On 15th September I posted a blog entry entitled Is Peter Bale's music streaming service actually Zune? where I pondered about a supposedly imminent release of a music service from MSN; Mr Bale is an Executive Director at MSN UK. My interest was heightened by mention of a music streaming service and I speculated that this may well have links with the newly launched Zune music streaming service in the US, this is what I had to say back then:

However, taken in context all of this is rather interesting given that Microsoft today launched a music streaming service under the guise of Zune:

Streaming Music, On Demand

Now as Zune Pass subscribers, not only can customers enjoy access to close to 6 million songs from the Zune Marketplace catalog for $14.99, the price of one CD a month, but they can also log into Zune.net and stream full albums and tracks through a computer's browser.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/sep09/09-15zunehdsoftwarepr.mspx

I wonder if this is the service that Mr Bale mentioned. Will the Zune streaming service be offered through MSN given Mr Bale's role in the company? Will this herald the introduction of the Zune service to the UK? (note that Mr Bale is head of MSN UK) Is this a portent to Zune devices being launched in the UK?

Well today MSN UK have launched that new music download-to-own service in beta at http://downloads.music.uk.msn.com/. One million DRM-free tracks are available from all the major music labels and are delivered through the MSN UK portal. Users can discover, play and download music as well as create their own playlists.   In addition to the download service MSN UK have also launched a limited music streaming service that will be trialled over the coming weeks with a select group of testers. 

I spoke to Mr Bale earlier today and he let me in on some interesting information about this streaming service, namely that it is built on the same platform that powers the Zune music streaming service in the US just as I speculated it may do back in September. He was quick to point out that this does not represent the launch of a UK or Europe wide Zune service however it is seen as testing the water so the portents for Zune launching outside the US are definitely better today than they were yesterday!

I'll have more information on the streaming service later but in the meantime go and check out the new download service at http://downloads.music.uk.msn.com/.  

- Jamie

Data on the web

Regular readers around here will know that I am a Windows Live enthusiast however what you may not know is that in my “other” life (i.e. at my job) I spend my time working with data and databases. Storing data, querying it, moving it, changing it…these are the things I spend my days doing and moreover I enjoy it so much its kind of a hobby as well (fellow geeks will identify with this I’m sure).

One facet of my work that really fascinates me (and what I would dearly love to spend more time doing) is learning about how data is represented on the web and working with that data to do interesting things with it. You might ask “what data exists on the web?”. The answer is “humongous amounts of the stuff”, in fact in my opinion every single web page out there is a piece of data and those facets that I talked about before (storing, querying, moving, changing) apply just as much to web pages as they do to more conventional kinds of data such as your banking transactions or medical history.

Microformats

One of the most interesting disciplines in the area of data on the web is the use of microformats. You can read more about microformats at http://microformats.org/ but in their own words microformats can be described as:

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging)

http://microformats.org/about

Err…what? Ok, I’ll try and explain a different way. I suspect that everyone reading this knows that web pages are written in a language called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), right? Well, microformats are extra pieces of information that can be added to HTML that can make the web pages understood by computers but that don’t affect how the web page appears to us humans because the extra microformat gunk that is added simply gets ignored by your browser.

Microformats have been defined for many of the most common types of data that exists on the web including:

• Calendars and events (hCalendar)
• Contacts (hCard)
• Reviews (hReview)
• Tags (hTag)   (N.B. The ”clubhouse”, ”story” & ”microformats” tags that you see at the bottom of this blog post are examples of hTags)
• Latitude and Longitude coordinates (geo)
• Cooking recipes (hRecipe)

Hopefully it becomes obvious why microformats can become useful. It is now possible to write software that understands web pages rather than just displaying the HTML to us so that we can understand it. Companies that run search engines are very excited about the possibilities of using microformats and indeed Google have embraced them wholeheartedly.

Let’s have an example of usage of a microformat. Upcoming.org is a site that allows people to advertise events that they have organised and I have come across one such listing for an event called Opencoffee at The University of Sussex on 5th November:

If we take a look at the HTML for that page we can see the following:

<span class="geo" style="visibility:hidden">
  <abbr class="latitude" title="50.8742997742">50.8742997742</abbr> 
  <abbr class="longitude" title="-0.0828099996">-0.0828099996</abbr>

</span>

Microformats and Windows Live

Ok that’s an introduction to microformats, now why am I writing this blog post? Well, I’m interested in knowing which microformats are supported by Windows Live and indeed where. Unfortunately I have to report that the answer to that question is absolutely nowhere whatsoever. I visited:

• http://people.live.com
• http://calendar.live.com
• http://profile.live.com
• http://photos.live.com
• http://spaces.live.com

and was perturbed to find that, according to Operator, not one of those sites utilises microformats. Not a single one. I had assumed that http://calendar.live.com and http://people.live.com at the very least would certainly be using microformats because hCard and hCalendar were designed specifically for the type of data that these pages contain. Sadly not!

