All sorts of problems can happen when you roll-over and carry a digit:
So we're busy preparing the major upgrade from 9.5x and 9.6x - and what's more obvious than calling it Opera 10? What's in a name, or a version number?
Apparently a lot of trouble.
More here: 10 is the one - By Hallvord R. M. Steen
¶ 12/18/2008 09:37:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
It has been a busy year. Not long after the Wave2 Windows Live release went out the door we immediately started planning for the next release. And here, before the end of 2008, is the latest refresh to Windows Live: Windows Live Essentials (Beta).
Just at a high level, these are the following changes you'll see in the latest refresh of WLPG (Windows Live Photo Gallery) as compared to the Wave2 2008 version:
Editing
- Noise reduction: new for our refresh release. This is a heavy duty intensive algorithm to look for noise in your picture and help smooth noise out and make it go away. If you're shooting with a point and shoot camera at high ISO (usually in dark rooms) you end up with a lot of color noise dots. This helps to reduce that noise. It's under "Adjust Detail" in the fix pane. It can be a very subtle effect but will make your noisy pictures look less distracting.
- Straighten: we've added straighten to WLPG. In fact, it will first do an auto-straighten if possible. You can also tweak it so that you're happy with the way things line up. I never realized how crooked of a shooter I was until I started shooting with my Canon Rebel. I'm going to use this feature a lot. The team was so happy with it, that Straighten was added to the Auto-Fix command.
- Black and White: and not just one black and white effect but six.
Panoramic Stitching:
- Improved! Our popular panoramic stitching engine has been updated (the same engine within I.C.E.). You'll see more natural horizons and blue skies that blend together better.
Publishing to more and more places:
- Skydrive: by default, WLPG now publishes your http://photos.live.com/ albums to your Skydrive.
- Groups & Events: did you know that you can have photo albums for an event you create? It's a great way of having everyone dump their photos into one spot to share with everyone else. Invite them to an event and then all they have to do is use WLPG and select Publish -> Event album and the event should be listed. Same for publishing to a group shared album.
- Plug-ins! Rather than us write code for every popular place to publish photos (and keeping up with their changes) the WLPG team added the ability for smart folks to take our example flickr publish plug-in and customize it to publish photos and/or videos to different sites. http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/pages/Plug_2D00_ins.aspx contains the list of plug-ins we know about, including publishing to Facebook and SmugMug.
UI Improvements:
- Star rating filter returns: it was in Vista Photo Gallery and removed for Wave2. It's back.
- More space: collapsible navigation tree: you can now make the navigation tree collapse to get more room. Either double click on the line drawn between the gallery list view and the navigation tree or just grab and move all the way to the left to make it go away. Click on the narrow arrow region that appears to make it come back.
- More space: simpler navigation controls on bottom: we moved down to the lower status bar the next / previous / rotate / delete / slide-show / play buttons, along with the zoom controls and the view control. This gives you back vertical space to have more to enjoy your photos. Yeah!
- More info in the Info Pane: when you select a photo, you'll see more information in the Info Pane about the photo, like camera, author, exposure, aperture, focal length, and ISO. One: you can geek out over studying stuff like this to improve your photography. (2) it can help explain sometimes why something doesn't look right (like the time I accidently put my camera into ISO 1600 in bright, bright daylight).
- Brighter: the overall UI is brighter and leaner, removing icons from the command bar.
People Tagging:
- Contacts: when you sign-in to your Live ID, we now download your Live Contacts into WLPG.
- Simple people tagging: whether you're signed in or not, this allows you to say who is in a photo by entering a name. Good!
- Contact people tagging: you can also people tag someone in a photo who is specifically from your contacts list. Great!
- Face tagging: in addition to just saying "Eric Richards" is in the photo, you can point me out in the photo. You can draw a rectangle around my face or, if I'm looking directly into the camera, we've probably auto-detected that there's a face there and you can just click on that face to call out that it is me.
- "That's Me!" tagging: once you're signed in, you can also go through the photos quickly noting where you are.
