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Briefly, on Windows 8
Recently, Microsoft showed a first glimpse at Windows 8, by way of a video demo. At first glance, it appears to be a touchscreen-first system, running a tablet-sized version of Microsoft’s beautiful “Metro” UI (the same UI you see on Windows Phone 7). It really looks great.
Then, just as you’re getting excited, the video pulls back the cover, revealing that the Metro UI is running right alongside the existing Windows UI. When the video demos how Windows 8 can run the standard version of Microsoft Excel, you can see it’s all there: the Start button, the Task Bar—all of it. Effectively, Metro works just like Windows Media Center does: it’s just an app that run atop the Windows we all know and…well, know. Just as Media Center provides a 10-foot UI on top of the existing keyboard-and-mouse Windows UI, so does Metro provide a touchscreen UI.
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Mike Downey: I’ve joined Microsoft
There’s something unsettling about a guy who’s spent most of his career as an evangelist for the Flash and AIR platforms taking an evangelism job with Microsoft on the Silverlight team. Downey’s a good guy, but suddenly his evangelism seems a lot less sincere and a lot more like what he does to pay the bills.
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Daring Fireball: Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline
Gruber has an insightful piece on Microsoft’s position in the market. There’s no debating it anymore: Microsoft is irrelevant (at least in the PC world — it still has plenty of relevance in video games, for example). Sure, they’re still selling a bazillion copies of Windows every year, but they’re lost any semblance of the mindshare they once had. No one believe Windows PCs are better than Macs, anymore. Some still buy them, because they’re cheaper, but no one argues that they’re better. And when everyone in the world believes Apple makes a better product, the difference in price is much, much easier for people to swallow. And even though Microsoft still sells plenty of Windows every year, they’ve just reported quarterly results which revenue fell $1 billion short of projections and declined 17 percent year-over-year. So even the argument that they’re still relevant because they being in so much cash is falling apart. No ones cares anymore. No one.
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Microsoft: I’m a PC, and I’m Creepy as Hell
Sometimes I wonder how Microsoft is so incredibly bad at “getting it.”
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jQuery finds its way into Microsoft and Nokia stacks
Wow. Big win for jQuery. Microsoft is apparently planning to distribute the JavaScript library with Visual Studio, and make it the sort-of go-to library for .NET development. I’m still of the mind that backend development frameworks like .NET (and Django, and Rails, and Cake, and Java…) shouldn’t be in the business of “preferring” a particular front-end library, but you can’t really deny that this is a Really Big Deal™ for the jQuery project.
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IEBlog: Microsoft CSS Vendor Extensions
Microsoft is moving all their proprietary CSS extensions to the
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CounterNotions: Why Apple doesn’t do “Concept Products”
A really nice piece on “concept” products, such as those we see all the time from car companies, Nokia, Microsoft, and the like:
> It turns out that when capable designers are given real constraints for real products they can end up creating great results. In Apple’s case, groundbreaking products like the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone. Constraints have a wonderful way of focusing the mind on the fundamentals, whereas concept products can often have the opposite affect.
Design is all about constraints, and concept products inherently remove most of them. Apple seems to spend most of its time focusing on products I can build today (or in the near future), rather than on what might be possible 10 years from now.
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Bill Gates: top ten greatest hits (and misses), the Microsoft years
Even ignoring all the charitable work he’s done and focusing solely on his tenure at Microsoft, it’s hard to deny that Bill Gates has had an incredible career full of hit products. People love to make light of the misses (Vista, BOB, Windows ME, Zune) and ignore some of the truly outstanding products the company has put out under Gates’ watch (XBox, Visual Basic, Windows Mobile, Microsoft Mouse, Windows Media Center). Love him or hate him, it’s hard to deny his impact. So long, Bill. The industry will definitely miss you being a part on a day-to-day basis.
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If Microsoft goes fully hostile on Yahoo
Marc Andreessen in plain English on the various possible outcomes of the MS/Yahoo situation.
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Internal Microsoft Vista SP1 promo: “Rockin’ Our Sales”
Wow. This is just unbelievably horrible. I don’t know what more to say. Wow.
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Internal Microsoft Vista SP1 promo: “Rockin’ Our Sales”
Wow. This is just unbelievably horrible. I don’t know what more to say. Wow.
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Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit
Chris Wilson and his team at Microsoft release a “readiness toolkit,” for IE 8, which includes (among other things), a beta of the application and a new debugging tool long the lines of Firebug. Nice.
As of today, the Web Standards movement is over. We won.
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Microsoft changes stance on version targeting default behavior
> “We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can.”
