Around six months ago, before Vista was even complete, I blogged about how the "Previous Versions" (aka Shadow Copy) feature could potentially be a great safety net against data loss.

As I was skimming through my feeds earlier today, I noticed this post by James Kendrick in which he writes about how he was able to recover shadow copies of critical files that he accidentally lost. The post is a clear testament to how awesome this feature is. While it's no replacement for regular backups, it can complement an existing backup strategy very well. Best of all, it works out-of-the-box and requires no set up on the user's part, as JK discovered.

It's all these little things together that make Vista totally worthwhile for me, even if it means having to put up with other minor problems now and then.

Chris Pirillo just linked to this impressive video via Twitter today.

In the video, Jeff Han and Phil Davidson from Perceptive Pixel demo a really cool multi-touch driven user interface. There are examples showing how you could navigate through Google Earth, explore tree structures, manage photos and videos, surf the web, etc.


I remembered another video I had seen on Channel 9 back in October of 2004, in which Andy Wilson from MSR demonstrated an early prototype of a multi-touch UI called Touchlight. "Minority Report becoming a reality," I had commented in that thread. :)

When Xerox PARC developed the graphical user interface in the late 1970s, it was a breakthrough that totally changed the face of modern computing. Since then, there hasn't been anything equally revolutionary in HCI design. Do you think multi-touch based interfaces, combined with advances in speech recognition, could be the next big thing? Whatever the future holds, I do think our generation is going to experience some really fascinating stuff in this area in the years to come. :)

I don't use my nine year old Windows Live Mail Hotmail account for anything other than Messenger and Xbox Live anymore. But today, when Messenger notified me that I had 30 new emails, I had to go check. And what did I see?


Every single one of those 30 emails is spam. No, not tricky, legitimate-looking spam. Blatantly obvious "Viagra" and "Rolex Replicas" spam. And they're all in my inbox. And yes, the junk mail setting is properly set to "Standard" mode.

For comparison's sake, my Gmail account (which, again, I only use for GTalk) has 309 pieces of spam, all of which were rightfully banished to the "Spam" folder. The built-in IMF filter on our Exchange server is also remarkably effective.

So what's up, Microsoft? Is this a temporary glitch, or is the Hotmail spam filter really, really bad?

In many ways, search in Windows Vista is quite a bit nicer than what it used to be in XP with Windows Desktop Search installed - search boxes in different parts of the system, like Explorer and Control Panel windows, are context-sensitive; low priority I/O reduces the performance hit of indexing to almost nothing; search folders are easy to create and are first-class citizens in the system; and so on.

However, there's one feature that I've been missing ever since I migrated my machines over to Vista - aliases. In my review of WDS back in 2005, I described the deskbar as "the run dialog on steroids" and wrote - "one of the unique features of Windows Desktop Search that none of the other desktop search apps have is the concept of aliasing. This is a killer feature for power-users."

Oddly enough, Microsoft didn't include the ability to create custom aliases out-of-the-box in Vista. Start++, a just-released, super-useful tool, adds that missing piece back in, along with some goodies of its own. I'll let Brandon describe it in detail. I love how it integrates with the command shell, and Search Actions are just awesome.

You definitely want to check this out. Vista should have shipped with something like this built-in. Nicely done, Brandon! :)

For those of you who are still running Windows XP (and I know many of you are), Windows Desktop Search 3.01 has just been released today. This is an update to v3.0 that was released last Fall.

Brandon has all the details, including download links.

WDS was one of my "must-have" apps on XP. If you've never used it, I suggest taking a look at my review. The document hasn't been updated recently (and won't be, since I've fully migrated over to Windows Vista now), but most of the information in there should still be valid and applicable.