silentblue | Quantified

“Sparkle” is a series of tools recently showcased as part of MS’s Windows Longhorn technology platform.

It will allow developers to make Flash-like effects from within Windows programs via Avalon’s vector-based graphical API. When you minimize a program in Mac OSX to the dock, it actually looks as if it gets sucked right into the dock. I think that’s the kind of effect we’re talking about.

But it also looks an awful lot like another vector-based animation tool – Macromedia Flash. Which is why some pundits are calling it the “Flashkiller”.

Right now it looks more like a rudimentary programmer’s SDK than something artsies will want to use to make their Christmas e-cards, but it should be interesting.

Macromedia – to be frank, their tools are overpriced, non-intuitive and haven’t really improved in the last three iterations. Their only real competition came from Adobe and maybe Java. I know, I’ve used them. But the work dang well, is all.

XAML is basically MS’s ripoff of Mozilla’s XUL (pronounced “Zool”), although it includes a few interesting new features. XUL is based on the XML metalanguage set. It is what makes Mozilla/Netscape 7 incredibly flexible; for example, you can even program games into Mozilla. Unlike XML it will be proprietary/closed source and closed platform. Again in a copycat case, the next-gen IE will run on XAML.

In a true testament of skill, Nobuya Chikada makes ports of Pac-Man and Space Invaders…to Microsoft Excel macros. Ingeniously, each spreadsheet cell is used as a pixel. Well, at least we now know VBA is good for something other than writing viruses.

Unfortunately, Pacellman only works in Excel 97 and Excel 2000. In that case, why not relive those days in the schoolyard playing Wario Land with David Winchurch’s thesis project – a Java applet Game Boy emulator?

Flash of the Day: Another Super Mario spoof, Barge of 1,000 Bullets.

File attachments can really bog down a corporate network. It just takes one user to send a 5MB MPEG of a dancing hamster to his team to see how wasteful they can be. You end up with giant Outlook folders and gobbled-up bandwidth. It appears a company called Creo has an interesting idea – everytime you send attachments, the Creo Token software compresses and encrypts everything into a “bundle”, but then sends a “token” instead of the actual file. With the Creo Redeemer software, your recipient can cash in the token, which points to the sender’s file bundle still residing on the sender’s hard drive.

Personally, I think they could do even better – how about having the sender’s bundle uploaded to centrally accessible, fast file servers, say an internal one for internal communications, and an external one on the Internet for extra-office email? I think there could even be a business opportunity for someone to offer Internet “public storage” for tokened files. The server can be configured to automatically destroy all files which have had their tokens redeemed, or after a preset amount of time.

Then, there will be none of this hard drive snooping business going on.

There was a leak of Windows Longhorn Build 4051, Microsoft’s next Windows OS, and Neowin and WinBETA have the scoop in it. And while the MSN Explorer-ish user interface (codenamed Aero) will most likely be reviewed and revised before Longhorn ships in 2005 (2006?), the features are very real.

The next Internet Explorer seems to have a lot of interesting features, such as a download manager (above), a pop-up blocker, and the ability to install “Add-ons”. Wow, they wouldn’t have been influenced by Mozilla’s Download Manager, popup-blocker or Extensions, would they?

I was a beta tester for the recently-released Microsoft Office 2003 System. I was impressed with its stability, even in beta stage, although I have to raise doubts on the value-add between Office 2003 and its predecessors such as Office XP or even Office 2000. And then there is the open-source office suite, OpenOffice. There is no one single user feature that makes it a must-buy, although Outlook (Go Chris!) and a lot of the underpinnings have been overhauled, making it more enticing in corporate enterprise situations.

Shell remarked that MS is spending $150 milllion on an ad campaign. “I just saw a parade roll by with people in orange Office T-shirts (a band apparently), a motorcade and then 3 powerboats painted with Office 2003 logos…The band was kinda straggly and it was drizzling. They had all these Orange and Yello balloons in the soccer field (remember that) plus 50 ft high balloon men saying ‘Office 2003’ waving around in the rain. Kinda weird.”

The debutante of the Office package was undoubtedly Microsoft OneNote 2003, a cool virtual scrapbook designed to make Tablet PC users take down notes. It has often been called “Notepad of steroids”, although the ability for users to stick text blocks, images and audio clips haphazardly on a page makes it much more similar to PowerPoint in technique.

I wonder if it will actually be USEFUL in day to day life, though. After all, it’s just lets you create really sloppy notes, which you will sooner or later re-edit into Word, PowerPoint or email. It may be over-engineered. I know most people just use a blank Word document to “scribble” notes in, or use a Palm note taking program, like MEMOPlus. I use QuickNote for Mozilla, personally. While none of these things lack the versatility of OneNote’s search and organization features, they do take notes just fine.

Bizarrely, while OneNote goes under the Office 2003 banner, it is sold separately. Even stranger, the marketing geniuses decided to sell it for $199 US MSRP. It’s great note-taking software, but it’s still just note-taking software.

Perhaps I’m a bit jaded because I don’t have a Tablet PC. Only a Tablet PC can understand your handwriting as text, thanks to its “digital ink” support; a regular PC will only see JPEGs. Of course, Tablet PCs haven’t exactly been flying off the shelves. The number one issue is cost – you can get a notebook with twice the horsepower for half the price. A tablet manufacturer claims that the ridiculous prices are due to Microsoft charging way too much for Windows Tablet PC Edition. Second reason is speed, or lack thereof, thanks to their low voltage mobile Pentium IIIs running at 800MHz – 1GHz and sluggish integrated video.