Well there goes the rest of my day… :) Photosynth is now out of private beta at photosynth.net. You can now sign up for a photosynth account to create your own synths and there are a host of new ones to browse.
There are a few things to keep in mind at the moment, all synths are public and you can only use Windows PC’s but I’m looking forward to trying it out. There might be a synth of my office up there soon…!
Looks like the Mac Live Mesh client has been released - despite the ‘Microsoft Confidential - Internal Use Only’ lable at the bottom of the installation window :)
Anyways, here it is: https://www.mesh.com/Web/MacDownload.aspx
Update: I may have spoken to soon there… although the client installed properly, once it started it asks for an update but then fails to find the files it looks for on the web. Not sure if thats just me though.
I just found this pretty good video on the apple site describing - at a high level - Mac integration with Active Directory.
http://seminars.apple.com/seminarsonline/activedir/apple/
For someone from a Windows background (like me) it’s worth a look. It’s also interesting to see the difference in style between the Apple and MS. Given the brand personas of the two companies you’d expect the styles to be reversed, with the more friendly informal stuff coming from Cupertino rather than Redmond. But, you can’t fault the content.
I got a Mac today. Ok… it’s works rather than mine, but you know what I mean! :)
I’ve always been a PC kinda guy. Not for any particular reason, I’ve just never needed to use a Mac, PC’s and Windows have always done the job. Recently however a few things have made me look more closely at Mac’s. Some of it is personal interest (I am a geek after all), but my immediate need is for work.
Although we’ve got a few Mac users dotted around, we don’t really support Mac’s in a big way. We’re essentially a PC house, based around Windows and Active Directory. Over the next few years though it’s pretty clear that we’ll need to adopt and support multiple platforms - at least on the client.
So… I ordered a Mac. It’s only a plain old Macbook, but it’s all I should really need for now. First impressions? I really like it.
In fact, the first impression you have of Mac is bound to be great because of the beautiful packaging. Apple really know how to make feel good about spending your money. Quite why the PC vendors haven’t caught onto this over the years is beyond me.
One thing that impressed me was the out-of-box-experiance, that’s in the desktop deployment sense, the initial setup and config. As one of the first things to be configured is the networking, the OOBE was able to go onto the net to get the latest up to date setup. Or at least I assume it does as I was asked to join Mobile Me, and I’m pretty sure this Mac was built long before it’s release last week.
With regards to the hardware itself, it’s as pretty as a Mac should be. Nice and shiny white. The keyboard is fantastic - much nicer than the ones on my Lenovo or old HP laptops. Although having said that I’m still getting used to the different layout and shortcuts (no del key?!?) but I’m sure all that will come in time.
Tomorrow I’ll start looking at how I go about integrating this new toy into our MS environment. From what I’ve read and planned, basic integration won’t be too tricky, but I want to do it myself to be sure. Then I’ll start looking at the basic applications. First on my list will be Office 2008, like it or loath it businesses run on Office, especially exchange. I’ll also need to take a good look at AV/Malware tools and print drivers etc. Should be fun :)
Oh… and I’m already missing Live Writer. What a great little app MS have there.
Liveside have just posted about a cool new technology MS is building called DeepPhoto. It looks like a mashup of tools like Virtual Earth and PhotoSynth and allows photo’s to be mapped against the geometric data being built up by the virtual earth team.
With all of this information combined you can do some pretty interesting things. The video demo the LiveSide guys recorded shows how knowing the real world 3D references for objects in a photo allows the technology to de-haze images that are hazy for example. The real interesting stuff for me though comes at the end of the demo.
A photo of the Yosemite valley is mapped against the geometric model from Virtual Earth. This allows the software to increase the accuracy of the 3D view by extrapolating colours and textures from the real image. You can then move around this composite view in 3D - in effect filling in the gaps between the photos in a PhotoSynth scene.
Working for a company that does loads of GIS work, and produces visualisations of new projects, I can see this sort of technology as being genuinely useful to business. Assuming there’s some sort of API for adding your own data into the views (hyperlinks and additional models for example) it would be a very powerful way of visualising the sort of change we plan and design every day.
The LiveSide Video:
Having just been thinking about what a next generation Microsoft OS might be like, I do wonder if they would keep the Windows name.
It’s served MS well for decades, but it brings with it a heap of baggage. A shiny new name would help give the platform the fresh start it might need.
