Moved to WordPress

I've given up on Blogger. Moved to WordPress.

http://briansweat.wordpress.com/

Microsoft WSYP

As a software developer, I have to admit that we don't really spend enough time reviewing every automatic error notification sent by our end users. However, Microsoft has really found an innovative way of dealing with this :)

Watch the video

More Information about WSYP here

New Google products

Google unveiled three new products this week! It's no surprise that Google is now the highest valued media stock.

Google Earth (beta) is a lot like Google Maps, but it runs as a Windows application rather than in your browser. It's much faster and it zooms in and out as you move around the globe or enter a street address. I was able to download it last night before they removed it today. I don't think they've explained why they removed the download, but it is in beta and they've posted a message to check back daily.



Personalized Search (beta) will now produce search results that are filtered based on your prior search history. There is also a calendar that shows your history color-coded by search volume per day. You can see each search phrase and which webpages you opened from the search results. It will be interesting to see how this will affect AdWords results.



Google Video (beta) was also released this week. I read a post on the Googleblog about video search in January and wasn't sure how long it would take to build up a decent index of transcripts. I think this feature might be useful for those times when you catch the last few minutes of a show, find out it wasn't recording and want to see what happened earlier in the episode.

Motorola Franklin

Brooks came over to our house on Saturday with his new Motorola RAZR. It's by far the coolest cell phone I've seen, but I think I'll wait until the RAZR Franklin is released. I still love my indestructible Motorola V60g (no color screen or camera) and will wait to trade it in along with my iPAQ for a Franklin.


Check out the specs at Engadget.com

Longhorn loves RSS

Microsoft made an announcement at Gnomedex on Friday about details of how RSS will be supported in Longhorn and Internet Explorer 7. It's no surprise that IE 7 will have an easy way to read and subscribe to RSS feeds, but what's really cool is how the feeds will be managed. Longhorn will include a common feed-list to maintain a single list of RSS feeds that can be used by other applications. This is really great, considering that none of the current news readers have a way to share feed lists easily.

The Channel 9 video below shows how RSS Bandit was quickly modified to use the common feed-list. They also set up a calendar in Outlook 2003 that is populated by iCalendar (ICS) files embedded in an RSS feed with the Gnomedex schedule and wrote a sample app that took an RSS feed from a Photoblog and created a screen saver with the text of the blog entry as the photo caption. Fast forward the video to 23:00 to get a glimpse of IE 7!


Watch the video
Download the video

Interactive websites using AJAX

I've heard a lot of buzz about this new way of using JavaScript and XML to produce some really powerful web pages with AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Before I continue, you can see AJAX in action at Google Maps (beta), Microsoft Start (preview), Google Personalized Homepage and Gmail if you haven't heard about it yet. These interactive sites are very easy to use and appear to response much faster than traditional sites since the entire page is not reloaded after each item is clicked. However, AJAX has some problems that might really annoy users. The problems listed below are very similar to problems found in websites using Flash...

1. It doesn't have an alternative view if your browser doesn't support JavaScript, similar to running a browser without the Flash plugin.
2. The back and refresh buttons don't work (by default) in your browser
3. It doesn't change the URL in the address bar. This prevents bookmarking a page. Google has addressed this issue by providing a Link to this page feature on Google Maps that redirects the browser to a URL that can be bookmarked.

By the way, I've still got a bunch of invites if anyone wants to try Gmail, the best free webmail IMO.

MSN Desktop Search

I was really excited when Google announced that they had released a desktop search application last year, but I was disappointed after installing it since it didn't support Firefox or MSN Messenger, so I never used it and eventually un-installed it.

I've now installed Microsoft's MSN Desktop Search, which doesn't appear to search your internet history. However, it does search MSN Messenger conversations, which is really cool. I am constantly trying to remember some conversation I had with someone and I have multiple archived MSN conversation log files for each of my co-workers since I am a heavy user of Messenger. The included MSN toolbar also adds tabbed browsing into IE, but I'm not comfortable switching back from Firefox to IE yet. It also installed an Outlook toolbar (add-in) that should replaces the Find funtion for most people.

Anyways, I'm optimistic that I'll actually keep and use MSN Desktop Search.