Where do you want to go today, Microsoft ?

Microsoft is not longer inventing must-have gadgeds like the iPod, e-book viewers like Amazon’s Kindle, Smartphones like the iPhone or Blackberry nor popular web services like Facebook or Twitter. It fits in the big picture that “almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left..”

Read an insight article by a former Vice President of Microsoft in yesterdays New York Times Issue.

Tags: microsoft

Will HTML 5 replace Adobe’s Flash ?

Bleeding edge browsers like Chrome or Safari support HTML 5, which abandons SGML that no browser ever fully implemented. XHTML 5 will finally support streaming Video, Audio and better manipulation of websites through DOM5. Uber-Nerd and Apple CEO Steve Jobbs is saying yes – Flash will be replaced. This blatant statement could be more than sheer self-marketing, since the man has also predicted the end of the Floppy Disk.

Read more at the Slate Magazin.

Tags: adobe, apple, dom5, flash, html5, sgml

Windows 7 Release Candidate phases out

Tags: microsoft, windows

Apple’s Magic Mouse on Windows 7

Windows offers a vast universe of Software and extended configurability and Apple produces excellent Hardware. Why not combine best of both worlds? Or like a collegue put it, Apple does not manufacture hardware but fitments or design objects for our home. The magic mouse indeed is the biggest revolution in mouse history since the optical mouse.

Of course everybody would tell you, this wouldn’t work and the Apple Specialist at the Apple Store would tell you that you are out of luck or at least out of support. Blabla. Luckily we are not out of basic IT skills.Here it goes

1. Buy the Magic Mouse

2. Install the drivers from the guys over at Uneasy Silence

3. Pair the mouse with your bluetooth dongle. It’ll work with Microsoft’s Bluetooth Stack.

4. Install SmoothWheel for Firefox. Sadly I didn’t find a proper solution for IE8.

In SmoothWheel alter these settings:

Step Size: 1/10 page

Speed: Normal (0.4 sec)

Adaptive-Step: Extreme (x10)

Adaptive-Duration: (x1.5)

There you got it – almost perfect Apple feeling on your PC.

But only almost ! Because I encountered a lot of annoying problems. Occasional drop outs of connection, horizontal scrolling isn’t smooth and only time will tell if battery sleep mode is working like on a Mac. This was tested with a broadcom bluetooth chip by DELL. I also failed to pair the mouse with a bleeding edge Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR Dongle by Trust. Long story short, I wouldn’t yet use the magic mouse with a non-OSX. I might be testing again if Apple adds official Bootcamp support to the mouse.

Tags: apple, bluetooth, hardware, mouse, windows

Apple’s new 24inch LED Cinema Display

Today I went to the only Apple Store in Germany to take a look at the ACD 24″. The Store was extremely crouded and it was very hard to get my hands on the ACD. I could check it out for about 10 minutes. The Display looks and feels absolutely amazing. So in a way, I am sold.

A swift checkup of Video, Brightness and Text revealed more of its Qualities to me.

+ Build Quality is amazing

+ Video looked good and not very blurry with nice and very deep black levels. Blur was maybe a bit more than on an TN Panel

+ Text looked sharp, a lot sharper than on the 30″ ACD next to it. I observed sharp text also on the IPS Panel in the 2209WA by DELL

- Color reproduction was not the best of its class. I would say the DELL 2209WA with its comparable Inplane Switching Panel had more natural colors. Colors were only near natural on 60% brightness, on 100% brightness the colors were off scale. Blue was way to blueish, I guess this effect reduces the visible color range a lot.

- Brightness less than 100% was too low because of the whole reflection thing going on. So the reflections did not disturb me directly, but they indirectly worsened contrast a lot.

To sum it up, I would say for general purpose use and movies this screen is very nice. Given the quality of the exterior the price is ok. Extending the warranty to 3 years with Applecare would be a must-have. I read user reports of occasional dust patterns below the glass front.

Let’s get to the infamous but - if you need color accuracy run home and try forget the haptics of the ACD – you may need 2-3 glasses of whiskey. You got to stick to the ugly Eizos or NECs made out of plastics. Your work’s results will thank you later.

One more thing, the ACD comes with a mini display port, so to hook it up to your PC, you’ll need a Matrox Graphics Card with mini display port. If you want a 3D graphics card you’ll most likely be the first one on the net to try it.

Tags: apple, display, led, screen

Use Hotmail as free Exchange Server

Now everybody would agree: Since Microsoft took over 10 years ago, Hotmail has become a pain. It’s Webinterface is slow and even worse incompatible with so called 3rd Party Browsers. Heck, you can’t even forward your  mail to mailboxes outside the Live-Universe. Duh!

But.. there are features of Hotmail that are truly amazing if you know how to unleash them. Let’s help Hotmail mutate to a quasi Exchange Server that pushes mails as they arrive onto your E-Mail clients and mobile devices. In addition we maintain a server side folder and filter rules structure. Read on if you want to know how to do this.

1. First we will setup your Mobile Device to receive Pushmail
2. Then we integrate your other mailboxes
3. Then we setup a serverside folder and filter structure
4. Finally we setup Outlook (or other client) to synchronise your Hotmail Account.

1. Exchange Substitute & Pushmail to your Mobile Device

I tried this only on my freshly acquired HTC Smartphone and not on the iPhone yet. With Apple Devices you would use Yahoo as free Pushmail option anyway.

