Archive for September, 2008
September 29, 2008 at 7:18 am ·
Filed under MicroLife, Live Services
What is Choice Guard? This is one of the questions that pops up every here and there during discussions on browser features. A lot of people don’t know what it is, and to be honest, I didn’t even know it existed until today. A fellow Microsoftee puts it like this:
Choice Guard is a piece of code that is responsible for setting the users homepage and search default if they chose those options during setup. Typically this is a simple task of writing a value into a regkey. However, several of our competitors install a “service” that is always running on your machine that prevents the regkey from being changed even if that is what the user decided to do. So Choice Guard looks for the presence of those apps that might be preventing the user’s choice from being carried out and works around their block to set the search default. It only does this one time… if the user attempts to change it again (either manually or programmatically) they are free to do so.
/nods head and rubs chin in a thinking and understanding manner.
Apparently to set the Live Search Default and Homepage on the Firefox browser you need to install yourself as an add-on which is why Choice Guard in Firefox, Choice Guard becomes visible.
Update Oct 1st:
Official statement regarding this topic on the Windows Live Wire via LiveSide
September 29, 2008 at 7:16 am ·
Filed under Fun
The seventh week of the GotW show. There’s too much cubicle humor out there to ignore it all, so I’ll line up the best one of the week, every week again :) What better way to kick off a workweek than with a comical graph made in Microsoft Office Excel? This week:
Source: GraphJam - Pop Culture for People in Cubicles
September 26, 2008 at 6:27 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife, Vista
So, I’m configurating and installing my brand new Lenovo X61 tablet pc. Since it’s a shiny new thing that came right out of the box and plastic wrappings, I have to start from scratch installing it. So I thought I’d document all the things I’m selecting so I have that list for myself and colleagues. By the way, colleagues, I’ve got all the install files saved to my Mesh so if you need a quick setup without too much hassle, ping me. And no, unfortunately that does not work for anyone outside of Microsoft. :) I love my job too much to do that.
First things first: I’ve changed my region settings so the PC thinks I’m in the US of A.
Very good for Beta testing and dogfooding.
OS: Vista Ultimate + Ultimate Extras (English version)
Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 kit
Office Enterprise 2007 (IT Supported version with SP1)
Windows Genuine Advantage
Live Mesh Tech Preview
.Net Framework 3.5
AutoCollage 2008
Full Windows Live M2 W3 beta suite (English version)
Microsoft Silverlight v2
Adobe Flash Player 9.0.124 (without free Google toolbar)
Adobe Air
Foxit PDF reader (instead of Acrobat)
Deep Zoom Composer
Photosynth
Virtual Earth 3D
3DVIA for Virtual Earth
Microsoft Research HD View Beta 3 for IE
WorldWideTelescope (Spring Beta)
DirectX Runtime
DirectX 10
Image Composite Editor (ICE)
InkSeine Beta
Windows Live Skydrive Upload Tool
SOTI Pocket Controller Pro
Office Communicator 2007
Windows Mobile Device Center 6
QuickTime 7 Standalone sans iTunes
Internet Explorer 8
Twhirl for Tweets
A few NDA dogfood thingies :)
That should about do it for now. If there’s more stuff I add while I’m using my lovely new toy, I’ll update this post.
September 26, 2008 at 11:36 am ·
Filed under Video, Technology, Releases, Live Services, Photography
A little while ago I posted about 3DVIA, the tool that lets you make 3D models and pushpin them on a location in Virtual Earth. Well, seems the team has been working really hard and together with the Live Maps and Virtual Earth updates, an update for 3DVIA got pushed out through Dassault with some changes in the interface and other tweaks. Let’s take a look.
You now have access to thousands of models hosted on 3DVia.com that can be “remixed” in 3DVia and hosted on Live Search Maps for rendering in your Virtual Earth application. Additionally, Dassault updated the UI and navigation to be more user friendly and released video tutorials illustrating among other things how to build a house in less than 5 minutes.
Quote Stephen Lawler, GM of Virtual Earth:
“Through our continued collaboration with Dassault Systèmes, we are now able to offer an even easier way for every Virtual Earth user to easily and intuitively create a realistic 3D version of their home, office or neighborhood. We’re pleased with the number of installs and engagement with the current version to date, and we expect that this new version will draw in even more enthusiastic users looking to bring their ideas to life in 3D.”