I’m really quite demoralised about this. If ever there were a way for Windows Live to win some favour with the type of people that routinely lambast the various services then adopting open standards such as microformats would be an ideal way to do it. Sadly it seems supporting open standards isn’t high on the agenda for those in Windows Live; disappointing indeed.

This is just another example of Windows Live’s existent as what I would refer to as a poor web citizen. If you want further evidence of this then go and read about their frankly quite embarrassing URL formats on my past blog post What’s with Windows Live URLs?

I can only hope to see some uptake in the use of microformats in Windows Live wave 4 but I already know that that is a forlorn hope!

@Jamiet

Big news today about Bing surfacing Twitter and Facebook status updates in http://bing.com search results. Its pretty impressive too. Earlier today I tweeted something about SQL Server:

and sure enough I got the back the following information in the Bing-Twitter search results:

There’s some things to note about this. Firstly, the short URL from my Tweet (http://bit.ly/45bv3t) has been expanded to the full URL to which you would be redirected to (https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=499134). Second, it has recognised following retweets so not only is it finding tweets containing the phrase “sqlserver” but its correctly grouping them together as well which I’m very impressed with. Third, there is a link to more tweets related to the same subject.

All very impressive but I have one question, what about Messenger status updates as well?

If the 40million Facebook daily status updates and god-knows-how-many Twitter status updates are considered valuable then surely the same can be said of the many millions of Messenger status updates that appear every day too, right? We as Windows Live users can already opt to make our Messenger status updates public so there’s nothing stopping this public stuff from appearing in Bing.

Now I must admit this isn’t exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. Tweets from Twitter have MUCH more valuable information in them than Messenger statuses do because Twitter tracks retweets and hash tags and that makes them many many more times more valuable than Messenger statuses (although as I have said before I expect Messenger statuses to move in the direction of Tweets in the upcoming Windows Live Wave 4). Nonetheless, if there is gold in those tweets then there at least has to be some silver linings at the very least in messenger status updates.

Alas I fear us Windows Live users are again going to be frozen out of Microsoft’s own search engine, just as we are from Bing’s forthcoming Bing and Ping feature.  Sad really isn’t it?

@JamieT

Since SkyDrive launched a couple of years ago probably the most oft requested feature is the ability to save a document directly to SkyDrive from your computer. Finally, in Office 2010, that feature is coming. Someone called Manan has posted a blog entry entitled Office 2010 Beta New Features & Changes and it contains the following ditty:

a new option under Share in Backstage – Save to Skydrive! This is to help you save your documents and use them with Office Web Apps. Screenshot:

Oh and the feature is fully functional.

Save to SkyDrive … FINALLY!!! Let’s hope that a SkyDrive API is forthcoming so other teams both in and outside of Microsoft can offer the same feature!

You’ll see this feature in the next interim drop of Office 2010 which is apparently already doing the rounds on the file sharing networks.

@JamieT

I found something out about Windows Live today that I never knew and I’m wondering if anyone else knew about it either. If you head to http://profile.live.com/details/EditWork.aspx you can edit the work details part of your profile and one of the items you can edit is the name of your employer. I was surprised to find that Windows Live gives you a list of employees to choose from; as you start typing the list narrows to your potential choice:

Unsurprisingly, given that I’m self-employed, my employer wasn’t listed :)

Someone has obviously gone to quite a bit of trouble to provide this feature so I’m wondering if they plan to do anything with this information in the future. Intriguing!

@Jamiet

Anyone remember http://my.live.com? This was a service that came out of http://start.com which was the first web property put out by the team that later evolved into Windows Live. Sadly it seems http://my.live.com has been put out to pasture as it hasn’t been changed in over a year and the team’s blog hasn’t been updated for a similar length of time.

I was looking back over that blog today and came across the following intriguing clue as to their future activities in a blog post entitled Important update to My.live.com:

What's Next?
We'll start planning for our next update to My.Live.com, aiming for a minor update in the Fall.  Right now, most of our time is being devoted to another project that we'll have more information about in the coming months.  Until then, we hope you like the changes, and look forward to reading your feedback in our new forum.

