istartedsomething

Amid the re-branding of WPF/E, Silverlight introduced a new name (still with me?), a new website, new theme and probably the most visually prominent, a new logo. Being a (self-proclaimed) designer, this is probably the most interesting of all the changes introduced. It’s hard to put down exactly what the logo is, but it looks something like smokey ribbons enclosed in a sphere-like shape. It’s outright abstract, somewhat blue for Silverlight and reminds me a lot of Strepsils’s logo.

What’s most interesting is how it animates and creates new variations of the same logo as demonstrated in the website showreel. Here’s a compilations of the Silverlight logo animating and creating new variations. Some of them I think even look better than the original!

It’s not even worth guessing what the ‘loading animation’ for the release-version of Silverlight might look like.

During November of 2006, Mary Jo “Watcher” Foley asked “Can Microsoft brand its way to coolness?” . The answer as of April 2007 is a confident “Yes!”, that is until Microsoft releases the “Zune 2″. God bless the Zune team.

Today Microsoft announced Silverlight, the official ‘hip’ name for the web-application technology otherwise known as Codename Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E) for the past 12 months. The announcement was such a success, it completely obliterated Adobe’s competing Flash-video announcement like Novell infrastructure in a blender. But it worries me that a lot of media publications and even technical bloggers think Silverlight is some sort of video-player including the notable Business Week.

Microsoft Aims to Outshine Adobe’s Flash
In a bid to capitalize on the burgeoning online video market, the tech titan is launching Silverlight, its new video-player software…let users trigger videos by clicking in a browser window

Silverlight is not a video-player. Silverlight is not a YouTube competitor. Silverlight is technically not even new. WPF/E has had VC-1 video capabilities since last December, which is amazing in its own rights, but that’s not Silverlight as a whole. Silverlight is an (exciting) platform which has video playback capabilities, which allows for YouTube competitors to be developed.

Speaking of which, anyone want to place bets on Microsoft’s own Soapbox to use Silverlight soon? I have a feeling the recent closure of Soapbox to new users is not only limited to piracy concerns, but also preparations for a migration away from Flash to Silverlight.

This announcement certainly generated the interest Microsoft wanted. The original WPF/E announcement didn’t catch on with most media-types, giving it less than a paragraph alongside the original WPF announcement in 2005. I must admit, I loved the WPF/E name. It’s technically spot-on – Windows Presentation Foundation, everywhere. Albeit it broke every naming rule for products, but you could guess what it was without reading up Wikipedia on it. Silverlight on the other hand is cool, abstract and low on word-counts – something a bit more approachable by the general audience.

In a way, I miss the technical names such as “Expression Interactive Designer”. No one ever asks “what is Expression Interactive Designer”, but everyone asks “what is Expression Blend“. I don’t think this is a dying trend – it’s a marketer’s dream, but a lot more questions are going to be asked.

Since everyone else is talking about the media experiences with Silverlight, I should put in my own 2 pennies.

1. Finally, Mac users can stop whining about WMV9 and WMV-HD not playable on the Mac. It’s not yet a desktop-application, but I’m sure someone can hack together an OS X video player with WPF/e Silverlight, enabling the WMV-codec.
2. Enabling a worthy competitor to apple.com/trailers. It’s no surprise now if you want the best collection of movie trailers at the highest possible quality, you go to Apple.com. There’s no denying Quicktime H.264 is drop-dead gorgeous. WMV-HD (also VC-1 based) in practice is equally if not better in quality, but it isn’t cross-platform compatible so it didn’t get the attention it deserves. Now with the VC-1 codec (the same codec used in HD-DVD/Blu-Ray) built-in Silverlight, someone out there (no pressure on Microsoft) could build an even higher-quality trailers archive and steal all of that traffic from Apple.

Hopefully Microsoft will announce something cool at MIX07 in 2 weeks’ time.

Thanks to Stephen from AeroXP for sending this in. Apparently Microsoft Netherlands was so eager to show off Windows Vista, they produced a magazine called the “Wow magazine” in celebration. In it, was a double-page spread on Tjeerd Hoek. As you would expect, he talks about design and Windows Vista, but what you might not expect is the a page dedicated to Tjeerd eating.