To see where the team has integrated these models on the map, you can check them in nearly 300 cities around the world - most of them in V1 of the 3DVIA client. The V2 models are only in 6 cities - Dallas, Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami, and Tampa. Obviously you can go start creating your own, like LizzyD did for the Butron Castle in Vizcaya in Spain.
If you follow the link of the picture above, you’ll be taken to the 3D gallery. However, to view the 3D models in action (not needed to download files from the gallery) you’ll need to install Dassault’s exclusive 3DVIA player (version 4.1), which unfortunately caused my browser windows to crash and slowed down my entire PC. Eventually I had to do a hard reboot and uninstall the plugin before I got things to work back as normal. Too bad. It could be my fault, but I’m just saying it happened. Check out this cool demo to see what it’s all about:
Download 3DVIA Beta
3DVIA Community Forum (to post your creations)
3DVIA Labs at Dassault
Official Press Release
Announcement on the team blog
September 26, 2008 at 9:52 am ·
Filed under Technology, Releases, Live Services
Live Maps FINALLY became more relevant for Belgium. It’s about time that happened. At last when I type ‘Oelegem’, ‘Ranst’ or ‘Emblem’ I’m directed to the exact location on the map. I no longer need to add ‘Belgium’ behind every city. That’s because the cool dudes on the team have updated the Maps with roads and postal codes for Europe, updated with April 2008 data from TeleAtlas, Navteq, and Map Data Science. Thank you. A warm and sincere thank you for the team. Finally I can start working on local demos and not always have to answer “they’re working on that to become local”. I’m happy.
So. Apart from the let’s-make-Miel-happy update, what else is new?
Again: a freaking lot of things. They’ve been doing overtime. Here’s the list:
- Communities
Community submitted collections are now indexed immediately after upload and can be searched seconds after they are created. In addition to this, we provide better overall information retrieval by using collections data to augment search results in the “business” scope in cases where limited or no business listings exist that meet the search criteria.
- Local Search Vertical
Search refinement - Searches can now be refined further through filters that become available based on what you search for. Hotels, Restaurants, and generic queries each have filters that you can use.
- Related searches
Related categories and neighborhoods with result counts allow you to see how many results there are before selecting a related search. This is the first time we’ve expose aggregate counts on the results page. These will be present for many filters and related searches in future releases.
- YPC Phase 1.5
MSN Yellow Pages and Local Search Vertical page both have ads above and below
- Details page
The details page has moved to an inline layout (from the tabbed model in previous version). This allows much more content to be exposed via controls that users will interact with anyway (scroll bars) instead of hunting through the content for the tab.
In addition to the layout enhancements, there is a new control on the page called the scorecard. This scorecard is a different way of looking at user reviews. It extracts user sentiments for a specific set of attributes that are applicable to hotels and restaurants. You can view the average score for that attribute and dig into the user comments themselves.
- Multipoint Driving Directions extends our historical point to point driving directions metaphor to allow multiple waypoints, or “stops”, along the path of the route. This enables you to generate a single set of directions for reaching multiple destinations. Common scenarios where you might find this valuable include running errands, visiting homes for real estate purchase, picking up and/or dropping friends, choosing an explicit route to arrive at a gathering or other multi-stop trips around your city, region, or country.
- Landmark Hints
In an effort to make driving directions more easily understandable, landmark “hints” are now provided at key locations along a route. These hints provide the user an additional piece of visual data when making a turn (TACO BELL on the corner), or provide a feedback mechanism that the user is on the correct path when traveling down a road.
Landmark hints are applicable to routes in North America and include the following types of businesses:
- Gas Stations
- Major National Chains of Hotels
- Restaurants
- Convenience Stores
- Grocery Stores
- Car Dealerships
- Geocoding
Results for place searches (e.g. cities, states, countries, landmarks, etc.) have been improved, particularly for international queries.
Coverage for high precision geocoding has been increased. Address geocoding for the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy has been improved, with dramatic improvements in unstructured match rates for queries in these countries.
