Microsoft
| EU passes telecoms reform – how the new regulations will affect you
The European Parliament passed into law a new set of telecoms regulations today. This creates a few new consumer rights and as such we could be seeing some changes in the mobile industry in the months to come. What’s going to change for consumers?
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| Microsoft Zune Phone due in June?
Update (12th May, 21:36): This Twitter account is a hoax. The official Microsoft account is @office2010movie. The @officethemovie Twitter account did look slightly suspicious to me in the first place but I reposted it when I saw that other technology sites (which obviously hadn’t checked either) posted it. Sorry. The rumour mill has been in full action today after Microsoft wrote on their @officethemovie Twitter account:
As the new iPhone is due to be unveiled in June, as well as the Palm Pre, many people think that this refers to a Zune phone from Microsoft. Alternatively, this could simply refer to Zune software being available on Windows Mobile 7 which is out in the second half of this year. There’s a bit more coverage and discussion over at Engadget. Watch this space. | |
| The Mystery White Box of MSN/Windows Live Messenger
I’ve noticed that this evening some mystery white boxes have begun to appear in Windows Live Messenger beneath display pictures. It’s just a strange white square which doesn’t seem to do anything. Why am I making a post about such a seemingly banal thing you ask? Well… It’s not in all conversation windows. And I’ve heard that certain people using Windows Live Messenger 9 see a Microsoft Office icon rather than a blank square. The reason why this is possibly significant is because it could hint that Microsoft is launching a way for people to collaborate on Microsoft Office documents through Windows Live Messenger. A way to collaborate on work through WLM and Office certainly seems a lot more natural than using Google Docs. I had a phase where I developed a few small applications which integrated with Windows Live Messenger and there was definitely a hint of future Office integration in there. In the “What am I listening to?” music feature, changing one argument in the API function call would give you the Office logo instead in the message My prediction is that Microsoft is just about to launch a feature where you can collaborate on documents. The only thing is there doesn’t seem to be any logic in which contacts the white box appears with. I thought it might have been visible for people who used Office 2007 but that doesn’t seem to be the case, nor does it seem to matter whether the other person has a copy of Office running. Watch this space… | |
| Test your website in Internet Explorer 5.5, 6, 7 and 8 A big headache for web developers is testing websites in different versions of Internet Explorer. In Windows you can only have one copy of Internet Explorer installed. To get around this limitation, some developers use IECapture which takes a screenshot of your webpage in Internet Explorer. It’s great for a quick test but it’s impractical during development: you can only see part of the page and if doesn’t help you debug anything. Another option is to use Microsoft’s virtual machine or the Standalone IE program.
A little application called IETester can simplify the process. It features the rendering engines for IE 5.5, IE 6, IE7 and IE8. You can open up a tab for each rendering engine, hence switching between different rendering engines seamlessly. It also allows you to split the view and to see your website in the different rendering engines at once. An interesting user interface design too… An odd blend of Firefox 2 icons with an Office 2007 ribbon. | |
 | Windows Live Messenger Down People across the world have been reporting that Windows Live Messenger, Hotmail and Windows Live sign-on is down across the world. Web Messenger also seems to be down, although Live Search still works. I get the following message: We were unable to sign you into Windows Live Messenger at this time. Please try again later.” Don’t worry, it’s not you… its Microsoft! It does make me wonder whether we put too much trust in Microsoft and one centralised IM server – maybe something decentralised like Jabber is a much better way forward, especially with critical and important IM. Oddly enough, I found out about the downtime when I saw the traffic from my blog doubling in one page and a few hundred pageviews on one of my old blog posts about MSN Messenger Downtime. In the mean time, it’s a fantastic time to catch up on work and those tax returns |
| Free Microsoft Software: Visual Studio, Windows 2003, Expression If you’re a student, you can download free Microsoft software from Microsoft’s DreamSpark website.
