Missed a chance to meet Adam Curry

At my current employer today in NYC, Adam Curry, former MTV VJ and Podfather, was giving a presentation on podcasting through his Podshow company.

This was very exciting yesterday when I heard about it because it was open for anyone to attend and I had every intention of going.

Alas, I will never meet Mr. Curry. My development team required me to fulfill my duties as app architect on the project I am running, and I missed the presentation.

Adam if you ever read this, thanks for the show, I really enjoy the podcasts.

PDC 05 - Webcast Feeback - Live!

11:30-11:58 AM
Watching the PDC 05 Webcast right now; and Bill hasn’t said anything yet, its all historical recap.

The webcast blocked out the recruiting video, with this message:
“Due to the proprietary nature of the content being broadcast we must temporarily suspend the audio and video portion of this telecast. Normal program will resume in a few moments”.

Lame.

11:59 AM - 12:04 PM
Bill doing more recap, snooze.

It strikes me how crappy the video quality is. Apple’s special event where the iPod nano and the Motorola ROKR iTunes phone Webcast, not live mind you so that may be part of it, but once available is gorgeous in Quicktime  HD (mpeg-4 is the standard).

Anyway, waiting for something to happen…

12:05 PM – 12:09 PM
Audio is still live, but video is freeze-framed. Hopefully it will figure itself out before Bill starts showing demos.

Ah, there is goes, Bill is animated again…

12:10 PM – 12:31 PM
Chris Capposela is now demoing Windows Vista. He took one deep breath before starting to talk.

App Switching
Thumbnails on the taskbar, ok, but not great. New Alt-Tab, again ok, but not great.

I missed something with sideways presented 3D windows, but a co-worker interrupted me.

Quicksearch Seems to work just like Spotlight, I don’t see anything here that is impressive. They have the search box everywhere like in OS X Tiger.

There is some stuff in the new Explorer, like expanding amounts of detail with a slider, which looks like it might be cool.

Sidebar and Gadgets. LOL…This is just like Dashboard and Widgets. You can undock Gadgets from the sidebar and put them on the desktop.

I don’t like mini-apps on the desktop, but some due and I think its largely personal preference. It’s clear the sidebar is very influenced by Dashboard and Widgets, Chris C. makes sure to point out they have nice visuals!

Aux Displays. These little LCDs on the front of laptops can show gadgets, which might be useful.

Games Explorer. Has built-in parental controls, and box shots (this is what it looks like) of the games.

Phishing. Chris attempts a joke about paypal phishing emails, it falls like a rock, not even a chuckle. I hope he doesn’t attempt that again. I have nothing against Chris, first time I have seen or heard of him, he has a tough job, just jokes when you don’t have “it” don’t work. He is also going a bit too fast.

IE 7. Thank goodness, they moved tabs under the address bar. Tabs bar itself is looking blueish. Ah, the first nice moment. The Exposed the tabs you have open inside the browser. This is nice functionality, implementation is a bit plain.

Moved on to printing. They finally fixed dangling headers and footers, which has always been annoying.

RSS. Chris says how nice they are presenting the feeds in IE, it looks just like, I mean near identical to Safari. They even put the filter bar on the right. Geez guys, at least put it on the other side, anyone that has ever cribbed a paper off someone in college knows to move sentences around…

12:32 PM  - 12:54 PM
Audience thought Chris was totally down, an awkward cheering moment ensued, now Chris is doing Office 12.

I feel bad for this guy that he has to know all the Vista stuff and Office 12, why couldn’t they split this up? I am surprised Chris is making it through this, you really gotta give it up for him, I have known people giving BillG demoes, they are almost always sick.

Office 12. Chris is in Excel 12. Menus are gone; they act like big tabs that switch the entire toolbar. This is tough to tell if it’s useful or not, the video is so small

Formatting data now, there is definitely some cool stuff with pre-built styles for formatting data. This has always been tough in Excel, it it’s as easy as the demo, they have done some good work.

Ugh, the scrolling repaint is very jaggy. Don’t know if this is the webcast, but painting just wasn’t smooth. Cool functionality, but where is the attention to detail.

Oh my goodness, I think they have a machine for every demo. Chris is demoing an add-on from some company. I know they mirror the machines back stage just in case the main demo machine fails, so it must be a crazy amount of machines they are using for the keynote.

Word. Live preview of font changes, I think Chris thought this would be a homerun demo, but its not really because the font transition happens to subtlety, you need some transition in place so show the user something is happening. He is doing a lot of stuff that is pretty hard now Word very easy.

New File menu, huge departure from any current notion of a file menu.

