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.

Check it out after the break!

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.

That said, if you’re looking for broad CES coverage beyond video interviews and reviews, be sure to watch Neowin’s dedicated CES-related postings.

Enjoy the show!

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.

The interview with Dan Polivy from PDC 2008 can be found here.

For those who don’t know, DreamSpark throws free software at students (after verifying their student-hood, of course). I previously wrote about using DreamSpark to get and use a free OS in place of Vista over here.

Now, keeping the awesomeness of DreamSpark in mind, Expression 3 was only very recently released. A number of threads have popped up on the internet, with the most notable first result for me being this thread on Channel 8. Coupled with requests from other students I personally know as well as faculty from schools near the DC area (thanks for reading, guys!), I figured I’d look into it.

There’s good news, and there’s the news which isn’t exactly bad. I’ll spill the news which isn’t exactly bad first.

There’s no official target date on getting Expression Studio 3 up on DreamSpark, nor will it be available in July, nor is the target timeframe a certainty or guarantee. There; that’s the news which isn’t exactly bad.

The good news: the target timeframe is still before the point when classes start for many of you. The word, as given by a Microsoft spokesperson, is that a “target timeframe would be [the] end of August.”

If you can’t wait ‘til then, go grab Expression Studio 2 from DreamSpark right now. Otherwise, show some patience, be awesome, and grab Expression Studio 3 once it drops for you guys for free in a month. Cheers to dreamers at Channel 8 for holding out, and I’ll have an update for people once a specific date has been settled upon.

This is the final part in a series of two.

Yesterday, I focused on the un-selling points of the new MacBook Pro line as announced during the WWDC keynote. Today, my focus is going to be on Snow Leopard, Apple’s rather depressing tendency to bash Microsoft, and the rather nasty turn-off this all happens to be. Granted, most of Apple’s recent ad campaigns have comprised of “let’s make things up about Windows!” in order to try and gain market share. Microsoft is only avoiding suing Apple because of the potential for the world’s worst Streisand effect, which is depressing given the libelous nature of the ads themselves.

Having said this, it’s no surprise to see this mentality persist throughout this year’s WWDC keynote, so I’ll pick up from yesterday and explain just why Snow Leopard in and of itself is nothing more than hypocrisy.

I won’t even bother to discuss the Mac v. PC non-Ad that opened the WWDC keynote. Instead, I’ll start with

“Even more complexity is present in Windows 7 – the same old tech as Vista. Just another version of Vista.” -Bertrand Serlet, 10:19 AM

So he slams 7 as another version of Vista and follows it (within the same minute) with:

“We come from such a different place. We love Leopard, we’re so proud of it; so we decided to build upon Leopard. We want to build a better Leopard, hence Snow Leopard” -Bertrand Serlet, 10:19 AM

Holy crap, that’s a new time record for admitting to being completely hypocritical! But wait, there’s more!

“Adding Exchange support to Snow Leopard. We’ve got chills. Chills we tell you!” –Bertrant Serlet, 10:20 AM

If the audience in that room had any idea as to who makes Exchange, I’m sure we would have seen many bricks in their chairs.

Bertrand later admits to the three major changes coming to Snow Leopard: refinements to the operating system, a few new technologies here and there, and Exchange support. What are these refinements of which he spoke? Nothing much; just a few under-the-hood changes to Finder and an installation process which is 45% faster and takes up 6GB less space! It sounds remarkable on face value until you realize that they dropped support for PowerPC.

PowerPC is a platform which Apple stopped using only three years ago, and Snow Leopard has already slapped it down to the pits of hell. If Microsoft had discontinued support for an older hardware just like that, there would’ve been a massive uproar, but apparently Apple users will follow along. Add the fact that Windows 7, which can run on hardware Vista couldn’t run, also installs faster than Snow Leopard and Windows Vista as well as the fact that Leopard is less stable than Windows Vista (let’s see how many times you run into that Rainbow Swirly of I-Want-To-Pull-My-Hair-Out compared to a Blue Screen of Death), and we’ll see which platform is the better platform to build off of. Bertrant talks about how bad a platform Windows Vista is, and yet, Leopard is sadly worse.

Let’s get to these so-called “new technologies.” Which new technologies did they add? How about Aero Peek?

