Tag Archives | Microsoft. Windows

Microsoft Surface Rises at PDC

Posted by David Worthington on November 21, 2009 at 2:35 pm

Microsoft’s Surface tabletop computer team has graduated from being a pet project of founder Bill Gates to a group that stands up on its own, and contributes back into other parts of Microsoft.

That is the impression that I left with after meeting with Surface General Manager of Software and User Experience Brad Carpenter this week at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) this week in Los Angeles. Carpenter said that Microsoft had more than four times as many partners for Surface as it did a year ago, and that the team contributed technology to Windows 7, including applications that are installed by computer makers.

While it is true that Surface hasn’t revolutionized how the world interacts with computers yet, Microsoft is very serious about the touch-screen interface. To that point, every PDC attendee received a free touch-screen laptop to write touch-screen applications with.

Silverlight 4 also allows applications to invoke Windows touch screen interfaces, so that online puzzles can become much more interactive. And that’s just the beginning.

Carpenter said that Microsoft is working with partners in over 18 markets to help them design touch screen applications that have high payback on their investment. Some of its development partners have also begun to build components for Surface applications.

At PDC, Microsoft announced that students from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh designed an application that ported Dungeons and Dragons to Surface. A group of German programmers wrote an application that pulls up information from specialized designed business cards.

Some other recent deployments that he cited are with Hardrock Café, Sheraton Hotels and Resorts, and Vodaphone, according to Carpenter.

Surface has momentum, and its tie into Windows 7 keeps it viable. It will remain a niche product, but its successes will help make it a much more common sight at your local mall.

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Microsoft: Silverlight will “Optimize Everywhere”

Posted by David Worthington on November 21, 2009 at 2:09 pm

Microsoft wants Silverlight to be optimized for every platform that it runs on, said Brian Goldfarb, director of developer and user experience platforms at Microsoft, during an interview at the company’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) on Wednesday (Nov. 18).

Silverlight runs on Mac OS X and Windows; it is available on Linux through Mono Moonlight, an open source project that Microsoft supports. I also expect that Moonlight will be running on Android in near future. Goldfarb explained that it was not enough for Silverlight to “run everywhere,” but that it should “light up” specific platforms.

Microsoft needs to consider screen size and other aspects of a device, which is particularly relevant in the mobile space, he explained. There are also mobile platform features such as SMS, phone dialing, and address books that Silverlight could exploit, he added. That would allow Silverlight applications to be customized for smartphones.

Silverlight 4, which Microsoft announced at PDC, will allow applications to access Windows features, hardware, and the local file system. That allows devices such as Webcams to accessed by Silverlight. However, the same level of optimization is not currently being offering for other platforms.

Microsoft will give Silverlight “trusted” access local resources on Macs, meaning that all features work except for COM integration, Goldfarb said. More work is needed to extend Silverlight for non-Windows platforms, Goldfarb admitted, saying that the company was “thinking around” the concept of extensions.

COM is a Windows technology that enables applications that may have been written in different languages to communicate with each other. Microsoft Office makes heavy use of COM. “We are actively evaluating the best way to get COM like features on other platforms,” Goldfarb wrote in a follow up e-mail.

To that end, the company has started an open source project called Managed Extensibility Framework for .NET and Silverlight. The Mono team is working on an equivalent project, Goldfarb said. He expects that Mono will “accelerate dramatically” in the near future, delivering more features to Linux users.

I expect that anything but Windows will be a second-class Silverlight citizen for some time. But Microsoft is making strides toward delivering an optimized experience on other platforms, and in doing so, will gain a foothold on the Web beyond Windows.

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The Myth of Platform-Independent Applications

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 17, 2009 at 11:21 am

At Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles this morning, Seesmic announced that its Seesmic Desktop, a popular tool among Twitter power users, is coming to Windows. Finally!

Um, hasn’t Seemsic run on Windows all along? Well, yes, but that’s because it’ s written in Adobe AIR, an application platform that lets programmers write Flash applications that can run outside the browser. (That’s a dumbed-down explanation of AIR, but enough to get the gist across, I hope.) One of the principal selling points of AIR is that it lets developers write one app that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, as Seesmic Desktop does.

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Two More Weeks With Windows 7

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 16, 2009 at 11:03 am

Project SwitchbackIt’s been a couple of weeks since I reported on Project Switchback, my experiment in using an ASUS UL30A-X5 thin-and-light notebook as my primary computer after a long period in which I was more Mac person than Windows person. How are things going? Pretty well.

The Asus has continued to perform well–it’s the best $675 investment I’ve ever made in a computer. I do, however, struggle to eke out half of its advertised twelve-hour battery life. And I did discover a display glitch: Sometimes, the machine refuses to render bitmapped images, such as PowerPoint thumbnails. (It’s been a minor enough irritant that I haven’t found time to troubleshoot it, although I’m now downloading the latest graphics driver just in case.)

