Some of you might have noticed for the past couple of weeks this blog has been on somewhat of a hiatus. Whilst it is statistically true that I earn more advertising revenue during periods which I don’t post new content, this is not the case this time, but in fact I’ve been working on a new web project.
The site “Here’s an idea” – taken from the popular colloquialism said before expressing an idea, is a community site dedicated to sharing and discussing ideas. I believe everyone has great ideas – big or small, and the first step to making them a reality is to share it. After all, ideas that spread, win.
With the basic fundamentals done, I also have a lot of ideas and features planned for the site that will hopefully help empower people to take their ideas further beyond conceptualization. In the meantime, I invite everyone to go and check out the site. Even if you’re short on ideas, check out some of the other interesting ideas submitted already and provide some much-needed feedback. 
If you’ve ever doubted if you were using the full potentials of PowerPoint, then watch this presentation I exported to video titled “Five Rules” included in Office PowerPoint 2010 (and the beta available today). Even if you’re already familiar with PowerPoint’s advanced animations features, it’s still quite impressive.
Designed by Duarte, a company who seems to specialize in corporate presentations (imagine making PowerPoints all day), this presentation not only provides some good insight on how to create a compelling presentation, but also showcases the powerful new DirectX-powered graphics engine in PowerPoint 2010 that’s behind the elegant animations with silky-smooth playback.
If you have PowerPoint 2010 handy, check out how the magic is created yourself by taking a look at the raw slides under “File > New > Sample templates > Five Rules”. While you’re there, open up some of the other sample presentations for some cool stuff too.
If there’s one company that knows how to build great multi-touch experiences, it has to be Razorfish. Over the course of a year now, these guys have been showing off a bunch of groundbreaking interactive retail experiences built on top of multi-touch technologies, prominently but not limited to the Microsoft Surface.
Their latest work, dubbed Razorfone, is a conceptual retail experience for consumers looking to purchase mobile phones, but what makes this stand out from the rest is that it’s actually built on top of Windows 7’s multi-touch support and Windows Presentation Foundation. Although not the first time this combination has been used before but it’s certainly one of the best implementations I’ve seen so far.
Those familiar with multi-touch retail experiences might recall some similarities between this and the AT&T Surface application – especially in the side-by-side comparison demo, but before you call their lawyers, that’s because Razorfish was responsible for that too.
They ought to get these in the Microsoft Stores, minus the iPhone of course.
It shocks me as a devoted Firefox user to say this, but Internet Explorer 9 could very well leapfrog the competition in the race of next-generation of web browsers in 2010 thanks to a groundbreaking platform-wide implementation of a hardware-accelerated renderer that I think is quite literally “a free upgrade for the web”.
What makes IE9’s implementation of hardware-acceleration so compelling is that it has major real-world benefits and its completely transparent to both end-user and web developers. Using the new capabilities in Direct2D instead of GDI, IE9 is able to rendering all the visual elements of websites much faster and smoother using the powers of the graphics processing unit (GPU), instead of the CPU. One example of where this functionality really shines is in the Bing Maps demo where continuously panning the map is just as smooth as navigating a map in a 3D strategy game.
During a meeting with IE general manager Dean Hachamovitch, he explained that this feature hasn’t already been implemented (or publically demoed) in other mainstream browsers today is because by no means this is an easy feat to accomplish. At least one issue he pointed out was the fact that there may be other components inside a frame that handles its own rendering, like Adobe Flash for example.
Having already overcome the major implementation issues, Dean was able to confirm this feature does not actually introduce any incompatibility issues besides a subtle difference in the layout of text as fonts are rendered by the more advanced DirectWrite engine.
Essentially, this feature coupled with an already improved and continued investment in web standards and overall browser performance until it is released, IE9 is in great shape to become the browser with the best browsing experience in 2010 when one might expect it to ship as a standalone download.
I may very well make the switch back.
In my casual scavenging of trademark applications at the USPTO, a new trademark filed this week has revealed an interesting new project from Microsoft that aims to help people familiarize themselves with the Ribbon user interface with a game inspired by the “Hero” franchise. No, I’m not kidding.
Trademark serial number 77872539 for “Ribbon Hero” is classified as a “computer software for training users to use business application software; and computer game software for use in computer user training”. In detail, it will…
providing online training in the nature of tutorials and “how to” demonstrations in the field of business application software; educational services, providing training and educational materials in the field of business application software; entertainment in the nature of competitions in the field of business application software user skills; and providing recognition and incentives by the way of awards and contests to demonstrate excellence in the field of business application software user skills.
After some more digging around, it turns out this is actually a project by the Office Labs folks whose privacy policy page reveals this will actually be a Facebook game with competitive scoring.
If you use the Ribbon Hero Facebook application, Microsoft stores your Facebook ID and the ID of your primary Facebook network. When you connect to Facebook, you can choose to share your scores with your friends. This will make your Facebook profile picture and overall score appear in your Facebook friends’ Ribbon Wars leaderboard. In addition, your overall score will be counted towards your primary Facebook network’s average score. Your Facebook friends will be able to click on your profile picture in Ribbon Hero, and then see how many points you have on each challenge.
Will this be a bigger hit than Guitar Hero 3 and Farmville? Only time will tell.
It’s day two of the three day Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2009 and keynoting today is Scott Guthrie, Kurt DelBene and Steven Sinofsky where the focus is said to be all things Silverlight, Internet Explorer, Windows and Office.
Join Ed Bott, Mary Jo Foley, Kip Kniskern, Paul Thurrott, Rafael Rivera, Tom Warren and I in our not-too-technical liveblog commentary below. You can also tune in the live video stream and recording after the event at the PDC website.
Disclosure: I am attending PDC09 as a guest of Microsoft Australia.