Your university will verify that you are a student. If you currently attend college you can get an ISIC Card for £9 to verify that you’re a student. Products available include:
Not bad for free eh? | |
| Still looking for the Wow I gave Windows Vista a go on a secondary computer and I’m still looking for the Wow. It really doesn’t do anything better than XP. The applications that I use are all the same, but I’ve had several problems with hardware working correctly, drivers, UAC driving me up the wall and generally Vista being slower than XP. The learning curve from XP to Vista actually wasn’t high at all; Vista was pretty intuitive. The compatibility problems are the main thing. I use my computer as a tool – a tool to play games, watch television and videos, listen to music, chat to people and to surf the internet. The two things which are important to allow me to do that are quality of hardware and quality of software. All my software, and all my hardware works with Windows XP. Now the chances are I could upgrade to Vista and benefit from transparent title bars, but it’ll require many hours of work to locate new versions of software, upgrade and resolve compatibility issues. Costs vs BenefitsOn the face of it, £60 for an upgrade to Windows which looks slightly nicer and allegedly has improved security is actually quite attractive. But the monetary costs only scrape the surface. There are many other costs:
There is also an opportunity cost* in upgrading to Vista. That is, upgrading to Vista, will probably involve about two or three evenings of work to reinstall software and resolve issues. That time could possibly be better spent elsewhere, or spending that time upgrading could mean missing vital work deadlines. Totalling up all the indirect costs of upgrading to Vista and including the monetary cost (very minor compared to the other costs) and comparing it to the benefits, I still believe Vista is far from a viable upgrade for me. That is, my computer works perfectly. The software and hardware; they all just work. Yet every week, I get asked when I’m going to upgrade to Vista, with Aero 3D and "improved security" always being the reasons cited. So Vista looks nice, but it doesn’t work. Wouldn’t it be a bit shallow to switch to Vista? * Opportunity cost is an economics term which means the benefit which would have been gained from the best alternative and was foregone by making an economic decision. That is, if you have a choice of doing A or B and you choose A, the benefits which you could have gained from choosing B is the opportunity cost. | |
| Upgrade Cycle I’ve had my computer for almost 3 years and traditionally I’ve always set about upgrading and updating my system every 3 years. This is to ensure the computer will run all the latest software, and its a fantastic way of cleaning up the PC (I honestly cannot be bothered to reformat, etc.) DOSMy first PC ran DOS 6.0. It had a 5.25inch floppy reader only and didn’t do a lot but I remember programming in Microsoft QuickBasic. It was really nice and I got the hang of DOS without too many problems. It did word processing and printed out on a nice ribbon printer. Windows 95Eventually we got a new PC (166MHz Pentium 2?) with Windows 95 and all kinds of nice graphical software. This was before the internet and I actually missed DOS cos you couldn’t just turn the computer off and I didn’t have my Quick Basic. But there were all kinds of cool programs you could get off the cover CDs of PC magazines to try out. We did get onto the internet from Windows 95 eventually, after spending absolutely ages trying to set up the modem. Windows METhe next upgrade was the infamous Windows ME (1GHz Pentium 3). It crashed several times daily but I didn’t complain because I experienced that on Windows 95. ME got very very slow after a few years of usage, probably because of the huge amount of junk I was installing from cover CD roms and downloading from the internet. Upgrading to
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| IE6 and IE7 on a single machine One of the issues with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 is that it isn’t easy to have it running simultaneously on the same machine as Internet Explorer 6. For web developers, this is a real headache. Many of our visitors still use Internet Explorer 6 so we need to ensure our websites work well on IE6 but IE7 is becoming more popular by the day. The Virtual ImageThe Internet Explorer Team Blog talks about this issue and recognises it. To cut to the chase, the Internet Explorer team recommends using virtualization. This is a way of having a piece of software on your machine behave like it’s a computer. You can run operating systems inside a window in another operating system. To help developers to that extent, they have released a free virtual machine containing a fully patched Windows XP SP2 with Internet Explorer 6. This will work with Microsoft’s free Virtual PC 2004 software. It’s pre-activated but it’s set up to expire in April 2007. The IE team say they’ll investigate virtual machines with different versions of Internet Explorer and perhaps having the programme running as a service for developers on a concurrent basis. Unfortunately you can’t run Virtual PC on Linux so web developers on Linux won’t be able to use this service.
Standalone IEStandalone versions of IE are currently one of the most popular ways to have both IE6 and IE7 running on the same machine. You don’t have to worry about installs, virtual machines, etc. Simply download a zip file, extract it and run the relevant copy of iexplore.exe. I’m currently using this method to test my sites in IE6 and IE5.5. There are several issues with running standalone IE and Microsoft don’t support it. But I find it works pretty well for just having a glance at the layout and it’s certainly a lot better than not testing in IE6 altogether. | |
| Microsoft Licenses Office 2007 Interface Office UI designer Jensen Harris reports on his blog that Microsoft has decided to license the Microsoft Office 2007 user interface to other developers under a royalty free license. This includes the Ribbon, galleries and mini toolbars. Developers will have to get a license from Microsoft and it’ll come with several restrictions – for example it must change it’s layout when the window is resized, must include a quick access toolbar and the ribbon should disappear if the window gets below 300×250.
At first glance it seems like Microsoft is simply licensing this out of the goodness of their heart. But it does make a lot of sense – people have already tried to imitate the Ribbon in their own products, without a license from Microsoft. Microsoft probably knew people were going to do it anyway so this way gives Microsoft a bit more control over how the UI is used in other programs. There is a 120 page booklet of guidelines which developers must adhere to. Says Jensen Harris, "There’s tremendous value in making sure that we all use these models in a consistent way, because it helps to ensure that people have predictable user experiences moving between Office-style user interfaces." To get a feel for what the guidelines look like, see this preview which shows the guidelines for ribbon resizing. You can use the Office 2007 UI on other operating systems but you can’t obtain a license if your product directly competes with Office 2007. So is Microsoft’s license going to hinder or encourage the implementation of ribbon-like interfaces in other programs? Could we soon be seeing Firefox with a ribbon-like interface? Ribbon "Widgets" for your website? A whole GUI based on Ribbon? See the licensing web page or the press release for more information. Via Inside Microsoft. |
