Windows Media Player 11: Calling All Feature Request!

From MakesYouGoHmm

Ok, there is no direct link to this post, well I can’t find the post on Scobles site where he talked about feature request for Windows Media Player 11, so linked to it from TDavids http://www.makesyougohmm.com site I discovered through http://chris.pirillo.com.

So what should be in Windows Media Player 11?

– What does Apple do that Microsoft doesn’t do (often)? Make aesthetically pleasing stuff. Time to redesign the Media Player. It’s about as interesting looking as a pet rock. Open the M$ vaults and pay for some really cool looking default design. And get rid of the standard gray tabbed option boxes, please. Those things are 1995. Yes, I realize WMP can be skinned without too much trouble, but the default skin shouldn’t be the plain design, it should be something slick and cool looking. The first look should be “wow!” instead of “oh.”
– Quit with the default checked page take overs on installation. If users have to uncheck a bunch of boxes to stop their homepage and default search from being changed that’s irritating.
– Encourage more third party plugin / APIs development. Hire some developers who are bloggers and have their sole job to build cool stuff to plugin to the Windows Media Player. New free tools every week! Do a better job answering the question: why should developers develop/write plugins for Windows Media Player?

Read the rest here

Here are my personal request, minor, but I want them:

* I would like to see syncronization between the Windows OS and Media Player volume Controls.
* Support for more codecs of course, I downloaded a song and had to convert to MP3 in Itunes to play it in Media Player 10.
* More modern updated themes.More visualizations like Energy Bliss, at least 50.
* Easier CD-Burning.
* The music and video guide takes longer to load than if than if were loading in a web browser.
* Access to my music library with album art, so when click on an album, it just list the contents of the album in a right pane.
* Album art gets blurry and does not match the correct album when you select another album or song to play.
* Better use of meta data about a song or album, it still does not find appropriate album art even after a few months with enough information in a song file properties.
* Better file integrity tools to know if a song is corrupted or damaged.
…and a lot more I can’t think of right now.

Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006 Review by Paul Thurrott

From WinSupersite

Often criticized for the sheer number of digital imaging products that it offers, Microsoft has faced a bit of resistance to its Digital Image Suite product line, which offers consumer-oriented digital photo editing, management, and sharing functionality across three applications. That’s a shame, because the last few versions of this application suite have been fantastic, and I’ve been moving away from Adobe’s PhotoShop products as I’ve come to be more familiar with the Microsoft offerings, which are often superior as well as less expensive. In this review, I’d like to examine the latest version, Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006, see how it compares to Adobe’s consumer-oriented photo editing solution, PhotoShop Elements 3.0, and take a look at all its new features.

Read the rest here

Photoshop CS version 8 is my tool of choice for anything concerning photography. I even handle my scanned documents in Photoshop. I still PhotoDraw 2000 version 2 though, Microsoft should have never given up on that program.

Longhorn RSS Support – WinSupersite Technology Showcase

From WinSupersite

On Friday, June 24, 2005, Microsoft announced that it was adding deep platform support for a technology called RSS to Longhorn. RSS, or Real Simple Syndication, is an XML data format that’s used to publish Web content to which people can subscribe. RSS solves a problem that Microsoft and Netscape tried to solve a decade ago with so-called "push" technologies: Rather than force people to manually navigate to Web sites to see when content has been updated, they should be able to subscribe to that content and receive notifications when updates are made.

Read the rest here

Talking about 15 million MSN Spaces blogs

 See my earlier post about MSN Spaces has 14 million users. MSN Spaces, you ROCK and once again CONGRATS!

Quote

15 million MSN Spaces blogs

Wow, Microsoft can push some massive traffice. That’s quite a number. 15 million blogs at MSN Spaces alone in a little over 6 months according to Scoble. Congratulations to the MSN Spaces team.

Microsoft AntiSpyware Update Notification screen, Build 614

There have been some posts concerning not being sure that the popup from MS offering 614 Build was the real deal or not. I just managed to have it pop on a pc, and snagged the screenshot.

