shahine.com/omar/

It's probably not obvious that you can do this, but I thought I would let you all in on a little secret.

Some of you probably aren't lucky* enough to have access to a service like Intellimirror Folder Redirection (where your My Documents folder can be replicated among multiple machines that are part of a domain). Or, maybe you have a home PC that you want to share files with? Well, I use OneNote on all my computers, but my home PC is not part of the Microsoft domain and as such it's not easy to have quick access to the same notebook files.

Well, if you are an MSN subscriber (I have the subscription only service) you automatically get a folder in the MSN cloud. You can access this folder using WebDAV, and if you are running Windows XP, it's very easy to get to this folder from your Network Places. If you have given XP your passport account then you should have an entry in Network Places called My Web Sites on MSN. This shortcut will point to http://www.msnusers.com/. In that folder will be a folder called My Web Documents. Simply copy any OneNote sections you want to that folder and double click. Now you can jot notes in there and they will be available to any machine that can speak WebDAV and authenticate using Passport.

*while Folder Redirection is a great feature, it has many warts and I find myself fighting with it every day even though it provides me with critical functionality.

My personal e-mail account has just gotten hammered with spam. Not sure what to do anymore. I get about 30 messages a day that don't get filtered away, and I simply can't be bothered to figure out what is going on. I've been toying with the idea of using mailblocks or just switching to using hotmail for all my non-work e-mail.

Challenge/Response seems pretty compelling at this point since I'd rather shift the burden to people trying to send me mail. I get like 5 messages a week sent to my personal e-mail account, so there isn't much value add for me to deal with the spam.

Recently, Peter wrote on his blog:

“Why do so few of the great usability features of Microsoft's Mac software ever make it to the Windows platform? The Mac applications always seem so much ahead of their Windows counterparts. And they come from within the same company! Why such a pronounced dichotomy?”

This is something that I hear quite a bit. I guess it can seem this way, but let me explain some things.

First of all, The Macintosh Business Unit is a little island inside Microsoft. We have our own planning, usability, marketing, user assistance, dev, test, program management, and localization teams. We do all our own research, leveraging all the research already done by other teams etc, and we cater specifically to the Macintosh market (which is unique in many ways). We have a few million customers, not the hundreds of millions that Windows or Office have. As such, it is much easier for us to make tradeoffs here and there. Our customers also have an elevated sense of design and expect a lot from a Macintosh program (they can smell a port a mile away and won’t touch it). Finally, no one tells us what to do (outside MacBU), and we own almost all the Mac software that Microsoft makes (sans Windows Media Player and Services for Macintosh).

Contrary to what people may think, we don’t share features with any other teams. We aren’t obligated to implement anything, and we aren’t tied up much by external dependencies (and this is important). Not having dependencies, like Office has on Windows and vice versa really frees us up. Our only dependencies are internal, and since we control the schedule, it’s much easier to resolve any issues. Having said all this I don’t think it’s fair to say that our applications are so much ahead of our Windows counterparts (well maybe the Project Center is). The thing is, we focus on a very specific set of features (because we are a small team) and we try to get it right the first time. We don’t have the tens of millions of customers to cater to that some of the Windows teams do. Additionally, we appreciate and borrow many features from Windows Office (where we see fit). Good examples of this are the three column view in Outlook 2003 that we added to Entourage. In fact, I'm humbled by all the functionality found in Windows or Office. It's simply amazing what capabilities lie within those two sets of products. Again, all there because to some set of customers they are critical.

One interesting example to see how our strategy differs is Word Notes (a new feature in Office 2004 for Mac, you can see more and go through a demo). On Windows there is a fantastic little app called OneNote that is targeted at both Tablet and non-tablet users for taking notes. Well, on the Mac there isn’t any kind of Tablet PC, so instead we focused on building the Notes functionality into Word. This allows us to leverage an existing code base (we can’t just go and port OneNote) and enabling similar scenarios on the Mac. Additionally, there are some platform specific technologies we can leverage on the Mac that don’t exist on Windows and vice versa.

However, we do spend a lot of time showing and evangelizing our work to lots of different teams in the company. We realize that not many people have Macs in their offices, so it’s often hard to find out or see exactly what we are up to. We’re really proud of the software we build and we’re happy to show it to anyone at Microsoft that will listen. Every once in a while you’ll even see the occasional Mac feature appear later on in a Windows product (The Web Archive in IE 6, Lists in Excel, Search Folders in Outlook and many others). Much of this really just boils down to time and schedules. Finally, people do leave MacBU and go elsewhere in the company to do cool things. Dan Crevier who works on Longhorn, Hillel Cooperman who leads the Longhorn Aero team, Michael Connolly who works in MSN and the list goes on and on (it’s quite a distinguished list, really!).

