As a former Microsoft employee myself, I think Scott is right on for the most part regarding the issues surrounding Vista (and its delays). I'm not however convinced there's a door open for competitors (besides Apple) which is wide enough, and will remain open long enough, for most competitors. From Scott's blog:

However, the door is open for competitors . The bad Vista PR over the last year has made a window - Linux, Firefox and Red Hat should be doing something: a viral ad, a marketing campaign, anything. But they've been awfully quiet and I don't understand why. I think this is the more interesting story than what's going on in Redmond. The MSFT Windows multi-slip ship cycle is an old (perhaps sad) story, but the silence on the battlefront deserves more attention.

Most Microsoft competitors are plagued by several factors:

• no budget (open source doesn't generate much revenue -- certainly not enough to make a dent even in the US market place)
• not compelling (Linux is still trying to be a clone of Windows)
• not better (it's not measurably better than Windows in really any way)
• no one really cares really (Example: my parents don't care what operating system is on their computer any more than they care about the specifics of the engine in their car. Both get them where they want to go. And, as long as I'm official tech-support, I'm going to put something I'm most comfortable with and the platform that offers the most support). (And the same is true of Firefox vs. IE -- they rarely need to have more than a single web browser open at a time).
• and did I mention no budget?

What are your thoughts?

Posted by Aaron at 9:02 PM | Permalink

Yahoo's FARECHASE is one of the slickest airline travel search tools I've used. It's heavily Web 2.0 -- AJAX, etc -- and very well done.

It's got the autocomplete/suggest behavior ..

Nice calendar support:

And slick, live results searching (no more "waiting" screens like other sites):

It's slick how the search results can be modified live without page refresh:

I have selected one of the flights (which for some reason pops up a new window rather than being in place):

Rather than doing the booking at Yahoo, you're taken to the airline's web site for final booking (or to another 3rd party travel site):

I know where I'll search for flights in the future. It's not Expedia or Orbitz anymore.

Posted by Aaron at 7:23 AM | Permalink

There's a buzz about Google calendar on the web. Although I need an online calendar as much as I need yet another portal web site, I was impressed by two things in particular:

1. Quick add functionality
2. General rich client feel (dragging appointments, etc.)

The function I wanted to highlight is the quick add feature. Easiest to show a few snaps:

In the upper left corner of the calendar is a "Quick Add" link. Click it and you'll get a field similar to the one above (without the "meet harry" part of course). I bet you can guess where this is going:

Slick. Simple. Very cool. No pop up dialogs with a bunch of fields to fill out. Only a simple sentence. I admit it wasn't 100% on the few that I tried, but I was experiementing with how varied I could get the text to be before it put the appointment somewhere unexpected. My findings were that if you kept it a little less "human" and a bit more "computer speak", the better it worked.

I want that in my day to day scheduling software please (especially if it were smart enough to recognize that "Harry" meant someone in my list of contacts (I'd be happy to provide a more unique name if that helped). Microsoft Outlook team? Please.

If you have a gmail account, it's a two click sign-in.

Posted by Aaron at 7:37 AM | Permalink

Found on lifehacker: toread.cc.

""toread" is an email-based free bookmark service.

You can bookmark your "toread" web pages by just clicking the bookmarklet on your browser. "

It seems to work fine in my simple tests. Signup only requires an e-mail address.

Shortly after clicking on the toread.cc bookmark I added to my browser toolbar, an e-mail arrived containing the contents of the web page I was viewing. The graphics aren't attached -- so if you want a full fidelity experience, you still need to be connected to the Internet. Either way, neat (although I won't use it that much I'm sure).

Posted by Aaron at 8:13 PM | Permalink

Movielink, a web site/company specializing in legal downloadable movies recently announced that they would be allowing purchases of movies, rather than just a DRM-time limited download. Prices vary, but I was interested in comparing to a movie I purcahsed a week or two ago at Circuity City, King Kong (2005). We bought it the week it was released for $13.99 in the store.

Here's Movielink's price: $26.99!

Why would I want to download the movie for $27 US if I can buy a physical copy for less? The DVD I can play on any DVD player (loan to friends, etc.), whereas the download will play on up to 3 PCs (and I'm sure they must be running Microsoft Windows).

I also don't see where the size of the file is listed for the purchased downloads. I wouldn't want to store too many of them given that a full movie averages about 1.5 GB.

Has anyone bought a downloadable to-own movie? If so, why? How was the quality? We we tried the rental service, we weren't happy with the quality when we watched it on our movie screen via a Media Center extender. It was somewhere between VHS and DVD quality.

Posted by Aaron at 7:51 PM | Permalink

WPF has some simple features which really can make some effects easy. For example, if you'd like to add a shadow or a glow to a TextBlock in WPF (or other elements, such as a Button), you need to only add a BitmapEffect to the proper UI element. For example, in the code below, I've applied it to a TextBlock element.