“Next up, the Dock: We’ve had a feature that we use to deal with clutter, called Expose, and now we’ve built it into the dock.”

Like the way Aero Peek is built into the amazingly more usable Windows 7 taskbar? It’s funny because their particular implementation is the most minor thing, and yet it somehow warrants inclusion within a keynote. Aero Peek is more functional than Expose and a bigger boost to productivity than Expose all because it allows for full window previews, thus boosting productivity in the office, and yet the best Apple can come up with is just adding Expose to the dock. They have three buttons dedicated to it on the keyboard, which lends one to the idea that the only reason they even attached Expose to the dock was because Microsoft successfully created a more usable taskbar than their dock.

Of course, that’s not all. Apple finally started trying to truly join the x64 club, and this is what we have:

“So first, 64-bit. The obvious reason is to take advantage of a lot of memory. When you run in 64-bit, the memory limit is… 16 billion GB. It’s unlimited.”

First of all, it’s actually over 17 billion, but I won’t pick nits. The point is that Windows has been doing this since the days of XP, and that Vista and 7 have basically mastered the art of 64 bit. Apple has been so late to the game that Adobe actually stuck with Microsoft for a 64 bit implementation of Creative Suite 4. The Windows world has almost completely finished adapting to the 64bit world, and Apple is only just now beginning to arrive.

“All the major system apps run in 64-bit mode in Snow Leopard.”

Wow, it’s not even a complete transition! They only ported the major apps over to 64bit; the minor processes and non-system-essential applications are still stuck in the last decade.

Sure, Snow Leopard isn’t a complete disaster. There is one technology which Apple did well to include, and that’s Grand Central Dispatch. The thing about GCD is that it will allow for programmers to easily create their own multithreaded applications without actually having to worry about the threads, which is a wonderful addition to the OS and is a tool I hope developers use to their advantage to create better applications.

Then there’s OpenCL, which stands for Open Computing Language. It’s essentially a framework that can run code along any processing-capable path, such as CPUs and GPUs. Kudos to Apple for making it open, but it’s not even Apple’s technology anymore. While Apple still holds trademark rights (which they’ll no doubt abuse), the Khronos Group is now the managing force behind OpenCL, so anyone can include it if they fit the bill.

However, that’s basically it in terms of any new technology. In the end, Snow Leopard is a partially-64bit OS comprised of Safari 4 (standalone included), Quicktime 10 (standalone included), Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, Exchange 2007 support, tweaks to Expose and Stacks, performance fixes to the Finder, and an update to the Common Unix Printing System, all while dropping support for Macintoshes more than three years old.

Apple is charging 29 dollars for this? Keeping in mind that the only new technologies are Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, 64bit readiness, and Exchange 2007, it’s time to start picking this price apart for what it is: a rip-off.

Vista Service Pack 1 brought the finalized Server 2008 kernel to Windows Vista. That’s an enterprise-quality near-bulletproof kernel added to consumer versions of Windows for free! In addition to boosting performance just about everywhere (not just in Explorer), Vista SP1 also introduced support for an entirely new filesystem, exFAT. Following this was Service Pack 2, which brought a new version of Windows Search, support for Bluetooth 2.1, native support for burning Blu-ray discs (something Apple still doesn’t support even reading), a new framework for wifi connection management, support for VIA’s new 64bit CPUs, as well as a new power management framework which actually puts an emphasis on saving power both for desktops and laptops as opposed to just being efficient with how it’s all used.

Together, these service packs introduced more performance boosts and features to an already fast and powerful operating system for free. Apple is not only introducing less new features, what they’re introducing is either behind the curve or won’t directly impact productivity, and Apple is still charging 29 dollars for previous Leopard users. Worse yet, if you happen to be one of the holdouts still using Tiger because you figured out that Leopard is an unstable sack of crap for an operating system, you’re out of luck; Apple’s going to flip the bird and charge you “full price,” whatever exorbitant amount that is for a gimped service pack to an operating system which you already didn’t like.

Let’s not forget that Apple dropped support for the ZFS filesystem, which was one of the features many Apple users were looking forward to the most.

As usual, share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

Update: Sam chimed in via WLM with the following:

Sam says:
You’ve got to be kidding me.
I just wrote this long comment to explain why Snow Leopard is worth $29.
Just as I was thinking Safari is naturally going to crash now, it disappeared.

