As a consumer I believe that companies should share with customers what their plans for the future are so that I can make an informed decision but that doesn’t happen unless some guy leaks a huge bunch of internal documents for us to feed on.
Jun
28
A few weeks back I had written about a patent that showed Microsoft’s intent to bring Kinect’s body sensing technology to Windows. Someone, somewhere leaked a few internal Windows team slides that made it to the Internet. Martin at Microsoft Journal was the first to write about the information.
Jun
23
I find geo-location based services to be quite fascinating. Windows 7 brought with it themes and geo-location sesnor APIs, mixing both to have themes change based on geo location has been lingering on in my mind for long. Once Long and Rafael released Geosense, I realized this could quite well be possible without depending on GPS hardware.
I call this application GeoThemes. The idea is quite simple, you can set themes for specific locations, a different theme for work or college and a different one for your residence. A simple mock up of the application:
Jun
12
The Zune being available on the Xbox 360, Windows and being the sync software for Windows Phone 7, is quite an important piece to Microsoft’s three screens and a cloud strategy. Microsoft officials have repeatedly said that they consider Zune to be a platform and not just a PMP, which leads me to believe that the new Zune software will be revamped, possibly both back-end and front-end.
The Windows Entertainment Client team has made two job postings on Microsoft’s career site giving us some information on what Microsoft plans for the consumer digital experience. One of the two job postings is quite explicit in saying that the next generation “synchronization platform” is being done “ground up”. Here’s the job description:
Jun
11
Been some time that I came across an interesting patent application but here’s an interesting one. Microsoft engineers have applied for two patents detailing the Architecture to control the PC using hand gestures. Earlier Microsoft showed controlling devices by muscle movements and has applied to patent a pressure sensitive mouse.
The basic architectural diagram shows a user can use voice, gesture, keyboard or mouse as inputs to a computer. Microsoft engineers talk about using both voice and gesture together to control various actions on the PC. A basic image shows the two cameras and a mic are placed in front of the user:
Jun
9
Microsoft announced the full release of Office Web Apps recently which meant OneNote went live. I wanted to try out the sync between OneNote. Well, I did and I’m pleasantly surprised at how smooth it. Here’s a demo video of the sync:
Jun
8
One of the most important ritual when a new gadget comes out is, iFixIt doing a teardown. Apparently, Jobs decided to show everyone what’s inside the new iPhone 4 before iFixIt did. The new iPhone 4 has two engineering marvels in it – a Gyroscope and the stainless steel body being used as antennas. Here are a couple of images from today’s keynote that shows you the insides of the iPhone 4.
The insides of the iPhone 4:
Jun
7
(Image credit Long Zheng)
At Tech Ed US 2010, Bob Muglia while talking about Microsoft’s cloud strategies shared a video where James Cameron talks about how they used Microsoft technologies for Avatar.
Jun
6
I wrote about some pointers regarding getting your Windows Phone 7 apps on the marketplace when it opens, in this post I’ll talk about games.
One of the biggest announcement is the Xbox LIVE integration with Windows Phone 7. With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft is stream lining game development on the phone, desktop and Xbox. The idea is to make available a common library that makes it easy for developers code games for either of the platforms.
Jun
2
Last year I posted a video on how Microsoft India’s Development Center celebrated Windows 7’s launch. I then came across another version of the video posted on MSIDC’s official Youtube page, the video is a behind the scenes of the 7000 domino launch and in between they talk about what features of Windows 7 were developed in India. Why I didn’t blog about this earlier surprises me too.
