May 2006 - Posts

http://microsoftgadgets.com/Blogs/gadgetnews/archive/2006/05/25/5857.aspx

Also: http://gallery.microsoft.com

These were both released or updated pretty quietly over the holiday weekend.

I like that there is a centralized location for all of this, but I don't really care for the fact that Gadgets should work the same across both Web and Vista Sidebar. It seems that most of what we will get will be gadgets that aggregate data. or gadgets for little games, but you get almost no access to the local machine. I use Desktop Sidebar (http://www.desktopsidebar.com) and it seems like it'll be infinitely more capable because it has acess to machine level functions instead of a few APIs (Power Level might be nice for a laptop, but CPU Usaage isn't very useful without a process list, etc...) According to this URL, there are a few system functions you can access, but without real machine level access, I think a lot of the power/worth of sidebar gadgets will be lost.

(The only web site based gadget I have is weather.com, the rest are for control of my local machine, or accessing local data, like controlling Windows Media Player, or Windows Live Messenger contact list)

Of course, I could be missing something, hopefully there will be better samples soon.

(As an aside, there is no tag for Windows Live itself in the tag list for Community Server. That seems like a bit of an oversight)

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1720&page=1

Rather entertaining article. I hate to say I've had a few computers go out because of things on this list (including an improperly jumpered motherboard, although that one wasn't my fault)

 

Downloaded and installed Windows Media Player. I have to say that I'm pretty impressed. I like the new interface, it's clean.

What I really like though is that it looks like WPF applications to a large degree. When I was playing with WPF before, I was concerned that it was a new design philosophy, so it's really good to see MS applications demonstrating it. (As an aside, IE7 appears to use it as well, but I don't like that the buttons are all over the place.)

I know it's probably not WPF since I don't have WinFX installed at the moment, but it's the same apparent design, so at the same time they are putting forth a new design schema, they are making it available to developers....
I saw one of the Get A Mac commercials last night. (As discussed in this article: http://www.betanews.com/article/Apple_Launches_New_TV_Commercials/1146593322) Maybe it was because it was the virus commercial, it really came across as FUD. I'm sure that if Mac gains more traction (and even if it doesn't) there will be viruses for the Mac. Ugh!
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