- People in the navigation tree: in the navigation tree, you can look at your photos by folder, by date, by descriptive tags, or by the people in your photos. And if you're signed in we have your address book and you can drill in to find your family or coworkers. Click on them to see the photos you've tagged them in and a little extra…
- Person page: when you click on a person in the navigation tree, you get a special view of all the photos that person has been tagged in and (if they have a Live ID) which albums they've published to Live Photos and a quick way to visit their Live Photos Page.
- Profile pictures: if your contact has a Live ID and they've set a profile picture, we'll show it when you click on them in the navigation tree and we'll show it when you're tagging people via our people selector box.
Additional features:
- Offline sign-in: you can sign-in now even if you're not connected to the network. We'll, after you've signed in at least once while on-line to let the system cache what it knows about you. This way, even if you're off the network, you can still have your contacts loaded and do some people tagging and viewing.
- Windows Live Sync: if you're a Windows Live Sync user, you can synchronize your photos now between your PCs, including the originals that we save away in your application data so that you can always restore an original after doing some edits.
- Touch: we've done some Touch features that you'll get to enjoy when you're running Windows 7.
- Blog posting: you can fire up Windows Live Writer within WLPG to blog about a set of photos.
- Extras: while it's a nifty idea to try to do everything in WLPG (create photosynths, do some geo-tagging, auto, etc.) we just can't do it all. You can at least install some of our premier photo tools and then find and select the photos in WLPG and launch the appropriate nifty application via the Extras menu.
- Meta-data control: under the options menu there is more level of detail about what kind of meta-data you want preserved or stripped out when you share your photos.
- Tag Clean-up: sometimes you end up with descriptive tags that no longer apply to your photo set. You can especially run into if you have a load of hyper-tagged stock photos and then get rid of them. You can now go and have WLPG scrub your tag database to remove any tags no longer associated with photos.
And there's a lot more that happened under the hood, so to say. I'm very proud to work with the engineering team that made this year's worth of work on Windows Live Photo Gallery possible.
Larry Osterman recently talked about Feature Crews (http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/10/15/engineering-7-a-view-from-the-bottom.aspx ) and I have to say that the Photo Gallery feature Dev, Test, and PM members did an excellent job driving the decisions and work to get their features implemented. The product has remained solid for the development cycles, which is hard when your hooking up some major new gears, so to say.
And now we're out with a new refresh! Enjoy! Be sure to get a Live ID, set a profile picture, and publish some photos up to your Skydrive and play around with it. While you're on the new http://home.live.com/ site, note that you can import your contacts from Facebook or LinkedIn to start building your contact list for People Tagging. And man, if you're on Facebook, you should go to our plug-ins page and that the Facebook plug-in for publishing photos to your Facebook account.
Drop by our official team blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/ ) to learn more about the current refresh and to pose any questions + issues.
Although Virtual Earth mapping has the rocking Bird's Eye View for looking at neighborhoods - which for me usually end up being a lot more interesting than the overhead view, especially with the ability to rotate around various angles - RedFin just switched to Google Maps because of the driving need to be able to draw lots of push-pins fast:
"Every millisecond counts" is a "Googley" UX design principle that we remember from Marissa Mayer’s evangelism of speed and that we strongly believe in (see here, here, and here). Users who come to Redfin's site now should see maps load and render just a little bit quicker, which makes us feel a little Googley inside.¶ 12/12/2008 08:27:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
A write-up on WLPG's latest beta at PC Magazine. The summary:
Bottom Line
The Windows Live Photo Gallery (Wave 3) beta has improved editing tools, a unique people-tagging feature, and the ability to upload to Flickr and other services. But Photo Gallery still trails Picasa, which has better face tagging and integration with online galleries.
Pros
Good organization of photos. Easy uploading to online photo galleries, including non-Microsoft sites. Automatic face tagging. Excellent panorama creation.
Cons
No geotagging. No help with screen captures. People tagging trails Picasa's equivalent. Limited slideshow and special photo-effect options. No blemish remover. Unsupported camera RAW formats.
Looking at the Cons...
Around the people tagging: given that it's in the Windows Live Photo Gallery desktop client and Picasa people tagging is currently Web Picasa only, WLPG a lot more interesting for actually organizing your full-resolution photos by people and enjoying them on your computer, including the photos you're not keen spending the time (or risk) putting online. Given that you tag the people once on your hard disk, you can do groovy things like get the LiveUpload Facebook publish plug-in and ba-damn! all your people tags get auto-Facebook tagged for people with the same names on your Facebook friends list.
