Sarah In Tampa

Circle Dock Is No Ordinary App Launcher

sarahintampa — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 04:45:00 GMT

I’m sure you’ve seen docks before – the launch bars that let you start up applications with one click. For Windows users, one of the most popular docks is Rocket Dock (I use this one myself). Another favorite is Object Dock. However, I had never seen anything quite like Circle Dock before. Instead of a simple bar that attaches to a side of your computer screen, Circle Dock will launch (via a hotkey) wherever your mouse sits on the screen. The apps it contains can display either as concentric circles or as a spiral. There’s a lot you can do with Circle Dock too – you can rotate it, skin it, and add apps, files, folders, and shortcuts to the dock by drag and drop. Circle Dock may not be for you, but it’s definitely a unique take on the UI experience. Circle Dock is free download and works on 64-bit. It’s available here.

If you want to get really crazy, you can download the newly-released alpha version of Circle Dock. In this version, Circle Dock 0.9.2, the middle button can now open up the Windows start menu. You can also group your icons into dock folders and open them up in groups and click on the middle button to navigate back out of the folder. (The picture is of the alpha version).

Live Mesh Expands To More Countries

sarahintampa — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 04:43:00 GMT

Today, the Live Mesh team announced the expansion of their service into other markets. Now the list of countries that will allow sign-up without a wait list for the Live Mesh Tech Preview includes Canada, India, and Ireland. This is in addition to USA, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, for whom Live Mesh has already been made available. The announcement was posted today to the Live Mesh blog, where they also pointed us to other Live Mesh resources, including these Channel 9 videos and the link to the Community Forums, which is where you can send in Live Mesh feedback.

Get All the Microsoft Blogs at BlogMS

sarahintampa — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 04:42:00 GMT

At Microsoft, there are a lot of product and support teams blogging – so many, in fact, that it can be hard to keep up with them all. If you tried to subscribe to all the sites on your own, you could be overwhelmed by the sheer number of posts. Well, now there’s a better way to keep up with Microsoft news. A new resource called BlogMS makes it easy for you to follow all the Microsoft blogs by offering regular weekly and monthly updates from product, support and other specialist teams within Microsoft. The site tracks over 130 blogs in total! Every week and calendar month, BlogMS will also publish a full summary of all the latest articles in a single blog post on this site as well as offer a report which you can download. During the week, blog alerts will be issued to highlight important announcements. Here’s the list of all the blogs the site is tracking, but if you want to check out all the Microsoft produced blogs, you can go here to the Microsoft Community Blogs site. We hear that we have Brandon LeBlanc from the Windows Experience Blog to thank for getting this list started, so thank you, thank you, Brandon (and everyone else who ended up contributing to this site) for making our lives easier.

Snap2Face Version 1.0 Arrives

sarahintampa — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 04:42:00 GMT

Earlier this year, we told you about Snap2Face, a Facebook app designed just for Windows Mobile users. Now, that app is out of beta and the official 1.0 version has been released. With Snap2Face version 1.0, you can fully interact with Facebook. That means you can view albums, upload photos, update your status, see the statuses of your friends, view and respond to messages, pokes, wall posts, and friend requests. However, what’s really cool about the newest version is its Outlook integration. Snap2Face allows you to import your friends’ profile photos into your Outlook contacts and then use them for caller ID. Snap2Face is available as a free download on all Windows Mobile 5.0/6.0 devices (both Pocket PC and Smartphone). You can download it from here.

Three Flickr Plugins You’ll Love

sarahintampa — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:11:00 GMT

If you’re a flickr user, there are three plugins that you need to know about: Flickr4Writer, Flickr4Outlook, and Flickr4Word. I had mentioned the Flickr4Writer plugin before when I blogged about some of my favorite plugins for Windows Live Writer - it helps you to insert flickr photos into your blog posts. However, thanks to gHacks, I learned that there are also similar plugins for both Word and Outlook. Like the WLW plugin, they give you easy access to your flickr photos from directly within the application. You can also use the built-in search feature to find photos from other flickr users that match the tags you enter in the search box. The Outlook and Word plugins only support Office 2007 installations (Word 2007, Outlook 2007). All of the plugins are available from their respective sites (linked above) as free downloads. Hey, does this count as software+services? I think it might!

