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Old 11-02-2007, 04:51 PM
Jason Dunn
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
Default Windows Consumer Experience Event in New York City

On October 23rd I hopped on a plane and flew down to New York (partially on Microsoft's dime) to attend a Windows event that I honestly didn't know much about beforehand. All I knew was that it had something to do with Windows Vista and Windows Live. Off I went! My eventful first night in New York is detailed over at my personal blog - this event happened on day two, the only full day I was in New York. I snapped a series of pictures at the event, so this article will be a combination photo essay and walk through of the conversations I had at the event.


Figure 1: Whoa...trippy!

When I first arrived at the event (via private town car - nice touch!) I went up to the 14th floor, looking for Peter White Studios. Coming out of the elevator I was immediately bathed in ultraviolet "blacklight". I wasn't sure if I was going to a rave or a press event, but I pressed onward and came to a nice-looking studio with a big Windows Vista logo near the entrance. Looks like I found it!


Figure 2: Vista beckons me hither (thither?).


Figure 3: I was tempted to take a nap on the comfortable couch - I'd had almost no sleep the night before.


Figure 4: The space where the event was held could best be described as "Urban Classy".

Aaron Coldiron, Senior Marketing Manager at Microsoft (thanks LinkedIn!), was the one walking me through most of the presentation. I've known Aaron since back when he started The Hive (Digital Media Thoughts was a founding member), so it was a nice, relaxed conversation. Well, I was relaxed - who knows how my questions made Aaron feel. ;-)

Windows Live Photo Gallery
Aaron started of by demonstrating Windows Live Photo Gallery, which is currently in beta. Having had a relatively recent negative experience with a beta of Windows Live Mail that still has my Messenger contact list badly screwed up, I hadn't tested Windows Live Photo Gallery, so much of what Aaron showed me about the product was new. If you have Windows Vista, you already have Photo Gallery. This is a program that installs itself overtop of Windows Gallery, essentially giving it the "Live" juice (added features, many of them online-based). Features include histogram display, better adjustments to fix photos, and a panoramic stitching function. Creating a panoramic image is quick and easy, but I noticed there wasn't any preview for the user - so I guess that means the results are either good or bad, with no in-between. Terri Stratton, one of the people that helped coordinate my attendance at this event, took a few photos and used this panoramic stitching function to create the following image (960 KB) - looks good to me! The program continues to support restoring changes to files, allowing you to roll back changes at any time - but Aaron didn't know where the files are stored. I was curious about this because one of my pet peeves with Picasa is how it stores edited images inside a hidden folder, which usually ends up getting exposed in some way.


Figure 5: A big, glorious LCD TV was the focal point for demonstrations.

One of my frustrations with Photo Gallery is that 10 months after Vista's release in Canada, there still aren't any online photo printing companies available in Canada. If you're in the US, there are many partners to choose from - but zero in Canada. It's like someone at Microsoft thought online printing would be a good feature to have, but they only focused on the US. It's frustrating and insulting to the user - and unfortunately Windows Live Photo Gallery has exactly the same problem, which is disappointing. Why even show that menu item to the user if they can't use it? Aaron had no answer to my question as to when other countries would be able to order online prints. If your country still isn't supported, I'd encourage you to drop the team an email and let them know. This feature is particularly vital for inexperienced users who are intimidated by browser-based uploads.

A great new feature that Windows Live Photo Gallery has is the ability to publish photos quickly to an online gallery - right now only Windows Live Spaces and Flickr are supported, but they're looking at adding new services. I'd vote for Smugmug of course, but more than two services should definitely be supported. I think the team did a great thing by supporting more than just the Microsoft option - it shows commitment to users that they'd support Flickr. The feature looks quite well thought-out, and there are more details, and a video, on the Windows Live Photo Gallery team blog. If you put your images up into Windows Live Spaces, there's a plug-in to have them appear in your Facebook account as well. I asked about restrictions on resolution uploads, and unfortunately there aren't any - when you upload to your Spaces account, people will see the full-resolution image. Some people might not mind that, but I never want to give away the full-resolution image: it's really the only proof that you're the one that took the photograph. And speaking of image sizes, Windows Live Photo Gallery still can't resize images - it's such a basic function, it's bizarre they don't support that option yet.

Photo Mail is a cool function I hadn't seen before: it's basically HTML email with embedded photo images, but when you select the images and create a photo mail message, you can do things like change the edge effect on the image (spotlight, brushed edges, wood frame, etc.), auto-correct the image, make it black and white, and control the size (quality) of the images you're sending (here's what Photo Mail looks like). The images don't appear to be attached to the actual email though - they link to a private Spaces slideshow where the user can go to and see the high-resolution images with transitions. That's cool!

What's not cool is that the private slideshow will eventually expire, so when grandma and grandpa want to watch a slideshow of photos you sent them last year, it may or may not be there. Permanence (or as permanent as possible in the online sense of the word) is important in the digital age, so I find Microsoft's approach a bit curious with this. Another down side is that Photo Mail only works if you're using Windows Live Mail client - if you're using any other email client (Outlook, Windows Mail, Gmail, etc.), Windows Live Photo Gallery will just attach the images. A nice middle ground would be creating HTML email with embedded photos like Picasa does. But if you're using Windows Live Mail, Photo Mail is a cool feature that you'll enjoy.

