Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

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.

...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?

...and its other Expression friends.

It's been more thab two years since we first suspected the existence of an internal Microsoft project codenamed "Sparkle" that was intended to help designers build Longhorn user interface elements. Some suggested it was a "Flash-killer", but that didn't make sense - as Avalon was about a lot more than animations. Flash has matured considerably over that time, and has become a UI design tool in its own right.

Today's announcement has brought us a Sparkle that's very close to my initial speculations. It's a tool for designing rich Windows forms that separates the design task from development. Developers can produce template forms in their usual development tools, hand the form template over to a designer, and can carry on working with their code while designers build a rich user experience on top of the initial template. This is a new approach, but one that's not far from the interface-first design paradigm required by distributed application development. All we have to remember is that the user interface is important as our component interfaces - and needs to be treated in the same way. So design all your interfaces first, lock them down and then write your code (and your tests).

Looks like Microsoft has realised that it needs a complete set of design tools to get the Windows Vista application experience it's promised. Not so much an attack on Macromedia's market share, more a realisation that it'll need that class of tools to encourage designers to work in XAML. So we get Acrylic as a hybrid 2D/3d vector/bitmap design tool and Quartz as a web application design tool.

Of course the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, so I'll be waiting to get my hands on the code. I'll also e looking forward to applications that look a lot more interesting than the traditional forms metaphor...

LA is freeways, hotels and conference centres. Or at least that's all marypcb and I have seen so far. That and cardboard Hummers.

So what of the conference?

The big news is probably the Windows Vista Community Technology Preview (and of course the return of the Sidebar to the Vista desktop). Then there was Office 12, with its "results-oriented" approach. Microsoft seems to be finally working on the context problem - and it'll be interesting to see how it all fits together over the next year or so. The windrows Vista CTP contains the first bits of Aero, Microsoft's 3D UI. It looks pretty and appears to work well. As my main machine at home now has an Aero-capable graphics card, I'm looking forward to playing with this.

Somewhat more esoteric, but still important were the announcement of LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) which gets rid of all that tedious XPATH and SQL in your nice clean C# code, Microsoft's AJAX framework Atlas (which I've already written about for the Guardian), and the catchily-named WPF/E (a version of the Avalon display technology for small devices).

All very hardcore, but all part of the whole software industry trend to increased abstraction. They may seem just more ways of writing code, but they make what were hard problems easy, and give us a whole new set of tools to deal with the demands of today's businesses. The ability to query objects, XML and relational data and then serialise the results to a web service in just a few lines of code is world-changing stuff (so it's a good job where seeing Java move this way too!).

Tomorrow we (apparently) get to see Sparkle. I've been waiting for that one for two years now...