Zemanta Plugin for Windows Live Writer

sarahintampa — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 07:10:00 GMT

Zemanta is a technology used by bloggers that inserts automatic links, adds relevant photos, adds links to related articles, and automatically tags your posts. The technology is available either as a browser plugin or a server-side plugin that supports either WordPress, Movable Type, or Drupal. However, I recently learned that it’s available as a Windows Live Writer plugin, too!

After installation, the Zemanta plugin will appear in the right sidebar of WLW where you can see the content it is suggesting for your post. (You have to write at least 300 characters before it will provide any suggestions.) The plugin works on Live Writer versions 12-14. You can see what version you run by going to “About” from the “Help” menu in Live Writer.

To try the Zemanta plugin for yourself, you can download it from here.

Sheratons Get Surface

sarahintampa — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:48:00 GMT

If you’re in New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, or Seattle, then you may want to pop by a Sheraton Hotel. Why? Because those Sheratons have received Microsoft Surface tabletop computers for their lobbies. Hotel guests can use the Surface computers as a virtual concierge by means of an application called “CityTips,” a program which uses Virtual Earth to help guests find nearby restaurants and entertainment venues. The other applications available include “Sheraton Snapshots,” which lets you check out all the other Sheraton hotels worldwide and “The Sounds of Sheraton,” which lets you play music using the Surface as a jukebox.

To see one of the Sheraton Surface computers in action, check out this video:

video from seattlepi.nwsource.com

Back-to-School Zune Skins

sarahintampa — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:06:00 GMT

The GotZune? site has the scoop on some back-to-school specials on Zune skins over at skinit.com. For anyone who likes to customize (and protect!) their gadgets, the official Zune skins over on skinit.com/zune are now only $14.95/each. The skins are all made from high quality 3M vinyl and are available for Zune 30GB, Zune 4/8GB, and the Zune 80GB. There are tons of categories to choose from, so you are sure to find a design you’ll like whether you want an artistic image or whether you would rather show your support for a cause, your favorite sports team, your school, your sorority or your frat.

Diagnose Hard Drive Problems With HDDScan

sarahintampa — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 00:27:00 GMT

Have you been hearing an ominous clicking sound coming from inside your computer? That sound could be one of your hard drives on its way to failure…or something else entirely. If you want to know for sure, a utility called HDDScan can help. This free app will scan your internal or external drives for bad blocks, test write/read/erase capabilities, read and analyze S.M.A.R.T. parameters and run S.M.A.R.T. tests, and even monitor the temperatures of the drives themselves. When complete, the reports produced can either be printed or saved for future reference. HDDScan is definitely an app worth adding to your toolkit.

(Thanks AppScout!)

Play The Olympics With Popfly

sarahintampa — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 00:26:00 GMT

The Popfly team has put together a handful of Olympic-themed games in honor of the Summer Games occurring now in Beijing. There are ten games in all included archery, boxing, diving, gymnastics, long jump, soccer, synchronized swimming, track & field, weightlifting, and even torch lighting! Well, that last one isn’t really a sport, but you get the idea. The games, like most of the gaming content built with Popfly, are for the casual gamer who’s looking to kill some time or just relax and take a break by playing a lightweight, easy, and fun game. Next to each of the games listed, there is a link to customize the game, so if you want to tweak it to make it your own, you have that option, too. You can play all the games from popfly.com/sports.

New 3D Photo Viewer From Microsoft Research

sarahintampa — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:23:00 GMT

If you thought Photosynth was cool, you haven’t seen anything yet! On his blog, Long Zheng shares with us an amazing video out of Microsoft Research that focuses on a new immersive 3D technology for manipulating digital photos. The technology, which appears to be an advancement of an older technology called Photo Tourism, allows for browsing through photo collections in 3D. In the video, the photos used to demonstrate the technology in action are taken from the flickr website. However, the technology could be used with a collection of images out of your own personal photo collection, too.