Groovy.
And there's certainly the opportunity for the people tagging metadata in the photos to be used and read by other photo sites going forward. It's pretty easy for them to just look at the XMP XML blob and do something with it. This includes Web Picasa.
I'm not sure what Mr. Muchmore's RAW comment on the Cons list meant. If you have the appropriate raw codec installed for your photos (like Canon's for CR2 files) you'll be able to see them in Photo Gallery just fine and organize away. See, not edit. But you have to have the manufacturer's codec installed. Also, if you're heavy into RAW, you most likely have been using the RAW software that came with your camera or have sprung the big-bucks for a RAW-focused photo editing environment like LightRoom, so again, not really a focus as of today for real point-and-shoot and mobile-phone-photo-snapers.
Screen captures? This is important for consumers? I'd like to know more.
And for geotagging lovers (an exuberant but perhaps tiny minority - of which you can see I'm a member if you go to my flickr map page), you can at least download the Microsoft Pro Photo Tools and it shows up under the Extras menu in WLPG Beta, meaning that you can select a bunch of files to send over to Pro Photos to geotag etc.
This is why you want diversity in ownership of media companies:
Joystiq broke word this evening that Netflix stopped Xbox 360 users from streaming movies distributed by Sony Pictures Entertainment.
It makes no sense for a huge electronics company to be allowed to own media like this. This is a pretty obvious negotiating tactic, probably around getting NetFlix for the PS3 and preventing the Xbox from having a living room advantage.
Usually, it has been to Sony's extreme strategic loss to own these media companies. This ownership killed their Walkman line: here you are creating a media player that, you know, might be playing music pirated from the other parts of your own company. Better put in some exotic extremely distasteful codecs that no one wants to ensure that the media only comes from physical CDs.
Oh, and put a rootkit onto our CDs so that we can prevent people from ripping them.
Dumb. And now their stupidity spreads.
Sony should be forced to sell off their media assets.
Original story: MTV Multiplayer » Netflix Speaks Out On Sony Movies Disappearing From Xbox 360 Service — It’s Not A Glitch
¶ 11/19/2008 09:15:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Will Duff has released his Facebook plug-in for Windows Live Photo Gallery that lets you not only upload your pictures to your Facebook account but also works with People Tagging in the latest version of Windows Live Photo Gallery (currently in Beta):
LiveUpload to Facebook is a plug-in for Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta that makes it easy for anyone to upload their photos to Facebook. The plug-in takes advantage of the new people tagging feature in Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta to persist your people tags onto Facebook.
Features:
- Organize and tag your photos in Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta.
- Quickly and easily upload your photos to Facebook, including any people tags added in Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta.
- Upload your pictures to an existing album or create a new one.
Download link: LiveUpload to Facebook – Home
Will also has an upload to YouTube plug-in: LiveUpload to YouTube – Home
Good job, Will! It's great to see these plug-ins released.
¶ 11/14/2008 12:17:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
John Thornton has a new blog entry up about people tagging in the current Windows Live Photo Gallery beta, including some pretty nifty UI animation to show how it works when you're noting just who is in a photo: Windows Live Photo & Video Blog : Why "people tags"?.
Rodger Benson has the newest WLPG post up: Windows Live Photo & Video Blog : Photo Gallery beta cheat sheet where he goes through at a high level most of the new features in the current beta.
Two of the areas mentioned that we've invested heavily in:
- People tagging: rich meta data for the photo indicating who is in the photo and, optionally, where they are in the photo. We have face detection running to help. Also, for those who like to quickly go through their photos noting themselves, we have a "That's Me!" button.
- Publishing plug-ins: did flickr just add some new feature that we don't support? Do you wish we did something a little different publishing to flickr? You don't have to wait on us, you can write your own plug-in to add that feature to flickr, or write a plug-in to publish to a whole new different destination.
For editing, the straighten feature is something I use heavily. For some reason, I take crooked pictures. Too busy enjoying the shot to frame it right, I guess. With straighten, the gallery will first attempt to automatically correct the photo, and usually that's pretty good. But you can go in and fix it up before applying the change.
