I’ve been using a spare Laptop running Windows XP since my main laptop was stolen last Friday, and its been a revelation to me. There are quite a few Vista features I miss and some are not that obvious before you’ve lost them. In no particula order;
- Search built into the Start Menu – I realise now that I use it to find programs more than documents.
- Variable sized thumbnails – I have load of photos at home and viewing them in XP is painful.
- Side Bar – this surprised me, but I use the Side Bar far more than I thought. I miss my clocks showing the different Timezones of team I work in, the C89.5 radio gadget, my weather station gadget and the calendar gadget. Without these I’m definietly less productive (ok, the weather station and radio gadgets dont affect productivity).
- Suspend/Hibernate – now this may be driver/hardware based but the suspend and resume process on the temporary laptop isn’t as reliable/consistent as on the old Vista laptop. I’ve gone back to the “flaming rucksack” days (where the laptop wakes up in the rucksack then overheats).
- UAC/RunAs – Even under XP I never used to use an admin account day-to-day, and I’m now reminded how much better Vista handles elevated access compared to XP (networking, timezone etc).
As I said, some of these aren’t that obvious until you’ve lose ‘em. To be fair, I should also list the stuff I don’t miss;
- Folder view in Explorer – the lack of a simple folder view in Explorer windows annoys me: I prefer the XP one
- Startup time – the XP machine doesn’t bog down as much on first startup
I just spent the evening with Matthew Boettcher a Microsoft colleague, playing pool in Bayswater and my rucksack got stolen with the laptop in it. For years I’ve known that it is a matter of time before something goes missing, and tonight was it. Thank god for my Homeserver which automatically backs-up my laptop every few days. I only have three days of data at risk. Let’s see how easy it is to recover my data tomorrow… Watch for the update on how easy (or not) it is to recover my data onto a different box.
Whilst I was climbing with Beat Schwegler in Switzerland last weekend, he told me about the most recent book he’d read: Microsoft 2.0, How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era by Mary Jo Foley. I read the first two chapters whilst we were waiting for the rain to clear and enjoyed it sufficiently to order it from Amazon. This is unusual for me as I find business books mind-numbingly boring most of the time.
Having read some more, I’m still enjoying her observations and perspectives. I don’t agree with some of what she says, but most of her insight seems rational to me (so far). Whilst the book obviously focuses on Microsoft, I’d recommend anyone pick this up if they’re interested in the future of IT.
Orange recently released an update to the TyTN II which upgrades the device to WM6.1 – I installed it last Monday and love the enhancements, the most significant being;
- Battery life definitely seems better
- audio quality and volume is improved
- it includes the HTC Home Screen add-in which I really like and
- the thread-based SMS reader is nearly as good as the iPhones
Sadly no significant update to Pocket IE, and I’ve not yet bothered to install Opera Mobile 9 beta – I’ll get round to it.
Seeing as all settings for my phone are stored on Exchange Server, the upgrade was no issue even though it flashes the firmware which deletes all preferences/config. Setting up a new sync partnership with my Vista PC resulted in all my contacts, web favorites, email and calendar automatically syncing with the phone. The only hastle was re-installing the apps, but that only took 30 mins or so. Oh, and I always turn off the Orange Home Screen app – I prefer standard Windows Mobile (and now the HTC Home Screen add-in).
Well worth the upgrade in my opinion – a good phone made even better.
Nicholas Carr has written an interesting article on how Google is disrupting many traditional businesses, from newspapers to movie studios and internet firms, and in so doing he explains their motivations (in his opinion) and draws a comparison with other businesses, including Microsoft.
Whilst I don’t agree with Nicks opinion that Microsoft is in business only for the money, the article makes for a good read, as do the comments from his readers.
A group of organisations including xRez, Microsoft and The US National Parks Service have produced a web site that allows you to zoom into images of certain parts of Yosemite valley in amazing detail.
They’ve taken 1000s of high resolution digital photos then using some clever Microsoft software to combine them all so you can seamlessley zoom in from the widest angle shot showing several miles of the valley edge to a close-up of climbers. You can go close enough to see the color of their socks!
For more about how they did it and to see the results here. Just zoom in until you see an image, then keep going and going and going… I’ve stood in Yosemite valley and been blown away by its size, this technology helps you appreciate just how impressive the valley is.
Unbeknownst to me, whilst I was writing the Chrome post last Wednesday afternoon before flying off to Swtizerland for a weekend of climbing, a storm was brewing over the terms of the Chrome license. I wrote;
How they strike the right balance between using Chrome to deliver more adverts to their users (which means user profiling) and maintaining user privacy will be an interesting thing to watch
and it turns out this balance wasn’t right, but not just in the way I imagined. I thought they would be using Chrome to profile your use of the internet (which they are), however the liecense went much further asserting that anything you create whilst using it is re-usable by Google. Every email you write on GMail or Hotmail, every blog post you write etc. As reported on CNet, Google have since changed the license terms which is a good thing, but your browsing habbit are now profiled in addition to any searches you do, irrespective of search provider.
For more information, see the ongoing CNet coverage of Chrome here.
Its been all over the web for the last 24 hours; Google have announced they’re working on an IE and Firefox competitor called Chrome. I share some of the opinions raised in a Cnet news.com article, especially the points about Google having to share Chrome with the open source community, but I’m not sure I agree with its conclusion.
Matt Asay essentially says people will not defect to Chrome because Google has thus far failed to get any significant adoption of its existing client-side software. He makes a good point, but I can’t help but feel people want a better (or maybe just new) way to surf the web.
Byond tabs (which are “just” an evolution – albeit a very useful one) we’ve not really seen significant innovation in browsers for a number of years. I emphasise seen because both Mozilla and Micorsoft (and to some degree Opera) have all made improvments to their respective browsers, but the basic idea remains the same. Do any of us think the current model cannot be improved? I honestly don’t know. Web Slices (in IE8) seem like a good idea – I’ve long wanted a way to cut out a part of a webpage and paste it onto my desktop and still have it “live” with updated information. However, slices require a webpage to be coded in a certain way to support them, which will slow down adoption.
Google have a strong brand and if Chrome manages to significantly improve the way we use the web without further eroding user privacy, I’m sure it will be adopted. How they strike the right balance between using Chrome to deliver more adverts to their users (which means user profiling) and maintaining user privacy will be an interesting thing to watch.
Last night I was using my iPhone to browse the web on the train into London. Now I’ve done this since I owned my first web-enabled phone in 2001 so I know the experience is pretty poor due to the patchy network coverage. However, on this journey the iPhone hung completely, not even holding the power button would shut it down. After about 3 minutes, it turned off and restarted fine, but every single AppStore application I’d already downloaded would just crash. I wonder if I’m now a victim of the iPhone app crash bug?.
Before it crashed I was reading an article on news.com about rumours that Microsoft will launch an AppStore equivalent called SkyMarket (rubbish name IMO) for Windows Mobile sometime in the Autumn. This got me thinking: are the iPhones apps poorly written due to the developers lack of experience? Is it because Apple haven’t exposed enough of the iPhone’s system? If its the former I’m sure we will see similar issues plague applications in SkyMarket as its likely to draw more developers to Windows Mobile – especially as it has twice the market share as the iPhone at the moment.
Whilst I’d get a lot of satisfaction out of blending my iPhone, I still enjoy using the device.
