Here’s some stuff going on today or recently:
Novell Free To Sue Over Long-Dead WordPerfect
The Supreme Court has ruled to allow Novell to go ahead and sue Microsoft for alleged antitrust infractions involving WordPerfect, which Novell sold 12 years ago. Novell is complaining that Microsoft used its Windows monopoly to depress sales of WordPerfect, resulting in the product dropiing in value from $1.2 billion in 1994 to $170 million in 1996. Novell only owned WordPerfect for two years, and much of the failures of WordPerfect that allowed Microsoft Word to trounce it in the marketplace occured before they bought the product, but the case is apparently strong enough to go trial. We’ll see if it’s strong enough to actually win.
OneCare Gets Marketing Campaign
Microsoft has a new marketing slogan for Windows Live OneCare, its all-in-one security suite. The tagline is, “Don’t Worry, We Took OneCare Of It” and the ads typically featuring some nasty virus it “took OneCare” of. You have to read it a few times before the sentence makes sense, but the ads are cute. I’m pretty sure I saw one of these ads in the Post yesterday.
Flash Coming To Windows Mobile
Microsoft has licensed Adobe Flash for Windows Mobile. Specifically, Adobe Flash Lite will be built into Internet Explorer Mobile in future versions of WinMobile as a plugin, so webpages with Flash should, for the most part, work as intended. That means full YouTube for Windows Mobile users, even as Apple complains that Flash doesn’t work on its devices. Boo hoo. I’d look forward to seeing Flash in Windows Mobile 7, but that’s pure speculation.
Become a Windows Mobile Fan on Facebook
Facebook has a feature that lets you become a fan of entertainers, celebrities or politicians, but apparently you can be a fan of a product as well. You can now become a fan of Windows Mobile and show your love for the platform. I’m in. Just head here while signed in to Facebook and click “Become a Fan”.
Live Spaces Loses 15% Of Visitors
Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft’s once high-flying social network/blogging platform, slipped badly in the last year. It’s still technically the biggest blogging platform around, but it failed to keep up with MySpace and Facebook, its real competitors, losing 15% of its unique visitors in the U.S. in the last 12 months. Live Spaces lost 1.4 million unique visitors, coming half a million of LinkedIn, which rose 271% last year. Guess the buzz on Live Spaces is over, and Microsoft has some work to do to keep the rest from leaving.
Bill Gates on Running A Good Startup
A student at the University of Waterloo stood up and asked a question of Bill Gates during a roundtable breakfast at the University (no, it was not a Q&A session, she just really wanted to ask), wondering how he had the courage to start Microsoft at 17. Gates answer says a lot about how he values his employees, and could be a good lesson for startups.
At 17 I didn’t have much to lose. I promised my parents that I would go back to university if things didn’t pan out. But I did worry about all those people who had spouses and children. They depended on the business succeeding. That’s what worried me at night. So I made sure that I had enough money in the bank to pay everyone’s salary for a year if none of my customers came through. That’s how I got through it. Eventually there came a time, though, when we needed to hire 30 people, and that was a real crisis. I really didn’t want to expand without a financial safety net in place. Ultimately, I compromised and said yes, go ahead and hire. But I want to know immediately when the increased revenues offset the costs of paying everyone a year’s salary … that way I could sleep again.
March 18th, 2008
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Windows Mobile, OneCare, Adobe, Mobile, Bill Gates, Live, Corporate, Security, Law, Windows, Spaces, Word, Applications |
one comment
Microsoft has announced yet another platform will be receiving a plugin to support playback of Silverlight content, this time Silverlight will be on Nokia phones. The Nokia S60 web browser for Symbian OS phones will support Silverlight when the plugin is released later this year. Nokia Series 40 phones and internet tablets will get Silverlight some time after that, and a Windows Mobile version of Silverlight is expected around the same time.
Perhaps this could be how Silverlight truly one-ups Adobe Flash. While Flash is ubiquitous, support for Flash on mobile devices is a mixed bag, ranging from poor to non-existant. If Microsoft can get Silverlight on a lot more phones than Adobe can manage for Flash, that might prove too tempting for web developers to ignore.
March 5th, 2008
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Mobile, Adobe, Silverlight, Windows Mobile, Developers |
no comments
Microsoft has taken off the beta tag, cleaned up the code, and released the final versions of its HD Photo plugin for Adobe Photoshop, ready for you to download for free. Get the Windows (XP and Vista) version here, and the Mac OS X (Tiger & Leopard) version here. Both work on Photoshop CS2 and CS3, and are unsupported but work in some fashion under older versions of Photoshop and Elements.
The old beta expires at the end of the month, and this version is better anyway, so go pick up the final release now.
December 6th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Adobe |
no comments
Microsoft’s Word 2007 has the ability, with a plugin, to save your documents as PDF files. What it can’t do is import PDFs, but Microsoft’s MMEvents blog lists two utilities you can use to take a PDF and bring it into Word as an editable document.
Scansoft’s PDF Converter 4 lets you turn PDFs into fully formatted documents, forms and spreadsheets that look just like the original, retaining formatting and graphics. It even imports into WordPerfect, integrates with Word and Windows, and has a ton of other features for working with PDFs. The software costs $50 for download and requires Windows 2000 or better and works with Word 2000 through 2007.
Able2Doc 4.0 PDF to Word Converter also costs $50 and performs very quick conversions, and it has a free trial. They also have the more versatile Able2Extract PDF Converter 5.0, which can convert PDFs to Word, Excel, Powerpoint, HTML, text and more, for $100.
November 29th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Adobe, Word, Office, Applications |
one comment
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!
September 5th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Adobe, General |
35 comments
Microsoft has released a new version of the HD Photo plugin for Photoshop, one that runs on Mac OS X. If you want to save your photos in the high quality HD Photo (or eventually, JPEG-XR) format, you can now use the plugin in both Windows and the Mac.
The Mac plugin is new, and the Windows XP/Vista plugin has been updated, with a redesigned encoder options dialog that gives you seperate basic or advanced controls, as well as a completely redesigned codec that significantly improves performance on larger images, a fixed tiling option, other bug fixes, and a new setup program. The Mac version is identical to the newer Windows version, and it adds support for HD Photo to Finder, including image thumbnails.
Get the Windows version of the plugin here and the plugin for PPC and Intel Macs here.
August 23rd, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Adobe, Apple, General |
no comments
Wired’s Michael Calore says that Adobe might be working on an office application suite to combat Microsoft Office. Over the last few years, Adobe has cemented itself as an application powerhouse, with creative works applications (Photoshop, Creative Suite, Production Studio) and online creative apps (Flash, Dreamweaver), and the time might be right to challenge the big dog in the application space: Office.
No one has mounted a formidable attack on Microsoft in many years. Currently, the only real competition Microsoft faces are from web-based and open source office applications, while former desktop competitors wilt away. The article says Adobe could use its Adobe Integrated Runtime to create web-based apps that also run when the user is offline, leaping past Google’s limited suite to take on Microsoft.
Right now, Google has the most attention in the online office space, but Google’s applications are limited, don’t look very good, and don’t work offline. Even though Google has a framework for running online applications offline, it hasn’t implemented it in Google Docs yet, so the market is open for Adobe to make a big splash. There’s room for a more mature package in this market, and Adobe could fill it.
Don’t forget something: Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure is coming, and when it does, it may fill that online office void in a unique and innovative. I fully expect it to.
(via Slashdot)
August 16th, 2007
Posted by
Nathan Weinberg |
Live, Adobe, Office, Google, Windows, Applications |
one comment