Ah, they integrated hidden information removal into the File dialog. This has taken way to long, and you get no points from me sir on this.

Powerpoint. Built-in ability to change text only to graphical diagrams, like cycles, flow-charts, arrows.

Man is this annoying; I can hear music over the feed from somewhere. Clearly not part of the demo and it’s very faint in the background. When there was silence earlier, I could hear ESPN radio in the background.

SharePoint. Next version has a recycle bin. How timely, I was in a meeting where my company was discussing backup and restore strategies for Sharepoint, including writing our own code and tables in the DB, or buying a 3rd party tool. They can’t ship this feature fast enough.

Outlook. This is yet another new machine (YANM). Ah how I miss Outlook (I hate Lotus Notes). Tasks are in the main UI now, as is a small calendar. They achieved this by collapsing the folder bar.

Ah, the finally got preview in the messages for attachments. This seems like a potential security nightmare, just knee-jerk reaction based on past history.

Outlook gets RSS. MS just killed RSS readers for anyone using Outlook. Uses the same store as IE 7 for RSS, as expected.

Search looks just like it does in Apple Mail with Spotligh, but it’s across all of Outlook, including Tasks and anything else.

Outlook has SharePoint integration, which includes using the document libraries offline.

Ugh, seriously Moby – Beautiful is playing in the background. Mute WMP, no music and Webacst, unmute, you hear the show and music. Guy running the Webcast should be shot.

12:54 PM – 12:59 PM
BillG is back on stage, recapping again. There is just no energy in this presentation now.

Damn, co-worker wants my attention. Now seems like a good time, Bill is building up to workflow in the server, but I might have time.

1:00 PM – 1:19 PM
I am back online. Jim Alchin is one stage; he is telling the audience that they are getting a pre-Beta 2 build of Vista.

There was some proprietary content, so I picked a good time to answer a question! Jim also demoed what may have been Windows 1.0, so nostalgia is a good thing.

Jim I have always enjoyed listening to his presentations before, his keynote at PDC 03 was very entertaining, particularly with Don Box and Chris Anderson.

But so far, Jim is not very entertaining. It sounds like he is building up to a demo, but geez, we have all heard this before. Maybe this is just me, but I want the delta from PDC 03 to 05. A lot of this keynote seems like PDC 03 redux. I guess that is unfortunately where we are.

Ah, Jim said they are highlighting the changes since PDC 03 somewhere, too bad I am not there.

Jim said there are hundreds of new features in Vista, he can only talk about a few. Stop talking, DEMO DEMO!!!

1:20 PM – 2:02 PM
Reboot Manager. Jim mentions this to reduce reboots from config changes. Very nice.
Transactional NTFS. About time.
Protected Users. Standard normal user, yes, they he is going to demo!!!

LOL. Jim asked if anyone has a machine that gets slower over time? Some chuckles from the audience, everyone knows Windows decays over time. Commonly held rule is that 6 months is the half-life of a Windows install. They are trying to do something about it.

Superfetch. Jim shows what XP is like today. Everyone knows that XP on cold boot load time sucks, but its pretty good after a cold boot.

Jim now turns on superfetch. Shows a monitor that is loading up memory with all the applications you typically use. Everything is fast. Jim has to ask for a clap, because superfetch is faster, but not ridiculously faster.

This is something; Jim plugs a USB memory stick into the box. The virtual memory manager just uses the USB stick as main memory. Impressive, though not sure how USB sticks perform relative to main memory, latency has to be bad. Need to see more info.

Sandbox. Jim is demoing sandbox mode for IE. This is truly impressive, caveat always on if it really works. Even a standard user can break themselves with holes in IE, just as they can on OS X. Sandbox mode for IE, or any app, prevents that. This might be the second killer feature for me, behind transactional NTFS.

Presentation layer. Jim is introducing Atlas, MS’s Ajax dev environment. Atlas works with any modern browser, extension to ASP.NET 2.0

Jim claims the Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) is well ahead of what anyone has, breaking it down to the dev framework and the engine.

WPF/E. Windows Presentation Foundation for Everywhere. A subset of WPF on Vista. Instead of C#, dev is in JavaScript.

Darryn Diekon came out to do a demo based on work they have been doing with NetFlix. This should be interesting. App that runs on a PC, Tablet, Media Center, and a phone.

If they are all running some flavor of Windows, not so impressive. Netflix catalog browsing app on Vista, very similar to the Amazon catalog browser they did for PDC 03. They obviously couldn’t show that again, so they came up with this. Again, maybe it’s the Webcast, but the animation ends choppy, I think its not the Webcast because most of the time it’s smooth.

