Late last week, I decided to begin the process of moving the forums from the aeroxp domain to the winjade domain, finalizing a transition that was planned before the turn of the year. That said, the original plan didn’t play out as intended, which is why I’m writing this today.
For now, the board is still frozen in order to prevent further writes (which would necessitate yet another board database migration, which none of us can do at the moment due to the burden of time). I’m going to be in New York over the next two days covering product announcements and developing more content, so there will not be any updates to the board before Thursday at the earliest. That said, you can take a look to your right to see other sites which are definitely worth your time during this outage. Personally, I would like to recommend taking a quick look at UrbanTops, a planned nonprofit venture between Michael Reyes of HardwareGeeks as well as myself. There isn’t much there, but you can get a feel for some of our upcoming plans.
We’re all looking forward to seeing you again! We anticipate being back online, forums and all, by this Saturday, and I look forward to getting back to bringing more of the videos you all know and love now that time has become an ample asset.
Update: The board has successfully been upgraded. We’ll be working out some minor kinks here and there before opening it up later today (Sunday). Update 2: and we’re back! Barring some user-uploaded files which are currently being migrated, the board is now up and running.
-Bryant, on behalf of Sam, Stan, Rob, and the rest of the winJade staff
Up until now, Bryant’s life has been dominated by more scholarly matters. Now that time exists, things should be returning to a manageable pace.
How many different consumer online platforms does Microsoft have right now?
Bing
MSN
Windows Live
XBOX Live
Zune Marketplace
That’s just a quick braindump; there are probably more, but for the purposes of my quick bout with insanity, this should suffice. The way I see it, Microsoft is rapidly losing branding focus, and while this doesn’t sound like something that matters in this age of Web 2.name-it-whatever, it is an issue for Microsoft, and it extends beyond the world of Microsoft’s online properties.
Jump to see why I think this is becoming a problem. Yeah, it’s long, but this is one of the few times when an overly long post is justified.
What’s the best way to tell the whole world that your competitors are actually gaining on you against the founding premise of your business? Start advertising that one service you’ve never had to advertise. Google did just that during Super Bowl XLIV, showing off not a phone nor even a new service, but merely an ad promoting Google Search.
Since Bing and Yahoo are effectively on the same side and Bing has been gaining marketshare against Google, this is an obvious sign that Google actually feels threatened by Bing.
Competition is good. Windows 7 arose out of competitive need, and we might now see two amazing search platforms arise out of a heated Google v. Bing war. I’m looking forward to it.
Disclaimer: I own shares in Advanced Micro Devices. That said, all workhorse laptops in my possession are quite satisfactorily running NVIDIA GPUs and Intel CPUs. There’s no favoritism being shown here towards any company whatsoever.
NVIDIA confirmed last night their intention to launch their Fermi-based GF100 graphics cards during Q1 2010 now that delays in the Fermi architecture have been settled. The board and others in the Fermi lineup will include DirectX 11 support while adding other features such as live raytracing to the mix.
The demo box was running the UNiGiNE benchmark, and while I didn’t have time to run through that benchmark last night, I will have time to run through it after this morning’s NVIDIA press conference in just under three hours.
ASUS (pronounced ah-soos, apparently) demonstrated four laptops at their press conference yesterday. Announced were
the ASUS NX90 Bang&Olufsen concept (pictured).
a new line of EeePCs designed by Karim Rashid.
ASUS’ latest gaming laptop, the G73. It wasn’t branded as a Ferrari or Lamborghini this time.
the U Series Bamboo Collection.
All of them had an unusual focus on aesthetics, with each focusing on some theme related to the target market. The G73 took on a stealth look, while the U Series focused on Bamboo (the explanation was that Bamboo grows back quickly, though the laptop isn’t exactly green in any other sense). The Karim Rashid EeePC and the Bang & Olufsen laptops are both designed for the sake of design. I’m not entirely certain how usable the dual trackpad design of the B&O concept is, but it does make for a clean design.
As for specs, the G73 and the NX90 are top-tier, with both allowing for the use of quad-core Core i7 processors. The G73 uses AMD’s Radeon 5870 for the GPU, while the Bang & Olufsen concept focuses on nvidia’s wares by using the GeForce GT 335M. The Bamboo collection can run with either Core i7 or Core i5 processors, while the EeePC sticks to the latest generation Intel Atom.
Videos of the NX90, the EeePCs, and the U Series are after the break. I’m still working on the G73.
After the Chevy Volt and OnStar mobile app demonstration by the guys of GM, I got some quick time with Walt Dorfstatter, president of GM’s remote assistance subsidiary OnStar. There were only three questions I had for Walt since the Chevy Volt, no matter how spectacular a vehicle it has shown itself to be thus far, isn’t actually a part of what winJade’s focus. The questions focused on possible future platforms for the app (Windows Mobile was not mentioned while the iPhone was), the inspiration for creating a mobile app for the sake of controlling OnStar in the first place. and whether applications such as these could boost subscriptions.
