My Digital Life - Technology, cars, and other nonsense

Windows Mobile 6.5 Touch Gestures

Although I now have an iPhone, I have to admit I’ve always quite like Windows Mobile. It may be a bit clunky compared to Apple’s newer toys, but I’ve had WM phones since the original Orange SPV years ago.

Anyways, I’ve been keeping an eye on how the new version, Windows Mobile 6.5, has been developing. I managed to have a play with a phone running 6.5 a few months ago and was actually quite impressed. While you could tell the old WM was underneath, the touch interface was a great improvement on the old home screen, and it felt modern – even next to the iPhone.

I was just going though my rss feeds and noticed this new post from Marcus Perryman over at Microsoft. He’s written quite an in depth article about how 6.5 implements touch and the gestures you use to navigate and do things. It’s pretty techie (don’t say I didn’t warn you!), but quite interesting if you’re into that stuff.

Marcus also points out the official touch gesture docs have been published and can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee220920.aspx

Augmented Reality on the iPhone

A hat tip to Jason Langridge for finding this demo clip of a new Augmented Reality app for the new iPhone 3GS. Very cool (in a geeky kinda way).

Using the iPhones GPS and Compass the app is able to overlay directions and other info onto the view from the camera. I’m sure this is just the start… there are so many uses for this sort of technology.

Google Aims for the Enterprise

A few months ago I spent a day at Google talking about their products for enterprise customers. Whilst their products at the time were impressive, there were a few key things that I thought were missing, in fact I posted some thoughts here about what I would do if I were them. It seems I wasn’t too far off the mark (woohoo).

As they have posted on their blog today, Google have released a host of new features aimed at luring large companies away from the likes of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.

Over the last few weeks and months there has been support for Blackberrys, Outlook and Offline access. Now today they have announced support for email delegation and mail retention, both features that companies would look for in an email solution. Oh and they’ve taken off the ‘beta’ labels!

So what questions remain? Well there are a few obvious ones like does delegation work with the Outlook integration? Delegation is one of things that most people won’t use, but those that do will be the PA’s of important people who will make lots of noise if it doesn’t work. So you want to make any move of email system as easy as possible, Outlook support would be a big help.

The other gap I can see is in the Unified Communications area. Microsoft have a very good suite of products in the area with Exchange and Office Communications Server, and IBM have a pretty good solution in SameTime. Google Talk – from what I have seen – isn’t nearly as convincing. They have the makings of a wider service, but nothing solid as yet.

The good news for Google is that MS’s Online services don’t currently do a great deal in the Unified Comms space, if you want that you need to go with an on premise solution.

I think I’ve written before that personally I think Microsoft moving Exchange online might be Googles biggest opportunity. By going online MS are validating the cloud messaging model in a big way, and companies looking to move to Exchange 2010 will have to ask themselves whether to go the traditional server route or go online. With Google now supporting Outlook as a client, Google is a legitimate alternative to an online Exchange product.

It’ll be interesting to see what MS do to fight off Google. With Exchange 2010 online and web based versions of Office they have the makings of a great product. But the pricing will have to be very good, Googles $50 a year per user is hard to ignore.

Silverlight on Xbox

A few weeks ago Microsoft announced that their Silverlight platform was coming to the Xbox. Strangely they made this announcement at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, talking about Silverlights ability to deliver interactive advertising media. Whilst it can undoubtedly do this, I can’t help thinking that the advertising theme isn’t the whole story – if it is then it’s a huge waste of potential.

Here’s my thinking… If an update to Xbox firmware brings native support for Silverlight to the dashboard it opens up a huge amount of new functionality.

For one thing Silverlight would offer the Xbox a proven media streaming platform. Now this aspect may well be related to the advertising announcement. MS clearly want the Xbox to a platform for video streaming, whether that be though the Netflix linkup or their partnership with Sky in the UK. Silverlight could do the streaming and as well as tying in the context sensitive ads that the agencies would love. Past the ads though, MS’s streaming tech seems to work very well indeed – hence it’s use by many major sporting events like Wimbledon and the Olympics.

Silverlight would also automatically bring support for cool technology like the SeaDragon based DeepZoom and Photosynth. Whilst these may seem like eye candy, in the context of a living room they would work very well indeed, especially when combined with a Natal interface. I can imagine a panning around a photo album and zooming in and out of pictures all though gestures. I reckon it would really work.

But what else could it bring? How about an app store? I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I reckon the Xbox is crying out for one. Silverlight would offer a relatively lightweight environment for people to write small apps, and in the marketplace they have the makings of a system for monetising those apps. Now I could be talking nonsense, but I think that would be really exciting. The iPhone is a great platform, but I’d love to see what sort of things people would come up with given an Xbox and a big screen TV to play with. Hell I might even get the TED app I mentioned months ago! :)

Google App Sync stops Outlook indexing email

(Please note the update at the bottom of this article)

If you you’re a corporate user of Google Apps you may well have been playing with the Googles recent release of Google Apps Sync for Outlook.

It’s basically a plug-in for Outlook that allows it to access email, calendars, contacts and global address lists from Google Apps rather than Microsoft Exchange. It’s a pretty big release for Google I reckon. With everyone including MS moving email services into the cloud, if Google can provide the same level of Outlook user experience from Apps as people expect from Exchange (at least for these basic services), it positions Google Apps as a more credible alternative to Exchange Online than ever before.

In practice the add-in seems to work a lot like the Live Mail add-in. Rather than enabling the MAPI protocol on the backend, the add-in extends Outlook so that it can communicate with Google directly (though I should qualify that… I’ve not looked into it in detail, but that’s what it initially looks like).

Anyway… Whilst looking for some other stuff this morning I spotted this KB article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base. It looks like Google have been a little cheeky with some of the settings that are configured when installing the add-in. From the article:

“The installation of the Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook disables the ability of Outlook to search the Outlook data. When you install the sync plug-in for Outlook, the sync plug-in changes a registry key. This disables Windows Desktop Search from indexing and providing search functionality for all Outlook data, not just the Outlook data being synchronized from GMail. Because Outlook search relies on the indexing performed by Windows Desktop Search, Outlook search functions are broken.”

Whilst I’m sure that there are sound technical reasons why Google chose to disable the integration between Outlook and Windows Search, the cynic in me does wonder if the Google recommend fix might be install Google Desktop Search :)

Fortunately you can turn the searching back on by changing the registry key back:

1. Click , type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.

2. Locate the following registry subkey:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Search

3. Double-click the PreventIndexingOutlook registry entry.

4. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.

5. On the File menu, click Exit.

(backup your registry, I take no responsibility, yadda yadda!)

Update: It looks like I posted to soon – it looks like Google have released a fix that solves this problem and addresses a few other niggles. It’s really good to see Google and MS working to fix these things quickly. Thanks to @MattBrowne for pointing out yesterdays update from Google!