I also enjoy the new Info Pane with all the extra info about the photo (date taken, size, exposure, aperture, etc). I miss it when I use the previous version.
Going back to people tagging: note that on sign-in we download your contacts and show them in People tags. For your contacts that have Live IDs and that have set a public profile picture for themselves, we download that picture as you start tagging them in various photos. Then, as you tag them, you'll see their public profile picture in the tagging UI. And in the header if you click on them in your People tags tree.
Ready for the latest Windows Live Beta?
- Downloads - Windows Live - official download link.
And, the Windows Live Photo Gallery download page:
...has a high-level overview of some of the new features.
Today is the day. Windows Live Beta is released later today. Everyone (well, every brave soul willing to install Beta software) can have a chance to try out what we’ve been working on for the past year.
Chris Jones: Windows Live Wire : Building Windows Live.
The Official Photo Gallery blog: Windows Live Photo & Video Blog Next version of Windows Live. That’s also a good place to leave your constructive feedback for the whole team to consider.
Be sure to subscribe to the Photo Gallery (aka, Digital Memories Experience) team blog for frequent updates about the new features. I’ll post some high-level run-throughs, too, of what’s new in the Gallery and do my best to track interesting feedback that shows up in my blog searches.
More later.
Oh, wait, more now: LiveSide has their initial take here: Wave 3 Windows Live Photo Gallery – New Features – LiveSide (and shows the end-to-end frustration we all share when way-off-the-mark speculation over unreleased / undiscussed features happens, so don’t be sad about something that was never there).
This past week, Microsoft held the Pro Photography Summit, with many attendees being people who make a living through their photographic skills. In "Photo Business News & Forum Microsoft Pro Photo Summit 2008 - Recap" John Harrington not only supplies some follow-up links from the presentation but also digs into friction around defining who is a "Pro" and who is not.
Interesting reading.
I'm not tracking it because I'm a pro. I'm not even really a Prosumer Photographer (the enthusiast who spends lots and lots and lots of money on professional level gear). Okay, I've got some nice glass but I'm shooting on a Canon 400D, not even a 40D, let alone a 5D.
And that's fine for me.
But I am amazed going around and paying attention to the kinds of cameras people have nowadays. When I was at Cougar Mountain Zoo taking a few shots, a couple showed up and they each had super impressive camera gear. While my lovely Rebel let out an enthusiastic ka-snap with each shot, their's whispered along quickly with barely discernable clicks.
And hiking around Twin Falls State Park revealed lots of folks toting about heavy duty gear.
Hope sells. It sells gold mining tools and it sells great camera gear. The hope to publish your stuff and have it syndicated as news or syndicated through flickr / Getty Images, well, that inspires people to get better results and to enjoy chasing the dream. Let alone the joy of taking great photos to share. And anything that helps photographers in that pursuit - and that makes them feel as good as a Pro - they are going to love.
¶ 7/11/2008 01:06:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
Kettle, you're black.
Adobe 9 [dive into mark] goes into the initial sins discovered trying to install Acrobat 9 and all the crap and inconvenience that comes with it. Additionals:
Back when I was on Microsoft InfoPath, I saw the genesis of Acrobat into more than a convenient reader of PDF files but rather a whole new platform that Adobe wanted to scale up into, leveraging the wide distribution they got with Acrobat being a useful PDF reader (providing high-fidelity rendering in a low-fidelity HTML world). Form editing and more. Who knew Acrobat would be a competitor for an Office product?
And then they started glomming and glomming and glomming technology. And they have made Acrobat a performance pig.
Acrobat has become a clumsy vector for delivery of Adobe strategy. That seems like a violation of trust. One that reaps a black, bitter harvest.
Like, you know, my new HP desktop having a one-off PDF reader for the traditional use of plain ole PDF. Reading.
¶ 7/04/2008 05:58:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
Jim Louderback has a very nice write-up of a Denial of Service his company suffered during the holiday weekend: Revision3's Denial of Service. Snippet:
Although I can only guess, here’s what I think really happened. Media Defender was abusing one of Revision3’s servers for their own purposes – quite without our approval. When we closed off their backdoor access, MediaDefender’s servers freaked out, and went into attack mode – much like how a petulant toddler will throw an epic tantrum if you take away an ill-gotten Oreo.
