of ZoneAlarm]… It does have the outbound capability but that is off by default.”

Zone Labs believes the release of Vista is likely to boost sales of its own firewall, as happened when Microsoft launched SP2 for Windows XP. “There was a lot of attention for SP2, which put more attention on firewalls and [that] you need a good firewall.” said Yecies.

In general, Yecies believes that Zone Labs customers will be better off once Microsoft launches Vista. “I am glad they are making their system better. My customers will be more secure if the average Microsoft customer has better security on their system — because they will be less likely to be a bot.”