Infinity and Beyond

Today Microsoft released an early test version of Windows 7 to developers and gave the most in-depth demonstration of the new operating system.  About 4.6 people around the world, who still use their Zune’s, actually cared.

OK, to be fair, on Wall Street quite a few people cared, sending Microsoft’s stock up about 4%, outpacing all the major indices.  But that was for, oh, about 45 minutes.  Now, the stock is back in trend with everyone else.  And it appears that Wall Street, much like those of you probably reading, have already stopped caring.  

 

 

 

In case you’re one of those people who have eagerly been awaiting what wondrous possibilities could await you after Vista–or more likely are one of those folks who have decided to pass on Vista all together–you’ll be able to get your hands on a retail copy “by January 2010″.  That’s only a little more than a year away!  Of course, given Microsoft’s track record with releases, I’m saying November  2011 at the earliest.  Taking a historical look, Vista was birthed in May 2001, with an expected ship date of 2003.  In August 2004 the product still hadn’t shipped and the Windows XP code base was thrown out and Vista was rebuilt on top of Windows Server 2003.  Vista didn’t actually ship to retail shelves however until January 30th, 2007.  

So lets guess that MS started coding for Windows 7 as soon as Vista was released (Wikipedia says the first build was released in January 2008).  If they manage to cut the dev time in half for their new OS, we could in fact see a 2010 release.  If they go par for the course, we’re looking at late 2012 or 2013.  I’ll give them a little credit and stick with my November 2011 target.

But who cares when it comes out…just know that it’s on the way!  With such features as a new Microsoft Paint app, now featuring the familiar Office Ribbon!  Tripple w00t!  Now we’re cookin’ with gas–check out the hot new color pallet! (admittedly my favorite part of Excel 2007 is the much-improved default color pallet…)

 

And no more do you have to go into a menu to get to the zoom!  Just slide away in the lower-right and zoom to all the pixelated glory you can!  And Paint would be worthless without something to showcase your creation in, right?  Well step on up Windows 7 Wordpad!  Now with Ribbon!

 

I’m already saving up my $350 for the Super Premium Ultimate Edition–I wouldn’t want to miss out.  But I’ll be disappointed since Bill G. probably won’t sign the box.  But maybe I can get a cool Halo 5 Master Cheif Replica Helmet if I buy the right version.  

But that’s all fun and games.  What about the real meat and potatos of the OS.  Well to that we have plenty of screenshots over at Neowin.net.  Here’s my favorite:

 

Wowie Zowie!  No they didn’t!  Ohh yes they did!  You can right click an item in the task bar and…BAM! a contextual menu with your book marks.  OhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHH SNAP!  And is that a transparent frame I see around the window, letting me see my Internet TV widget through the min/max/close buttons?  OhhhhHHHHHH SNAP!!!  

And forget Expose or any of that crap that Apple offers.  Why press a single button and see all your open windows from all your open applications conveniently at one time, when you can meticulously hover over each taskbar representation of a program, wait a few seconds, and finally be presented thumbnails of the page? DUH!  Clearly a brilliant design feature!

 

Damn!  Hot shit!  Just like the woman featured in the screenshot above, this feature is sure to be a real maverick when it comes to changing the game in the OS battles.  Take THAT you fat cats at One Infinite Loop!

Man ohh man am I excited!  I just hope that Nvidia comes out with some new GPUs so when I build my next-next-next Windows box I’ll be able to enjoy all these hot eye candy features (I damn well hope so because their stock is a heaping pile of crap right now, and not fit to be recycled in the spiffy new Windows 7 translucent recycle bin of the future).  Niiiicccceeeeee!

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Chrome freakin’ rocks.  At least that’s my first impression so far.  

After a relatively quick download and install from the Chrome Beta site, I was up and running last night with Google’s new browser.

What I was instantly blown away by was how snappy the browser was.  From loading the browser in the first place, to opening new tabs, to opening heavy pages on the Internet, Chrome just seems zippy.  Forget that…it doesn’t seem zippier, it is.  Especially on JavaScript and media heavy sites.

 One of the first thoughts I had when I started using the browser was, “Ohh, so this is what Web 2.0 is supposed to be like.”  No long waits for bloated websites to sluggishly try and render in IE.  Remember back in the day when you first experienced the web over a true high-speed Internet connection?  It’s like that again.

My companies website, which I know is very JavaScript heavy, loads much, much faster in Chrome.  Gmail seems to open almost instantly.  I’m reminded of arriving at the University of Washington and downloading MP3s via Napster–often the download would be done before the % complete bar would even display.  That’s the feeling I get surfing with Chrome.  