(I love the toddler theme running through the story.)
¶ 5/29/2008 11:22:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
Don't go buying a Blu-ray player anytime soon:
Ironically, although Blu-ray has been declared the winner, it is right now about the worst time to invest in a standalone Blu-ray player, because of the high prices and looming obsolescence.
Source: TG Daily - Blu-ray player prices hit 2008 highs as competition dwindles .
I'll probably end-up with a Blu-ray player of somesort by years end during the far more competitive holiday season, unless I can download via NetFlix and watch movies via my Xbox by then (or Xbox introduces a similar n-downloads per month plan like NetFlix has, with a comparable catalog).
I guess Java skills will continue for sometime to be useful, even if in a niche area like Blu-ray feature programming...
¶ 3/12/2008 07:32:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
Congratulations to everyone who has ever worked on the Photo Gallery for achieving this remark about Windows Live Photo Gallery:
All in all, this free download is one of the best programs Microsoft has developed in ages.
Source: My 10 favorite Windows programs of all time | Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report | ZDNet.com
A nice collection of Tilt re-configurations and extensions: 10 tips on fixing common AT&T Tilt problems .
(found via the Tilt Site.)
¶ 2/07/2008 02:35:00 PM 0 comments links to this post
Engadget finally picked up the video issue with the HTC Kaiser / AT&T Tilt, and this got HTC around to answering questions about it vs. blowing off the situation: HTC further responds to video driver issue, will improve future products - Engadget.
Well, http://www.htcclassaction.org/ probably helped a lot, too.
The CorePlayer guys have done some coding so that their upcoming product will work more natively with the hardware on the device, so it's a "for pay" solution for watching videos at a more natural flow. Unfortunately, all remaining video heavy applications (like a graphical GPS program) suffer without a driver to do all this acceleration naturally.
My old Axim v51 kicks butt compared to the out-of-the-box HTC Kaiser / AT&T Tilt. And that's too bad.
In this day and age, Windows Mobile devices need to compete directly against the iPhone, and this is a case of a hardware provider falling down and not doing the right thing for their customers.
Long has a pretty intensive work-out of two photo-stitching solutions in this post: Windows Live Photo Gallery gives leading commercial panoramic stitching software run for its money - istartedsomething . Thanks for the post, Long!
The ability to create a panorama out of a set of photos was released in Windows Live Photo Gallery and - looking at most of the blogging around the WLPG - has been one of the more enjoyed fun-features to the Gallery.
It can result in some delightful (and really, really big) photos along the way. Looks like the feature does reasonably well for Long, though the occasional seam-mismatch or drop happens. I personally haven't tried stitching a seam of the same photo over and over again to see what happens, though I know former DMX'er Jordan did it as a way to make a stiched photo and appear in two places at the same time.
You freakin' build it yourself.
Or, at least start a bounty to create a proper video driver: D3D Driver Bounty - $770+ Raised So Far! - xda-developers.
It will be interesting to see how this goes. HTC is silent on the lack of a proper video driver for the HTC Kaiser / AT&T Tilt. The community, frustrated at the lack of engagement and filled with love for their device, is going to try to build a driver on their own.
It's a good thing that this might work. It's a bad thing that this has to be attempted.
I just discovered one work around for TCPMP playing video on the Tilt / HTC Kaiser to make it less of a jumbled mess:
(1) Options -> Video -> Video Driver: GDI (or Raw Framebuffer); not DirectDraw.
(2) Options -> Video -> Quality -> Low
Since the ROM video drivers are crap, this avoids the frame drop. The video I watched didn't get out of sync with the audio anymore (good) but hit occasional fuzziness due to the lower quality setting.
So that works for TCPMP. I didn't see anything off-hand for Windows Media Player.
Source: AT&T Tilt: Poor video performance - AT&T/Cingular (HTC) - Wireless Forums from AT&T.
Oh, and if you're a Tilt / HTC Kaiser owner and not happy about the choppy video and want a small moment of relief: HTC TyTN II Video Driver Petition. And seek solace on the XDA thread: Petition opened for HTC - 2481 signatures - spread the word - xda-developers.
