IT PRO: Blogs: Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe: Beta

Home

Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe's Blog

What do you want to do where today?

By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial

Posted in virtualisation, Beta, smartphone, operating systems, Web browser, Futures, Google, Windows, Hardware, Windows Mobile, Microsoft on November 5, 2008 at 2:43 am

Permalink | Author Profile

Or Windows 7, let’s hear it for the hardware; looking forward to WinHEC.

This is the only Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Conference before Windows 7 ships: unless the next WinHEC returns to its usual May timing that gives Microsoft another year to get it right. I’m expecting to hear positive things from the OEMs who’ve been playing with Windows 7 for much longer than we have; 7 is leaner than Vista and it literally puts devices ‘on stage’ with the Device Stage ‘experience’ (a task-oriented alternative to the AutoPlay dialog). And Ray Ozzie was very careful to frame Microsoft’s cloud play in a way that doesn’t ignore hardware.Google doesn’t give the hardware manufacturers much love, because it doesn’t have to, but for the first time since Paul Maritz left (and he’s now playing ‘who blinks first’ with server manufacturers at VMware over whether virtualisation will sell more servers rather than fewer in the long run) Microsoft has remembered how much the OEMs matter. The lack of drivers when Vista launched and the willingness to ship Linux on netbooks may have refreshed the Microsoft memory here.What’s good about the PC? Copy and paste, as I say whenever anyone asks me why I’m not packing an iPhone. And hardware. “Both Windows and the apps are sitting right next to the hardware, the processor, memory, graphics, and disk.” You can take advantage of a big screen in a browser app, but you’re wasting a lot of the power of the PC by not taking advantage of what Windows can do on the CPU. And storage is still much more efficient in the OS, as Ozzie notes there’s “immense value in the storage on PCs for confidentiality and mobility, for speed of access and local convenience for documents and rich media, photos, videos, music, and more”. Yes, Google Gears would like to work with USB drives and GPS directly, but as long as the Gears team are saying that “everything in the browser is inherently safe”, I won’t be installing Gears.Cloud, said Ozzie, plays to the strengths of the Internet: remember, this is someone old enough to remember the Internet before the Web and to appreciate the range of services online for communicating with companies and people. Rich Internet Applications? “Yes, the browser as universal run time is cool and it’s really useful” admits Ozzie, “but this is not the core of the Web’s sustainable uniqueness. The Web’s unique value is in its ability to assemble the world’s people, the world’s organizations, its public information, its services and devices, enabling us to connect, to communicate, to transact, and to share. ” And the phone is somewhere in between, says Ozzie. Yes, you can write software that uses the hardware on the phone - in fact, with the slower processor and limited storage you have to. But what the phone really gives you is context - something Microsoft is trying to add to the PC with the sensor framework in Windows 7 but is unlikely to match. “The truly unique advantage of a phone-based app is that it’s always with you and it’s ready for your spontaneous action. The phone knows where you are, what time it is, so it can tag your location on something. With its camera, you can snap a picture in the context of what you’re doing. You can record a quick idea or use text or ink to jot down a note. There’s no better way than a phone for you to immediately comprehend that something that you care about is suddenly in need of your attention.”We use Microsoft’s Live Mesh service to share documents peer-to-peer on the road. It’s very effective - in fact it’s changed the way we work. It’s handy to have it available through a browser but we’ve never used that because where we need the files is on the PC (or often two, three or four PCs between use) that we’re working on. Live Mesh has just come out for Windows Mobile and the Mac (for a limited number of users while Microsoft ramps up the service). We probably won’t look at many PC files from a phone, but if we need to it’s going to be much more convenient than hauling out a laptop at the hotel front desk or in the rental car agency. And all those to-do lists I jot down on the phone; they’d be a lot more useful if they showed up on my desktop when I could do something about them. That’s almost exactly the three scenarios Ozzie defined last week, and they need the balance of hardware and software to work. Last week we saw the new software that’s on the way; this week it’s what the hardware brings to the party and whether the manufacturers are as positive as Microsoft has predicted. -Mary

Not yet rated

Loading ...

Troubleshooting 7

By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial

Posted in support, Beta, Windows, Microsoft on October 30, 2008 at 9:31 pm

Permalink | Author Profile

I’m writing this blog entry on a run of the mill Dell XPS laptop. The only thing that’s different from the laptop you can buy today is that it’s running the pre-beta build of Windows 7 that’s been distributed here at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in LA.

You’ve seen the reviews all over the web, and you’ve read the analysis of the effects on the Vista marketplace, and of Microsoft’s changing role in the industry. Let’s take that all as read, and use this as an opportunity to drill down into one of Windows 7’s more interesting new features.

One thing about the PDC, it’s an excellent place to meet Microsoft staff who rarely leave Redmond, and to learn more about the issues of programming and developing Windows applications. Unlike TechEd, it’s an event that looks at the future of Windows, and it regularly unveils new tools and technologies. We spent the week talking to people, and listening to all kinds of presentation.

Much of what’s been written about Windows 7 focuses on its consumer features - but there are a lot of things in the next Windows for the IT pro - many of which will make your lives a lot easier. New self service tools in the OS make it a lot easier to manage, as your users will be able to solve many common problems without having to call a help desk.

Windows 7 will identify and help solve problems with the new Troubleshooting control panel. Just type “fix” in the search bar to see a list of troubleshooting options. Alternatively you can use the new Solution Center to see where you need to start finding solutions.

The Troubleshooting control panel has 8 categories, each of which is full of the top issues that have been reported to Microsoft. If you look at the Programs section you’ll find tools for managing program compatability, along with quick fixes for Media Player and web browsing. All in there are over 100 listed root causes, with common solutions. There may be one or more solutions to a problem, and you’re given the option of trying them each individually or all at once. Just click OK and your machine should be running normally again.