The UI is very minimal.  Or at least it feels that way.  Perhaps it takes up just as much toolbar space as IE 6 and 7, but it doesn’t feel that way.  The integrated address/search/everything bar is pretty slick as well…just start typing what you want.  The bar is smart enough to know if you’re searching or looking for a website in your history.  Furthermore, Google’s top-search suggestions are displayed when it recognizes you’re typing a search.  And the intelligent filtering seems to be a lot smoother than the jarring redraws you see with Firefox 3.

The new tab window seems just…smart.  Why wasn’t this done before?  When you open a new tab, Google displays thumbnails of your most-frequently (or most-recently?  I’m not sure yet…) sites, so with a simple click you can navigate to your favorite locations.  If you think about it, you’re really often only going to a handful of sites each day, and now those will be easily accessible.

I haven’t checked, but I assume that Google has provided me a way to access these sites without having to pick up my hands from the keyboard and use the mouse.  I need to explore what kind of keyboard shortcuts Chrome offers.  The keyboard shortcuts are one of the reasons I find Gmail so easy to use–I am constantly frustrated when Outlook doesn’t understand “g-i” means I want to go back to my Inbox.  Bah!

 

Now, Minyanville ran a story regarding IE 8’s new “porn mode”–aka private browsing or what MS refers to as “InPrivate.”  This feature is not new to the browsing world, with Firefox, Safari, and Camino all having had similar features for quite some time.  Minyanville, referencing a Financial Times article, insinuated that this would somehow take a hit out of Google’s search engine revenue.  Because of course all those people out there in Teh Internets are constantly being mindful of their browsing behavior and the kind of data that Google is collecting–and thusly they’ll always browse “InPrivate”–cutting off some valuable data for Google’s search algorithms.

I dont’ think this really going to be an issue however.  Firstly, even if you’re browsing “InPrivate” and you make a search via Google, Google’s obviously going to have your search term, and can still target ads.  Furthermore, Google built in an “Incognito” mode into Chrome.  And they did some interesting things with it.  Their implementation is not all-or-nothing.  You can start a new window in “Incognito” mode, or you can right click a link and open the link in a new window that way.  The mode is denoted by a rather incognito looking dude in the top of the window and a different colored frame than the default browser.  The mode will not keep a history, and will automagically delete all associated browsing data, including cookies, when the tab/window is closed–not just when you restart the browser.  So you can surf half your windows privately while keeping the other windows in a normal mode.  Buying a surprise gift?  Surfing hot trample porn?  Sweet!  No need to clear your entire browsing history and leave a telltale indication to anyone who is snooping you history.

 

And to end my first impressions of Chrome, while I have to say the browser feels faster and snappier overall, it does appear to use more memory than Firefox.  Google claimed that because of the sandboxing of each window and tab–each run as a separate process, allowing a crashed tab to not bring down the entire browser or OS–there is a larger memory overhead to being with.  But as they’ve revamped a lot of the garbage collection in the code, over time the overhead will pay off because other browsers will get bloated and not reallocate unused memory.  In initial testing, I opened the same windows in Chrome and Firefox 3, and got about 100MB in memory usage out of Chrome (across all Chrome processes) compared to only about 63MB of usage in Firefox.  What I haven’t had a chance to do yet is run both FF and Chrome all day, and find out which is more bloated after a whole day’s usage (I doubt my Windows box will get through the whole day without some other issue or update causing a reboot, so this test might best be left to someone else). 

In all, Chrome rocks.  Download it, use it, love it.  At least for now.  And at least until IE 8 comes along and you’re forced to use it to log into some arcane corporate intranet tool.  Damn those IE-only sites…

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TDS–no it’s not a new compact car from Volkswagen. Instead, it’s the Tongue Drive System, a new user interface device created by Georgia Tech researchers to allow users to control various systems with their tongues.

Use of the tongue would allow for much broader and quicker interactions with systems–the current “sip and puff” setup which you’re likely to have seen apparently limits users to only four commands at a time. The Georgia Tech solution uses a magnet placed under the tongue to give you forward, back, left, right, single- and double-click abilities–essentially all the interactions a standard two-button mouse would give you. Sensors outside the cheeks determine the magnets placement and motion.

The researchers also talked about expanding the number of commands that could be given. I assume that the tongue is agile enough to mimic the kind of gestures that you do for instance with a pen on a table computer or PDA. I also wonder about using something like a cheek piercing to make the sensors a more permanent part of the wearer’s face, but right now I think they have to be wired up.

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Can’t afford a burial plot for your deceased loved one in Japan? Here is a solution that CScout reported on–store the urn in a facility which uses RFID cards to automatically retrieve them from storage for viewing.

This use of RFID is a new one to me. It makes sense though, especially in a situation like this where space is at a premium. You would think though that they’d make the viewing areas a little more private for mourning purposes.

