shahine.com/omar/

I don't know how I missed the is keyword in C#. I must have been asleep or something when I read about this. Up till now I've been getting the type of an object and comparing to the typeof() a class.

object foo = "bar";

if (foo is string)
{
    Console.WriteLine("foo is a string");
}

if (foo.GetType() == typeof(string))
{
    Console.WriteLine("foo is a string");
}

For a few months now I've been happily using a Gyration Wireless Keyboard and Mouse for my Windows Media Center. I've been extremely happy with this combo. The mouse can be used without needing a table or surface (you just wave it in the air). It takes a while to get used to this, but once you do then you are free to walk around etc while you control the mouse. The mouse comes with a charging station and also has an optical sensor so that I can be used as a regular mouse.

They keyboard is very small, and is running on it's original set of batteries. It's perfect for MCE as I can easily hide it. Another bonus is that the keyboard requires no drivers and works on the BIOS screen in case you need to make any tweaks etc.

A few weeks ago, my mouse flaked out though. On Monday I finally got around to calling them. The support experience was fantastic. I got a human on the first ring and he told me to send it back to them (no need to find my receipt or anything). Today I got my replacement (total of 4 day turnaround). Now that's great service!

Read about the new stuff in the .NET Compact Framework v2. I am so happy they added support for XML Serialization.

If you hury, PCMall has 28 in stock and ready to ship. I just ordered mine, Wohoo! Should be here Tuesday or Wed.

Update: PCMall screwed up my order and I'm filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.

Here were the chain of events:

1. Ordered Camera Saturday morning. 29 in stock.
2. Checked order status on Saturday evening and it said that it was Waiting for customer and it did not ship.
3. I called them to inquire and they said that they called me to verify the order (since it was over $1000) and I was not there to answer. Checked my caller ID, and no one called. But they said to call Monday and speak to credit dept.
4. Called sunday to make sure that they were holding a camera for me while this was sorted out. They said yes, no problem, it would ship monday when I called.
5. Called monday. Item is out of stock, and they kept transfering me to people who weren't answering the phone. I left a message for the manager who never returned my call.

This story does have a good ending though. Many months ago I placed my name on a waiting list at Roberts Imaging on the recomendation of Rob Vreeland. Well, they called me a few minutes ago, and are shipping my camera kit FedEX overnight and I'll have it tomorrow. Wohoo!

Now off to the Better Business Bureau to file a complaint against PCMall.

This is something I've been thinking of, and there have been an number of blogs posts relating to this.

Anil Dash recently wrote about Outlook as a platform. And Marc's Outlook on Productivity Site, has a number of posts about some utilities that really enhance my productivity in Outlook. “My Equation for Serious Outlook Productivity” discusses a number of these tools such as (the following are links are to articles on Marc's site):

• Getting Things Done - tools based on David Allen's methodology
• Lookout - search Outlook in seconds
• NewsGator - system for reading RSS feeds in Outlook and more
• ActiveWords - can't really explain what this is, you need to try it yourself
• Anagram - tool for parsing text and generating Outlook items (tasks, contacts etc)
• Plaxo - contact management tool
• SpamBayes - spam filterting

I don't use all of these, but I use some. I spend most of my day in Outlook and for may years I've really not felt very productive in Outlook, even though it's a necessary tool to do a good chunk of my work at Microsoft. However, as Marc and Anil write, these additional tools really do make some of us a lot more productive using Outlook. NewsGator really just delivers more information to me, much of it interesting, but it really just adds more to my life . Lookout helps my find things in my huge Outlook store, and that saves me a lot of time. Plaxo allows me to keep my contact information up-to-date without having to track down people as they move and so on. Getting Things Done has allowed me to stop stressing about my e-mail and feel good about knowing that all the stuff I need to do is on my task list or on my calendar, freeing me up to keep on top of the information I need to process. Finally, I just installed ActiveWords (thanks Buzz) and plan on exploring this highly regarded piece of software.

If you spend a good chunk of your life in Outlook, I recommend you read up on some of these tools to see if they are good enough for you.

Finally, I've personally been thinking of how OneNote, Outlook, Getting Things Done, the file system, and my analog files all work together. I seem to have Outlook pretty well on track to making me productive again, and I've got ad-hoc ways of using OneNote and my documents but the integration between all these things isn't so fluid at this point. I think I'm going to have to get my hands dirty and write some code. Thankfully there is a GotDotNet workspace called Niobe that promises to make writing Outlook Add-ins in managed code a reality.

I remember when I used to see announcements or rumors of Pocket PC and Smartphone devices and I would get so excited. I'm at the point now where I just don't care any more.

I've been dreaming of a smartphone or Pocket PC device like my wife's Treo 600. I desperately want a thumb keyboard since most of what I use my phone for is e-mail. So when I saw the Motorola MPX I was extatic, then today when I saw this new BenQ device I was, initially happy, then just plain depressed.

It so happens that it really doesn't matter what anyone releases. All that matters is what my carrier offers me. The news that the MPx is going to retail for around $900 is so absurd. So lets cross that one off. What are the changes of AT&T or T-mobile offering the BenQ phone? Probably slim to none, so scratch that one off as well. The devices that the US carriers offer is pretty pathetic. AT&T offers a single MS Smartphone (the Motorola MPX-200). This phone is running Smartphone 2002, which we all know is older than the current Smartphone 2003 release. Additionally, the phone has known bugs (Caller ID, random disconnects with headset), and I'm already on my 3rd phone in 6 months. AT&T can't even get us a firmware update to resolve these issues. Then there is the 2? year old Pocket PC phone that all the us carriers have been selling forever now. No thanks. Then there is T-Mobile, no Smartphone, same Pocket PC Phone. Cingular (soon AT&T's owner) sells no Microsoft Mobile devices that I am aware of. I won't even bother with the CDMA carriers.

So, in a nutshell, we have a single US GSM carrier selling a smartphone with an old OS, some real problems they have not dealt with to my satisfaction, and all have a track record for releasing these phone incredibly slowly. Meanwhile, everyone except for Verizon sells the Treo 600... hmm I wonder why. If only it was running the Microsoft Smartphone OS.

Hopefully in 2005 I can get a Windows Mobile powered device with a thumb keyboard for less than $500 dollars. I can dream can't I?

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.