Like Photosynth, photos of the same object or location are stitched together, but this new technology goes beyond that to allow for a 3D model of the scene through seamless transitions between the photos as you move through them. In addition, the system also corrects the color balance and stabilizes the transitions as you zoom, rotate, and move through the images. With this system, you can navigate through the photos, zoom in and out, select different orbits, view both daytime or nighttime photos, and so much more. This technology doesn’t seem to have a real name yet – both the video and the website are simply titled “Finding Paths through the World’s Photos.”

This is the sort of thing that’s kind of hard to explain – it has to be seen to be believed. Check it out:

On the website, you can view the video, download the paper, and even download the source code.

UnWrap: 3D Surface Models From Video

sarahintampa — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:22:00 GMT

New from Microsoft Research’s UnWrap team (Alex Rav Acha - Weizmann institute of Science and Pushmeet Kohli, Carsten Rother and Andrew Fitzgibbon - Microsoft Research Cambridge), comes a technology which, among other things, allows you to generate 3D surface models from video. That extracted image, called the “unwrap mosaic,” can then be edited, manipulated, and then re-composited back into the original video. This technology could be used for resizing objects, repainting textures, copying/cutting/pasting objects, and deforming objects. To learn more, check out the UnWrap website and video. (via MicroMiel)

Cooliris Plugin For PowerPoint

sarahintampa — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:21:00 GMT

Cooliris, the browser plugin technology that used to be known as PicLens, is an amazing tool that transforms the sites in your web browser from a 2D pages into full-on 3D experiences. (Read our previous review here). But did you know that you can use Cooliris outside the browser, too? The Cooliris team has released a new plugin designed just for Microsoft PowerPoint users. With this plugin, you can easily browse through your presentation for a particular slide and pull it up full-screen. Cooliris is certainly a good way to make your presentations engaging and interesting for your audience. You can download the plugin from here.

Olympic Fever: Search, Widgets, and More

sarahintampa — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:38:00 GMT

With the 2008 Beijing Olympics now underway, a lot of people are infected with Olympic Fever. There seems to be million ways to watch the Olympics this year and keep up with the news. We’ve highlighted some of these ways already, including the Silverlight-powered NBCOlympics website, Olympics on your mobile phone, the MSN toolbar's Olympics tab, Olympics on the Go for Media Center, and even an Olympics Medal Count Vista Gadget. But that’s still not all the ways you can keep up with the games, so how about a few more?

On the Neowin website, they’ve broken down all the ways in which Live Search is delivering Olympics coverage as well as offering other Olympics-related features. This includes the following:

Olympics 2008 news scope, available in Live Search News at http://news.live.com gives readers up-to-date coverage with additional elements such as Olympics 2008 news images.
Olympian xRank, available at http://xrank.live.com gives fans a way to track the popularity of their favorite athletes.
Olympics Videos are available at http://video.live.com when customers search “Olympics.”
The Live.com Homepage will rotate Olympics images in the background for the duration of the games.
Athlete Instant Answer will feature profiles of Olympians as searchers type in the first and last names of the athlete in search queries. For instance, fans can search “Shawn Johnson” or “LeBron James.”
Medal Count Instant Answer will provide an “all up” medal count by country, sport, or by country and sport when searchers type in Olympics-related keywords in search queries. For instance, fans can search terms like “swimming” or “China gymnastics.”

HD View Internet Plugin

sarahintampa — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:37:00 GMT

HD View is a technology developed by Microsoft Research specifically for the purpose of viewing and interacting with large scale images on the web. As the HD Team describes it, it’s a “camera for the web.” But really what it does is allow you to interact with large, panoramic images that don’t fit on your screen. You can move around the images and zoom in and out, all while still maintaining a high-definition view of what you’re seeing. The technology is still very much of a concept because sites have to be HD View-enabled in order for this to work, but there are still several sites that have done so if you want to check it out. Here’s the plugin for IE. Zooming in on photos reminds me a lot of the capabilities of Silverlight with its deep zoom, so it will be interesting to see how each are used.