Damn, connectivity problems again. I lost everything for 20 seconds. Darryn is demoing the Netflix browser on Media Center Edition. Movie previews in the app are a bit sketchy, slow to start.

Cell phone itself looks cool. Its over a $1,000 phone. But Jim has a special deal, $149 for first comers at the PDC. That’s sick, and its totally like an infomercial, and he knows it, one of the few genuine laughs during the show.

Darryn shills for Resonate, the app developer that they got the browser done in 1 month with 3 devs and a graphics designer. Geez guy, we all know those people didn’t sleep the whole month....lol!

LINQ. Language Integrated Query for searching across XML, relational, or other stores.

Windows “InfoCards”. Something about federated identity, like Hailstorm, but totally different this time.

This is getting very long, I am not sure if it gone over the time, but I am tired even thinking about the new information.

P2P. Can’t remember what they called this feature, but you can connect to other machines on your local subnet and share documents, joint edit, and replicate the changes back to the original machine. Very cool, but as Jim says the experience isn’t done and it shows. I wonder if this is stuff from the Groove acquisition.

DON BOX! Don is such a presence the feed crapped out again for a few seconds. I love Don’s presentations. Here comes Ander’s Heijsberg, father of C#. He is talking about LINQ.

You can query any IEnumerable derived object, like arrays. This looks powerful, but the syntax is looking very similar to T-SQL. Same where and order by clauses.

2:03 PM – 2:27 PM
We get automatic object mapping to the database with LINQ being the query language. This is very powerful, bridging data and objects in a seemingly elegant way. This is tough to see though as the Webcast window doesn’t allow me to see the code.

You can join a table and an in memory object together. This is great stuff.

XLINQ is next. I really don’t know what the standards compliance aspect to any of this is if any.

Chris Anderson is now onstage, Don is talking through the Indigo stuff and the universal contract.

OMG, this presentation is so long, 2:47 so far since I started a few minutes before 11:30 AM.

Don is going crazy fast, you really can’t follow; he obviously knows this backwards and forwards.

Don and Chris so how to connect the browser to indigo services using AJAX. Nice, but the details are lost now because I can’t see any code.

ScottGu is on stage now to flog Atlas. Can’t see code, *sigh*. Scott is going to connect a better looking UI to the indigo service, lots of typing by Chris. Chris types very fast. The client side of this is very nice too.

2:28 PM – 3:22 PM
Wow, drag and drop client side and pretty rich presentation. And they add in the MSN Virtual Earth control.

LOL...they just brought up a Mac to demo cross-platform browsing with Atlas. They run the same demo on Safari, it works perfectly, no code change. Best part of the demo! This would seem to mean ASP.NET 2.0 detects the browser and makes any changes to the browser code as needed. Very intriguing.

The Avalon LapClient looks decent, at least the built-in controls look decent. They added some 3D in it, just goofy.

Jim Alchin just came back on stage. He is teasing a sample app, they are going to demo a sample app that demoes the platform. Hillel Cooperman is doing the demo. He did the first Longhorn UI demo at PDC 03.

Showing Microsoft Max. It’s a photo blogging app, with some nice image rearrange stuff. The smallest thumbnail view has to much white in it, but again tough over the webcast. Slider based zooming, looks very similar iPhoto resizing.

Oops! A co-worked pulled me away for a few minutes and the show is over. Man was that a long one. Some good stuff in there and curious what the other opinions are. Have to hit RSS Bandit!

WoW's Impact

The NY Times has an article up on the impact of World of WarCraft to the gaming community at large. Here is a quote from the article:

"If you're only playing WOW and you're paying every single month, what does that mean for all of the other Internet games out there that are trying to get your $10 or $12 or $15 a month?" Mr. Green said. "WOW is now the 800-pound gorilla in the room. I think it also applies to the single-player games. If some kid is paying $15 a month on top of the initial $50 investment and is devoting so many hours a week to it, are they really going to go out and buy the next Need for Speed or whatever? There is a real fear that this game, with its incredible time investment, will really cut into game-buying across the industry."

I can tell you this is exactly what has happened to me, but I am not any kid. I have bought zero games for either the computer or Xbox since WoW came out. I would have bought probably 1 a quarter before WoW came out. WoW then is actually saving me money over my normal gaming purchases.

I have bought exactly 3 PSP games this year, Lumines, Ridge Racer, and Coded Arms,  and they have all been disappointments, except maybe Ridge Racer, I would call that acceptable. I got the PSP to play on the train while going to work, but the games are just retreads of existing stuff, nothing with good story. I hold out hope for Madden 2006 when it drops on the 20th.  If I could get an Internet connection to my laptop on the train, I would eBay the PSP and play WoW on the train. It would be tough, you really need a mouse, but I would make due.