That was on 7th August 2008 and there hasn’t been a sniff of news since. If anyone knows what this “other project” that we were promised some news on “in the coming months” actually is please get in touch because I would love to know!

@JamieT

I just received an email from Microsoft Billing telling me that my Hotmail Plus subscription had been renewed for the next 12 months. No issue with that, I’m an avid user of Hotmail Plus (only 14.99GBP a year) because it allows me to browse Windows Live without seeing any ads.

What struck me as strange though was the listing of benefits that Hotmail Plus provides:

• the ability to send larger attachments
• 10 Gigabytes of total Windows Live Hotmail account space
• exemption from the account expiration policy
• No third party advertising

Perhaps someone should tell whomever manages Hotmail Plus that regular Hotmail offers everyone ever-increasing storage space so their boast about 10GB of storage is a little bit shallow! Just a thought!

@Jamiet

A quick post on Office Web Apps before I pop off on holiday for a week! You may have heard that Office Web Apps was released in Tech Preview form two days ago as announced in a post Office Web Apps Coming to Windows Live on the Office Web Apps blog. I’ve been taking a look and here are some early thoughts.

Firstly, you need to get accepted into the Tech Preview. Liveside have posted a workaround that seems to be getting most people in although I suspect the number of invites is finite so get in quick. The only thing I would add to what Liveside said is that, if you are not in the US, you should point your browser at http://skydrive.live.com/?mkt=en-us rather than just http://skydrive.live.com.

Upon getting in you’ll find the interface very familiar. I have been poking around at the Excel web app as opposed to Word or Powerpoint and so far it seems as though most of the basic functions are there. Missing features that I have discovered so far include:

• CTRL+<down arrow> doesn’t move you to the bottom of a set of data like it does in the desktop flavour of Excel
• There is no fill handle

One thing that I *really* like is the fact that there is no need to hit a ‘Save’ button, everything gets saved straightaway exactly as happens with OneNote 2007. I’ve long thought that the Save button is superfluous these days so its great to see it disappear.

The other great feature is that multiple people can edit a document simultaneously and any changes that one person makes appear instantly on the screens of the other editors. Give it a try yourself by simply opening the same document in two separate browser windows – it really is a fantastic feature.

These two simple changes are paradigm shifting. For years hitting the Save button and not being able to edit documents that other people are using have been staple annoyances in offices around the world, Office Web Apps (and indeed Office 2010) will change those activities forever.

If you want to make feature requests for Office Web Apps then head to https://mscuillume.smdisp.net/Collector/Survey.ashx?Name=aTechPreXL_Req_en&loginid=null. I have already submitted a couple of requests:

1. I use CTRL+<down arrow> a lot in regular Excel to go to the end of set of data. It would be nice if it worked in Office Web Apps too.
2. (This one is a bit geeky)
   Now that Excel spreadsheets are online it would be great if we could use a URL to address a subsection of a spreadsheet.
   For example, I have a (publicly available) document here: http://cid-550f681dad532637.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/Misc/20090919Demo.Xlsx that has some data in cell range B2:C5.

Wouldn't it be great if I could access just that raw data by appending some extra parameters like this: http://cid-550f681dad532637.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/Misc/20090919Demo.Xlsx?range=B2:C5&format=csv and it returns me back the data in CSV format that I can view in the browser (formats could be raw XML, RSS, JSON etc...).

I do a lot of work that involves distributing data and I reckon this would be a great and simple way of doing exactly that in a way that is easily consumable by other applications.

What are your first impressions of Office Web Apps?

@Jamiet

Back in July some quotes from MSN UK Executive Producer Peter Bale alluded to Microsoft providing a music streaming service. He said:

"Music is an important area for Microsoft. We are looking at launching a music streaming service imminently.
"It will be a similar principle to Spotify but we are still examining how the business model will work."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/5817049/Microsoft-is-launching-a-music-streaming-service-this-month.html

As is typical for hit-hungry online news sites various things were inferred from this that on first reading might be attributed to Mr Bale but which actually aren’t. Namely:

• It was to be ready in July (Mr Bale never said that was the case and indeed that turned out to be wrong)
• It will be offered through MSN (nothing that Mr Bale said suggested that was the case)

Never let the actual facts get in the way of a good headline eh? (Can you tell that I have a slight disdain for online journalism).

