Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Who ever said Microsoft doesn't innovate is just full of it. I just picked up the Microsoft Fingerprint Reader. This thing is so utterly cool. The software it comes with is awesome.
Basically it works like this. You install some software, reboot, plug in the reader and train it on any of your fingers. Now if you have a PC at home that is configured to use Fast User Switching, you just place your finger on the device and it automatically logs you in. It even knows which user to select.
But it gets better. On any web page, or Application, you can configure the device to enter your credentials. The UI is super cool, and it does an amazing job at guessing where the right text boxes are, and places this nice halo around the box to make the selection explicit. You can also point it to things if it cannot figure out what the username, password or signin buttons are. Finally you can configure it to select “Remember my password” and such. Below is a screen shot of what this looks like for logging into my blog.
I have also configured the device to enter my Microsoft Money Password, which is super cool.
Kudos to the Microsoft Hardware folks. This thing rocks. I wish my laptop had a biometric reader.