Windows 7 Beta - More Things That I Like

Windows 7, it is argued, is what Windows Vista should have been. That may be true, and this is a good thing. Having used Windows 7 for a few weeks, there are some features that I really like, because they are as they should be, and so I would like to point them out. The first is the new Taskbar. I have already discussed it in a previous post, but one thing that I didn't touch on before was the ability to show the desktop. If you click on the far right of the Taskbar, it will hide all windows and show the desktop. If, however, you merely hover over the button on the far right, the windows will become transparent (as above) and you will be able to see the desktop. Other than looking pretty, what's so great about that? I shall tell you. First, the wallpaper configuration has gotten better. Instead of just picking one wallpaper, you can pick a set of images that will rotate as the wallpaper. This totally unnecessary feature is exactly what I have been wanting since Windows 95, and have often employed third party programs to achieve. It's nice to see that they listen. Second, and with a more utilitarian bent, Windows 7, like Vista before it, has Gadgets. Gadgets are little graphical widgets that tell you the weather forecast, give you access to your calendar, an RSS feed, or really anything you can think of. Basically, it's a mini-interface to whatever you want and whatever someone has bothered to throw together. It comes with a default set, but you can also download them from the Internet, and thanks to Vista's Sidebar (where Gadgets used to live), there are plenty to be had. It is worth noting that the first thing that I have done to every Vista installation I have ever made was to permanently disable the Sidebar. It wasted valuable screen real estate for very little benefit. However, in Windows 7, there is no Sidebar. Gadgets live on the desktop, and you can tuck them away in the nooks and crannies in between where you normally keep your windows open (or even underneath them), and they don't get in the way until you want to interact with them.

So there you have it. Two things done right.

Windows 7 Beta & Windows Live - First Impressions

I just installed the beta version of Windows 7 on my laptop. Thus far, the experience has been generally good. I like what they've done with the Start Menu and Taskbar (though I did tweak the settings slightly), and the new User folder makes organizing your files a seamless experience. I downloaded and installed the Windows Live programs, and I've given a couple of them a try. These programs also work on Vista and XP, so they're not unique to Win7, except that Microsoft developed these programs along with Windows 7 as an answer to what other companies have to offer.

• Windows Live Writer appears to be a blog publishing program. I've messed with it a little bit, but this post is being authored using the Blogger website (running on Firefox, no less), so that ought to give you an indication of how much I'm plugged in to the Microsoft universe.
• Windows Live Messenger is the same old chat program, where you sign in with your Windows Live ID (a.k.a Hotmail/Passport/MSN account). I don't use my Live ID for much, and I don't connect with others using it much either. I do chat over MSN, but my Hotmail account is just one of three IDs on three different services that I use all the time (and the least active of the three), so there is very little chance that I will switch to using Messenger over Pidgin.
• Windows Live Photo Gallery is basically Microsoft's answer to Picasa. It's a relatively slick interface, and from what I hear it integrates with Facebook (and Facebook has a patent on user-initiated facial tagging, so let's hope that's in there somewhere).
• Windows Live Mail is an e-mail program, along the lines of Outlook Express, but hopefully not as cumbersome and annoying. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like it will work with multiple e-mail providers, not just Microsoft-owned ones.
• Windows Live Call is a VoIP client that works with Messenger (I think).
• Windows Live Family Safety is a console for parents to monitor and control their kids' online activities (though I'm sure it only works with other Live services).
• Windows Live Movie Maker Beta is a video editing and publishing tool. I haven't messed much with video editing, so it's nice to have a free program that does that.

Some of these programs interest me and some don't. As I already mentioned, I'm not likely to switch to Messenger from Pidgin because Pidgin works with Google Talk and AIM as well as Live. The same can be said of MSIE, which lacks indispensible extensions that Firefox has (though I hear Foxmarks is testing a version of their bookmarks manager to work on MSIE as well as Chrome). Writier is worth a try, as is Photo Gallery, and Movie Maker looks interesting if I ever have a need for it. With the release of Windows 7, Microsoft is pushing for modularization, since anyone can develop their own programs to fill these roles and have them seamlessly integrated into the operating system, and from the Application end. Microsoft is providing their Live applications as a download so that they can escape the criticism they've gotten in the past of forcing their services on the users. Some OEMs will install them by default, some will install competing application suites (such as from Google). In the end, I hope that this will result in innovation and competition that benefits all users. If and when I have a chance to explore any of these in the future, I'll try to put a post up about my experience. I want to give the Microsoft versions of software a fair chance, but I'm not prepared to simply do without the familiar programs that I use all the time. To that end, immediately upon installation, I installed Firefox, Pidgin, Chrome, Picasa, OpenOffice, and PyTTY. I was pleased to find that Windows 7 has PowerShell already installed. PowerShell is a much better command line interface than the old DOS-like cmd. I still haven't used the command line much in Windows (at least not at home), and when I do, I'm usually running Cygwin commands or logged in to a Linux box via SSH.