-So you’d need a Hotmail/Live Account of course.
-Then open Windows Live on your mobile device
-Enter Credentials and set your device to use Live services including Mail
-Click on menu and selection options
-Select Sync Schedule
-Under frequency, select “as items arrive.

2. Integrate your other Mailboxes into Hotmail
We want to use all your mail accounts with PushMail of course. Hotmail also allows you to write on behalf of that other mailboxes, so the recepient will not recognize you as hotmail user, but as lets say Google Employee. (maybe you want to hide from your google boss that you are using the new HTC HD2 with its enourmously big screen)

English: Add an e-mail account -> Email address /Passwort -> Advanced Options -> Possibly you want to uncheck “This server requires a secure connection (SSL)”

German: E-Mail Konto hinzufügen -> Adresse / Kennwort -> Erweitert -> eventuell Häkchen bei SSL entfernen. Dann Bestätigungsmail abwarten.

3. Filtering and Folderstructure
Best of all, your Windows Mobile Device and Outlook will also synchronise your folder Structure of Hotmail, once you set it up. Add Hotmail filtering rules and what you get is basically server side filtering automatically synchronizing with your E-Mail client and Mobile Device. Yes that is amazing, because it’s all for free.

English: Options -> More Options -> Customize your mail -> Automatically sort e-mail into folders

German: Optionen -> Weitere Optionen -> E-Mails anpassen -> E-Mails automatisch in Ordner sortieren

4. Outlook Integration
English: Tools -> E-Mail Account Settings -> New -> Others -> Microsoft Office Outlook Connector

German: Extras -> Kontoeinstellungen -> E-Mail-Konten -> Neu -> Andere > Microsoft Office Outlook Connector
Of course this would work with any other (e.g. Open Source) E-Mail Client as well.

So to sum it up, until you can afford your own Exchange Server, I would say this is a cost-effective solution to synchronize all of your E-Mail account in a centralized & neatly foldered fashion.

Tags: exchange, microsoft, mobile, windows

 at the beginning of websites in Linux

That cryptic sign, the  is a BOM – a byte order mark. This is set by some text editors, if you encode your page as UTF-8. Most commonly Microsoft Editors like Visual Studio or Expression Web add this BOM at the beginning of your page. You don’t need it with UTF-8, only with UTF-16. UTF-8 is recognized by most editors automatically. Also W3C Validators throw error messages if you encode your UTF-8 page with a BOM.

To get rid of the BOM in Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008, go to “File” -> “Advanced Save Options” and choose “UTF-8 without signature”. There you go, no more cryptic  signs at the beginning of your webpage on those self-compiled Gentoo Boxes.

This is also discussed by the guys at the Microsoft Silverlight Forum

The Best and Worst Identities of 2009

The Blog Brand New ruled over some of the most prestigious redesigns of visual identities in 2009. MSN’s new logo is also up for discussion on the Blog. A recommended read for every Marketer or Visual Designer.

The Best and Worst Identities of 2009

Tags: Design, identity, logo

Color Transition with AS3

If you want to tween any MovieClip in Flash from one Color to another you will discover that the current transition classes by Flash don’t support tweening properties apart from alpha channel, position and size.

You now have 2 options: Write the classes yourself or hope that somebody else did write them already. But luckily you don’t have to invent the wheel twice.
You might want to try the Caurina Tweener Classes hosted at Google Code. http://code.google.com/p/tweener/

This task would have taken me 50 to 100 lines of code at least, since you need to convert Hex to RGB values and calculate Color Multipliers and apply every new resulting Color one by one to a unique frame via transform.ColorTransform(); of your MovieClip.

With tweener it’s a simple one liner:

Tweener.addTween(myMovieClipName,{_color: 0xc5ce8a, time: 1, transition:"easeOut"});

That underscore before _color is not just another depreciated AS2 specific property, its from Tweener’s classes and you have to use it even in AS3.

As the more advanced Actionscripter might notice, Tweener is a static class and you can’t instantiate any objects from it, but you can tell Tweener what to do with your own objects and any of its properties. The resulting motion tween doesn’t have to be linear movement with its artificial look. Tweener is better than that: you can apply Penner’s Easing equations.

In my above example I used a simple accelerated movement called easeOut. It will create a accelerated motion between your Object’s given color and the Color C5Ce8a. Which happens to be nice greenish tint.

Tags: as3, classes, color, flash, object, oop, transition

ExternalInterface Call with AS3 and Javascript

I recently came along this problem with Actionscript 3. How to tell Javascript or your DOM what to do from inside of Flash. getUrl threw tons of Security Warnings in Internet Explorer – yes people use that one. fscommand is depreciated. In AS3 you want to use ExternalInterface.call

But… that darn thing did not work, no matter what I tried. After 2 hours -which I want to spare you with this post- I found the solution.

The trick was to put the Flash and xhtml Site onto any server environment. A friendly reminder to finally set up that IIS or Apache locally for live testing.

The Code: call your Javascript Function ‘JsTestFunction’ with the string ‘2′ and don’t forget putting your files on your server.

var call_JS:uint;
call_JS = ExternalInterface.call('JsTestFunction','2');


Tested with Firefox 3.5, IE8 RC1, Chrome 3, Opera 10 on Win7 RC1

Tags: actionscript, as3, DOM, externalinterface, flash, javascript