shahine.com/omar/

Wow, a week can be a really long and short time. This past week I went back to Shanghai with some folks from work to spend time with our team (in addition to working on our calendar product this team is also building the non-ajax version of Windows Live Mail that just shipped to beta testers). Shanghai is really an interesting place. Dick or Aditya said it best, it’s like being in the future and the past at the same time. Jin Mao Tower is quite possibly the most amazing sky scraper I’ve set foot in. Having drinks on the 88th floor is an experience I want to repeat over and over. Of course, it will soon be shorter than Shanghai 101 and Shanghai 102 currently in the makings and across the street in Pudong.

Anyway, the time difference really messes with you and my feeble brain gets confused often. I managed to keep up with most of my mail, but not any personal mail or rss feeds. Most of the time was at the office, or hanging with the team. On one day we took the team on a surprise moral event to a speed car racetrack. Most of the team members had never driven a car, but managed some pretty good lap times! Fun was had by all. There are some very striking contrasts in Shanghai… you can have lunch for $1 – $2, or dinner for $100. A subway ride costs 50 cents, 20 min cab rides a few bucks but of course starbucks, KFC etc all cost the same. Many of the folks who work in our office design and develop software for a living, but don’t own a computer at home.

Oh, now that I’ve been there twice, if you go, take the Timeout Shanghai Guide, it’s the only one worth a dime. A visit to the Shanghai Planning Museum is also a must (they have a model of the city that takes up a giant room and gives you a sense of how dammed big Shanghai is and how much bigger it will get in the next 6 years).

Well, the only thing I’ll close with is that some big things happened in the Windows Live Mail Space. We shipped our Milestone 4 release of Kahuna and it’s got some amazing features in there. More importantly, it will allow us to bring millions of people into the beta. This is really great news as up till now our beta audience was very limited. The feature I am really most proud of is the Microsoft Word style spell checking. It may sound like no big deal, but bringing real time spell checking to the web is no easy task. We are using the exact same spelling engine that will ship with Office 12, except we have to use many additional technologies to make it work. Primarily FireAnt (XMLHTTP, JavaScript, DOM, CSS, TriEdit, TextRanges). Spell Checking was one of the first things that we prototyped last year to prove FireAnt as a technology to build our product. One of the main developers on the spell checking feature loves to say that if real time spell checking were easy, everyone would have it. It’s hella hard, requires super smart guys, and of course technology from other groups at Microsoft. I also got to see some of the search stuff I have been working on ship (with lots of support from the Hotmail Backend team)…

You can read more about our M4 work in Kahuna on Reeves’ Windows Live Mail Update post:

The latest update to Windows Live Mail beta was released to the world today.  There are lots of great improvements including performance, in-line spell checking and the introduction of the "down-level" experience (the non-AJAX version for older browsers).  The best place for a quick summary is Steve's post and the best place for lots of details is Imran's post to the mailcall blog (be sure to also check out the video on spell checking).