I don’t see stopping either. I have only one character, and I have only played for one faction in the game. I have so much I can do with other characters, and I can’t wait to see what comes out next.

For Mac owners, WoW is really the only MMO in town, and as a Mac WoW player, I will continue to reward Blizzard for putting the Mac OS X and Windows on equal footing. Patches come out on the same day and have all the same features. I have to believe this has some affect on the success of the game. Don’t misunderstand, this game would be extremely successful without Mac owners, but since Mac WoW players are a very captive audience, and they have both Mac and PC friends, they lobby to get as many people as they know to keep WoW, their MMO, viable. WoW was the deal maker that allowed me to dump my PC and get a Mac. From the beta, I knew I would be playing this for a long time, so I didn’t need a PC around to play games; WoW is the only one I need.

Rx: Subversion

Let this serve as a reminder to all developers out there, source control is your friend.

I am working on my first Mac OS X development project, and I am the only dev on this, so I think I get rolling without figuring out the whole source control system.

A month later, and I have made pretty good progress learning the frameworks, Objective-C, and Xcode 2.1. I have been doing things the way I am used to in .NET and MS C++, but I just started wrapping my head around Cocoa Bindings, so I copy the code into a backup folder and proceed to start ripping things up to get Cocoa Bindings in the code.

I chop maybe a hundred lines of code out of my app using Cocoa Bindings, so I am pushing hard to do as much as possible using bindings, but then I break something that I SWORE was working with bindings, and I can’t figure out what it is.

I “restore” my backup copy and start adding stuff back in, which goes much faster because I know what settings to hit, but the thing I thought was working, having MyDocument class observe the NSArrayController for the keypath “selection.self” isn’t working. No exception, just nothing happens. I setup the observer in init, actually, maybe that is my problem. Have to try that on the way home. But if I had used source control, I would have had a log of my changes, probably, and I could have seen where things went off the rails.

I think I better get the Subversion stuff installed, find a hosting provider, and configured ASAP. Then maybe I can use Eric’s Subversion Cheat Sheet.

Windows Rage

Windows XP SP2 multiple monitor support is ruined by one egregious bug. Anyone using multiple monitors, one of them being a laptop, and extending the desktop onto the second monitor knows what I am talking about.

How can it be OK for all my icons to get scrunched together from the laptop display to the secondary display? How can this feature, its got to be one of the most common scenarios, make it out of QA without getting fixed? This is attention to detail stuff guys, it shouldn’t make it 4 years before this gets patched.

I feel Windows Rage. It’s when I encounter something so bone-headed in Windows I just want to stick a pencil in my LCD.

Spotlight vs. Desktop Search on Windows

When people compare OS X 10.4 Tiger to Windows XP, the conversation always heads to desktop search in Spotlight vs. 3rd party solutions on XP.

The 3rd party solutions that I have used on XP are: Google Desktop and MSN Toolbar with Desktop Search.

Both have the same fundamental flaw which Spotlight doesn’t share: there is a delay between file creation and the engines indexing the content. The Windows partisans will say it doesn’t matter that any of the desktop search tools for their platform have a delay, you won’t notice it.

But I noticed today in a few instances, and I sure wish that something on Windows had the inline indexing that Spotlight has.

First case, the size of my mailbox in Notes was starting to creep up, so I wanted to delete a whole bunch of crap. I used Google Desktop to find stuff I wanted to delete, and then I had to correlate that in Notes. Not too bad, but not as tight as Spotlight and Mail.app. I clean out this stuff, and then I went back into Google Desktop to see if I had missed any, and the index hadn’t updated, which struck me as wrong because I am used to Spotlight.

The next one was worse. I was working on a spreadsheet in Excel. I had received the original copy in email, so when I opened it, it was opened from one of the Notes download caches. I have no idea where that is. I didn’t realize this at the time, but when I did a Save As to rename it, I ended up saving the spreadsheet in the download location. When I closed the file and then went to email it to someone, I was confused that it wasn’t on my desktop and was fearful that I actually hadn’t saved. So I think Google Desktop will solve this problem, I really don’t care where the file is, only it didn’t because the index wasn’t updated. This is when I got angry and the Inner Exception was raised to blog this.

If desktop search on Vistows (I am auditioning Windows Vista nicknames) doesn’t index files when the file operations happen, it will suck and there will be no difference from what the 3rd party desktop searches provide now.

Google Talk is a mixed bag

Google Talk is a mixed bag, and not much to get hyped up over.

Things I like:

• Clean UI, not all the clutter of MSN Messenger


• Interop with iChat on Tiger through Jabber. Tried this last night, worked great.