However, taken in context all of this is rather interesting given that Microsoft today launched a music streaming service under the guise of Zune:

Streaming Music, On Demand

Now as Zune Pass subscribers, not only can customers enjoy access to close to 6 million songs from the Zune Marketplace catalog for $14.99, the price of one CD a month, but they can also log into Zune.net and stream full albums and tracks through a computer’s browser.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/sep09/09-15zunehdsoftwarepr.mspx

I wonder if this is the service that Mr Bale was talking about. Will the Zune streaming service be offered through MSN given Mr Bale’s role in the company? Will this herald the introduction of the Zune service to the UK? (note that Mr Bale is head of MSN UK) Is this a portent to Zune devices being launched in the UK?

We can only hope!

UPDATE! I’ve just seen the following quote from Terry Farrell, Senior Project Manager for Zune (emphasis is mine):

“The bigger story,” Farrell contended, “is about how it (the Zune) is helping us build a new entertainment brand for Microsoft. Among the core pieces of this brand are the Zune HD, MSN and Windows Media Center. The idea is to provide a set of unifying services — the same video service/same catalog — across all of these devices.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3960

So, it seems as though MSN is absolutely part of the bigger picture. I’m becoming more and more convinced that Zune streaming is the service that Peter Bale was talking about!

UPDATE 2: More intriguing still. The aforementioned Peter Bale has just posted the following on Twitter in reply to this blog entry:

http://twitter.com/PeterBale/status/4006211977

 @JamieT

The winners in the inaugural Clubhouse Choice awards were recently announced by the Community Manager for Windows, Marcus Schmidt, in a post on the community clubhouse space Announcing the Clubhouse Choice Award Winners:

We’ve tallied up the votes from the recent Clubhouse Choice Awards, and…(insert drum-roll here)…the winners are:

• Best Technical Direction:  Andre
• Best Story:  Michael
• Best Tip or Trick:  Vasudev
• Outstanding Art Direction:  Technogran
• Early Adopter:  Richard H.
• Rising Star: Ali
• Clubhouse All-Star:  Jamie

As you can see I was honoured and humbled to be awarded the Clubhouse All-star award; honoured because I will forever be known as the inaugural winner of this award and humbled because this was voted for by the only people that matter – people who use Windows Live products and services day-in and day-out all over the world. Just being nominated for the award was a real thrill for me but to actually win thanks to voting from my peers – words can’t really express how I feel about that. Its extremely gratifying and, as I said before, a really quite humbling experience.

My prizes turned up in the post this week and I really was quite taken aback at what I received. Here’s the run down:

• A commemorative award that I can put on my sideboard
• A laptop bag
• $25 in Amazon vouchers
• A Nikon Coolpix S220 compact digital camera
• A Flip Ultra HD video camera

Here’s a photo of them all together:

“Taken aback” doesn’t really do justice to the feeling I got when I unwrapped my prizes. This is an amazing set of gifts which I never even dreamed of receiving and I am truly grateful to Marcus and his colleagues at Microsoft both for providing such great gifts and in in doing so exhibiting their commitment to this great community of Windows, & Windows Live users that just keeps growing and growing and growing. I’m proud to be a part of it and, once again, thank you thank you thank you to Marcus, to Microsoft and most of all to those of you that voted me the Clubhouse Choice All-star 2009.

Last but not least I’d like to offer my congratulations to my fellow awardees and commiserations to those that were nominated but were pipped at the post; I’m sure the awards will be back next year bigger and better than before so get your authoring hats on, start your blogging engines, and maybe you’ll be the proud owner of the title of Clubhouse Choice All-Star 2010.

Thank you all once again.

@jamiet

Windows Live man-about-town Angus Logan wants your help. There are some submissions put forward for the forthcoming South-by-Southwest (SXSW) tech get-together that may warrant your attention, particularly if you’re a regular user of Windows Live features like Hotmail and the What’s New feed.

Web Mail - Is There Room Left to Innovate? (Web Mail)
Web mail has been around the block, and everybody’s got it. Its role may be narrowing to the place you manage online bills, shopping, travel, and photos with mom, with conversations migrating to social networks and IM, but companies are still pounding the digital pavement for new users. If web mail isn't going anywhere, where does it go from here?

The Stream Has Become A Tidal Wave (Social Media)
The stream is overflowing. How do you make sure the stream is still useful when there is SO MUCH getting pushed into it?

Social Network Interop (Open Standards)
Portable contacts, life streaming and various ‘Connect’ offerings have begun to break down the silos and walled gardens that are social networks. Come hear a panel of experts discuss some of the technologies, design issues and future direction of this trend.

It may be worth your while voting as these subjects will directly influence the direction that Windows Live (and other online social bodies) may go in the next few years. My pick out of the three would be the third one – social interop will play a huge part in our online lives in the second decade of this century!