Starting today, I’ll be at the Consumer Electronics show looking for new Microsoft-related happenings. This means that I’ll be skipping a lot of the new TV-related news (3D TV, basically) and most other home entertainment bits. Most of what I catch will either be with computers or Microsoft-based gadgetry.
My thanks goes, as noted before, to Microsoft for providing the licenses to give away. Best of luck to you all!
Last Update: the final drawing has been completed. Congratulations to @wizardcm for winning the last license! I’ll strive to find more to give away from CES.
Windows 7 launched on October 22nd to mass fanfare, and a good friend of mine at the event thought it would be fantastic to spread the Windows 7 spirit. In addition to assisting with Mary Jo’s Windows 7 afterparty in NYC (giveaway video here), he passed a few licenses my way to give away on winJade, so here it goes.
I’ve got three Windows 7 Ultimate licenses to give away (pictured above), and they’ll be given away as follows:
The first on Christmas Day (25th). @yertosaurus nabbed this one!
The second on December 28. @migue333 won this license!
The last on December 31. @wizardcm got this last license!
If you want one, dive in to find out what you need to do. It’s pretty simple.
As the person who headed the Office user experience teams and the person who is now running the Windows experience teams in Microsoft, Julie drove the idea for the Ribbon user interface in Office 2007 and led the conceptualization and development efforts behind all of the new user interface elements in Windows 7. At PDC, I had a chance to speak with her about her efforts within the Windows and Office teams. During this interview, we discussed:
the inspiration and need for a new interface for Office
the circumstances which led to the superbar and the multi-touch-oriented user interface in Windows 7
how the PDC laptops came into existence
the decision to use various new technologies such as gaze tracking, heat maps, among others.
Highlights:
Office 2007’s Ribbon: “A lot of the things they would ask for would already be in [Office], and so we felt we could come up with a better way to expose capabilities that were in Office and help people create better, more powerful documents”
The Windows 7 superbar, jumplists, etc.: “We wanted to simplify the whole experience and take away the differences between launching applications and switching applications and making it easier to get back to documents you did the day before. That was kinda the inspiration: to put the customer more in control of everything they’re trying to do on their PC”
Multi-touch in Windows 7: “There were a lot of cool things going on both inside Microsoft and outside Microsoft with touch, things like the iPhone which has the touch interface as well as Microsoft Surface, and so we felt that your PC experience could be very much enhanced by having direct manipulation [of objects on the screen], and you’d work much more naturally with it.”
The PDC laptops and how they happened: “We worked together with Acer to spec-out a PC and we kinda had the idea that ‘what would the ultimate developer machine look like?’ and ‘what can we do to put all the things in it that would be the things we want developers to do with Windows?’ So we had location awareness, the touch screen, all of the virtualization capabilities in it, 64 bit, etc.”
The direction of the Windows 7 beta program: “We used a lot of the beta feedback from Vista to help inform the plan for what we were going to do with Windows 7, as well as things on the blogs, the customer research that we did”
How the Office 2007 UI itself was researched: “We always try to apply new technologies to learn about how people use [our software]. We even talked about trying to figure out if we could put electrodes on [people’s heads] and measuring brain waves to see how they responded to one interface over another, but we didn’t get to that point.” (You can catch the Ribbon presentation where the gaze tracking and heat mapping bits were discussed on Jensen Harris’ blog. ~Bryant)
Catch the full video interview with full answers to these topics after the jump.
Update: I made the video public prior to posting this, but within the last ten minutes (as of 6:54 PM GMT-5), something happened to revert the video back to private again. Video has been re-established as public.
Update: Part 2 has been added after the jump. Update 2: added the link to last year’s Sensor Platform interview with Dan Polivy (as noted in part 2). This interview was recorded on Tuesday, November 17, 2009.
As the first of my interviews from PDC, I noticed that Loic Le Muer was quick to familiarize himself with me as a part of the interview. This fact coupled with his persistent praise for the Seesmic devs who worked on Seesmic for Windows have led me to believe that Seesmic might actually be one of the better small software companies in existence.
Loic demonstrated Seesmic for Windows at PDC 2009 during Tuesday’s keynote. The obvious difference between Seesmic for Windows and Seesmic Desktop (the AIR version) is that the Windows client is native and written on top of the .net CLR. The plus sides to this include far better performance figures, a more Windows-integrated UI, and a lower tendency to leak handles (and fill my ram). The only downside to this is that it’s Windows-only… well, until you realize that moving .net code from a Windows native environment to Silverlight is actually not nearly as bad as writing another app from scratch.
My interview with Loic takes a browse through Seesmic for Windows v. Seesmic Desktop. I also decided to run through Silverlight Seesmic with Loic during our quick block of time, and while the Silverlight version still requires some polish before going live, the Windows preview version is solid enough for everyone to take a look.
Both parts of the interview can be found below the read link. Blame YouTube for forcing me to split a 13 minute video. My thanks goes to Andrew Lyle from neowin for manning the camera.
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