It's a pity we won't be seeing an official Vista CTP build this month. Most of us were expecting not to when nothing appeared before the Thanksgiving weekend, but the news was confirmed today - Patrick posted the details of a Microsoft conference call on the OSNN front-page, and Rafael received part of a chat transcript from an anonymous source.

In any case, the folks over at Windows-Tweaks have posted a short review (with some pretty screenshots) of the installer and UI changes in Build 5259, which would have been the November CTP, had it been released. An interesting read, for sure, so check it out. I'm sure Bilal is going to love the two new leaf wallpapers. ;)

I've deliberately kept relatively quiet about the Vista CTPs on this blog so far because I prefer to reserve my opinions until Beta 2 and beyond, at which point we should be seeing feature-complete builds that more closely resemble what the OS is going to look like when it goes gold. The focus for me until now has been to report more significant (read "not UI-related") issues to ensure more stable builds. From what I can tell though, 5259 is starting to look more polished as compared to its predecessors, and it definitely looks like it would have been a fun build to test and play with.

Bring on the December CTP! :)

The first big update to Firefox since the 1.0 release has been officially released today.

Firefox 1.5 includes some notable new features and enhancements since the last release, such as streamlined automatic updates (browser and extensions), the ability to reorder tabs, a one-click option to clear all private data (history, temp files, cookies), a revamped, cleaner Options dialog, etc. The underlying rendering engine has also been updated to better support newer web-standards like SVG and CSS 2/3. Check out the Release Notes for a more complete list.

While I've been exclusively using the IE 7 builds in the monthly Vista CTPs, I've still been using the Firefox 1.5 betas and RC builds on the XP machines that I use at home and on campus. My favorite new feature is undoubtedly the new update engine. It's quick, it's painless, and it's exactly how a software update should be delivered. Those of you who have seen it in action will know what I mean. :)

If you're currently on the 1.0.x builds, 1.5 is a pretty big update. If you've been keeping up with the 1.5 RCs, you won't really notice much of a difference. Nevertheless, go ahead and update your Firefox setup now. Notice that the product pages have been moved to the new Mozilla Corporation site, with a .com rather than the .org.

It's been a busy week and I haven't had a chance to post anything for a few days. The four-day Thanksgiving weekend is here now, and we're leaving for the San Fransisco area in about an hour. Will be returning home on Saturday evening, and then back to uni on Sunday evening, as always.

The end of the quarter is approaching quickly...there are just about three weeks to go until winter break begins. I've been feeling pretty tired lately, and coursework has been pretty dry this quarter. I've always loved to work on practical stuff - writing code, working on projects that have tangible end-results, etc. and this quarter has had absolutely none of that. It looks like next quarter's going to be much the same - more theory classes. The good thing is once that's done, it's onto the more fun stuff - project-based classes like operating systems, compilers, artificial intelligence etc. Some of those courses are notorious for being especially challenging and time-consuming, but I'm looking forward to them. :)

Moving on to other unrelated things - my experience with Windows XP x64 has been very smooth on the new desktop so far. As I mentioned in an earlier post, everything I've tried to run has been really zippy. And I've been pleasantly surprised by the fact that, unlike many other x64 users, I've found 64-bit drivers for all my internal parts as well as external devices and peripherals. Canon released x64 drivers for the Pixma IP4000 printer last week too, and the OS includes drivers for the good old HP DeskJet 930C. One of the things I miss the most though is Windows Desktop Search, which is unfortunately still incompatible with XP x64. Considering how nicely everything else is running, I'm starting to feel a little reluctant to move to one of the 32-bit flavors of XP now. I might temporarily set up a dual-boot system in January once I'm back from NYC, just to see for myself if there's any noticeable performance difference; that should make the decision a little easier, I think.

That's about all I've got for now. To those of you in the U.S., have a nice, relaxing weekend. :)

A nice new service was added to the Windows Live Beta family today - Windows Live Domains.

The basic idea is that anyone with a domain can now point their MX record to the Live servers. What that means is that I could have Microsoft's servers hosting even my own domain's email accounts for free.

There's a restriction of 20 email accounts per domain, with each mailbox getting 250MB of space. In addition, the same account functions as a Passport account, and can be used to sign in to Messenger, Spaces etc. I'm assuming users also get access to the spiffy new Windows Live Mail Beta service as the webmail frontend for all their accounts, although that isn't explicitly mentioned anywhere on the site.

The team that's working on this also has an official blog, just like all the other Live teams do.

There's a new service called immedi.at that monitors RSS/Atom feeds that you specify and notifies you via instant messages when there are updates. It works with all the major IM networks, including MSNM, AIM/ICQ, Yahoo, Google Talk, and Jabber/XMPP.