Blogger.com and the Broken Comment Form: Third Party Cookies

A while ago, I noticed that, for some reason, when I was on a Blogger blog on the blogspot.com domain (such as this one), I was no longer seen as "logged in", even though when I went to the Blogger home page, or clicked the "Sign in" link on the upper right hand corner (or the "B" icon on the upper left), I was automatically signed in with my Google account. This was only a minor annoyance to me (it prevented the "edit" icons from showing up for me on the widgets my own blogs) until I started using the in-line comment form for my blogs. This feature puts the comment form right below the post on its page, in stead of opening a separate window or navigating away to a special comments page. I like it because it allows for immediate comment gratification, and a smooth user experience. The problem was that now my comment forms seemed to be broken if I was signed in with my Google account. (Google owns Blogger, and they transitioned away from the old Blogger IDs to Google accounts a while ago.) After doing some research on this problem, I came to the conclusion that the source of the problem was Firefox: specifically that Firefox (since version 3.0) has the default setting of blocking all third-party cookies. (However, if you upgraded your profile from a previous version, you may still have the old default setting left over.) A cookie is a bit of text that a web site can store (in order to read back later) to track information about a visitor to that website. A third-party cookie is a cookie that is loaded by a script that is not hosted on the same domain as the site that you are visiting. Most third party cookies come from advertisers, whose ads are loaded and, in the background, like to keep track of which ads a user has seen and at which sites they have visited. There are a few companies that like to collect as much information as possible, and the fact that they have their advertising tendrils on so many sites gives them a disturbingly extensive ability to track users' browsing habits. This is why the makers of Firefox decided to block third party cookies, except for those sites that the user has specifically granted permission to allow access from other sites. I agree with their assessment, and don't want to re-enable all third-party cookies, but I also want to allow certain sites that I trust to know who I am. Blogger is not nefarious in its desire to "track" me on blogs: it simply wants to let me log in, manage my blogs, and post comments. So, how do I let Firefox know that blogger.com should be allowed to track me on non-blogger.com sites? Here is the answer: Go to the settings menu. This can be found under Tools -> Options on Windows and Edit -> Preferences on Linux. I'm not sure where it is on Mac OS X, but I'm sure it's not hard to find. Once you're there, select the Privacy panel, and under "Cookies", click on the "Exceptions..." button:

Type "blogger.com" into the text field and click "Allow":

You're done. Click Close and exit the settings menu.

The next time you log in to Blogger, external blogger sites (such as those on blogspot.com, as well as custom domains) will know who you are.

Google Reader vs. FriendFeed

It seems that I've been introducing some of my friends to the features of various online tools a lot lately. Not that I've been going out of my way, but it seems that I'm "that guy" who is both "in the know" about tech stuff and willing to answer questions. A friend of mine recently asked me about Gmail. Her frustration was with the fact that the inbox was perpetually cluttered, and there was no way to clear out the old e-mails she had already dealt with without deleting them. So she thought, that is, until I told her what that "Archive" button does. Without it, there is no difference between the Inbox and "All Mail". Labels (aka "Tags") are also an indespensible feature of Gmail when used properly, but that's not my topic. Recently, I started using FriendFeed, and I thought I would explain what how I got there, what it is, and how its niche differs from that of Google Reader. Recently, I started using Twitter. It began with just subscribing to a friend's Twitter feed in Google Reader (my feed (i.e., RSS, Atom) reader of choice), but it would only refresh the Twitter content about once every couple of days, so I would get nothing for a while, and then about ten posts all at once. When things come in little bits, they're time-sensitive, and so I decided to get a Twitter account of my own in order to keep track of my friends' feeds in a timely manner, and be able to reply if desired. Thus, I became a Twitter lurker. However, it didn't take me long to figure out how to hook up Twitter to my Facebook status, making my "tweets" (another 'word' I dislike) a replacement for updating my Facebook status, and transforming me into a 'real' Twitter user. That wasn't enough, however. Apparently, my pallet for up-to-the-minute online content would not be satisfied until I found FriendFeed. When I first encountered FriendFeed, it looked redundant to Twitter's funcitonality, with the added detriment that none of my friends (and only one of my acquaintances) actually used it (at the time). This turned out not to be the case upon further inspection. FriendFeed is to Twitter what Google Reader is to Blogs. Yes, it will keep you informed of your friends' latest updates to Twitter, but it will also keep you informed of their activities on Digg, Reddit, Flickr, Picasa Web, their shared articles (on any number of services), and absolutely anything else that can be accessed through a feed. The problem was, since none of my friends were using FriendFeed, that none of their content and activity was available there. Enter the "imaginary friend" feature. Say I have a friend who uses Blogger, Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, and Digg, but this Friend does not use FriendFeed. I can create an "imaginary friend", complete with nickname and profile picture, that aggregates this friend's content from all the various sites and makes it visible in myfeed exactly as if that friend had signed up and entered all those services as their own. All I need to provide, depending on the service, is their account's display name or feed URL. But why, you might ask, would I need yet another feed aggregator, when I am already using Google Reader? The difference in the way that these two services are used is that while Google Reader provides a hub for consuming content, FriendFeed provides a hub for observing events. Google Reader is all about pulling in the meaty content: reading the whole article. Google Reader, therefore, displays all of the text and multimedia that it can, and keeps track for you of what you have and haven't read. FriendFeed, on the other hand, is a stream of things that "happened": so-and-so posted on their blog, this person updated their status, that person posted a photo or video. The substance of the content is not displayed on FriendFeed: only that it happened and a title, short snippet, or small thumbnail. When an event occurs, it appears as quicly as possible at the top of the page. Once something drops off the page, it's irrelevant. There are items that appear both in Google Reader and FriendFeed, but there are also items that only appear on one or the other. FriendFeed is all about, well, friends, therefore news sites, webcomics, and blogs by people I don't know are much better suited exclusively to Google Reader, where nothing is skipped, and information is handled exhaustively. By contrast, items with very little content, or of a transient nature, are better suited to FriendFeed, where they can be noticed and optionally interacted with should the occasion arise to do so.