@Jamiet

The Bing team are thinking about introducing a new feature called “Bing and Ping” which would allow you to share search results on Facebook and Twitter. Here’s the blurb:

We at the Bing team are firm believers in the idea that the only thing better than searching with Bing is sharing what you’ve found with your friends.  That’s why we’ve been working on a potential new feature for Bing that does just that in a couple of clicks, which we call Bing & Ping.

Let’s break this down with an example: say you use Bing’s Instant Answers feature to check the score of the game, and you notice that your buddy’s favorite team has just been beaten pretty handily.  Say you want to “delicately” remind him of their less-than-stellar moves with the ball. Bing & Ping lets you share this NFL instant answer through various places, like Facebook, Twitter, or even email in as few as two clicks.  Reminding someone that their team has no defense has never been easier (in spite of the screenshot below, we of course aren’t talking about our beloved Seahawks). 

It’s not just limited to sports, either.  Share a neighborhood plumber recommendation with a friend though email, tweet local movie times, or post a flight status with your Facebook pals while you’re trying to bum a ride from the airport.

If you’re interested in previewing this feature, be sure to become a fan of our Facebook page. We’ll be sending a special invitation to our fans to preview Bing and Ping. Check it out and let us know what you think, if you like it and how we can make it better

Sounds like a nice feature but my first reaction to this was… ”What about Windows Live?” and judging by the ensuing comments on their blog post I’m not the only one. Why shouldn’t we have the ability to add to our shared favourites or even send an IM to one of our friends (assuming we were logged in to Messenger)? If you agree that that would be a nice feature then head over to the blog post and add your weight to the debate.

@Jamiet

[Warning. This post gets a bit technical.]

I had a conversation today with a colleague (let’s call him John) about various online email providers and the services that they offer around that. He told me that his wife uses Hotmail for her email because she likes Windows Live for Windows Mobile – the client that can be installed on Windows phones to enable push email and email sync with Hotmail.

John however prefers to use Google Apps (which incorporates Gmail) because it enables him to use his own email domain (e.g. john@johnsdomain.com) rather than a Google-provided address like john12345@gmail.com.

He had one complaint about Google Apps though – there was no mobile client as good as Windows Live for Windows Mobile. However, the fact that he can use his own domain (johnsdomain.com) keeps him on Google Apps.

That’s when I mentioned a service that my wife and I (and others) have been using for a couple of years now, Windows Live Admin Center

Its a competitor to Google Apps because it allows you to use your domain (mine is jamie-thomson.net) in conjunction with Hotmail which also means you get to use the goodness of Windows Live for Windows Mobile, Outlook (via Outlook Connector) and Windows Live Mail for email plus the plethora of other Windows Live products and services. All for free.

John was pretty taken aback at this. He didn’t know that Windows Live Admin Center existed and upon taking a brief look he seemed very interested in migrating off of Google Apps. He’s going to take a closer look and then make a decision.

What I found most interesting though is that John asked the same question that I’ve been asking for the past couple of years, “Why don’t Microsoft talk about Admin Center?”. It really is a fantastic service (and recently got improved – more on that in a later blog post) but nobody out there knows about it and meanwhile Google Apps is hoovering up customers while Microsoft do nothing about it. It doesn’t make any sense to me.

@Jamiet

I just got the following email from Expedia:

	Having trouble reading this email? Click here for a web version Expedia No Longer Supports Microsoft Passport / Windows Live ID As we work to continuously improve our site, it's sometimes necessary to make changes to the services we provide you. Our recent upgrades require us to end our use of this tool. What does this mean to you? Instead of logging into Expedia with your Passport/Windows ID, you'll now sign in with your email address and new password. To ensure your itineraries and account information are saved in your account, you'll need to create a new Expedia Account password soon. Steps to Change Your Password: STEP 1. Type www.expedia.co.uk in your browser. STEP 2. On the Expedia homepage, click "Sign In". STEP 3. On the Sign In page, click ".Net Passport User? Sign In". STEP 4. On the next page, enter the email address associated with your Expedia Account. STEP 5. To protect your security*, Expedia will send out another email to the address you provided with the password reset information. STEP 6. Open the second email and return to Expedia via the link provided to create a new account password. Act soon, this link expires within 24 hours. STEP 7. Once your new password is set you can log in to your Expedia Account at anytime. Questions about this change? Expedia Customer Service is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week at 08001513000. Thank you, The Expedia Team TERMS AND CONDITIONS * Learn how we protect your identity online. Questions about your privacy? Read our Privacy Statement.