Something to consider if there's a particular feed that you really want to stay on top of. Just don't go overboard; you might find yourself getting bombarded with IMs all day. :D

Yeah yeah. I know almost every single one of you has seen that line far too many times already. It appeared in emails, IM's, AIM profiles, websites, blogs, forums etc. etc.

The reason I brought this up is not so that you can pelt me with rotten vegetables, but because Kevin Larson from the Microsoft Typography team today gives us the real reason why we're able to read through this now infamous passage of jumbled text with almost no extra effort.

Pretty cool!

Yesterday, Brandon announced the release of a new version of Windows Desktop Search, especially geared towards the enterprise. This release enables administrators to deploy the product on a large number of machines via SMS and manage the setups using Group Policy.

A refresh of the consumer version is also in the pipeline, but in the meantime, this release adds some notable new features. For example, WDS can now replace the Search Companion in XP, making it feel much more integrated into the OS. The search bar in Outlook can also display the results of a query within the Outlook window itself, instead of spawning a separate search results window like it used to. Both kick-ass additions.

I know I've recommended this to people over and over again, here on this blog, and on various forums. But those who finally cave in and decide to try it usually have nothing but good things to say about it. So if you're not using it yet, please, do yourself a favor - check out the review, and try it for at least a week; then come back and tell me what you think. :)

A few months ago, Google acquired Urchin, a web traffic analysis company. Google Analytics, a free service based on Urchin's technology, was launched today. As with most Google service launches, their servers seem to be getting hammered at the time of this post.

I'm planning to sign up once the mad frenzy ends and the dust has settled. The tiny screenshot on the front page looks quite pretty. I'm curious to see how detailed the stats are compared to other similar services. I'll report back with my thoughts when I get a chance to sign up and play with it.

Update: "Once Upon A Dreamer" has some screenshots of the Analytics control panel.

Tags: Google

So I can hear some of you saying - this guy had a three day weekend and all he did was build a computer that he's drooling over? What a hopeless geek! :D

Actually, I did a little more than just that. We visited the South Coast Botanical Gardens in the Palos Verdes Peninsula, which is about a 40 minute drive away from home. The garden itself is a pretty big place (we spent all morning there, so you can imagine) and it's very well maintained - some fascinating plants and trees in there that I had never seen or heard about before. And the surrounding area is absolutely gorgeous too; sea-side cliffs, green lawns, a pebbled beach, and hills on the horizon.

I've posted pictures from the botanical gardens. Unfortunately, we didn't get pics of the rest, but I'm sure we'll be visiting the place again sometime in the future since it's so close to home.

We have some fun plans for the Thanksgiving weekend too. More on that later though. :)

Well, I finally got around to building the new desktop on Friday. In fact, this is my first post from the machine. Everything fell into place easily and I managed to get it up and running in the first try without blowing anything up. :P I've installed XP x64 on the machine for now, but I'll probably be moving to MCE 2005 once my MSDN Universal subscription is activated in a week or two.

I haven't had a chance to do anything particularly taxing on the machine yet, but I can say one thing - it's crazy fast. Everything just pops open and it's a pleasure to use. Office 2003 Pro took less than 60 seconds to install! You should have seen the grin on my face after I managed to pick up my jaw off the ground. :D

The Antec Sonata is a superb case, by the way. Before I put everything together, I plugged the PSU into a wall outlet and turned it on. The case and PSU fans are so dead silent, I didn't know the thing was on until I saw the fans moving. Unfortunately, the fan on the 6800GT is a little louder, so even though the completed machine is pretty quiet, it's not entirely as silent as I thought it would be.

Still lots of stuff left to install, but if everything flies by as quickly as that Office setup, I think I'm really going to enjoy this...

So we all got done with our midterms earlier this week and decided it would be a good time to play some Halo before the workload builds up again.

We got together last night at 10PM and set up two Xboxes (eight controllers) in the room that we usually have our ACM meetings every other week. It's a pretty big room, so the two networked boxes were hooked up to two projectors that beamed up the picture on the empty walls in the room. I don't think I've ever actually played a game on screens that size before. It was totally sweet!

And since the building was virtually empty at that time of the night, we hooked up an amplifier and two Yamaha speakers and had music blasting in the background through the whole session. :D

And speaking of Halo, Bungie announced that the Xbox 360 will be able to do Halo and Halo 2 at 720p with full scene anti-aliasing! (Thanks to Brandon for the heads up)

A few months ago, Microsoft invited people to submit their stories about how Windows and related technologies have empowered them to do what they love. As described on the official site...