So there you have it. This should make a lot of standards-oriented developers happy, as it makes out jobs easier. I think this is the right move by Microsoft, although I never could quite figure out very firmly where I stood on the whole topic. At the very least, it prove MS is listening to the developers, and that can only be a good thing.
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Eric Meyer: Almost Target
Eric shares a story about a time in his days at Mozilla when they were faced with a similar situation to that which led Microsoft towards version targeting.
I feel sorry for the guys on the IE team. Having talked to a few of them personally about this, I know they’re smart people who want to do the right thing for the web. But the right thing, for Microsoft, is not necessarily the same as the right thing for the web. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, and they’re trying to make the best of it. Debate the pros and cons of Microsoft’s version targeting proposal all you want, but do keep in mind that these are genuinely good people, working hard at bringing IE up-to-par with web standards (no easy task, as far behind as it had gotten). They’re not the evil Microsoft borg — they’re regular people. They’re doing the best they can in a no-win situation — give them a bit of a break.
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The B-List: X-UA-8-Ball
James Bennett talks again about X-UA-Compatible (Microsoft’s IE8 version targeting mechanisim). This one is funny, and probably accurate — but it still doesn’t make me get that up in arms over the fact that I have to add a meta tag to my documents. Even if I have to do something similar again in a few years with MS releases IE9, I’m not that upset about it. Why? One, because getting up set isn’t going to change anything, and two, because in the time it takes people to write ALA articles about this stuff, I could re-jigger 150 sites for IE8 and move on with my life. To put it bluntly: I disagree with with MS is doing, here, but not passionately enough for me to spend a lot of time fretting over it.
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A List Apart: Version targeting, take two
Jeremy and Jeffrey have a bit of a shoot-out regarding the IE version targeting mechanism in the latest ALA. For what it’s worth, I come drown more on Jeremy’s side of this one — the version targeting was a good idea; defaulting to the IE7 rendering engine was not. But, I also think this is ultimately not that big a deal. All we have to do is add a single meta tag to our documents, and all is well. No, we shouldn’t have to, but we do, and it will take us no time at all to do it. I just don’t see this as the end of the world. The only part I disagree with Jeremy on is that MS’s plan is “doomed to fail.” It’s not. Yes, people will object to adding the meta tag, but they’ll do it anyway, because the alternative is writing pages for the IE7 rendering engine.
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Stickel
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Microsoft rules for having this party!
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The B-List: X-No-Thanks
For anyone trying to make sense out of the whole IE8
X-UA-Compatiblenonsense, James Bennet’s explanation is almost certainly the most well-thought out and easy-to-understand one you’re going to find. I now have an opinion on this matter. I’m with James: X-No-Thanks.But even though I have an opinion, it’s not a very strong one. Why? Because, quite frankly, I’m just not that interested. If
X-UA-Compatiblelands in IE8, I’ll suck it up and spend 20 minutes putting the tag in all my sites, toss a few more curse words Microsoft’s way, and move the fuck on. Ultimately, for those of us doing standards-based work, this isn’t that big a deal. If we’re doing things right, and this actually happens, it means we have to put one measly meta tag in our code form now on. Big f’ing deal.Here’s hoping it doesn’t ever happen, though.
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This Video Makes Bill Gates Look Cooler Than Steve Jobs
Bill Gates has been pretty hard not to love the past couple of years. The sound on this video is bad, but if you can get past that, it’s quite amusing. (Anyone have a link to a copy with clean sound?)
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IEBlog : Internet Explorer 8 passes Acid2
Wow, very nice. This is impressive. It also makes Opera look very, very silly. So now that all the majors can claim reasonable standard compliancy, can we please get those browser wars started again? :)
Congrats, IE8 team!
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Molly: Conversation with Bill Gates about IE8 and Microsoft Transparency
Kudos to Molly for being willing to ask Bill Gates tough questions straight to his face. Personally, I’m less interested in what MS is doing with regards to standards support in IE8 and more interested in what they’re doing to improve adoption rate of their newer browsers (like IE7 now, and IE8 when it’s available).
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ideasonideas: Microsoft repositions to kick ass
As someone who was there through the 90s — the time when the word “Apple” was always prefaced with the word “beleaguered” — my favorite part about this piece is the simple fact that people are talking about Microsoft as if they’re dead, much as they used to about Apple. Amusing.
And, it’s all very good insight that MS would be smart to think seriously about (but they won’t).
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Authentic Jobs: UX Design Lead at Microsoft
Mad UX design skillz? Come work in my neck of the woods, over on the East side at Microsoft. Great campus, great pay. Can’t really beat it.