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ZDNet News ran an article with details of NBC’s upcoming revamp of NBCOlympics.com and the goal of making it an online success, including live Web casts of the events plus archived footage.

The site will launch with an improved video player and other enhancements in time for the start of the 2008 Olympic games.  Over the course of the games, 2200 hours of video footage will be generated and accessible to users through both live and on-demand streams.  That’s good news for fans of various events that don’t get much, if any, television coverage.  Fully 25 sports are expected to be covered online which won’t really be seen on TV.

NBC hopes that the star of the Olympics will be Microsoft’s Silverlight, the web applications framework chosen by the company to power the new site.  It’s been in development for nearly a year now and is currently undergoing a number of UI tweaks.  They will be testing the site with live video during the Olympic trials.  The choice of Silverlight represents a win for the technology Microsoft has put forth to compete with Adobe’s highly popular Flashsuite.  

While choosing to use a Microsoft technology to power the site, NBC chose to go with DoubleClick to power the advertising, as opposed to Atlas platform which Microsoft acquired when it purchased aQuantive.  The Silverlight player will integrate with DoubleClick to display “dynamic ads” to viewers.  I’m assuming this will be your normal targeted ads, but perhaps they’ll be doing something new and amazing.

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So I tried the new chat feature in Facebook today for the first time, and wasn’t altogether impressed with it, at least so far.  Here are some observations.

• I liked the fact that the chat window is somewhat larger than the Gmail/Google Talk window that is anchored in your Gmail session.  It seems to allow a few more characters which makes for slightly less scrolling.
• However, you cannot reposition the chat window.  This is true of Gmail as well, although Gmail anchors the first window to the far right of the browser window, while Facebook implements a few extra tags so your first chat annoyingly appears right in the middle of the Facebook page you’re trying to read.
• Unlike in your Gmail session, Facebook doesn’t display your online friends to you all the time in an unobtrusive way.  With Gmail those contacts are always there below your inbox and other folders, with the option to expand/collapse the list.  Facebook has the list hidden by default, and revealing it takes up even more space on the Facebook page than the expanded chat session does.
  • You can choose to keep the Facebook online buddy list persistent, but like I said it takes up valuable screen real estate, unlike the Gmail buddy list.
• It is prettier to look at, with a more polished feel and the small user pictures is a nice feature.
• Facebook provides persistent chat so you can pick up a conversation where you left it, and scroll back and find things you’ve previously said.
  • Persistent chat is cool.
  • However there does not appear to be a way to search through your previous conversations.
  • There also does not seem to be a way to disable the chat logging features.  Sure even if you disable them in Gmail someone could maliciously copy-and-paste the conversation before closing, but it’s an added level of privacy which would be nice to have

All in all, I’d say it’s a nice implementation but is missing a lot of features I’d like to see.  I’m also still a lot more likely to have my Gmail open more frequenly than a Facebook window, so I’ll be accessible to friends on IM much more through Gmail.  If I could link all my chat accounts together into Facebook that might changes things though.  We’ll have to see how things change as Facebook works through the first iterations.

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After months of prodding to try to get my developer friends to work together to create a viable chat application for facebook they have announced that despite the over 500+ chat applications currently available, that they are just going to do it themselves.

That’s right folks, Facebook Chat will be launched this week allowing users to communicate in real time with their friends. But, “why just talk to someone when you can experience them?” Asks Patrick Thornton who runs “The Journalism Iconoclast” blog. Well, I don’t know how much experiencingI want to be doing of my friends but, this new feature has the potential to launch facebook into second place in the instant messaging world under AOL supported AIM. Maybe now I won’t have my gmail chat going all day and have to visit facebook separately. Ahh, the joys of all-in-one convenience.

It has been clear for a while that this was going to be the next big step in facebook’s evolution. Frankly now all they need is music pages with several songs per page and I’ll have no more reason to ever go to myspace again. Sadly at this stage of the game local musicians need myspace pages to remain relevant and help them break into the industry and get gigs.

At any rate, this is a welcome addition to the better of the two major social networking sites and it was one I predicted ages ago. Sadly for me I wasn’t able to create it own my own and won’t be getting a job with facebook anytime soon. 

Justin and Naseem are going for the subtle approach I see. Facebook Chat roxorz!

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…But regardless, it’s still sweet. Engadget posted about this latest interface craze to appear at CeBit, using large displays and multi-touch technology to manipulate the user interface. Think iPhone only 100 times bigger. Check it out:

This isn’t the first time this has been seen. There is Microsoft’s Surface project, and of course the original it “ripped off” from Jeff Han (sweet video). But this is the first one I’ve seen with multiple panels and on the wall.

I’d buy one. Well, maybe not. The Surface computer to my knowledge is still hard to find and ultra expensive. So how about, “one day” I’ll buy one. Or three.

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