"The Start Something Amazing Awards recognize the unique and creative ways people use Windows and related technologies to pursue their interests or start something new. From May through September 2005, people were invited to submit a personal story or nominate others for their achievements in the following categories: Music, Sports & Games, Memories, Culture & Community, and Home & Lifestyle."

Today, the company announced the winners of the contest in each of the above categories. The winner of the Grand Prize, Jeannine Johnson, is only 15 years old! Check out the two press releases for their stories and some short interviews.

Some of those once-in-a-lifetime prizes (scroll to the end), especially the National Geographic expeditions, are incredible!

Adrian Wong has put together an awesome resource that explains what almost every single one of those (sometimes cryptic) options in the BIOS does, mentions what the default settings are, and offers recommendations for people who are into serious tweaking.

Just as a word of warning - as with any such guide, be aware that there could be inaccuracies, so make sure you double-check and do a little research before you make any drastic changes to your BIOS settings. It's not an area that you want to fiddle with unless you know what you're doing!

I posted my initial opinion on the new Yahoo! Maps beta the other day. Charlene Li of Forrester Research talks about her experience with it while going house-hunting, and compares it to what it was like going through the same process with Google's popular offering. It really makes you appreciate the unique stuff that's Yahoo's brought to the table.

But the really cool part is the new API's that they provide. It's flexible, powerful and lets you do stuff like this. That's slick!

I would keep my eye out on Yahoo. They're often overshadowed by the Big G in the news, but they've been doing some great stuff and making some very smart acquisitions (Flickr, anyone?). I love the competition. It's bringing out the best from everyone! :)

Tags: Yahoo

Just had my last midterm this morning and I actually have no other assignments or projects due this week, for a change. The workload during the last couple of weeks has been pretty crazy, and it's nice to have a little while to relax.

Friday is Veteran's Day, so we get the day off. A three day weekend is just what I need right now. It should finally give me some time to put the new desktop machine together. I've had all the parts in my possession for almost two weeks now.

The question is what flavor of XP should I install on it once it's complete? I'm trying to decide between regular XP Pro SP2, XP x64, or MCE. Since the Vista CTP is already the only OS on my laptop, it's out of the question as the primary OS on the desktop. I'd rather have at least one solid XP setup that I can work on. Might set it up on a secondary partition later on though. There are still issues with XP x64 related to driver availability and software compatibility, so I'm not sure if I should risk going down that path only to reach a dead-end at some point. I'm considering MCE even though the machine doesn't have a TV tuner yet (I don't have cable TV in my room here anyway) only because I have access to it through MSDN and I think the Media Center kiosk-like UI might be nice to have even for just movies, or music when I'm not using the PC for anything else. That's what I'm currently leaning towards, but we'll see over the weekend...

Yesterday's launch of Visual Studio 2005 has also renewed my interest in C#. Actually, let me rephrase that. I didn't ever lose interest in it...just never found the time to pursue it seriously because of coursework, classes, exams...all that fun stuff associated with being a student. Let's see if I can find some time to get started again.

But not just yet. The rest of the week is time to relax, remember? :)

Tabs were a great addition into browsers and the fad caught on pretty quickly. However, as users open more pages simultaneously, having a single tab bar poses the same problem as the taskbar originally did for independent browser windows. Last month, I wrote about the various ways that browsers are helping users to manage the "too many tabs" problem.

Tab Sidebar is another nice extension for Firefox 1.5 that attempts to solve the problem in a different way. OmniWeb for the Mac has been taking the same approach for a while now.

So far, we have Quick Tabs in IE 7 (live preview tiles of all your tabs arranged in a grid), Tab Previews in Firefox (hover over tabs to see previews), and the Tab Sidebar (smaller previews of tabs arranged vertically down). If there are any other approaches that I missed, leave a comment and let me know!

Personally, as mentioned in my earlier post on this subject, I'd prefer a combination of Quick Tabs and hover-over previews. And if I really had to pick just one, I'd pick Quick Tabs. Why? Because I think it's the implementation that scales the best. What I mean by that is that as the number of open tabs increases, the Quick Tabs approach has the best design to handle all of them well, simply because the grid layout allows the maximum number of tab previews to be shown to the user simultaneously. In that respect, it has an upper-hand over the tab sidebar approach because opening enough tabs could lead to the need for a scrollbar on the sidebar. In fact, I think it would make more sense to have a horizontal preview bar because displays almost always have more pixels horizontally than vertically; so a horizontal bar would be able to display more previews simultaneously before bringing in the need for a scrollbar.

