Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

...as Chris Pratley's latest OneNote 12 entry means that I want it now!

Audio/Video: Audio and Video you have recorded or placed in OneNote will also get indexed (Video is indexed by the audio stream). This is some cool MSR technology from our lab in Beijing that we're quite pleased to have. The way this works is pretty cool. The audio is converted from waveforms to phonetic equivalents, and those are indexed. You can type your search term, then this is converted by OneNote into a phonetic equivalent which searches against the phonetic index of the audio. Actually this is a gross oversimplification but you get the idea. You can use this to search your notes for a particular voice note you took, or to find the point in an hour-long interview when a particular word is mentioned (way better than fast forwarding and rewinding to find a spot)

OneNote is possibly the most useful piece of software I use - it's the ideal tool for a working journalist, and this one feature will make it invaluable.

Hmmm. OneNote 12 as podcasting client, anyone?

Well, that was a bit of a surprise.

A demo in a session on Gadget development for Windows Vista here at the Microsoft PDC just showed the Windows Vista Sidebar running on Windows XP. I'm guessing that WinFX will be a prerequisite, but still that dramatically increases the potential audience for Gadgets.

Gadgets are useful - single function information delivery applications that are hosted by the Sidebar, very like Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets.

Not ready for prime time yet, but an interesting development, as it means that Microsoft is looking at adding rich internet functionality into Windows XP. That's a bit more competition for Yahoo!'s Konfabulator. What's also interesting is that the DHTML/CSS/JavaScript model used for Gadgets will make it relatively easy to port OS X Dashboard Widgets...

Interesting times.