Nice.

Update 2: I thought about it a bit longer and decided that not only is Apple issuing a gimped service pack, they’re also doing nothing to embrace the future. Tablets are one of the handiest business and graphics design tools in existence, and yet while Apple could easily have dominated the game, they didn’t bother. Now, Windows 7 is more touch-ready than ever, allowing for a far more favorable user experience on capable computers (such as on the HP TouchSmart and the Dell Latitude XT).

Not only has Snow Leopard seemed to not have any purpose, Apple itself seems to have gotten a bit distracted and lost any desire to improve usability, whereas Microsoft made usability one of their major goals with 7.

wwwaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!

Let’s look at a logic chain here:

1. User installs third party browser and makes it the default on Windows Vista.
2. User upgrades to Windows 7 down the road, chooses express upgrade options.
3. IE8 replaces the Vista default as the new default browser.

So, Mozilla and Opera are arguing that a new Microsoft browser which was installed onto Microsoft’s OS shouldn’t become default when the user just wants to install Windows and be done with it? Think about it this way: A user chooses to go with express configuration settings because the user doesn’t want to deal with setting anything up on his/her own. The user, therefore, consents to using Microsoft’s default settings, and Microsoft’s defaults include setting up Internet Explorer 8 as the default browser. If the user really wanted to customize any settings, the user would go ahead and do so without any problems. Keep in mind that installing Windows 7 also means, by extension, installing Internet Explorer 8.

There is no problem here; all I see is whining, and it’s getting ridiculous. Mozilla and Opera should work on creating a compelling product, and while I agree that Opera is better than Internet Explorer 8 in many ways including memory management (Mozilla’s RAM issues prevent me from considering it for anything), the point is that Windows belongs to Microsoft, and thus, Microsoft can do whatever they want with it. These “dominant market position” arguments don’t fly because Mozilla and Opera are both using the argument selectively; you don’t see them making nearly as much noise about Apple and the iPhone/iPod touch/Mac.

While researching to make sure my computer wouldn’t explode at exactly 12:00AM on Wednesday, I happened to see on that site that to check a server’s time, you can look up HTTP information via telnet (Note: This will only work on computers running Windows XP or below. Windows Vista and Windows 7 do not include telnet by default).

While examining these headers, I happened to see something very interesting with the site I tried: the very popular MSN.com.

Check after the break for an analysis along with other targets.

It would appear from looking at the information provided there that MSN is running on IIS 6.0 and that page was built with ASP.NET 1.1. Both of those relate to “2003″ versions of Microsoft systems – IIS 6.0 included with Windows Server 2003. ASP.NET was launched at the same time. That means that it appears that MSN.com – the number 6 site on the web according to Alexa – is running on software that’s now quite outdated. It seems very odd that they would be running such an important site on software that old, especially considering that the MSN landing page has been updated, in rather significant ways, many times since 2003!

But wait, there’s more

Seeing that site was running on old server software, I decided to see what was up with other Microsoft sites. Rather than mess around with telnet (remember, I’m a child of the GUI – DOS is something I only rarely interacted with in my early computing years), I decided to use the extention Firebug for Mozilla Firefox to extract all the juicy information I wanted from my headers.

Just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, I stopped by Bink.nu since they advertise that they themselves are running IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET 3.5 (correlating to Windows Server 2008). Sure enough, Bink is running IIS 7.0. It reports that the ASP.NET version is only 2.0, but I’m willing to say that’s just an error in that header it’s because .net 3.5 is just .net 2.0 with WinFX bits bolted on. [Props to Benjamin for the reminder. ~Bryant]

LiveSide reported the same bites of information as Bink.nu, which makes sense once you consider that their back-ends are very similar (both sites are powered by Community Server).

I then decided to check other Microsoft sites. First up, Microsoft.com – the company’s homepage. Again, Firebug reported the ASP.NET version was version 2.0. The real shocker, though, was in the server line. It is reported that Microsoft.com is running on IIS 7.5. This version of Microsoft’s web server is to be included in Windows 7 (Home Premium and above) and Windows Server 2008 R2. That’s right, software that hasn’t been released yet. That is quite a leap of faith to be running your whole corporate main site on prerelease software. It’s also quite a difference from what MSN reports. The servers for “Windows.com” will also report the same information. Update: Microsoft did clarify the move to IIS 7.5 in Early February. You can read this here. ~Bryant

MSDN reports that it is running IIS 7.0, which is a bit more reasonable and also the least surprising. Truthfully, it’s what I expected to see running everywhere here in April 2009. Finally, Live Search refused to give up it’s server info, just informing me that it was powered by ASP.NET (no surprises there).