Dan Crevier finally started a blog. I met Dan when I was a sophomore in college on an e-mail list for Claris E-mailer. Dan was getting his Ph.D. in Biophysics from this little college called Harvard, and writing code in his spare time. Dan ended up doing some contract work for Claris where among other things he helped create a Japanese version of the product (Dan apparently picked up Japanese while he was in Japan for a few months). Anyway, Claris had no clue about the internet, and let a beautiful product die a slow death. Meanwhile, the creator of E-mailer, Jud Spencer, was hired away by the then growing Mac Internet Product Unit (MacIPU) where he seemingly disappeared to work on “something”. To us outsiders it was either Internet Explorer or Outlook Express. Unfortunately, OE 4.0 was a junky piece of software compared to e-mailer, but I had high hopes that would change with Jud and Dan (and later David Cortright) at Microsoft.

Somewhere around my senior year I started the now dead Unofficial Outlook Express page, my claim to fame I guess. Dan got hired by Microsoft after he got his Ph.D., as did many other Claris and former Apple employees (most who worked on OpenDoc or Cyberdog). Some months later I started an Internship as a tester working on Outlook Express. Back in those days Dan would come by my cubicle every day and show my some cool feature he did (we had a long list of features that we wanted to do, and we knocked almost all of them off over the next few years). It was a total blast. I was such an annoying and bothersome tester that they decided I’d probably make a good PM where I could annoy and bother developers to my hearts content (rather than the other PMs).

Anyway, Dan is simply a coding machine. For most of his 5+ tenure in MacBU he was the #1 bug fixer, often fixing twice as many bugs as the next developer. I had a theory about how Dan got all this work done… he has a small company in India with 2-3 employees that wrote code while he slept at night . Anyway, Dan, myself, and a few others were responsible for shipping Outlook Express 5, and then we all transitioned to work on Entourage 2001 which was the super secret product I mentioned that Jud was working on all along. Outlook Express 5 was really a snapshot of the Entourage 2001 codebase minus a lot of features. We had a hard time deciding what to remove, and the problem we feared and ultimately realized was that OE was too good. Our customers loved it so much that we had a really hard time convincing them to use purchase Entourage 2001.

Dan quickly rose through the ranks of MacBU. He quickly became a Development Lead, then became a Development Manager and was responsible for all of the Mac Silicon Valley products (IE, OE, MSN, Entourage, PowerPoint, VPC). However, with all this new responsibility you could still convince Dan to fix your pet bug or tweak a feature (some of us even got our pet bugs fixed as wedding presents). Dan recently left our sunny state for Redmond where he is now an Architect on Longhorn as part of the ConnectUX team. I think this is great for Dan and for Microsoft. It’s easy to get upset when such valuable contributor leaves our business unit, however, I’m always encouraged that they will take some of the MacBU pixie dust and bring that to other parts of the company.

Some interesting tidbits about Dan are that he used to own the domain http://www.boingo.com for his Oingo Boingo website. However, he recently sold it to Boingo Wireless. Dan also wears shorts every day. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him in pants. Anyway, I wish him the best of luck. However, if he doesn’t check any code into Windows by the end of the month I quit .

So many more places to go, so little time .

United States

create your own personalized map of the USA or write about it on the open travel guide

The World

create your own visited country map or write about it on the open travel guide

Scoble recently wrote about Onfolio, which is essentially “Favorites on steroids” as he says. Well the favorites feature in IE pretty useless so anything is better. Kudos to the folks who made Onfolio though because the UI is very polished, something you don't see to often (nice 32 bit icons, good use of standard HI controls, fonts, elements etc).

Onfolio reminds me a lot of a feature we have in Mac Internet Explorer; The Scrapbook. Scrapbook was essentially a way to take a snapshot of a web page, and save it off for the user in their Explorer Bar like feature (we called it something else). Anyway, the feature was great because you could quickly and easily capture things like order confirmations and so on. Onfolio seems to extend that metaphor and adds a whole bunch of useful functionality, like better categorization, sharing, adding personal notes. However, as a person who uses more than one Computer I find it a deal breaker that there isn’t any kind of roaming story, or way to persist my saved stuff across multiple machines. Joe Cheng kindly left a comment in Scoble's post that indicates that since the data is just stored as .cfs files in theory they could be roamed. I use a feature called Intellimirror, or Roaming My Documents (part of Windows 2000 and XP) to keep the Windows My Documents folder the same across all my Microsoft PCees, so I'll have to find a way to get Onfolio to store the files there (which is where my IE Favorites are stored).

Interestingly enough Scrapbook, is one of my two favorite MacIE feature to make it over to Windows. Forms Autofill was another feature we created to help users populate web forms with some stored information. Google brings that to us with the Google Toolbar.