Other than that graphics weirdness, Windows 7 has been running like a champ. It’s the same pleasing OS I’d been running in pre-release form for a year, and I haven’t run into any compatibility problems, or suffered any crashes.

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Using Windows 7? Take Our Survey

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 16, 2009 at 4:12 am

Windows 7 SatisfactionWe’re still very, very early in the Windows 7 era: The operating system only went on sale as an upgrade and on new PCs on October 22nd. But it’s not too soon to check in with people who pounced on Windows 7 at the first opportunity–after all, their experiences will help everyone else decide whether the upgrade  is worth the effort and money. And if you’re one such early adopter, we’ve got some questions about your experiences.

Click here to take our quick survey about Windows 7. Thanks in advance for participating–we’ll leave the survey up until 5pm PT on Friday, or until we’ve collected enough results for a meaningful report on the state of Windows 7 satisfaction so far.

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Survey: XP Users Aren’t Upgrading to Windows 7

Posted by David Worthington on November 11, 2009 at 6:00 pm

Windows Vista users are flocking to Windows 7, but a considerable number of holdouts are resistant to upgrading from Windows XP, according to an InfoWorld survey that was taken over the past several weeks.

The survey found that Windows 7 now has approximately 4 percent market share among 20,000 systems that it monitors through the exo.performance.network. The network is administered by Devil Mountain Software, and tracks users who have chosen to opt in.

The new Windows 7 users don’t seem to be Windows XP defectors–that OS’s share is holding steady at 64 percent. And almost three years after Windows Vista’s release, its market share has barely cracked 30 percent. InfoWorld noted that Windows Vista appears to be losing market share as Windows 7 increases in popularity. However, I’m hesitant to accept whether there is any actual correlation without having seen the data.

Another recent survey by NPD Group reaffirms Windows 7’s popularity over its oft-criticized predecessor. It found that Windows 7’s initial boxed upgrades were up 234 percent over Windows Vista.

Microsoft offered significant pre-sale discounts for Windows 7. There has also been pent up demand for upgrades, because many businesses eschewed Windows Vista.

Windows 7 had a long beta cycle, and has received generally good reviews. In fact, I have not heard any real horror stories since it launched last month. That could be in part because there is no direct upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 7: XP users must perform a clean install to upgrade to Windows 7, and I suspect many still have machines that are too wimpy for Windows 7, and will therefore get the new OS only when they buy new PCs.

We’d like to hear from you. Are you planning on upgrading to Windows 7, or are you sticking with what you’ve got (or looking for an alternative such as a Mac or Linux machine)?

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Windows Copies the Mac? Shhh, That’s Our Little Secret!

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 11, 2009 at 5:53 pm

PC dressed as Mac[UPDATE: Microsoft’s Windows blogger Brandon LeBlanc has disowned Aldous’s comments.]

This is amusing: Simon Aldous, a “Microsoft partner group manager” in the UK, gave an interview to British tech site PCR in which he says that Microsoft wanted to give Windows 7 a “Mac look and feel”:

One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. We’ve significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it’s built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.

I’m guessing that Aldous is far enough removed from Redmond that he forgot you aren’t supposed to say things like that. (I mean, nobody involved with New Coke cheerfully told us that the goal with it was to make Coke taste more like Pepsi.) But the funny thing is, the only part of Windows 7 that strikes me as newly Mac-like is the Taskbar, whose bigger, unlabeled icons do indeed look more like OS X’s Dock.

On a meta-level, every version of Windows has cribbed from the Mac, and the versions released in this decade (Windows XP, Vista, and 7) all draw overall inspiration from the polished look of Apple OS X. But Windows 7 has its own perfectly pleasant aesthetic.  I ultimately prefer Snow Leopard’s–it’s more subdued and consistent–but if you told me you liked Windows 7’s flashier feel, I wouldn’t argue the point.

Oh, and a side topic: As a heavy user of both Vista and OS X, I’d love to get the details on how “the core Vista technology” is far more stable than OS X…not that both operating systems aren’t capable of crashing spectacularly in the right circumstances.

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5Words: Bring Back Windows Vista UAC!

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 4, 2009 at 11:20 am

5words

Windows 7 UAC: insufficiently annoying?

Verizon hikes early termination fees.

Gizmodo gets more Courier details.

iPhone apps hit 100K mark.

Can’t sell Beatles without permission.

More antitrust trouble for Intel.

More on Droid pinching, zooming.

Tethering coming for Verizon Droid.

Second Life launches business version.

More Nvidia x86 CPU rumors.

What’s up with the CrunchPad?

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