Vista Media Center TV Pack: Pros and Cons

Not too long ago, Microsoft leaked an upgrade to Media Center which they released to OEMs. This upgrade contained some "well duh" features: features that should have been in Media Center all along. It also contained a number of "WTF" featuers: features that were not added in the interest of end users; features designed to please television stations and content producers. Features that annoy me. Nevertheless, I have installed the TV Pack upgrade (codenamed Fiji), and continue to run with it. The good:

• Tuners with different feature sets can be used (and it won't reduce them to the lowest common denominator): analog, digital, HDTV.
• Multiple tuners can be hooked up to different sources (cable, over-the-air).
• Clear QAM support: Media Center now supports HDTV over cable. Unfortunately, I can't seem to be able to get it to recognize my Hauppauge 1250 tuner as a digital tuner when connected to cable, so I can't receive the QAM channels.

The bad:

• DRM: every recording is "protected" (from me accessing it) by DRM. There is no law or FTC policy that requires this to be done.
• WTV container format (replacing the DVR-MS format). This format is currently incompatible with commercial skipping and/or removal programs such as Lifextender or DVRMSToolbox.
• DVD burning of recorded content no longer works. At all.
• If I go back to the pre-TV Pack configuration (which requires re-installing the operating system), I won't be able to access any of the content that I've recorded since the upgrade.
• There is no WTV playing support on any non-[Vista-with-TV Pack] system, or Linux. The format is a complete black box that only Media Center knows how to decipher.

It went like this: I have two tuners: an analog USB tuner (Dell branded, Angel manufactured), and a digital HDTV tuner (Hauppuage 1250). Before the TV pack, I had both tuners hooked up to the cable. The other option was to have just the digital tuner hooked up to the over-the-air antenna, which would then receive HDTV channels, but no cable. Media Center allows you to browse through the next two weeks of movies that will be on TV and pick which ones to record. Cable (aside from having shows like Battlestar Galactica) has orders of magnitude more in terms of movie selection, so without the TV Pack, I would have to choose between quality (HDTV for broadcast, but only getting broadcast channels) and quantity (all the shows and movies on cable, but no HDTV channels). The Hauppauge customer support folks claim that since Microsoft hasn't officially released the TV Pack, and since the OEMs haven't yet released PCs with the TV Pack update yet, they aren't supporting Clear QAM in media center on my hybrid card. Clearly, it's a driver issue, and they haven't released one that deals with the problem, at least not officially. So, for now, I'm waiting: waiting for OEMs to start releasing TV Pack systems, which will in turn (hopefully) lead to driver support by the manufacturers; waiting for the Media Center user community to produce software that will decrypt, de-commercialize, transcode, and otherwise access the WTV format. This is already starting to happen, but more progress needs to be made for there to be a true solution. I don't like having my recorded TV locked in a proprietary DRM-restricted format, especially one that doesn't use much compression (I would prefer to be able to transcode to H.264), but for now, it 'works.'