And this all brings me to something I was complaining to my manager about the other day. Why did we just all of a sudden decide to stop innovating in the browser space? I mean it’s still in the top 2 things that people do on the Internet. Do we feel that IE is perfect and that further innovation is no longer warranted? Is it because it’s the dominant browser, end of story? Well we have other products that are market leaders and we still pour R&D into them. Well, it’s more than likely that it’s because it generates no direct revenue. However, it’s a part of Windows and that generates a lot of revenue. I’m personally upset that nothing is being done to enhance my productivity when browsing the web. Right now it’s atrocious, with all the windows that I can never track down, the annoying disappearing status bar, the CSS bugs etc. I’ve used Avant Browser and Firefox, but still find myself coming back to IE because it’s the default, and it’s there.

I wonder how much longer before my PC caves in because of all the add-ins, enhancements and other software I have that extends IE, Outlook, XP etc . I can just hear my co-workers reminding me of how many extensions and hacks I use to have on my Classic Mac OS machines...

So, here I am in Boston. I flew here for some customer visits we are going to do as part of an overall planning and research project. When we landed, my watch beeped and automatically showed the local time. In addition, it automatically got the local weather feed. Small things like this really make me happy. The nice thing about getting the weather this way is that I'll probably not be in Boston for another few years, so going to the trouble of setting up SMS alerts or checking some website (pull technology) just becomes unnecessary.

Now, seeing as I'm here for 2 nights it would be extra cool if I could find out info on nearby restaurants, local movie times and even traffic for driving back to the airport. However, I don't thing the traffic thing will help me since I've already gotten hopelessly lost getting to the hotel. The signs around her just suck. Now I remember what it's like driving in the northeast. Look there is the exit sign for so and so. Oh too late I missed it. Now I must wait in 15 min of traffic to correct this mistake.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1620&e=2&u=/sv/uscarstopeuropeaninreliability

Sheesh, no kidding. My 2002 Audi A4 was/is full of minor bugs. For example, my car remembers the side view mirror position for each driver based in the key used to unlock the car. However, the mirrors move randomly each time the doors are opened and for no reason. Audi of course doesn't know this is a problem and my dealer can't do anything about it since it's too much of a “software” problem. In fact, most times that I've complained of problems with my car they were written off as software glitches and well, Audi doesn't have Service Packs for their cars I guess.

The Sopranos in HD is just awesome.

For the past few weeks I've been working on support for the Front Panel Display that my custom build Media Center has. For about a year it was dark (not doing anything). But a few weeks ago, I got hold of some code from Ian Kennedy to talk to the display using C# and managed code. I also got hold of some sample code on how to write a Media Center Sink using managed code (you need to expose the class library as a COM object). All of this is documented in the Media Center 2004 SDK but all the code and related samples are in C++ (not something I care to know anything about, ever).

For me this was a great programming exercise. I wrote an Interface (allowing others to write plugins for their particular Front Panel Display), code to handle dynamic loading of assemblies, a state machine for aggregating Media Center State, Installer code for doing the COM registration using (non trivial for me), an MSI for doing all the right magic, and of course figuring out how to expose a C# class library as a COM object.

Would people be interested in having a look at this stuff? Is there anyone out there that is running Media Center and wants to write their own custom Front Panel Display? If so I might figure out a way to release this code.

Here is the result of the work I did. You can see that we are in a My Music session, playing Train Wreck from the latest Sarah McLachlan CD.

I've been using Resharper for a few weeks now and I'm impressed with the productivity gains I've experienced in Visual Studio. They continue to make bug fixes and feature enhancements on a regular basis. It's free to try the evaluation for now and I'm definitely going to buy it when it's released.

My favorite features are:

1. Better syntax checking (akin to VB.NET) for C#. You don't need to compile before finding out you have errors
2. Better code highlighting and code formatting
3. Simple refactoring support (rename) which I do all the time.

Lets talk about my inbox for a second. I never let it get over 200 messages, but it's never under 100 messages. I literally struggle every day to keep this thing from exploding. I have dozens? hundreds? of folders and I think the max number of server side rules that exchange will let me and I still can't deal. When I first started at Microsoft it was under 30 each day. But as my roles changed, my interests grew and my responsibility increased it's simply impossible for me to get back to this. When we shipped Virtual PC 6.1 I managed to get my inbox down to 4 messages, but a week later it was back to 150.

Robert Scoble mentioned a David Allen Seminar today and that got me intrigued. I'm not sure where he took it but I think I really need something like this. I went to his web site and already read this document that talks about e-mail tips, and then there is his book, a downloadable “paper” on using Outlook and finally his software that apparently implements his philosophy of e-mail management. I'm tempted to just throw down the $70 for his Outlook software cause I'm pretty much desperate at this point.

My work discipline around e-mail is so bad that it's spilled into my personal life and my “home” e-mail account is just as pathetic as my work inbox. I avoid looking at my other mailboxes because I can't even deal with my work one. I don't get any joy out of e-mail like I used to when I was new to the net.

BTW - I've always wondered. When you die, where does your e-mail go? Who answers it? Does it just stop when your don't pay your bills and your ISP shuts it down .