The underlying technology is that old favourite, PowerShell, and that means it should be possible to write your own troubleshooting scripts for your own applications. It also means that you’ll be able to push management scripts to remote machines, pre-emptively fixing problems if you start seeing your users all accessing the same problem information.

I’ve already used it once, to enable the built-in bio-metric scanner on my laptop, as Windows didn’t come with drivers. The troubleshooter tracked down the Vista drivers, and gave me the appropriate download link - all in a single dialogue box, with no intervention from a system administrator…

With tools like this in Windows 7, you’ll be able to invest your time in developing new applications and services (and maybe investigating new platforms like Azure), rather than answering the phone. If your users need hand-holding, why not delegate that to Windows…

–Simon

Not yet rated

Loading ...

T9 through your menus as well as texts

By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial

Posted in Telecoms, Beta, Toys & gadgets, Windows Mobile, Mobile on October 2, 2008 at 4:58 pm

Permalink | Author Profile

Nuance is finally bringing out the version of Extended T9 that suggests features on your phone as well as words you’re trying to type. That’s only 20 months after I saw it at Mobile World Congress so you can colour me impatient, and today you can only download it for S60 devices and not Windows Mobile. Before the end of the year Nuance promises to announce a ’significant’ handset manufacturer and two operator deals for T9nav.

The way it works is that you just start typing, from the idle screen of the phone; if you type 258 you might be dialling a number that starts with 258, or you might be calling the Blue Note Cafe in Glastonbury, or you might be looking for ‘Blue Moon’ in your music library, or you might be trying to turn Bluetooth on. T9nav will give you a list of all those options and you can get things done with three or four clicks rather than navigating through menu after menu after menu after menu…

Michael Whers, the VP for evangelism at Nuance also showed me the voice control version, VSuite 3.x, which lets you say ’send a text to Chris Green’ plus a prototype dictation service that lets you dictate the text of the text, so to speak. The voice control runs on the handset, even on a basic feature phone, because there’s only so many commands you need to recognise; the dictation runs on a server in the cloud because you need a more powerful machine to recognise all the words you might want to use in a message. The real barrier to good voice recognition isn’t the phone - it’s the cheap headsets most people use which either have a cheap microphone or worse still, nose cancellation that just filters out the white noise and flattens the signal so much that voice recognition doesn’t work. Another prototype, Voice Search, lets you ask questions like ‘what hotels are there in Palo Alto, California’ and get not just a list of Web results but a list of Google Map links to the hotels.

Wehrs showed that running on an iPhone, although the app isn’t on the App Store for reasons he didn’t want to go into. He also pulled out another unreleased product; the HTC Star Trek flip phone running Windows Mobile Professional, with a Fake Cursor application to give you a mouse pointer so you can use the touch-screen interface without a touch screen on the device. As a dedicated Windows Mobile Standard user (you can have my HTC Excalibur when you pry it out of my hand and replace it with something in the same form factor that has 3G and GPS), I suspect this is a gimmick - the interface is designed for tapping with a stylus or a fingernail, but most of the applications I tried worked surprisingly well with the fake cursor. Don’t hold your breath though; it could be another 20 months before anything like this ships.
-Mary

Not yet rated

Loading ...

Join the (beta) community

By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial

Posted in Community, Beta, Software, Microsoft on June 13, 2008 at 3:52 pm

Permalink | Author Profile

TechEd is Microsoft’s instant university, a place where developers and IT pros go to get information about the current state of all things Microsoft. It’s not really a place for big announcements - though the odd one sneaks out.

Most of the news from this year’s event has been about software moving from one stage of beta to the next. Whether it’s a new beta (like Silverlight 2) or a long running upgrade saga finally getting close to release (like SQL Server 2008) it’s not like a new release of Windows or a new Visual Studio. If anything we’re quickly moving into a world where the big bang launch is a thing of the past. Apple may be still spinning its “one more thing”, but even Snow Leopard will just be an evolutionary move. Instead public betas and community previews will become the way things get done, and the Web 2.0 perpetual beta will be the way of the rest of the IT business works.

Is this the end of the computing world we’ve come to know?

The answer is both a yes and a no.

It’ll be harder to write a software news story, that’s for sure, but that’s not really a problem. What’s really important will be the change in the way IT pros relate to the companies providing them with software. Commuunity-based development programmes mean that you’ve got a lot more clout than you’ve ever had. Instead of passively installing the code you’ver been given you’ve now got a chance to influence its development - so you can avoid big bang deployments that dissapoint and frustrate your users.

So what should you be doing?

It’s worth setting aside some hardware for test and development - and with virtualisation software now bundled free with most OSes, you can probably make do with one multi-core box, saving on space and power. Then sign up for the programmes related to the software and tools you intend to use. Once you’ve got the code you want, start using it the way you would in production, using real data (and if you can, real users).

The most important part of the process is possibly the hardest - you need to take time to join beta communities and take part in the discussions. Report bugs by all means, but also engage with the company representatives and describe your usage scenarios and any deficiencies you see. You’ll be surprised by how many people agree with you, and while you may not get an instant response from the developers, or even see the changes you want in the version you’re testing, your points will have been noted, and will be used to help define the next release of the software.

Beta software is an important tool. It lets you prepare for what’s next, and helps you understand new capabilities and interactions with existing tools. It’ll also make you ready for support demands - another area where beta communities can help, as you’ve got a ready-made peer group where you can share problems and solutions,

It’s a brave new community out there - so why not dive in and make the most of it.

–Simon