But as they say, different strokes for different folks - you might very well disagree with my opinion. So my question to you is, what's your favorite implementation? Which one do you think is the most convenient and useable? Which single one would you pick if you had to decide?

Literally. Unlike the folks at Google and MSN, who chose to go with AJAX, the current in-thing, Yahoo's new maps UI is completely done in Flash, which allowed them to bring in some very interesting features.

So what's the big deal? Yet another mapping service? What's new? How is it different?

- The ability to add live traffic reports to your map. If you live in a busy place like LA, you'll really appreciate this. Construction work, traffic accidents on the freeway...they're all reported right on the map so that you can plan a detour in advance.
- The ability to add multiple stop points. All the other popular mapping services let you pick a starting point and a destination. What if you want to add stops on the way? Yahoo makes that possible. Just keep adding places and new boxes appear to accomodate the final destination. Nice!
- The ability to zoom in and out using the scroll wheel - just like MSN Virtual Earth. I still don't know why Google doesn't add this. It's so much more natural. Repeatedly clicking those damn plus/minus buttons is annoying.
- Drag and drop: Looking for a pizza place on the way from home to school? Map your home to school route as usual, use the local search to find all pizza places en-route, drag the one you want to go to to the directions pane on the left and it gets added as a stop. Very cool and again, a very natural way of doing things.

I find it awesome that each company that gets involved is bringing in its own innovations to the online mapping space. Sure, they all borrow well-implemented ideas from each other (and I always stress that there's nothing wrong with that), but we've been seeing unique improvements and features coming from all the three big players - Google, MSN and Yahoo!

So go play with the new Yahoo Maps Beta and post your thoughts!

Tags: Yahoo

When I read about the Windows Live announcement yesterday, the name somehow sounded very familiar. I knew I had seen it somewhere before. Then it hit me. I dug around a bit on my drive and found this concept/mockup image from December 6, 2004:



Could this be the direction in which MSN Spaces (now Windows Live Spaces) is moving? The contact card, the photos, the blog, the list of favorite music...all the pieces are already there. With a bit of AJAX magic, these "tiles" could be modified so that viewers can drag and drop them around the screen and arrange things the way they like, similar to the tiles on Start.com (and now Live.com)

Some interesting possibilities... :)

Tags: Windows Live, Live.com

Niall Kennedy was at the event in San Fransisco and talks about all the new services that were announced in a series of posts:

Microsoft Live Platform
Live.com and Windows Safety Center
Windows Live Messenger and Mail

Also on the blog are a couple of screenshots of Windows Live Messenger, which will replace MSN Messenger when it's launched. Unlike some of the recent MSNM releases that added silly stuff like winks and nudges, Live Messenger finally adds some superb features like contact tagging, Active Contacts (automatic address book sync), file sharing (a sort of private P2P network), and the ability to make calls to phones ala Skype. I'm looking forward to seeing what the voice quality is like!

Windows Live Mail, the new name for Hotmail, is looking great too. I've had a chance to try out the beta, and it's hands down the most rich-client-like webmail interface I've used so far. It actually feels more like Outlook running in a browser window rather than a webmail UI.

The Windows Safety Center is an interesting service, and it looks to me like a free, web-based, limited version of Windows OneCare. In fact, I'm pretty sure it'll share common virus definitions with OneCare. A nice place to send people to for a quick scan and tune-up when they call you for help. :)

2006 should be an exciting year for Microsoft and its customers. There's a lot of cool stuff in the pipeline. Can't forget Windows Vista and Office 12, both of which are shaping up really well too.

So what was your reaction to today's announcements? Any particular Live services you're looking forward to?

Update: Here's an official page that includes more information about the file sharing and synchronization capabilities coming in Live Messenger. If this works seamlessly as described, I can see it becoming my favorite feature very quickly. :)

Tags: Windows Live, Live.com

Mike Torres has a concise bullet-point list of all the Windows Live services that Microsoft announced today.

Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research posted a quick analysis of what this is all about. Worth quoting:

What this is about is a recognizing that there's an attempt by others to co-opt the traditional Microsoft space with new offerings. Yes, there's been a lot of buzz about using AJAX for rich web development and people have done some amazing things. At the same time, Microsoft knows that the rich applications and OS model still have a lot of life left in them. It's not about one vs. the other for Microsoft. It's about both, working together and the synergy you get from them. These new services recognize the importance of connectivity and the near ubiquitous nature of high speed access but also combine with the richness that you can only get from traditional model. These are not replacements for Office or Windows but extensions of them.

Finally, take a look at the official press release as well as the preview sites for Windows Live Ideas and Office Live.

More on all of this later. Have to run to class in five minutes. :)

Tags: Windows Live, Live.com