Get Your PDC Bling

sarahintampa — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:32:00 GMT

Are you planning on attending this year’s PDC Conference? PDC2008, the Professional Developers Conference, promises to be an interesting event this year, with over 160 technical sessions, hands-on labs, training & seminars, as well as planned keynotes from Ray Ozzie, Rick Rasid, VP of Microsoft Research, and others. If you’re planning on blogging from the event, which begins October 27th and goes through the 30th, you’ll want to go ahead and download this collection of PDC imagery which you can use in your blog posts. The collection also includes some PDC wallpaper, so you can decorate your desktop, too.

TinyTwitter Updated: Now Add Pictures and Geolocate Your Tweets

sarahintampa — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:25:00 GMT

If you have a Windows Mobile device and you are a Twitter user, then you may have heard of an app called TinyTwitter. Many people say that TinyTwitter is already one of the best applications for using Twitter on their mobile phone, but now it’s even better than before! A recent update to TinyTwitter has added two great new features: picture uploads and geolocation. The picture uploading is done via a service called TwitPic and there’s nothing special you have to do to use it – just add append a picture to your tweet.

The new geolocation feature is pretty great too, especially because it’s using our very own Live Maps service to geolocate your tweets. Assuming your mobile phone has GPS built in, your tweets will be mapped out and posted on a timeline along with a link to Live Maps so people can see where you are. Don’t worry, though, it won’t be exact enough to encourage stalking.

To try out the new version of this app, go to TinyTwitter.com on your PC or visit m.ttwt.at from your mobile phone.

(Thanks to Jeremy Cath for the tip! Img courtesy PocketPCThoughts)

Get The Olympics On Your Mobile Phone

sarahintampa — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:43:00 GMT

Thanks to a partnership between Lenovo, Intel, and Zumobi, Windows Mobile users now have access to an app called the “Olympic Zoom Space,” which is available via a free download at http://lenovo.zumobi.com. This four-tile zoom space, like other Zumobi downloads, lets you quickly and easily view news and photos from the web without need of your web browser. The app features news, blogs, photos, and other updates from Lenovo’s “Olympic Podium” website, a site which focuses on providing you with a comprehensive guide to the Summer Games in Beijing.

Reverse Sync Your Zune

sarahintampa — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:56:00 GMT

A little known feature to those that don’t use a Microsoft Zune is the fact that Zunes have the ability to “reverse sync” back to a computer. What this means is that you can connect any Zune to any PC running Zune software and copy over music, videos, or pictures back to the PC. Matt recently blogged about this over on ZuneInsider when he surprised a friend by showing him how to he could copy an album from his friend’s Zune back to his own PC. He notes that he already owned the album in this example, but the secret here is that un-DRM’d content – like much of the content sold in the Zune Marketplace as well as on sites like Amazon’s MP3 store – makes this possible. With less restrictions on how the content can be moved around, accessed, and played, you aren’t as locked down as when you purchase DRM’d content like the majority of the music still sold today on iTunes. Not only is this helpful for letting friends share music with each other, it’s also a great feature for anyone with a multiple-PC household and more than one Zune or for taking your tunes to your office PC. For step-by-step instructions on how this is done, check out Matt’s post.

Go Green With Edison

sarahintampa — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:31:00 GMT

Edison is a new download that helps you with PC Power Management. The app comes from a company called Verdiem, which offers similar technology for large enterprises for a fee. With Edison, though, you’ll get those same power-saving tools for free. After you download and register the program, you can customize your settings through a set of easy-to-use tabs. You can specify when you use your PC the most, edit settings for both "work" and "home," use a slider to adjust your savings level, and more. But the best part of this app is where it tells you what your estimated annual power savings will be. Edison provides those figures in dollars, Kilowatt hours, and even in pounds of CO2 saved! You can download Edison from www.microsoft.com/environment – the link is on the right. (via Steve Clayton)

CrowdFire: The First Crowdsourced Digital Concert Experience

sarahintampa — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:38:00 GMT

At the upcoming Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival that takes place in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco on August 22nd through 24th, concert goers will be able to participate in an online community where they can share photos, videos, and interact with each other via text message. Thanks to a number of CrowdFire kiosks that will be installed at the event, the participants will have easy access to content creation and social networking tools so they can upload media mashups in real time and have those creations displays on screens at the festival as well as on the CrowdFire website.