From Ron Chamberlin

Microsoft AntiSpyware on News at 11

From Susan Bradley

Crazed woman arrested in Fresno after she disrupted a United flight from Las Vegas to Fresno.  Passengers say that the woman unbuckled her seat belt during take off and crawled over the seats and began strangling a passenger two rows behind her.  When questioning the surrounding passengers they said "I really don’t know what happened."  "One minute the guy was just discussing to the passenger next to him, how he downloads stuff through Morpheus and how it loads up pop ups and gunk on is machine and every so many weeks he uninstalls Morpheas and then uses Microsoft Anti Spyware to clean up his PC and then reloads Morpheous and starts over again".  "He said that he didn’t want to pay for Morpheous so he just put up with the pop ups and ads until it got really bad and then used the free Microsoft Anti spyware"  Passengers said "the next thing we know she’s screaming at the top of her lungs and got her hands around his throat".  They said that the female passenger calmed down a bit when the gentlemen praised the Microsoft product for being so good [and free] in cleaning up his machine on a regular basis. and the fact that he was urging a fellow passenger to search on the Microsoft site to download it and  install it on his machine.

The woman was carted away muttering….. "risk… he’s actually ACCEPTING spyware as a reasonable computing experience because he’s so cheap and sees this as perfectly fine"

My Say

Really strange and stupid woman. If the Microsoft AntiSpyware software is doing a good job of actually removing the software, why should he bother paying for something?

Would it have been any different if the guy was using Adaware or Spybot Search and Destroy?

Microsoft Shuffles the Longhorn Management Deck

From Microsoft-Watch

Chris Jones, one of Microsoft’s Windows allstars, is back on the Windows client team. His mission? To get the next version of Windows out the door. As part of its ongoing push to get Longhorn out the door, Microsoft is shuffling its Windows client management deck, according to sources close to the company.

In the latest reorg, Joe Peterson, vice president of Windows product development, is being removed from day-to-day Longhorn product responsibilities. He will be replaced by Chris Jones, who has been serving as corporate vice president in the Core Operating Systems Division (COSD), according to sources claiming familiarity with Microsoft’s strategy.

Interesting part:

Recent Longhorn pre- Beta 1 builds are now set to expire in December 2006, said one Microsoft partner, who requested anonymity. The partner said he took that as a sign that Longhorn is running late.

The December 2006 date "is embedded in the new beta code that is now downloadable," said the partner. "It will not expire until December 2006.

Microsoft could be extending the beta date beyond the final ship date, as it has done with other products, to cover testers experimenting with the beta code. But Microsoft also could be hedging its bets.

Read the rest here

Windows Longhorn Milestone End of This Week

From the WinFX General Newsgroups

We should enter our final drive to the final build of Beta 1 of the Windows Longhorn client at the end of this week. This drive is scheduled to run for a small number of weeks – however it may be shorter if the quality of the build we are trying to get accepted/signed off is high enough or lengthened if not.

 It would be fair to say that pretty much "anything could happen in the next few weeks". I would be personally surprised if we had the Beta 1 code ready in 8 days including a weekend to make the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. (also note that announcement of product does not equal availability).

I was saying that it is possible that Microsoft could announce the launch of Longhorn at the World Wide Developers Conference, Friday July 8, 2005. Its good to know the Longhorn Team is reaching a milestone at the end of this week.

This is a first for me, but I do hope I get to test Windows Longhorn, I would be so happy to be a part of this experience to both be part of the development of a revolutionary product and also to provide feedback to make it the best release of Windows to date.

RSS in Longhorn: The Security Question

From eWeek

Microsoft Corp.’s ambitious plan to bake RSS deep into the belly of Longhorn will open new attack vectors for spammers, phishers and malicious hackers, security experts say.

"It is inevitable, without a doubt. When Longhorn comes out, attackers will pounce on every new thing to see if Microsoft did it correctly. You can bet RSS integration will be one of those things attackers will want to exploit," said John Pescatore, senior vice president of research at Gartner Inc.

Looking to introduce the fast-growing content syndication technology to a mass audience, Microsoft plans to embed an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) platform to automatically distribute feeds into Windows applications, both its own and those from developers.

The plan is for Longhorn to provide a common feed list of subscriptions and a common feed store of data in Longhorn, which will be available to applications through Windows APIs. The Redmond, Wash., company’s vision also includes RSS discovery and easy-to-subscribe options in the upcoming Internet Explorer 7 browser refresh.

Read the rest here

Thats exactly what I’m saying, look at what has happened by integrating Internet Explorer at the heart of Windows? Why can’t the same bad stuff that plagued IE, also plague RSS? I really, really do hope Microsoft is thinking ahead.

DirectX, Longhorn and the Future of Windows Gaming

From GameDaily

It’s the tenth anniversary of DirectX. In honor of this occasion we spoke with Chris Donahue, the group manager for Windows gaming and graphics. Chris discusses the evolution of DirectX, the impact of the next Windows (Longhorn) and 64-bit gaming, how XNA will help developers on Windows and Xbox, where Windows gaming is headed and much more.

Read the rest here