Taking away Live ID sign-in? Congratulations Expedia, you just lost took away the one thing that makes me use your site so now you’ve lost a customer!

@Jamiet

Earlier this year I wrote a blog entry entitled Building a Twitter clone where I speculated how a developer might build a service to rival Twitter using Live Messenger statuses. In fact, the use of Live Messenger statuses to build a Twitter compete is something that I have pondered way back in September 2007 when I wrote Microsoft Presence. A rival to Twitter?

The more I think about it this subject then the more I’m managing to convince myself that Windows Live wave 4 will include some sort of Twitter compete when it get released, hopefully later this year. Twitter has proved the value of aggregating public status comments and it wouldn’t be too much of a leap for Microsoft to build a very similar service using Windows Live statuses. There’s gold in those tweets and harnessed properly there could be gold in Windows Live statuses too.

I await with baited breath.

@Jamiet

Up until fairly recently I was sceptical about the virtues of digital note-taking apps such as Microsoft Office Onenote. “A digital notebook? Pah, text editors work just fine ta very much!” used to be my refrain. Then I got turned onto Evernote (which I’ve blogged about before: Evernote - Your memory downloaded) and I started to realise that digital note-taking apps might have some legs. My initial interest in Evernote subsided however when I realised its key failing; that to all intents and purposes it is a web-only application save for some niche photo uploading abilities using mobile clients (I stand to be corrected on these points – I haven’t looked at Evernote for a few months).

That’s when I first took a good look at Onenote and realised just what a cool application it was. Here was an Office app that freed you from all those annoying nuances of Word that you have had to learn to live with. Onenote won’t unceremoniously rearrange all your pictures and scroll unannounced between page breaks like Word is wont to do – you put something on the Onenote surface and it stays there. The Notebook->Section->Page organisational hierarchy took a little bit of getting used to but once you’re familiar with it you realise the ease of which you can use it to navigate through your notes. Couple that with the ability to search through all your notes from one place (including text within pictures) and Onenote is one damn fine little application.

Another of my burdgeoning interests is the relevancy of syncing abilities in today’s applications (as evidenced in another recent blog: Sync is the word). Imagine then how glad I was to learn from David Rasmussen’s blog OneNote 2010 – What’s New For You that Onenote 2010 is to get the following new features:

• Sync to Cloud (Windows Live): Your notebooks sync and are available anywhere from any machine. Of course this is in addition to all the existing ways you can sync notebooks (file shares, SharePoint, USB drives etc.)
• OneNote Web App: You can access and edit your entire notebook from a browser. Even on a machine that doesn’t have OneNote installed.
• OneNote Mobile: A more complete OneNote version for Windows Mobile phones. Syncs whole notebooks. Syncs directly to the cloud. No need to tether your device. Richer editing support.

Wow. Sync your notebooks to Windows Live and make them publicly available – that is a killer offering. Couple that with another new feature (also from David Rasmussen’s blog):

• Wiki linking: you can easily create a link to an existing page or to a new page for a topic. You can do this by just typing the Wiki link syntax (e.g. just type [[The Page Title I Want]] ), or use our new page search experience from within the link dialog. This enables you to easily create Wiki like notebooks with lots of cross links across pages.

and Onenote/Windows Live has an opportunity to become the de facto wiki tool on the web. Free, no installation, no hosting, auto-merging and syncing using an offline (paid for) client – that’s a wiki offering that is going to be hard to beat.

If you’re interested in knowing more about what Onenote can do then go and read I Heart OneNote – 15 top Onenote tips by Chris Pratley.

I have but one future wish for Onenote – I want the ability to view all of my notebooks together at once using Plex on Touchwall:

@Jamiet

Windows 7 RTM has arrived and I’ve spent much of this weekend installing it, poking and prodding it, and generally taking it for a spin. My opinion? Well, I never realised how bad Vista was until now – Windows 7 is a pleasure. Its nippy, its uncluttered and it looks great.

Speed

My first public comment about it was on Twitter yesterday morning: #windows7 sleep –> login screen –> desktop in 12 seconds. Is this *really* windows?

This thing is quick. Really quick. Boot, opening apps, opening IE tabs…its all pretty instantaneous and its indicative of how Vista conditioned us to accept bad performance as the norm. One thing – it labours a bit if I have Zune software open but that’s more a problem with the app itself rather than the O/S.

