Windows Live Session #2

August 8, 2006

This month’s event was hosted in one of the Kingsway College buildings, aptly named Zero101, down in Soho, London. Way to go Microsoft, arrange a meeting right practically inside London’s Red Light District.

From Microsoft were Phil Holden, who was by all accounts present at the first session, and Koji Kato, a developer from the Tablet division, who flew all the way from Redmond for the event.

First up, Phil gave us a run through of the current services in the Windows Live portfolio, which currently stands at a healthy 17, with more yet to be revealed. Of the 17, we have Live.com, Mail and Domains and of course, Messenger. All of these are still under active development, and we can be seeing updates to all of them fairly regularly.

We were shown a demo of Live Local, which is Microsoft’s answer to Google Local/Maps. There’s not a lot to say about this to anyone who’s already used Google’s version. They are very similar. Major differences are that Live’s supports scroll-wheel zooming, and has transparency.

Koji gave us a brief run through as to what Live actually is. It can best be described as a Platform for which all the new services can run. At the core, we have things like Identity (who you are), Contacts (who you know), and Storage (everything else about you, e.g. mail). Sitting above this we have the Services, which means things like Search, Presence (whether you are online or not), and Advertising services. At the top level we have the things we most associate with live, and that is Email, Instant Messaging, Mapping etc.

It is because all these services sit on a single core, that we see as much integration between the Live services as we do. We’ve already seen this where your Messenger contacts appear in your Mail address book. These “Live Contacts” will be accessible throughout the entirety of Live’s services.

Koji then showed us several demos of some of the things users can do to enhance their Live experience.

Gadgets are a feature from Live.com, potentially elsewhere. Each of the items you can drag and drop onto your Live.com page is an instance of a particular gadget. They are written in simple JavaScript/JScript, with an XML manifest. Writing your own looks to be pretty simple, and you can add one to your page simply by linking to your XML file. The demos Koji showed us were pretty nonfunctional, but designed to show off just how easy it is to make one yourself. With just 10 lines of code on top of a simple framework, he had a drag-and-dropable gadget on his page, with a text box that responded to events. This same type of process is replicated across most of Live. Messenger activities are done in exactly the same way, as he showed in the second demo.

The most interesting demo by far was Koji’s search application. Most tech-savvy computer users find themselves spending a considerable amount of time searching for things. I dread to think how many Google hits I make each day. Using some simple looking C# he had a Windows Form with all the controls he needed to run and display a search query. The process of querying itself is typical of java and C#, horribly convoluted, with objects everywhere, but then I guess the only other alternative is like low level C, writing the networking functions each time - Guess they’re catering for the masses.

The fun started however, when he reminded us he works for the tablet divisions at Microsoft, and how he hates typing when he could be writing. He dragged a new Ink control onto the search form, over the top of the other controls, and with a small modification to the code, had a search application that worked directly from handwriting.

The most incredible think about Ink I reckon, is just how good handwriting recognition is getting. Koji’s was not the most legible handwriting in the world, but the control picked up every word exactly as he wrote it.

To set the priority of the words on the control, which basically acts like a sketchpad, he just dragged a selection round them (which was very cool) and moved them closer toward the top-left corner of the control, instantly changing the priority of the search terms. The literal comment in my notebook while watching the event is “ink layout > *”

Now we all know that Google is king when it comes to Internet searches, but did you know there’s one market where they aren’t number 1… Korea. Over there its a local endeavour that’s the most popular search engine, and if you’ve seen Yahoo Answers, you’ll know what it’s like. The new Live QnA is Microsoft’s answer to this. Instead of a normal search engine where you try to guess the write keywords to find the information you want, in QnA you simply create a new question and post it to the site. Over the next three days anyone can post their answer to the question. You can also vote on answers given, in a similar fashion to the Experts Exchange site. The more you interact with the community, the higher your Kudos.

This service is still very much in the dev/alpha stages, and we were potentially the first group of people outside of ms to see a demo. As such we got to observe all the silliness that happens when the developers are testing a new system with bogus data

As for the Kudos, it was hinted that this would be a similar theme throughout Live for community interaction, and that the might be better known as “points”. If you are an avid Xbox gamer, you might recognise the idea of points from Marketplace. It was suggested that this might become linked in some way in the future, that active members of the community would be rewarded for their efforts. I’ll be interested to see how that pans out over the coming weeks and months.

In my mind, the star of the show was the preview of the Live Mobile services (name subject to change). Imagine having Messenger on your smart phone (that is if you are lucky enough to own a smart phone ( ).

Bearing in mind the size of a phone screen, it was a little difficult to see what was going on, but essentially you get a buddy list that you can list your top contacts on. The list even included emoticons, and display pictures. Phil then demonstrated sending messages from his phone to his laptop over Messenger. Then he took a photo of someone in the audience with the built-in camera, and the picture was immediately sent as a file to the laptop’s Messenger. Now that is cool.

But more, you could be driving along in the car, as you do, when you receive a text message. Its a tad dangerous to try replying to an SMS while driving, Phil started speaking his imaginary response into the phone. Low and behold it shows up as a voice clip on the other client. True interconnectivity. I’m sure this is why voice clips were actually added to the Messenger client.

Although I typically hate the idea of nudges, and find the noise they make annoying to the highest degree, I was impressed to learn that the mobile client supports them. When you receive on your phone vibrates and makes a distinctly similar noise to that of the PC version. Despite that I think I’d probably still be tempted to turn that off almost immediately.

As for how much of this gets supported is going to depend very much on the phone you have and the operator you use. But this is very exciting technology and I’m looking forward to seeing some more of this in the near future on oh yes, the smart phone I won \o/ We chucked our names into a hat/cardboard box, and joy upon joy my name got drawn out as one of five. I love Microsoft (shush you uni linuxy peoples ).

Filed under: Windows Live |