(What a pointless post… I apologise! :) )
There’s been quite a lot of talk over the past few days about an project MS is running called Midori that may, or may not, be the makings of a new legacy free OS.
The prospect of an entirely new OS is quite an exciting one, the world has moved a long way since the WinNT code base that XP and Vista are based around was first written. It’s probably fair to say that to some extent today’s hardware is held back by the legacy components that the OS are forced to include.
That said, as Ed Bott talks about on his blog, such a change is not something to be taken likely. There are A LOT of existing Windows users and applications that would need to be supported in any change. As I believe MS discovered with Vista, the cost of migrating applications to a new platform is a huge obstacle to business migration.
Or is it…
Virtualisation technology is advancing hugely, if not in overall functionality then in the ease with which it can be utilised. Microsoft’s Hyper-V is part of the basic server OS, and as I understand it will be core to Windows 7. Application virtualisation is maturing nicely as a tool and is, I believe, about to become mainstream. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is now something that enterprises can realistically consider, again Windows 7 will drive this even further forward.
With all of these components in place, the release of a new OS should be much simpler than ever before. Application compatibility, the big killer of migrations, should slowly become less of a challenge. The toolset needed to run applications across multiple OS’s on the one system is pretty much all there. Of course those apps won’t benefit from whatever advances Midori might bring, but as cover for a transition period that’s not so important. As long as they work, both independently and with each other, that’s a huge problem out of the way.
I agree with Ed that any new OS is likely to live in parallel to a standard Windows product for some time, but I do think the migration will be quicker than we’ve seen before.
Yesterday I got a HTC Touch Diamond to play with for a few days. I’ve been wanting to see one in the flesh for a while, partly because I need a new phone, and partly because we’re a Windows Mobile house here and with the 3G iPhone looming we’re thinking hard about future direction.
The Diamond… well it’s a sight to behold. The phone itself is tiny, with sharp styling and is very lightweight. One comment I heard yesterday was that it makes any phone you sit it next to look 10 years old. I like the look of it a lot. The rear surface (as you’ve probably seen in photos) isn’t flat, it has slightly raised jagged pattern that makes it look like it’s been cut from stone, or well… diamond.
The small size of the device poses some interesting question. Previously WM Smartphones used to be the smaller option, sacrificing the touch screen for a smaller footprint. Now however, this full WM device with all the GPS and stuff is small enough that it doesn’t matter. I’m not sure what future the Smartphone OS has if devices are now this small.
Powering the thing up, the first think I noticed was the quality of the screen, off hand I’m not sure what the resolution is, but I’ve seen desktop LCD monitors with worse picture quality, it’s very very good. This allows the interface to use small, sharp fonts without them being hard to see or use.
The main ‘home screen’ interface is miles ahead of any other Windows Mobile phone I’ve used (and that’s quite a few!). At the bottom there’s a scroll bar of buttons for the main functions (contacts, photos, music, settings etc) that is easy to use and and quite intu itive once you realise it’s there. You just move your finger across the screen until you reach what you want, for example photos, the bulk of the screen is used to show previews that you can then scroll through. It’s all great looking and reasonably well thought out.
In fact, in terms of the user interface I’d say the worst thing was the underlying Windows OS. Once you find a function or task that isn’t covered by the HTC installed user interface, the jolt of going back to the old Windows Mobile interface is quite shocking. I’ve always got on quite well with WM before, but the Diamond really does highlight that MS need to start concentrating on the ‘Mobile’ part of their OS not the ‘Windows’ part. The normal windows like GUI just doesn’t cut it in the mobile space anymore.
Would I buy one? Not sure… If there wasn’t a 3G iPhone just days away then yes, without a doubt. As it is I’ll wait and see.
…That when you close MS Word, the ‘X’ closes just that open window… but when you close Excel, the ‘X’ closes all the open Windows? Seems like an odd inconsistency.
A few months ago MS announced that it was going to cut off the DRM servers that support the old MSN Music service, effectively limiting what people could do with the music they had paid for.
It turns out that they’ve now changed their mind and decided to keep the servers going until 2011… so all the bad press was for nothing. I seem to remember saying at the time that it was crazy!
As Joe Wilcox says over on Microsoft Watch, it would have been easy for MS to turn this in to a PR win. Why not give the people who were effected credit on Zune Marketplace? MS do know how to do customer service when they need to but it just doesn’t seem as pervasive as it should be. It’s a shame.