Neowin reports that participants in the Windows Server 2008 are being invited to participate in the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 beta. Emails are being sent out telling testers in the Server beta to go to Connect and fill out a survey within that beta to be eligible for the Vista SP1 beta. Meanwhile, the rest of us sit and pout (or download leaked versions from file sharing networks).
Windows Live Spaces added two new photo capabilities. You can now upload images at higher resolutions than before, and even click to optimize photos for printing. The printing comes in handy due to the second feature, Snapfish integration. The feature lets you send off your uploaded photos to Snapfish in order to get prints of your photos.
(via LiveSide)
A terrible tragedy has befallen the Microsoft campus. Some fiend has absconded with the Muffin truck! According to MMTyler, someone robbed the Muffin Man and stole his Muffin Truck, leaving Microsoft with no muffins, no muffins at all. And on someone’s birthday! How terribly terrible.
(via Raymond Chen)
Microsofties were heard singing:
Do you know the Muffin Man?
The Muffin Man,
The Muffin Man.
Do you know the Muffin Man,
Did you rob him?
You son of a bitch!
Give me back my muffins!
One of Raymond’s commenters had the best title for this story:
Muffinless Microsofties Mourn Muffin Malarkey
Apple made a number of big announcements today, including lowerng the price of the iPhone and releasing a new iPod. How’d they do?
Scores on a scale from 1-10:
Ringtones: Apple announced that it will cost you 99 cents extra to get music ringtones on your iPhone, on top of what you paid for the song (only songs from iTunes, not your own music, will work). Besides the $2 total, and the limited inventory, users can just hack their iPhone with little effort to do the same thing. Underwhelming, not effortless (you have to edit the ringtone yourself, and pay for each edit), and buyers will avoid this one like the plague.
Grade: 2
iPod Shuffle: New colors, looks nice, same low price. It’s a good product for what you get, though other companies have stronger cheapo players these days. Nothing terrible here.
Grade: 6
iPod Nano: New Nano is short, fat, plays video and games, has CoverFlow (with poor performance). The pricing is great, but the player is too damn small. The screen, while improved, is too tiny for video, making the video feature a waste. The old iPod screen was tough for video; this is going to be impossible. The price is great, though, and the shape is kind of stupid. Gets good points for being cheap, lots of storage, and colorful, but if you want video, the grade is a 4.
Grade: 8
iPod Classic: The old iPod is now “Classic”. It’s also thinner and with a lot more storage. The 80-gig is a mere $250 and the new 160-gig is $350. The Zune can’t compete with those numbers and these features, not with Microsoft’s failure to deliver on wifi promises. Barring an 80-gig Zune at $250 with better wifi features, Microsoft could be toast.
Apple does not have a huge hole in its lineup. As you’ll see there are no iPods between 16 gigs and 80 gigs, and certainly no 30-gig cheaper than $250. Apple should have kept making the 30-gig for $200. That’s a mistake. The Classic is clearly unpopular (Nano is the top seller), and Apple is overloading it with space. Don’t be surprised if they find a way to retire the model entirely in a year. Nothing really new, but holy crap the storage space!
Grade: 9
iPod Touch: New iPod, basically a thinner iPhone with no call phone features. It has wifi, internet, YouTube, giant touch screen. For $300 (8 gigs) and $400 (16 gigs), this is the new top iPod (forget the Classic, k?), It’s a wonderful thing, though not cheap enough to not just pay a little extra for an iPhone. As usual, the iPod is full of great features, but the price begs questions. Still, if you wanted an iPhone, here’s a cheaper way to do it.
Compared to a real PDA, it’s not perfect. Still, it is the slickest touchscreen device on the market, full of fun stuff, and it works better as an iPod than an iPhone. It’s a great product, not perfect, but really, really good. So tempting, I might buy it (and I’ve never bought an iPod).
Grade: 8
iPhone: Apple dropped the price by $200 and killed off the 4-gigger. An 8-gig iPhone is now $400, $100 more than a similar iPod Touch, but (for the most part ) still stuck with an awful AT&T contract. It’s cheap enough to not be absurd, and while the price drop should annoy the biggest Apple fans, it makes the hottest phone of the year more available.
Grade: 9
Wireless iTunes Store: This is useful, and would be nothing special, but Microsoft has been dragging their feet on this for a year. Microsoft’s failure to ship this makes Apple look amazing, so this gets a high grade.
Grade: 7
Starbucks: Seriously, they didn’t know that a ten-minute commercial for Starbucks would bore the hell out of everyone? And now the iPhone will annoy you and say, “Hey, a Starbucks!” every time you pass one? If you can’t turn this “feature” off, it’s a reason not to buy.
Grade: 3
Overall? Apple did great, not spectacular. Sales should be flat, which is great, considering the high expectations from previous years, but it takes really good products to merely stay flat at this point. The main thing is that Apple proved today that it exists in a seperate universe from its competitors, and that their products really don’t measure up.