Here's the XAML:

<Page
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" >
<Grid Background="#ff2d76ff">
<TextBlock
HorizontalAlignment="Center"
VerticalAlignment="Center"
FontSize="48"
Foreground="Gold"
FontFamily="Courier New"
FontWeight="500"
Typography.StandardLigatures="True">
<TextBlock.BitmapEffect>
<OuterGlowBitmapEffect GlowColor="Black" GlowSize="3"/>
</TextBlock.BitmapEffect>
<Span>Wired</Span><Span
FontFamily="Verdana"
FontSize="40"
Foreground="Orange"
FontStyle="Italic">Prairie</Span>
</TextBlock>
</Grid>
</Page>

Posted by Aaron at 3:34 PM | Permalink

Copernic Desktop Search 2.0 Beta is now available here.

Here's my one sentence review:

I would highly recommend it -- if you need a desktop search tool.

Some details about why below.

I posted recently about how I was using an earlier version of their desktop search product here .. and they've addressed most of the dislikes I had about the first version. (Still some to go though ... )

I like the combined search results quite a lot (there's still the old method of selecting a particular type of search, such as e-mails, files, etc.). It's blazingly fast even with a TON of e-mails and content to search (I include in the index a shared network music and photo drive and still find it's fast). I love the built in preview window with the search word highlighting (and the fast method of jumping from one result to the next by clicking the search word). (Yes, I know it isn't original at all, but I still find that feature very handy). It works well on the file types I typically need, such as Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, source code files, etc. (I don't know if there's a list of file types anywhere).

On my wide screen, I have it set to show the preview on the right side rather than the default bottom.

It's still a larger application experience (a full screen experience would probably be common), but you can use the included deskbar to quickly search for keywords as well.

It searches source code files -- anything you want. The one gotcha you might encounter is if you're searching for words (or programming language constants) which contain an underscore. If you search for WM_LBUTTONDOWN for example, Copernic treats that as two words: WM and LBUTTONDOWN. Add quotes to search it as if it's a single word.

In a funny irony -- I went to their Search Help Zone (accessed via the Help menu) to find the list of file types that can be previewed/searched. I couldn't find it -- they don't have a search feature in their online help system!

Posted by Aaron at 9:08 PM | Permalink

From Apple:

More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.

Boot Camp

Posted by Aaron at 7:19 PM | Permalink

Wired magazine (online) and their top ten list of Apple flip-flops.

My general rule of thumb when it comes to technology (software, hardware, etc.):

Unless you see the technology and it's shipping, any promises relating to that technology are likely to come back to bite you hard (in your least favorite body location).

Posted by Aaron at 7:30 AM | Permalink

400+ differences of Visual Studio 2005.

"The difference is obvious" claims the web site. I'm not sure what they are comparing to actually -- other than something else. I clicked through a couple to see what they thought was different.

Difference #1: .NET Remoting

Excuse me? The first difference is .NET Remoting? A technology they will be deprecating in favor of the Windows Communication Foundation?

Some of the differences have a Learn More button that takes you to a new page with a more detailed description. Things like .NET Remoting, oddly do not though.

The only reason I'd suggest visiting the web site would be the to view the series of brief videos, "Life as a Developer." I chuckled at 6, 109, and 256.

I don't know why they chose to list 400+ things in a user interface like this. Who is going to click through 400 things?

Posted by Aaron at 7:56 PM | Permalink

If you visited WiredPrairie recently, you may have noticed little Rojo inserts like this:

As of now, I've removed them all. Not only was the content barely relevant most of the time (I never wanted to click on them), it slowed page load time dramatically. Sorry for any inconvenience they may have caused.

Did anyone find them useful (did you click on one and enjoy the page it suggested)?

Posted by Aaron at 7:41 AM | Permalink

In the usability and software world ...

Tor: An anonymous Internet communication system. I hadn't heard of it before I came across their user interface contest yesterday. It would have been fun to participate. Here's a snip from their web page explaining the project:

The Tor project, affiliated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is running a GUI competition to develop a vision of how Tor can work in a user's everyday anonymous browsing experience. Some of the challenges include how to make alerts and error conditions visible on screen; how to let the user configure Tor to use or avoid certain routes or nodes; how to learn about the current state of a Tor connection, including which servers it uses; and how to find out whether (and which) applications are using Tor safely.

They awarded two winners in February, CMU Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory, and the April3rd team.

If you're interested in software design or usability, you might want to at least scan through the winners. They took very different approaches to the same functional problem.

Posted by Aaron at 7:33 AM | Permalink

If you haven't noticed, there's a new 60+MB update available if you're a Mac OS X owner.

Details

One of the more humorous fixes though:

Updates Calculator so that the percentage button ("%") will no longer divide, under certain circumstances, when you expect it to calculate percentage -- this could happen in Mac OS X 10.4.3 through 10.4.5.

Eh?!

Posted by Aaron at 9:01 PM | Permalink

Microsoft announced today that Virtual Server 2005 R2 is now available as a free download! Additionally, A handful of Linux distributions (RedHat and SUSE) are also supported more formally by a new release of Virtual Machine Additions for Linux guests.

More information here.

Get it here.

Posted by Aaron at 8:10 PM | Permalink