Windows Live

Today almost everyone have more than one computer; one at work, a few at home, a media center, a PC, a Mac etc, your family members, friends and colleagues have the same. One problem is that a lot of us need access to files on one machine when we are using one of the others. For example I want to access my images when I’m at work sometimes and I do not want to copy all of these images onto my work laptop, when I’m at home I want to have the same favorites and documents that I use at work and so on. Then I have another scenario, let’s say that I do not have any of my computers with me and I want to access one of my files, then I want to have some way to access the files using a standard browser - and why not have editing possibilities.

Today I have spent a few hours tagging photos using the incredible Windows Live Photo Gallery application. It’s quite slow and still has some buggy features, but it’s so good for cleaning and tagging photos. As I tagged along I found some images I took during the PDC 2008 at the LA Convention Center entrance hall. From the Windows Live Photo Gallery I fired up Microsoft Photosynth and made me a Synth. Creating the synth was really easy and done in a few minutes and here it is:

Microsoft is currently extremely offensive on their new cloud services targeted to consumers and business users with their Live services. I use a number of them daily with the Live Mesh as the newest addition. A couple of months back I started to move my and my family’s documents to Skydrive, 5Gb free online storage, and I’ve made some efforts to get started with the Office Live Workspace, to have a better place work working with the documents. Then Live Mesh came into the picture, and it lets me automatically sync documents between our PC’s and cell phones – really awesome!

During the Virtual Earth that I attended yesterday we were shown a really nice beta in which you easily can create your custom 3D Models for Virtual Earth called 3DVIA. The tool is a browser plugin which will open when you, from the Virtual Earth 3D mode right-click where you want to insert a new model and select Add a 3D Model. Since this is a beta it will take a while until the 3DVIA interface opens up. In my case I had to retry about 10 times due to some unexpected errors. It is also really slow and hogs your CPU.

Today I attended a really interesting event at the Microsoft Stockholm location about the Microsoft Virtual Earth Platform. The event was a result of large amount of questions from partners and customers and the bi-weekly webcasts by the VE team. During the day the team from UK presented the Virtual Earth platform including the Virtual Earth AJAX controls and the MapPoint web services as well as SQL Server 2008, which contains impressive spatial data management. I was there to hear what the Virtual Earth platform could do for my customers and our solutions and during the day I noted down some really interesting ideas and pitches that I will try on them, but…

You can now subscribe to this feed using Windows Live Alerts, just click the Windows Live Alerts logo and customize how you will receive the alert. This is another great Live service from the Microsoft Live team. You can sign up to create your own alerts here. Thanks to Michael Ganotti for the tip.

The great blogging application Windows Live Writer has left the beta phase and is now released, as a part of the Windows Live Wave 2, with version 12.0.1366.1026. Below is the previous About screen and as you can see there are no Beta remark anymore… I have not yet found any information on what’s new or what’s updated, but I guess we will soon here about it!

 A new developers community for Windows Live developers - Via Windows Live - has just been launched. The community site contains sections about Silverlight, Live ID, Live Writer, Messenger, Alerts and all the other Live products. As of now the content is quite thin, but it’s up to you/us to fill it with useful information. Just register and then start using it. The site has a Wiki, a Gallery, Articles and more. And you can subscribe to the “aggregated blog of everything Windows Live”.

LiveSide reports that MSN is trying to get back in the business, taking back whatever they have lost to Windows Live. The first battle looks like it’s going to happen on the mobile arena. In the first corner we have the mobile version of www.live.com - mobile.live.com. And in the other corner the mobile MSN version - beta.mobile.msn.com. At a first glance, for me, the winner is live.com since when logging in you have instant access to the feeds, mail, gadgets and other personalization you have done in the rich live.com. The mobile MSN of course contains the classic MSNBC news, FOX sports and other types of content. So if you are interested in that maybe MSN will be the winner. Content vs. customisation?

Today I start my two weeks vacation and I thought I should summarize this year. The year of 2006 has been characterized, for me, as the year of Betas and Technology Previews. I have been trying to involve myself as much as possible in the all the goodies flowing out of Redmond. Microsoft has released numerous amount of new applications and upgrades. Internet Explorer 7 The new version of Internet Explorer is the application this year that will have most impact in the short run on users. More standardized and a slicker interface with support of for example blogs.

When writing blog posts I once in a while link to classes and methods in the MSDN Library. So why not simplify this job a bit by writing yet another Windows Live Writer plugin - MSDN Locator plugin for Windows Live Writer. The plugin allows you to search for a class, namespace, method or property using the full name and then inserts a link tag with a description (title attribute).

Yesterday I wrote a quick post on Google Co-op and Windows Live Search Macros and i thought that I should provide you with two great samples. Lawrence Liu has set up a custom search on Windows Live Search called SharePoint Community Search. The search focuses on SharePoint related sites and blogs. Gavin Joyce, the man behind DotNetKicks.com, has created a .NET Search Engine using Google Co-op. Gavin invites everyone to contribute with .NET releated sites that should be in the search scope.

Microsoft has released Windows Desktop Search 3.0 RTW and it’s available for download here (XP x86, other versions are available at Microsoft Download Center). I have been using the beta 2 extensively since the release, and the betas before that. It’s a great desktop search application and integrates incredibly nice with the upcoming Office 2007. Finding e-mails in Outlook 2007, documents on your harddrive or captured images in OneNote 2007 is really easy and fast. Give it a try!

Both Google and Microsoft have released custom searches which allows you to create your own specialized searches. Microsoft call it Windows Live Search Macros and Google Google Co-Op. They are basically the same and allows you to create search engines that are specialized for a certain interests, sites or set of keywords. Microsoft Search Macros is the easiest one to start with and with a few simple clicks and forms you are done. Before saving a macro you have to have a valid Windows Live account and then create a Creator ID, which will identify your search macros. For example I have registered wictorwilen as a creator id and my macros will appear under http://search.live.com/macros/wictorwilen/. You have the ability to share your searches or keep them for yourself.

Yesterday I sat at home using my XP Media Center and decided to check out the Windows Live Gallery if ther were any new interesting Writer Plugins. I fired up Internet Explorer and browsed to the gallery via the link from one of my earlier posts to my Acronyms Plugin. I ended up in an error page that said that the request could not be handled, pleas try again in five minutes. The page was in swedish and provided a link to the Gallery start page, which also was in swedish and there were no links to the Writer Plugins. To bad for people in sweden! But, it all worked fine on my laptop a few hours ago and my first guess, which was right, was that Internet Explorer was defaulting to the Swedish language (found under Internet Options - Languages), and my laptop used English (United States).