What can we see from these seemingly random version numbers? We can see just how complex Microsoft’s web servers are. They range from the nearly outdated (especially for a company that develops web server software) to the bleeding-edge software that isn’t even released yet and many things in between. At the very least, this gives an insight both into the different requirements for the many pages at Microsoft as well as the different practices between different teams of developers. One would probably bounce between at least five or six different web server versions (major versions, not minor revisions like the 2.2.11 of Apache) each day in your daily web travels. As long as it serves up your pages and isn’t riddled with more holes than swiss cheese… that’s the main idea isn’t it?

In case you’re interested…

Apple.com runs on Apache as well: version 2.2.8. Mac OS X Server 10.5 says that it includes Apache 2.2, so it would be a pretty solid guess to say that Apple.com is powered by an Xserve.

• Anyone on Silverlight 1 or Silverlight 2 Beta will be automatically upgraded to Silverlight 2.0 (as written in the EULA). I asked Scott if Windows Server Update Services can block Silverlight from auto-upgrading on a business network. Answer: Yes.
• Changes from RC0 are limited in scope, basically bug fixes and minor UI tweaks to some of the controls.
• Content can be DRM’d, which makes sense given Blockbuster’s willingness to embrace Silverlight as a platform.
• Eclipse IDE support!

To download Silverlight 2, simply head here. Catch more tidbits of Silverlight 2 goodness after the break.

Usage and Deployment Statistics:

• One in Four customers, according to Microsoft, have access to a machine with Silverlight.
• NBCOlympics.com boosted United States Silverlight deployment by 30%.
• Silverlight 1 was used primarily to seed adoption by deploying a plugin with (comparatively) basic media support. Silverlight 2 will be deployed on top of these guys to bring the seeds up to date.
• Silverlight 2.0 will be roughly the same size as previous beta builds: 4.5MB, roughly a 10 second install time on a clean machine.

Third Party Statistics and Notes:

• NBCOlympics.com had 70 million viewers in two weeks. Video quality was at 1.5MBit/s
• Average time spent per user on NBCOlympics.com: 27 minutes, which is nuts!
• Companies which have Silverlight 2 plans today or will have something soon: CBS College Sports Network, Hard Rock Cafe, Toyota, AOL Mail Live (as discussed at MIX), Yahoo Japan, Blockbuster
• Example: Blockbuster’s implementation would be used for buying/renting films.

Expansion:

• Google Chrome deployment was a pain on earlier releases. The most recent Chrome dev release for Windows has the blocking issue fixed, so Silverlight should now work with Chrome without any issues. Thanks, Google!
• Apple does not want any browser extensions (e.g. Flash, Silverlight) on the iPhone at this time. Surprise!
• Android, on the other hand, is a route which Microsoft is actively investigating. Given Android’s open nature, expect a release here at some point.
• No word on whether Silverlight will come bundled with Windows 7 (or if that’s even legal, for that matter). More at PDC.
• Symbian has Silverlight on it thanks to an agreement between Nokia and Microsoft. This was announced back at MIX but will likely be reinforced as Microsoft tries to broaden Silverlight’s exposure to more platforms.
• Scott mentioned private testing with other manufacturers, and while he declined to mention any besides Nokia, Apple, and the Android OS teams, his “private testing” note fits well with what I’ve heard from sources regarding discussions between RIM and Microsoft for Silverlight integration on the next series of smartphones after the current (9000) series. This is separate from any rumored RIM/Microsoft buyout plans, of which I’ve got no word.

