You are here: Home / Archives for microsoft

Microsoft’s vision of how we will work and live in the future

January 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Microsoft is working on its view of the future. This is a video of how Microsoft envisions Office in the (near?) future, and how it impacts our work and home live. Pay close attention to the recipe the girl selects at the end – it shows the ingredients being displayed on the kitchen counter. What it leaves out is something I’ve seen in another video, where the ingredients are put on the counter, matching the displayed ingredients – and it detects mismatches in the items.

Exciting to see this kind of vision, and I’m really curious how far away this is. We have face to face talk, interactive surfaces, touch screens, etc. Maybe 10 years from now, this will be the norm…

Filed Under: Features, Lifestyle, Productivity Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Minority Report style surfing with Microsoft Kinect

December 3, 2010 By 1 Comment

Makezine has a report on a demo from MIT Media Lab‘s Fluid Interfaces Group. The group has created a Chrome Browser extension that uses a gesture interface to control a standard browser with the Microsoft Kinect controller. See the video below for a demo:

DepthJS from Fluid Interfaces on Vimeo.

Filed Under: Features, Games Tagged With: , , , , ,

Outlook shows some appointments off by 1 hour

October 21, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Well, it’s that time of the year again, Daylight Savings is about to end, and Outlook decides that some of my recurring appointments now happen 1 hour later.

Mind you, not all of them. I still have lunch appointments at 12PM, but I now have a recurring alarm to go home at 6PM instead of 5PM. That sounds like my boss is getting me to work an extra hour, but fortunately the recurring appointment “Commute to work” is starting at 8:30AM instead of 7:30AM…

Oh, and my Blackberry synchronizes with Outlook, but somehow manages to correct the braindead appointments to their correct time.

This seems to happen pretty much twice every year, ever since the US government decided to extend DST by a couple of weeks. We’ve patched all our servers and clients, ran conversion tools left and right, but it still happens. Creating a new appointment doesn’t really fix the problem – I have to wait until next week to make that appointment, and by mid-November they’ll be off again!

Luckily some Googling brought me to this post, and although it mainly discusses problems with Exchange and the Blackberry Enterprise Server, it does contain a reference to a Microsoft tool for Outlook (KB931667). To my surprise this tool was updated in August 2008 (hasn’t it been a couple of years since the change in DST?). After installing and running the tool, it found 13 appointments to fix. When I gave it the go-ahead and fix these culprits, the problem magically disappeared!

My only fear now is that I have to run this again on November 2nd… we’ll see.

Filed Under: Productivity, Windows Tagged With: , , ,

Ford Sync hands-on review

July 25, 2008 By 2 Comments

This week my car was in the shop, and as a loaner vehicle I had a 2008 Ford Focus, with Ford and Microsoft’s new Sync system.

The car itself is OK. I normally drive a Ford Taurus, so the Focus is a little smaller, but I used to drive a Renault Clio back in the Netherlands, so I’ve got no problems with a smaller car. Actually, in about the 3 days I was driving it, I managed to get the average MPG up from 25 something to around 31.6. Not amazing, but better than the 19+ MPG we get out of the Freestar, and the 22-24 MPG for the Taurus.

You can tell the Focus is the low-end model of the Ford line-up. The sun visor feels a little cheap, there are some other things that make the car feel less sturdy, and whoever designed the cupholder inserts has never put a cup in one – and tried to remove it (hint: I think the rubber insert should stay in the cupholder, not around the cup as a misformed bottle warmer.

On to the tech part – the Sync system. Sync is a voice-controlled system to control phone and audio. A wide range of phones and audio devices (read: portable MP3 players and the likes) are supposed to work with it. I have a BlackBerry Pearl 8130 and a 3rd gen iPod, pretty standard equipment, so I didn’t expect any problems.

The pairing of the phone over Bluetooth went smooth. And every time I started the car, it connected to the phone quickly and without intervention. The only time I had an issue was when I got in the car around 11:15PM, and Sync didn’t connect to my phone. It took me a minute to remember that the phone turns itself off after 11PM… :-)

Hooking up the iPod to the Sync system was a little more complicated. The steps in the Sync manual describing how to connect your music player through a USB cable – didn’t work. The system maintained there was no music player. After a little bit of fiddling in the menus I managed to tell Sync it really

had a music player. After that, I was able to select songs, artists, albums, genres etc., but my play lists were completely missing. At least I was able to play music and the likes! But my confidence in the manual was pretty much gone.

