Being Mark Cohen

Adobe Photoshop Express has been launched by Adobe. I think the best description for it is “social iPhoto”. After taking it for a test drive, I’d recommend you buy Aperture or Photoshop elements instead. Great idea, nice try, but even Paint.net is better

My work laptop reached capacity and I needed to free some space up. I found a nice visual tool called WinDirStat which is very useful for finding what has eaten up all the space on your hard drive. You can very quickly locate the biggest consumers of data, by file type or by folder. This screenshot is after I started my cleanup. I found duplicate copies of SQL databases – over 11 GB worth – and had heaps of old Google Videos that I’d downloaded and brought in to work for training / presentation. Windirstat needs some time to analyse the drive, but it has relatively small resource requirements and so (at least on my middle of the road laptop) it can happily chug along in the background. The two biggest files in green below are my pagefile and hibernate file.The purple is all the crud that has built up in my windows folder – a whole lot of msp files. My Windows directory is sitting at 8.2 GB

Huntsman
Blogged from my mobile

A mate of mine at work (no link-love because I don’t know if he has a blog ) showed me animoto today. This site is really cool. You can upload photos, add or choose music, and it produces what could be used as really cool presentation intro videos. Here’s a sample I made using some photos from Vegas, and music from their library:

The site is in beta, so it is a bit buggy but totally usable. For a nominal fee you can produce bigger and better videos. I rate this concept highly, producing similar videos would cost a fair amount.

Here’s a sample video made using pictures from this property on Domain.com.au (as you can see, this could have some interesting commercial applications):

The rendering process is fairly slow (as you’d expect), but it’s well worth trying out.

Day One is drawing to a close, the die-hard party animals are venturing out onto The Strip, and the weak and feeble old geeks like me are quietly fading into the background and sneaking off to sleep. Today’s sessions were mostly good, highlights for me being:

The presentation of IE 8

• (see previous post)
  • Huge improvements to W3C compliance
• CSS 2.1 Compliant. W3C Certification-tested
  • “Real world interop begins with CSS support”. (uh… yeah, we know that… ;o)
    • IE team are really focused on W3C compliance (couldn’t be more right)
  • IE8 by default will interpret content in the most standards-compliant manner. This is not IE7 mode J
  • IE8 has an IE7 compatibility mode (controlled by page / developer)
• Performance
  • Much better than IE7, still working on it.
  • Still trailing Firefox, Safari from slide shown very briefly.
• HTML 5 Start
  • Ajax back-button support added. End user gets the expected user experience.
  • Connection events: Page can be aware when you go offline. Page can then store data locally and save later when reconnected to web
• Dev tools
  • Big steps taken to improve developers’ lives with an extension like FireBug, but in some respects more feature-complete
• Activities
  • Right-click context menu actions that can be specified using xml. Example was “search for this on eBay”
• WebSlices
  • Possible to monitor slices / aspects of a page and be alerted when it changes. Ie: a “watch”

Ray Ozzie talking the future architecture of Microsoft’s offerings

• Key take-away for me was the move to more loosely coupled services instead of tightly coupled components
• Moving more products into The Cloud, as alternative offerings to Server products. With SQL Data Services being the next offering, as a hosted SQL product in the cloud.
• Ubiquitous digital assets – when we buy media we will be able to access that media on any of our assets, and it will live in the cloud. So if you blow away your Media centre, when you register your new one it will recover your assets.

Frank Arrigo’s panel discussion

Frank Arrigo hosted a panel discussion talking about monetizing web 2.0. His guests pretty much agreed that the two most feasible models were ad-driven revenue and the Freemium model. The panelists had some great discussions about data portability (Chris Saad from the Data Portability project was on the panel), open APIs, and the phenomenon where a successful service like Facebook (Tim Kendall from Facebook was on the panel) has to allow the people using the platform to monetize their apps before the platform itself can monetize. So they in effect provide the VC for their service consumers by providing a free platform. Interesting angle. Hopefully more to come tomorrow J

Microsoft made Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 available today, with the first public display in the Mix Keynote Address. The browser focuses heavily on W3C compliance, has an IE7 compatibility mode (developer-controlled) and boasts significant performance enhancements. Grab it here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm

Ray Ozzie took the stage first, Touched on the Yahoo! Offer. Sadly no big announcement there.

• Virtualization
• Device proliferation
• Reshaping of software landscape: Leveling of software provided to low and high ends of market
• “Server Symmetry”.
• Application design patterns are transitioning from being closely interlocked components to loose federations of cooperating systems
• Touched on the need to step out of the browser, and even beyond the pc. Apps need to take advantage of the particular device they run on.
• Sees fundamental shift in the way we develop as our apps shift towards living in The Cloud

Connected entertainment: License media once, use any device to access and enjoy media.

MS gone from the PC in every home to a Media Centre per individual / home. Zune / Mobile / PC / Home Server all sharing same media assets. (I like the sound of that J)

Tapping the benefits of the context / platform being used. This is something I have been talking about at work as a need for our own offerings too.

“Connected Productivity Strategy” – implied some big news around Office Live. Could this be the speculated-about Office delivered through Silverlight?

Exchange, Sharepoint, Office communication server already offered as service or onsite server products.

New offering: SQL Data Services moves SQL Server into the cloud. (Session tomorrow)

Next up: Scott Guthrie