• No Ads. I hate MSN because of this.


• Chat windows and the main friends window “snap” together when you move them close enough to each other. Then if you move the main friends window, it moves everything attached to it. Very nice.


• When you are typing a long message in chat, the textbox for you to type automatically gets bigger so you can see your whole message. Sweet.

Things I might like:

• The Talking. Don’t have anybody to try this with at work, no mic. Since no Google Talk for OS X yet, no testing this out for me. Docs say it should work through firewalls and NAT, so it sounds promising.

Things I don’t like:

• No graphical emoticons. You have got to be kidding me, how can you release without these.


• Tray Icon is plain. Icon looks almost exactly like the iChat menu bar icon. But this is XP, not the OS X menu bar, and you need color to standout from the other baubles in the tray.


• Can’t control the fonts in chat. I like seeing different colors for people chatting so I can at a glance see who sent the last message. This isn’t hard.


• It’s a Beta. Do these people ever release anything?

Random Windows XP Complaint:

• I wish there were shadows under non-maximized windows, like in OS X. Google Talk makes this so obvious because they are using a, possibly, 1 pixel border around all their windows. All the overlapping windows just jumble together.

iMac G5 Recall

Apple has issued a voluntary recall, iMac G5 Repair Extension Program for Video and Power Issues.

I may have already been bitten by this particular problem, but I can’t be sure. Shortly after I moved back to the East Coast in February 2005, I lost power to the house and the iMac of course was unceremoniously shutdown.

It was never right after that, scrambled video, and eventually it just wouldn’t boot. Two self-service repairs later, one for the power module, the other for the motherboard, and I was back in business. The self-service stuff on the iMac G5 was brilliant, once I walked through their troubleshooting wizard on the web. Apple sent me parts, backed by a credit card of course. All I had to do was install the new parts and return the old ones. I also secured the first personal UPS I have owned in a long time to prevent the power outage thing from happening again.

But the iMac G5 fan noise has changed, it is louder or maybe just higher-pitched now, and I always wonder if I messed something up with my open-backplane surgery. I think I might take this repair opportunity to have an Apple Tech put the iMac right, if they will of course. Not that there is anything truly wrong, it runs like a champ and I have “stressed tested” it with 6 hour marathon World of WarCraft sessions.

Is this recall a negative thing? Yes, there is a problem with the original parts Apple used in the iMac G5. However, we all know this happens with any number of PC manufacturers, and instead of manufacturers coming clean and saying they are going to take care of this for you; they make their customers work, and usually real hard, before repairs are authorized, even on warranty equipment. This has happened to me so many times, it’s why I ended up just building my own PCs from scratch because the manufacturers weren’t giving me anything I couldn’t do myself.

Transactional NTFS

Just found the Transactional NTFS (TxF) blog over on MSDN.

This is really good stuff, and something I have wanted in a filesytem for a really long time.

TxF might be the only feature in Longhorn (sorry, I think the name Windows Vista sucks) that I am actually excited about.

If HFS+ isn’t made transactional in OS X 10.5 Leopard, I will consider it a crime.

This is also the first post I am creating using the Blogger for Word that my buddies over at my former company developed for Google.

This work was started while I was there, and I tried to pitch doing something similar for Word for Mac or Pages, but I had no takers.

Word for Mac saves what Word for Windows can't

This is a completely true story that happened to me yesterday. One of my co-workers is writing a spec for the project I am running. She of course is using MS Word for Windows. We have been working on this document for close to a month and she was putting the final formatting touches on the document, adding polish. And then suddenly Word 2003 for Windows crashes on her. She hadn't saved in 75 minutes. Word tries to open its AutoRecover version of the document and nicely locks up instantly. She calls me over to asses the situation. She's already hit all the usual troubleshooting steps, so we copy the AutoRecovered document to a USB keychain planning on trying to open it on my laptop. 10 thought ballon spasms latter XP shows me what's on the USB keychain, and I try to open the document in Word. Same thing, it's completely hosed. So I bring out my personal PowerBook and plug in the USB keychain. Ah, the USB drive just appears on my Desktop, no seizure for this OS trying to figure out what this simple device is I just plugged in. I then attempt to open the corrupt to WinWord document in Word 2004 for Mac. It opens! It's obvious something is wrong with the formatting in the doc, since nearly all table headers have a numbered outline style applied to them. But Word for Mac doesn't barf. No no no, I save the document back to the USB keychain drive as a new file. I bring the USB keychain back over to WinWord, and now it can open the document because MacWord has created a document it can use! This version of the document is now the version of record and what will get delivered to the development team. Mac saved my business lost content and time!