And then the issues started:

  • I like listening to podcasts. Some of them are pretty long. And I don’t like leaving my iPod in the car. However, when you stop the engine and the Sync system, or disconnect the iPod, it loses track of where it was in the “song”. The only option you have is to fast-forward to the point where you left off – a fast-forward that only skips 5 seconds at a time, at a speed of roughly 10 seconds skipped per real time second. To get back to 1 hour and 15 minutes into the podcast, I had to press the fast forward button for about 8 minutes. On top of that, roughly after every 20 minutes of the “song”, the fast-forward stops, like it thinks you can’t be serious about skipping that much of the “song”.
  • While I was listening to some music, I received a phone call. I was able to answer the phone call, and talk to the person on the other side. The music had stopped. After terminating the call, I was still in the phone menu. The voice commands were now focused on the phone, not on the media. It took me roughly 3 minutes of yelling at the voice system and pushing buttons to get my music to play again. At least it continued where I left off.
  • The “Help” command in the voice system can be handy, but at times is completely useless. I use voice recognition because I’m driving. The system knows I’m driving, because I’m not allowed to do certain setup options. Then why, pray tell, does it tell me after asking for “Help” 2 options, one of which is to “see the manual”??? Should I whip it out and read it while I’m doing 65MPH? Not a very safe suggestion.
  • To this day I cannot ask the system to play an artist or album. I can play genres, but only if I select it through the button menu. The voice system claims no knowledge of any music on my system, be it an
    artist or a genre. Apparently it is supposed to index your music files, after which these voice commands work. But: “Indexing” doesn’t appear in the Sync manual index, and neither does “Factory defaults” and some other useful options.

The Sync system is a very useful idea. It aims to keep your hands on the wheel, and the heads-up display helps keep an eye on the road. But it misses its goal when I have to fumble around on the dashboard because the voice recognition can’t switch from phone to media, or recognize half of the commands. My phone is equipped with voice dialing, and does a great job of understanding me (I can even call my wife, who has the same unpronounceable last name as me – and the Pearl understands who I want). I can’t believe the Sync system has such a hard time.

All in all, it feels like a Microsoft Windows product. It looks OK, but not very intuitive. It halfway works, but I’m waiting for version 2.0. At least it didn’t blue screen on me….

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Is Microsoft deliberately trying to kill Vista?

May 2, 2008 By Leave a Comment

As I twittered about a week ago, I’m upgrading from Vista to XP. Vista has become very unstable over the last year that I’ve been using it, and all the beta drivers and programs that I had to install to support 64 bit probably did their share of damage. Not to mention the WOW64 addition to the registry – what a pain in the behind that is. Service Pack 1 was a case of “too little, too late”: hardly any perceivable improvements. I don’t care if a lot of the improvements were “under the hood”: if I don’t benefit from it, directly or indirectly, it’s next to useless to me.

We (the company I work for, and probably everybody else that looked at Vista) installed Vista on the machines we got around this time last year, under the impression that XP was quickly going to be replaced by Vista. Dismissing the reports that Vista wasn’t all it was supposed to be, we installed it on 6 machines in our IT department. I actually was so bold as to install the 64-bit version, assuming that within a year, 64-bit would be the norm instead of the exception. Yeah right.

Not in Windows land. Apparently things move slower there than anywhere else on this planet. And that’s coming from someone born and raised in the Netherlands, that used to have the title that everything happened 25 years later there than in the rest of the world. I’ll ask the city of Redmond to come by and pick up that trophy. After a year, most programs I used to use are available in 32-bit versions (oh, Symantec: having a 32-bit application doesn’t do any good if the installer is frakking 16-bit!). Most programs. And the ones that are in 32-bit, don’t all support 64-bit Windows (as I found out when we were rolling out our ShoreTel phone system with accompanying clients).

One of the “improvements” of Vista would be its increased security. Much to my surprise I read an article a week or two ago, in which a product unit manager at Microsoft, David Cross, is quoted as saying that one of the security features in Vista was deliberately designed to “annoy users”, to put pressure on third-party software makers to make their applications more secure. I’m still wondering if amongst those applications were such gems as Microsoft Office, and not to forget Vista itself.

Then of course in the beginning of April was the commotion about a Windows 7 product announcement for 2009. Regardless of whether or not this announcement is viable or not (as is David Cross’ comment), if I run a company with 500 PC’s, and am faced with either upgrading to Vista now, or waiting another year or so and skip the Vista upgrade, I know what I’d choose.

On top of that, two analysts from Gartner describe Windows as “collapsing”, and claim that Microsoft must make radical changes to the OS or risk becoming irrelevant. Is this foreshadowing that Windows 7 will be better, or that Windows will be replaced by one of the competing operating systems (Apple OSX, Linux, etc)?

I’m with Dvorak on this one…

Filed Under: Windows Tagged With: , , , ,
« Older Posts