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Bungie to split from Microsoft, become independent company
Ahh, full circle feels good. After a few years of playing Marathon, I remember sitting in a little theater at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas, watching on a projection screen as Bungie introduced their next amazing Mac game — called Halo — during Steve Jobs’ 1999 MacWorld keynote address. Jaws everywhere were hitting the floor in astonishment. Of course, it was only months later that Bungie got bought by Microsoft, who was developing a gaming platform called xBox, and the Halo series became the single biggest reason for its success. It took two years for Halo to finally hit the Mac (and Windows), and the sequels were XBox only. Here’s hoping this means we’ll see Bungie titles on non-Microsoft platforms in the future.
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This is the difference between Microsoft and Apple
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Sprint, Microsoft roll out location-based Live Search
Nice stuff. I can’t figure out why the iPhone doesn’t use cell tower data for location-based services. It seems so simple, doesn’t require GPS hardware, and is good enough for 90% of the use cases.
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Blue Flavor: The non-agency agency
Brian and Nick talk with Molly Holzschlag at Microsoft about how Blue Flavor began, how we interact with clients, and more in this 16 minute long video on the MIX site.
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Brian Fling demos Leaflets for MIX
Brian gave a little demo of Leaflets over at the Microsoft campus last week and it’s current being featured on the MIX site.
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Halo 3 preview on the IMAX tonight in Seattle Center — or, nerds invading my ‘hood
If you’re a complete nerd and you live in Seattle, you can catch a sneak preview of Halo 3 on the IMAX screen at Pacific Science Center tonight. I can pretty much spit on the Science Center from my apartment, and I won’t be there. That shows you how much I care about Halo. But, if you do, I’m sure it’ll be cool.
Now, if they were showing a Halo 3 edition of Red vs. Blue, I’d totally be there.
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Font rendering philosophies of Windows and Mac OS X
“…Windows looks sharper at the expense of not actually being a very accurate representation of the text. The Mac with it’s design/DTP background is a much more accurate representation and scales more naturally than Windows which consequently jumps around a lot vertically.”
The piece includes a great example of just how true this is. It also includes this great quotes:
Visit“The issue is reminiscent of the ‘I hate black bars on wide-screen films’ brigade who believe that the film should be chopped, panned, scaled and otherwise distorted from the artists original intention simply so that it fits better on their display.”
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Video of incredible new graphics application
Brilliant video of amazing new digital artistic tools. A must-watch, really. Check it out.
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Life at Google - The Microsoftie Perspective
Interesting look at what it’s like working for Google, from someone who (apparently) now works at Microsoft and is trying to help them be more competitive with Google in recruiting.
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Steve Jobs and Bill Gates: Historic discussion live from D 2007
Engadget has a rough transcript of the conversation. Sounds like it was really thoughtful, fun, entertaining, and respectful. Hopefully they’ll be a video or audio released sometime.
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Microsoft Surface: Behind the Scenes with video
Gotta hand it to Microsoft on this one — thing looks incredible.
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Microsoft is Dead
This has been linked a million times now, so I’m behind, but…it’s really good stuff. It’s so true, too. It’s amazing just how much Microsoft has lost in the mindshare over the past several year. They’re still a very successful business, but, as Paul says, nothing about the feels dangerous anymore. They’re just another behemoth making a lot of money. They’re not cool, they’re not fun, they’re not interesting, and they’re not even scary anymore.
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Microsoft & OpenID
Wow. Microsoft is officially backing OpenID. Can you say killer app? Awesome news.
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Molly: Working Together for a Better Web
Molly has signed on at Microsoft to deal with “standards & interoperability education and outreach” for the Web Platform and Tools division. This can only be a good thing. Thank you, Molly.
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CNET reviews Windows Vista Ultimate
Overall, it sounds like Vista is a good, solid upgrade to Windows XP, but when CNET (who hates Apple) says, “Compared with Mac OS X 10.4, Windows Vista feels clunky and not very intuitive,” you know us Mac fans won’t be getting jealous of Vista users anytime soon.
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New W3C HTML Working Group chaired by Microsoft
The new W3C HTML Working Group, who will create the next version of HTML, will be initially chaired by Microsoft’s Chris Wilson. Although my impression is that Chris is a good person and has good intentions, I agree with Roger that it’s hard not to be a little leary of Microsoft being in this position of power — what with their attitude towards web standards over the years. Still, I remain cautiously hopefully that Chris Wilson will use this position to influence Microsoft to do the right thing, rather than for Microsoft to influence the W3C.
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with Simply Measured, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my past clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, Django, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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