Windows Live OneCare 2.0 and Vista Parental Controls
The next segment of the presentation was something that was less interesting to me personally, but for many people it would be: OneCare 2.0 will protect three computers with anti-virus, anti-spyware, and anti-phishing protection for $49 USD per year. That's great pricing: I've always been amazed at how expensive the Norton packages are, especially if there are multiple computers involved. Microsoft really moved the bar for multi-computer households. Now if they could just figure out the same thing is needed when their operating systems... ;-)

OneCare 2.0 does a few other cool things: it recognizes if your WiFi network isn't secure and will help to fix it, will configure printer sharing, will do complete system backups to a network drive (which even Vista Ultimate will not do) and Online Photo Backup. That last one caught my attention. I dug into it online after the fact (as I'm writing this) and discovered that it's a feature that's in beta but is due out soon. This video gives a good overview, but the basics are that you get 10 GB of storage and you can backup photos on any of the up to three PCs that you have OneCare installed on. 10 GB is a decent amount, although if you have more than that I'd suggest Carbonite [affiliate] as a solution because they offer unlimited backups for not only your photos, but all your other data as well.

Parental controls are something I have no use for yet, as I don't have children, but I'm convinced I'll appreciate them a great deal a few years from now. What's new here is the Windows Live Web Filter: it replaces what comes in Vista today, and what it allows you to do as a parent is to log into your account remotely and approve or disallow Websites for your child. That's pretty cool when you think about it: if you're a parent, working late, and your child IM's you saying he needs access to a certain Website for a school project, you can grant him access to that site remotely. It also allows you to control your child's Windows Live Messenger contact list, a helpful method for keeping online predators from getting too close.

The last part of this segment was a short discussion about Games for Windows. This is Microsoft's branded effort toward making games on the Windows platform less mysterious when it comes to system requirements, parental ratings, and installation and functionality in the operating system. This was a pure re-hash, nothing new was presented.

"Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Toys?" - Jack Nicholson as The Joker in 1989's "Batman"
The next section I moved to was focused on devices either running Vista (laptops and desktops) or devices that are certified for use with Vista (cameras, printers, etc.). I snapped some pictures of the ones I felt were the most interesting.


Figure 6: The Samsung SPF-72V Digital Photo Frame from the front.


Figure 7: A view of the on-screen control system on the Samsung. It was hard to manage it from the controls on the side because you couldn't see the controls and the screen at the same time.


Figure 8: The Samsung SPF-72V Digital Photo Frame from the back.

The most interesting device I saw was the Samsung SPF-72V Digital Photo Frame. The quality of the 7" screen was excellent (800 x 400 pixels), although it was a bit small for my liking. It would fit well on a desk, but it's too small to put on a shelf in your living room - you'd want at least a 10" screen for that. It comes with 64 MB of integrated Flash memory, and can read pictures from Memory Sticks, MultiMediaCards, SD Memory Cards, xD-Picture Cards, and CompactFlash Cards. Resolution is limited to 3200 x 2400 (8 megapixels) though, which would seem to exclude any of us with 10+ megapixel cameras (of which there are more every day). It also supports MP3s, playing them back through a built-in speaker, and MPEG-4 and WMV videos. The killer feature? Built-in WiFi that will pull photos from any RSS feed: I could point this at my Smugmug RSS feed and it would pull down images as I add them. That's just killer, especially if you were to set one up for your tech-challenged family members and your photos would just show up. The down side? I feel the $229 price tag is a big high for only a 7" screen. It's hard to wrap your brain around the fact that for around $229 USD you can pick up a 20" widescreen monitor, but they want to charge you that much for a 7" screen with a WiFi chip and a few other on-board functions. If the price drops to $149 for a 7" version and $249 for a 10" or 12" version, I think we'll see more people wanting to pick these up.


Figure 9: The Dell Inspiron 1520. I hadn't seen one of these in person yet - not bad for the price!


Figure 10: HP's dv9500 Entertainment Notebook PC. Nice, big and bright 17" screen, built-in Webcam, 256 MB dedicated video card - what's not to love?


Figure 11: Sony's VGC-LT is a PC/TV unit that's pretty interesting: 22" wide-screen monitor, a Blu-ray DVD drive (that also burns), 2 GB of RAM, TV tuner...it's got it all. Interesting design as well, with the transparent glass around the screen.


Figure 12: I'm a sucker for a great finish on a laptop, so this red/black design on the back of the Toshiba Satellite X205 really blew me away. It was gorgeous! The rest of this very large desktop replacement laptop is equally impressive: NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT in dual SLI mode, a four-speaker Harmon Kardon system with a subwoofer, dual 120 GB or 160 GB hard drives, 17" inch display at 1680 x 1050 pixles, 2 GB of RAM, a 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, and a lot more.

Wrapping it Up...
If you'd like to see a bit more, there's a decent 4-minute video overview hosted by Microsoft Windows Senior Product Manager Craig Cincotta that covers off everything I saw - it's sadly quite low resolution, but since I didn't take any video, it will have to do.

The event was, I think, geared more toward press that didn't know much about the Windows ecosystem. If you hadn't ever heard about all the new Live services and how they integrated with Windows Vista, the event might have been quite exciting for you. Since I use Vista every day and try to keep up to speed about what's going on in the Windows World, most of what was presented was a re-hash to me. That being said, I still discovered a few new things (especially about Windows Live Photo Gallery) and I came away from the event with a greater understanding of where Microsoft is with Windows Vista and Windows Live.

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. New York is a bit too noisy for his tastes.
 
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