Aesthetics

As I said it is uncluttered and looks great and I had no wish to spoil that by filling the desktop full of worthless shortcuts so I’ve kept it almost as barren as after a fresh install save for some Mesh folders and a couple of gadgets:

Taskbar has gone vertical rather than horizontal following advice from Tim Sneath and so far I’m liking it. The background image is part of the Windows 7 Architecture Aero theme and changes periodically.

Backwards Compatibility

I had an issue when trying to install the drivers and associated software for my HP Photosmart C7820 All-in-one printer/scanner:

The installer wouldn’t run on Windows 7 because it didn’t recognise the O/S. Windows 7’s Vista Compatibility Mode to the rescue then which enables you to fool an installer into thinking its running on Vista:

With the software installed my printer/scanner is working normally.

Jump lists

No doubt about it, jump lists rock. I particularly like the Explorer jump list which allows you to pin specific folders to it and the Virtual PC jump list which automatically gives you shortcuts to your virtual machines.

Powershell

Powershell built-in. Consumers won’t care but to IT geeks like me this is a big big plus!

Thirsting for more…

This wouldn’t be a blog post authored by Jamiet if there weren’t a list of improvements that I would like to see in the future so here goes:

1. I have now taken to launching programs by pressing the windows key () and then a number pertaining to a program’s position on the taskbar. Its a sweet little time saver but could be improved by showing a little tooltip over each taskbar icon whenever I press so that I know which number to press. Office 2010 (and 2007 as well I believe) does this when you press the ALT key and its incredibly useful:
   
   
   I’d like the same in Windows.
2. Taking the previous idea a little further, why not popup a menu of every option available to me when I hold down . I’m sure most people don’t know about the goodness of shortcuts like:
   • +Spacebar
   • +L
   • +TAB
   • CTRL++TAB
   • +T
   • +U
   • +P
   • +M
   • +F
   • +E
   • +Pause
   • +X
   • +G
   • +S
   • +[left arrow]/[right arrow]
   • +[up arrow]
   • +[down arrow]
   • Shift++[left arrow]/[right arrow]
   and I admit I certainly didn’t know about a lot of them before writing this blog post so a better way of telling the user about them is definitely required. Try them out for yourself right now (some are Windows 7 only) and see what they do or read about them where I read about (most of) them at Keyboard shortcuts – Windows Vista Help.
   
3. I’m missing Vista’s globe icon that you see in the systray when you have an internet connection – bring that back please (if there’s a way to do it in Windows 7 or there’s an alternative that I’m missing please let me know).
4. It would be nice if IE8 web slices could co-exist as Windows Sidebar gadgets. I asked for this one a long time ago however (when the first beta of IE8 came out) and have not seen it materialise so I don’t envisage it happening any time in the near future either.
5. I haven’t yet found a way of accessing the jumplists without resorting to using the mouse. OK, that’s not quite true – jumplists are available on the start menu as well (which I can get to without using the mouse) but that isn’t as easy as using +<digit> to launch an app. Perhaps Shift++<digit> could be used?

Conclusion

Windows 7 is simply a massive leap forward from Vista and I didn’t realise quite how bad Vista was until this weekend. Agree or disagree? Let me know in the comments.

@Jamiet

Avid Windows Live watchers like myself will no doubt have read Kip Kniskern’s blog post from earlier today Two new Windows Live services coming soon: Documents and Devices. Kip included some screenshots that just about confirm what I’ve suspected all along (read my post from January: Some thoughts about the convergence of Windows Live, Office Live and Mesh), that Windows Live, Office Live and Live Mesh are being combined into a single combined service.

I’ve been taking a closer look at the screenshots that Kip published and the one below caught my eye in particular:

Clearly “Devices” is meant to be a reincarnation of the same functionality that currently resides at http://www.mesh.com so its fair to assume that that site is going to disappear (that would explain why its hardly changed in the past 12 months). I wonder then if the brand name “Mesh” is going to disappear also – its a word that Ray Ozzie seems particularly keen on churning out in his infrequent speaking appearances but it seems that Mesh as a product and as a brand might well be going for good.

What is also intriguing to me is the following line that you can see in that screenshot:

Add your PC with Windows Live Sync which comes with Windows Live Essentials

That makes me think that the current Windows Live Sync and Mesh clients are to get merged into one and, again, the “Mesh” moniker will be dropped.

All of this makes complete sense of course. As cool and as useful as Mesh clearly is it has never progressed beyond a beta so it makes sense that its features get embroidered into an existing mature product suite with which there is a lot of overlap. I’m now more and more excited about the upcoming Windows Live Wave 4 – I can’t wait to get my grubby mitts on it!