The magazine offers no explanation why it features him eating stamppot in front of the camera, but one can best assume the look and feel of the AERO interface has a direct relationship with potato and sausages.

For some reason, the editors felt like his right thumb had to be Photoshopped in one photo, but the job was done so poorly it begs to know what’s really there underneath.

Update: On closer inspection, his thumb problem might be related to his previous hand-related problems.
Update 2: On even closer inspection, it’s a knife. You can go home now.

After 4 years of loneliness sitting inside a dusty server at Redmond, the video stream from Hillel Cooperman’s infamous presentation “Getting Users to Fall in Love with Your Software” at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in 2003 has finally trickled it’s way out. It was so applauded at the time some bloggers even confessed “I’ve Fallen in love with a presentation I’ve not seen“, and neither have I.

There’s something about Hillel’s presentation style that induced me into making it my life’s purpose spare-time hobby to find this forgotten video that never got released on DVD. It became a forgotten treasure sunken deep inside Microsoft’s archives. I finally got the opportunity to see it today and for the most part, it lived up to its hype. Other bits were a little stretched out.

It would be foolish of me not to share this with anyone else who’s been dying to see this, so I’ve taken the liberty to cut up this hour long presentation into little minute-long pieces to give you a highlight from the best of the best. Anyone interested in the full-length videos should not hold their breathe as distributing such a large video is not on my to-do list.

(more…)

Like I’ve said a month ago, Windows Vista is full of little things that doesn’t write the history books of computing or utilize your $1000 GPU cards to pump-out breathtaking 3D effects, but it adds up. This is another one of those little gems, called the “Windows Mobility Center“.

The Windows Mobility Center is an applet – the equivalent of a fresh-born software program not bloated with splash screens, toolbars and task panes. In fact, I don’t even know why it has a help file. It’s sole purpose in life is to configure mobile PC settings – quite a crappy life really.

In the past, to change the brightness of the display, volume of the speakers or the screen rotation either meant giving your fingers a yoga workout – holding one key whilst trying to press another conveniently placed inches away from the span of your hand; or digging deep into OEM application branded like NASCAR vehicles which also comes with 50 startup processes just so you can rotate the screen on-demand. It was so outrageous that even the patent inventors described the experience as “tedious and annoying”. Right they are!

What makes “Windows Mobility Center” tick is its (over)simplification. It’s one centralized interface with one tile representing one feature. Every tile has only one icon and one control – one slider, one dropdown, one button. It just works. No learning curve, no advanced options, no “Ok” button. You just click and go.

I keep a shortcut in my Quick Launch menu to it (drag and drop the link from the Control Panel) for quick access if I’m in tablet mode, or just Windows key + “X” when I’m in keyboard mode. It’s an applet so it opens in an instant, and once you’re done, you just close it. I’m running out of positive adjectives, it’s just brilliant!

What I really want to see is developers taking advantage of this simple interface to build mini-applications with one purpose in mind. For example, a lot of the times when I listen to a podcast I want to turn off my laptop display without waiting for the screensaver or going to standby. There’s a lot of applications out there that does this, but comes with an installer taking up several MBs bloated with unnecessary functions. I’d love it if someone could build a “Turn screen off” tile for the WMC. Any takers?

If you think about this concept of aggregated control panels, it could apply to many other scenarios. There could be a “Windows Performance Center” for desktop PCs targeted at high-performance users such as gamers. Maybe there could be options to control the fan speed; switch between predefined performance modes which balances noise and performance; an option to disable system sounds and prompts; an option to quickly disable non-critical system processes to reduce load for resource-intensive applications.

Does anyone else share my passion for the Windows Mobility Center?

And don’t forget MSN Hotmail which is currently still operational. That’s a total of 3 desktop clients, and 3 web clients.	One desktop client. One web client.

Update: Microsoft comes to recognize the problem and reshuffles Windows Live Mail.