Thursday 19 November 2009

Tech Update: Office 2010 beta + Wii iPlayer

Office 10 public beta

Just downloaded & installed MS Office 2010 (public) beta and using it now for this quick blog update. Big file to download (700Mb), installation required me to close Firefox (might be just my computer) but seems OK so far but still plenty to explore…

Quite a few professional reviews out there already based on the tech preview, but if you like tinkering around with this stuff, the link is above to download it.

Wii iPlayer

A while back Nintendo made the Internet Channel free (it cost 500 points previously) allowing you to surf the internet using your Wii (and therefore your TV in the lounge). This is pretty cool in itself but better was being able to access the BBC iPlayer.

However, the last Wii system update updated the Flash player and made the whole thing incompatible with the iPlayer. Anyways, yesterday the BBC made the fix available in the form of a dedicated iPlayer channel on the Wii main page.

You need to "purchase" this (it's free) from the Shopping Channel to get it. It's the same for the Internet Channel by the way in case you don't already have it (purchase it for free from the shopping channel).

Hopefully iPlayer navigation will be improved over time (for finding specific programmes by name or category for example) but it works and I've been able to catch up on some TV shows (Top Gear!). Picture quality is pretty reasonable and the fact that I don't need to hook up the laptop or anything like that is a blessed relief. Clearly the limitation is the fact that the Wii uses 802.11b/g so high quality streaming is going to be unlikely and playback is badly affected by downloads that maybe going on elsewhere on your network.

Anyways, that's enough for now. Next up I want to play around with the new Excel 2010…

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