Development Support and Technical Data:

• Eclipse! http://www.eclipse4sl.org/
• Visual Studio support will be there, both via Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition.
• Expression Studio 2 will also have full Silverlight 2 development support via service pack later this month.
• “Powerful” built-in controls:  DataGrid, ListBox, Slider, ScrollViewer, Calendar controls, Deep View, etc.
• The usual cross-platform support will still exist on Mac, Windows, and Linux (via Moonlight)
• .NET framework language support will be boosted to a ridiculous level: Examples: Visual Basic, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby.
• Silverlight 2 will have its own in-house .NET framework, so .NET won’t be required on the machine beforehand. This is part of the 4.5MB download.
• DRM support.
• Advertiser support, data reporting, SEO, and the like.
• Full Screen keyboard usage is better than before but still limited in an effort to block spoofing attacks. Keys popular for gaming will be allowed, but the full gamut of keyboard strokes will not be accessible in full-screen mode.

Remember to download Silverlight 2 on October 14 if you don’t already have a previous version of Silverlight installed.

• Import and export images
• Change, add or remove properties
• Import and export STREAM images
• Compile into a totally new MsStyles-file

In this post I will highlight some details of Vista Style Builder (VSB) which show how much easier this application makes it to edit MsStyles.

The Main Window

Most of the time when creating Visual Styles, you will be looking at the main window of VSB. This main window exists basically of four parts:

• The command bar in the top of the window to do things
• The UI parts browser on the left which displays every UI part in a MsStyle neatly grouped into categories
• The Preview pane, which will show the images used in a UI part
• The property view in the bottomright, showing an editable list of all properties for a UI part

As you might notice, there is no menu bar anymore. In line with most Vista applications, VSB uses a commandbar for all possible actions that can be done.

Importing Images

VSB allows a user to export the images used in a Visual Style in order to edited the images in an external application, such as Adobe Photoshop. It is possible to export a strip of images (e.g. all different button states in one image), but it is also possible to just export one state of an image (e.g. the button-pressed image).

Importing is done in a similar fashion: you can import an image with all states or just one state directly. VSB always provides a default name for importing and exporting, so if you follow that naming schemes, you can quickly import and export images.

VSB will notice it if you try to import an image of different dimensions than the original; it will actually ask you what you want to do:

Alpha Channel Importing

One of the problems people are currently facing with Vista Styles is that photoshop and Vista uses a slightly – or so it seems – different format: the alpha channel comes out wrong in MsStyles for files imported manually.
Vista Style Builder fixes this incompatibility when importing images.

Adding Properties

Another feature in VSB is the possibility to add new properties to UI parts. This makes it possible, for example, to give the taskbar fonts a glow or even make the breadcrumb bar glow.

Properties are added through a easy to use dialog which allows you to select the type of property (e.g. enum or color), the name (e.g. iconeffect or textcolor) and the value. For enumeration-types, such as Iconeffect, a listbox will automatically show all possible values.

StyleHacks

People often want to change the same things in their Visual Styles. Some good examples are a thinner taskbar and a small startmenu. Most of the time, these things involve editing a number of properties in some unexpected way.

To make it easier for everyone to use often done things in their styles we invented StyleHacks in VSB. A StyleHack is an easy way to apply an often done thing (a`hack`) to your Visual Style. For example, there is a StyleHack to change the height of the taskbar to 18px.

Visual Style Builder provides an in-application menu to browse the available StyleHacks with a preview image and apply them with a click of the mouse:

Import XP Styles

A featue of Visual Style Builder that has been secret until now is the ability to Import XP MsStyles.
That’s right, VSB makes it possible to use your favorite XP Styles on Vista! Most XP Styles only need some small modifications after importing to work correctly on Vista .

Here’s an example of XP Luna after having it converted to a Vista Style after importing:

As you can see, the dialog uses the Luna window borders as well as Luna buttons. As a bonus, the Luna theme got dropshadows and is rendered by the DWM. For this theme, I opted to keep the Aero buttons because I personally think they look great on the Luna theme.

Of course, not all themes can be imported 100% correctly: Vista has some more restrictions on the window frames than XP had. However, it will make porting much easier and it works for a lot of themes without modifications.

Availability and price

The big question is now when will VSB be available? Unfortunately, I can’t really give a date yet. The technical side of the application is completely done; the business side, however, is not.

I know a lot of people expect this application to be free, but I can tell you that it will not be free. There went a lot of work in VSB and, at the very least, I need to earn the invested time back.

Editor’s Note: A distribution policy for Vista Style Builder and AeroXperience members is currently being researched