Microsoft is sponsoring the CrowdFire pavilion, which will feature next gen PCs, an Xbox 360 gaming contest area, a Zune-interactive area featuring songs from the performing artists, as well as many other things. Additionally, Windows Live Alerts will keep the participants up-to-date with news and info about Outside Lands and Windows Live Spaces will be set up to feature detailed info on the festivals artists.

You can check out the action online during the festival at www.crowdfire.net.

DeepLOL

sarahintampa — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:29:00 GMT

We’ve talked in the past about Silverlight and Deep Zoom and have featured many creative uses of the technology including sites like HardRock.com, Europe’s One Big Weekend website, and even an Obama Deep Zoom. However, we have to admit that this latest Deep Zoom site we stumbled across beats anything we’ve seen before in terms of just being a really funny and clever use of Deep Zoom: DeepLOL. As you may have guessed from the title, this site is a deep zoom site of nothing other than lolcats. That’s right – lolcats, the crazy kitty pictures that are still one of the hottest memes on the internet today. The site features two of the most iconic lolcat images, which, if you zoom in on them, are revealed as being made up of hundreds and hundreds of other lolcat pictures. You could spend a long time on this site zooming in and out and moving around to see them all, so lolcat fans be warned before you click - it’s the best time waster ever.

Slide:ology Teaches You How To Create Great Presentations

sarahintampa — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:54:00 GMT

I had never heard of Nancy Duarte of Duarte, but I had seen her work. Via a recent interview published on Web Worker Daily, I discovered that her agency was the one that designed and produced Al Gore’s keynote presentation for the movie An Inconvenient Truth. No matter how you feel about global warming, you have to agree – that was an impressive slideshow. Although most of us will never have the opportunity to craft a slideshow of that magnitude, there is a lot we can learn from Nancy and her team at Duarte about the art of the presentation. In fact, Nancy will be releasing a new book on the subject called slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations. But you don’t need to wait to read the book to start getting some of those great tips now – you can just subscribe to the slide:ology blog. Here, you’ll find posts like “Tips for Remote Presenters,” “A 30 Second Presentation,” among other, more personal articles. The blog is relatively new, so I look forward to what other insights may be in store for us.

Photographer Thomas Hawk Visits Media Center Team

sarahintampa — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:53:00 GMT

Ian Dixon reports that the Media Center Team recently received a visit from the well-known photographer Thomas Hawk. He took a tour of the offices and snapped some pictures which are now available on Flickr. He also had some nice things to say about the working environment:

First, I was surprised what a relaxed environment they all work in. For some reason I'd always pictured people working for Microsoft wearing business casual polo shirts and Levi's Dockers behind desks that all looked pretty much the same. Each person on the team had their own workspace and each had it pretty much set up however they wanted. Couches, futons, very cool music space set ups that looked more like a DJ stand than corporate offices. And while I didn't see any dogs or Foosball tables, the set up reminded me a lot more of a Silicon Valley start up than the corporate behemoth that is Microsoft.

Thomas also said that he’s been a big fan of Media Center – in fact, it was his very first photo he ever posted to Flickr. He really heaps on the praise saying that Media Center “represents the very best home entertainment system available on the market today and sits head and shoulders above AppleTV, TiVo and other home media platforms.”

Wow, thanks Thomas!

You can see all the photos from his visit here. (Including the one that accompanies this post!)

Awesome Xbox 360 Case Mods

sarahintampa — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:53:00 GMT

Officially, we have to remind you that case mods void your warranty, but unofficially we have to say, Wow! These case mods are awesome! Over on the CyberNotes website, they’ve updated their old list of the best Xbox 360 case mods which originally ran back in 2006 to include the best ones from more recent months. We’re not surprised to see that several of them are inspired by Halo – those fanboys can do some pretty amazing things with metal and LEDs. However, that Simpsons one isn’t too shabby either. To see all the pictures of the mods plus links to the original sites, just click here.