Zune 2 better be better than we’re hearing, or it shouldn’t be released at all.
Gizmodo ran this image showing what a source tells them is the next version of the Zune, as well as the first version of the Flash memory-based Zune (like the iPod Nano). The new iPods supposedly coming out in an hour, it’s good to see what’s next. Looks like the big Zune will have 80 gigabytes of storage, while the Flash Zune will be offered in 4- and 8-gig versions.
Zune Insider reports that the Zune is getting a $50 price cut off suggested retail price, dropping it to $199. Coincidence that the cut is coming as Apple is announcing new product, and as Microsoft is prepping a new version? Of course not!
Of course, Amazon has it for even less, just $181.
A participant in the Google Summer of Code (a software development competition run by Google) created a set of widgets that can be used to create Linux applications with an interface similar to that of Microsoft’s Office 2007, complete with the famous Ribbon. Microsoft allows developers to use the Ribbon, and they don’t seem to have banned it for Linux, so long as you don’t clone an Office 2007 app specifically, this should be fine to use.
Microsoft has settled its patent dispute with Eolas, ending eight years of litigation. The dispute was over the patent that makes Eolas such a successful patent troll, one for invoking external applications in a web browser, one that Eolas won once over Microsoft with a $521 million judgement that was never fulfilled.
Microsoft altered Internet Explorer to avoid Eolas’ patent (which is why you have to click to activate an ActiveX) control, plus Microsoft may have found a way to beat Eolas back in May of this year. According to Wikipedia, Microsoft was awarded a patent with almost the same wording as Eolas’, prompting the Patent Office to open arguments that Microsoft owned Eolas’ patent.
The circumstances of the case almost guarantee Microsoft paid less to settle this than the $521 million 2003 judgement. I would not be surprised if Eolas, eager to avoid losing its big patent, settled for considerably less. Microsoft will only say it paid $60-72 a share, but no one knows how many shares exist.
For many Photoshop users, there is a horrible bug in Adobe Photoshop that causes the program to stop importing from the clipboard. You’ll be using the software for hours or even days without a problem, and all of a sudden you won’t be able to copy and paste anything into it at all, with your only option to close and re-open Photoshop.
Thank god there is a solution, because this has been driving me nuts! I upgraded to Photoshop CS3 over the weekend, and the bug is ten times worse on CS3 under Vista than ever before.
The solution, found in a few user forums, is in the AlwaysImportClipbd_ON.reg file, contained on your Photoshop/CS install disk. Go to \Photoshop CS3\Goodies\Optional Plug-Ins\Photoshop Only\Optional Extensions or the equivelant folder on your disk, and run that file.
If you don’t have the file, don’t fret! It’s a simple registry file, and that means you can create it yourself right now without the install disk. Open Notepad and type:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Photoshop\10.0]
“AlwaysImportClipboard”=dword:00000001
Version 10.0 is Photoshop CS3. If you have CS2, use 9.0; for CS, 8.0; and for Photoshop 7, 7.0. Save the file as AlwaysImportClipbd_ON.reg, then double-click on it. That’s it!
Photoshop has an internal clipboard, so when you switch applications, it asks the Windows Clipboard if it has anything new to offer. Sometimes, Photoshop forgets to ask, and it needs to be closed before it starts acting normal again, but this fix forces it to ask all the time. This fix should work on all versions of Photoshop, from 7 through CS3, as far as I know.
Happy? I sure am!
Tim Cowley (designer of Windows Vista screen savers) and Stephen Coy (engineer for Office) teamed up to release a package of “unofficial” visualizations for Windows Media Player, based on the Vista screen savers. Psychedelia, this viz pack for WMP, is available for download after a year delay in certification testing* at WMPlugins.com.
Long Zheng lists the different visualization families within the pack:
- Album Art 3D - 3D cubes with the album art of the song you’re currently playing
- Bubbles - inspired by the Bubbles Vista screensavers also featuring the album art
- Distortion - distorts the album art in a 3D waveform
- Hypnobloom - hypnotic checkered purple rings
- Ribbons - inspired by the Mystify and Ribbons Vista screensavers (as seen above)
- Gigertron 3D - 3D layered visualizer bars
- up cuber - a pigment arrangement of 3D hexagon cubes
The album art-based visualizations seem to have trouble picking up the album art of the currently playing song, but either way this visualization pack is a must-have for and Windows Media Player user. It looks great, and is well worth the two seconds to download and install. They work in Windows XP and Vista, so long as you have WMP.
* - If you ever wonder why Microsoft products are never “cool”, this is why. A year for certification? Of an unofficial viz pack? By two Microsofties? What hope do the rest of us have of making cool stuff? Microsoft needs to fire the certification team and hire a new team under the “more is more” motto.
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