@Jamiet

• http://home.live.com (or perhaps http://www.live.com) will be a gateway into Office Web Apps as well as the existing Windows Live services such as Skydrive, Spaces, Hotmail and Groups.
  
• Office Live Workspaces will be mothballed and its features rolled into Office Web Apps
• http://office.live.com will be the place to go for all Office Web Applications and the existing Office Live Small Business service will be rolled into it as well (although perhaps not in this first release).
• We will be able to save documents directly to Skydrive from within Office Web Apps.
• We will be able to make Office documents available for public viewing and editing at http://office.live.com. Any updates we make to such documents can be posted to our What's New feed at http://home.live.com
• The web messenger toolkit will be employed at http://office.live.com

Admittedly this is a mix of predictions and a wishlist and is all pure speculation. I have no access to information other than what is available in the public domain so take this with the pinch of salt that it deserves.

UPDATE: This video from Robert Scoble with Office GPM Chris Bryant :

Powerpoint broadcast
  

explains how we will be able to broadcast Powerpoint presentations from our desktop to the web via Windows Live! Cool!.

Quote from Chris: “the web applications will have a Technical preview later this summer on top of Windows Live”. Even more intriguing!

Update 2: Another Windows Live nugget from Chris Bryant. In the following video he says: “this [Excel spreadsheet] is publishable to Excel Services running on top of Sharepoint or eventually on top of Windows Live” (fast forward to about 5m10s):

Office Web Apps
  

Update 3:

“Office Web applications will be available … through Windows Live, where more than 400 million consumers will have access to Office Web applications at no cost” - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jul09/07-13Office2010WPCPR.mspx

Update 4:

My suspicion about SkyDrive from the top of this blog post has been confirmed:

“This iteration of Office brings great collaboration tools and a web client that you'll be able to use simply by keeping your docs up on Skydrive.”
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/LarryLarsen/A-Look-At-Office-2010-with-Chris-Capossela/

Update 5:

A good juncture to link back to a related blog post from January of this year:

Some thoughts about the convergence of Windows Live, Office Live and Mesh
(http://jamiethomson.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!550F681DAD532637!9146.entry)

@Jamiet

Silverlight 3 has just been released to much hoopla and razzmatazz and from what I’ve heard there is a lot in the box for developers in the guise of new capabilities and performance improvements.

That’s all well and good and doubtless will make for better applications but I can’t help thinking there isn’t much in the box that I would call explicit new user features. Yes, developers can build better applications and that is obviously of benefit to users but other than being able to take applications out-of-browser there isn’t much here that users will see different from Silverlight 2.

I’m sure that will change with Silverlight 4; for example its strongly rumoured that Silverlight 4 will enable apps to interact with peripherals such as webcams and another one I heard was that right-click context menus will start to be supported. All good stuff.

There’s one feature though that I believe could be a knockout blow, namely Live Framework support!

For those that don’t know, Live Framework is a programming interface that allows a developer to interact with a sync data model called the Live Operating Environment (LOE) - it enables developers to store data from one device and have it automatically sync to any other device that the user owns. Does that sound at all familiar? If you are using Live Mesh then it should do because Live Mesh is simply an application that sits on top of LOE and it uses the Live Framework to interact with it.

So what capabilities would Live Framework support in Silverlight provide for users? Well here’s one example; Silverlight enables an application to persist data into an area called Isolated Storage, this is typically used for storing usernames and passwords to save the user from typing them in every time. Unfortunately the user has to enter those usernames/passwords on every computer on which they have the application installed which is a bit of a pain however this is exactly the sort of scenario that Live Framework is intended to alleviate. If the application developer chose to store those usernames/passwords in LOE rather than Isolated Storage then they would be available on any machine on which the application runs thus saving the user from having to type them in again. Pretty cool!

Another ability provided by the Live Framework is the ability to cache data offline and for that data caching to happen “behind the scenes”. Silverlight 3 enables applications to run offline but frankly there isn’t much use in doing this because of the miniscule amount of storage available in Isolated Storage. Imagine if your Netflix movies automatically appeared on your computer and you could watch them while offline, in Silverlight. Perhaps even on your mobile phone. That’s another capability that could be provided by the Live Framework.

Anyone on the Live Framework Technical Preview will know that we can already build Silverlight applications on top of the Live Framework however some additional steps are required – it would be much better if this support were native to Silverlight. I’m inclined to believe that this is exactly why the out-of-browser feature has appeared in Silverlight 3 – its a precursor to something much bigger and better in the future, namely the convergence of Silverlight and the Live Framework.

Here’s hoping!

@Jamiet