- Imagery Processing and Rendering
Updated Desktop and Mobile road tiles (including overlays for hybrid/labels view) using the Baker (April 2008) road and place data. All Bird’s Eye Scenes were updated with new road and label data
The British Isles are rendered using a new map style
Aerial (ortho) updates:
- USA: 63 metro areas across 27 states
- Outside US: 278 metro areas across 56 countries
Bird’s Eye (oblique) updates:
- USA: 146 metro areas across 35 states
- Outside US: 97 metro areas across 14 countries
- Vector Data
Refresh of roads and postal codes for North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific using April 2008 data from TeleAtlas, Navteq and Map Data Sciences (MDS)
Data to support the new and improved Virtual Earth find place implementation for Helios for the Geocoder and Find Place web service.
- Localized Tiles
Giving the best map label experience was a goal of the Helios release for international customers. Across Western Europe, the updated map tiles provide the place names in the local language including UK English (En-gb), French (Fr-fr), Spanish (Es-es), Italian (It-it), and German (De-de).
That, my dearest readers, is a whole lot of goodies, merging our way. Obviously many of the new releases are US only for the moment, but I see these things expanding gradually. And then I’ll be even more happy.
Additional info and illustrations for all features can be found right here.
September 26, 2008 at 9:04 am ·
Filed under Technology, Releases, Live Services
After the recent massive 14 Tb image update and some releases on the side every now and then, the Virtual Earth team steps up again with some impressive work for consumers, designers and developers. The first thing in the long row is Virtual Earth Web Services SDK, Version 1.0, a set of Web services that allow you to add mapping and search functionality to your application, including location finding, map imagery, and routing capabilities. Next they’ve launched Virtual Earth Map Control SDK 6.2, the map control software development kit (SDK) consists of a complete set of reference topics that cover the Virtual Earth map control application programming interface (API). Apart from these releases, the Virtual Earth AJAX control on MSDN and the Virtual Earth interactive SDK have been updated/upgraded as well.
What’s new? Well. Umm. A lot.
Check out the list below Mark Brown posted on the DEV site yesterday:
New Mobile Support
Users can now build mobile applications with Virtual Earth, which offers more features and enhancements to support mobile platforms such as, Windows Mobile, RIM Blackberry and Apple iPhone. Rich imagery creates immersive mobile end-user experiences that bring location-based information to life.
- Rich Imagery for Mobile. Mobile applications feature geocoding and new maps rendered specifically for mobile devices (64×64 image size).
- More flexibility to develop mobile features. The new Virtual Earth Web Services will support features (mapping, geocoding, and routing) that can be implemented for use on mobile devices.
Enhanced International Opportunities
This latest release of Virtual Earth provides more support and more detail for more countries around the world. Enjoy the functionality and features of Virtual Earth in a broader range of countries.
- New localized maps. Maps are now available in English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish for users in Western Europe. These localized maps are supported for both desktop and mobile applications.
- New international reverse geocoding. Users can now find international addresses with reverse geocoding, which is now available anywhere Virtual Earth has routing.
- Extended parsing capabilities. With expanded parsing capabilities, users will experience better match rates for addresses in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Puerto Rico.
Richer Data: See More in the Platform
The Virtual Earth platform is designed for the enterprise and public sector user, from features to support. This 6.2 release enhances the platform infrastructure with new geocoding and parsing improvements, as well as more detail revealed in relevant ways.
- Pushpin clustering. The new map control includes the ability to zoom in on a map to better visualize a cluster of points. The pushpins can be clustered and surfaced at larger zoom levels, or hidden from view at smaller zoom levels, to give a better user experience.
- Expanded number of rooftop geocodes. Virtual Earth now offers 85 million unique addresses—more than 65% of all rooftops in the U.S.
- New near-matching capabilities. Using near-matching capabilities, customers can find locations using alternate and similar spellings, resulting in a more relevant search experience.
- New landmark-based routing. Customers in the U.S. and Canada can now use maps that feature familiar landmarks, such as gas stations and fast-food restaurants, called out by name.
- New imagery metadata. Users can now find out the relative age of a given image, which will help them assess if the imagery is still relevant to their needs.
- New imagery. Find locations that come to life, with richer bird’s eye and 3D imagery of more locations in cities across North America.
- New functionality to hide base layer tiles. Developers now have more granular control to hide the Virtual Earth base map tiles for those applications in which they choose to use their own imagery or overlays.
- Weather integration. Bring your 3D maps to life by featuring near real-time local weather and cloud formations.
Stunning, isn’t it? Almost as good as a virtual world.
Enhanced Functionality: Do More in the Platform
The latest release of the Virtual Earth platform offers a richer user experience and more intuitive functionality. There are more ways for customers to search for more types of mapping information, in ways that are tailored to their individual needs.
- New Virtual Earth Web Services. The new SOAP based Virtual Earth Web Services v. 1.0 offers static map images (.gif, .jpeg and .png), direct map tile access, one-box search functionality, geocoding, reverse geocoding, routing . It supports Virtual Earth on the desktop and on mobile devices.
- New one-click directions. Through the Web Services, customers can now get directions in one click, choosing from route options by shortest time, shortest distance, or traffic flow.
Related links:
Windows Live Dev announcement
Virtual Earth team blog
September 25, 2008 at 3:19 pm ·
Filed under Releases, Live Services, Photography, Gadgets
Many programs use RGB color hex codes. Colour Picker from Microsoft Live Labs makes it easy for you to use the colors you use most across all applications. It’s fun to explore, discover, and save new color combinations. Even if you don’t use it in your applications, it looks nice as a decoration on the sidebar. This gadget incorporates the API from colourlovers.com, a resource that monitors and influences color trends. Developed by Jeff Weir, a UX designer at Microsoft’s Live Labs, the Colour Picker Gadget is a tool for content designers, developers, amateur designers and photography enthusiasts that allows them to quickly access and save various colors (the RGB hex code is shown for each) and palettes
Related links:
Kudos to Ars Technica
September 24, 2008 at 10:31 am ·
Filed under Technology, Releases, Photography
I discussed it earlier somewhere in August, and I didn’t update on that post yet, but since 50 percent of the posts I’ve done this week are photography-related, I might as well add it right here. AutoCollage has been released for the general public, be it in a 30-day trial. Should be enough to make a bunch of really cool DVD covers for those stacks of discs you have drifting around with pictures of past family reunions.
Photo collages celebrate important events and themes in our lives. Pick a folder, press a button, and in a few minutes AutoCollage presents you with a unique memento to print or email to your family and friends.
Related links
September 24, 2008 at 9:19 am ·
Filed under Releases, Live Services, Mobile
They’ve launched it in silence, but ever since I signed up for it I’m happy to have stuff to read when I have the time for it (in the elevator for instance) and to be able to stay on track with the latest news of world or who chewed on who’s dogfood in tinseltown. Meet the Belgian version of MSN Mobile, a three-door portal to either News, Entertainment or (yeah it had to be there too) the Weather channel. The URL I paste below might seem a little long, but here’s how it works: go to this link for Dutch and to this link for the French and enter your phone number in the display box. You’ll get a free sms with the short URL in it, so you just have to click it in the text message and the goodies are all yours.
Have fun!
September 23, 2008 at 10:57 pm ·
Filed under Technology, Releases, Live Services, Photography, Digital Life
Since we’re totally into announcements for photography and for imaging experiences, let’s keep going down the same road with the latest release of the DZC, the new Deep Zoom Composer that’s been launched last month. I haven’t had time to discuss that yet, so I thought this would be an appropriate time to do so. When the team released the final pre-release of Deep Zoom Composer, basically they tweaked the design to make DZC more appealing to non-technical users. You now have the ability to directly upload your creation from within Deep Zoom Composer to PhotoZoom (see later in this post) where you can quickly have your content posted online along with a URL you can share with your friends. No need to go through the hassle of finding a server and knowing which files to upload or anything. They take care of those details for you. There is even a Facebook application for this, and you can see an example of it live on Janete’s page!
Another cool feature is panoramic stitching (yes, this is the link to ICE). DZC uses MSR’s latest stitching engine to allow you to create your own panoramic images directly from inside the application:
Which then brings us to Photozoom. Another pearl in the Live Labs shell. PhotoZoom makes it easy for anyone to create zooming albums from their uploaded photos. It is an experimental site, developed at Microsoft, that uses the Deep Zoom technology in Silverlight 2 Beta 2. This is definitely worth checking out too.
Related links:
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