shahine.com/omar/

Someone at Microsoft is making sure we're acquiring cool and useful companies. Sysinternals is the most recent, but we've also acquired iViewMedia Pro which is a fantastic Digital Asset Management software for photographers. Add to this such recent acquisitions as Onfolio and FolderShare and I'm a pretty happy camper . Not to mention that the talent that has come along with these acquisitions is top notch.

Who knew that while I wasn't paying attention, the mess of configuring blogging software was solved.

"Really Simple Discovery is a way to help client software find the services needed to read, edit, or "work with" weblogging software. Although I talk about weblogging software, there's no reason this format can't apply to other forms of web client/system software that I wasn't considering, or may not even exist as of this writing. (There is an example below where I did just that.) This format is simple but flexible. One of the deisgn goals was to ensure that it would be human writeable. This was my "test" for ensuring that the format was easy for everyone to implement. "

Anyway, I've just checked this into dasBlog, and it should be part of 1.9 when we release that (no eta yet).

Thanks goes to Daniel Berlinger for taking the initiative and coming up with a reall simple solution to a long standing problem .

(The South Beach in San Francisco, South of Market)

I guess it's a good thing I sold. My condo sold in 11 days and under asking. I took my first offer cause I knew that if I didn't, I might be stuck holding on to my place for a lot longer. Average days on market for my building was close to 50.

"In numerous posts, Socketsite has featured the new developments in the South Beach/Rincon Hill Area and I wanted to share with you a S.W.O.T analysis put together for some of my clients that own property there.

I originally named it "Looking Bleak in South Beach," but I'd rather refer to it as "SELL NOW!"

Yes, you can still get your money. For now aleast."

Source: ReyEstate.com

There has been a lot of raving of the iRiver Clix of late. That’s nice, that after a few yeas an OEM was finally able to create a device that didn’t suck in some big way. However, I don’t think the world is better. Why? Cause I don’t trust any of them to continue on this path and no one will notice anyway.

Sean Alexander has a series of posts where he writes about his involvement with the Clix.

One of the first of these projects has just launched. The "iriver clix" - a new portable media player from iRiver.  Designed to work great with Windows Media Player 11 and the new Urge music service launching today from MTV, the clix may look similar to the award-winning iRiver U10, but it's so much more.  Our team worked closely with iRiver, providing feedback, usability resources, and assistance on interaction design starting with a complete "teardown" of the existing iRiver U10 product.

and then some comments based on a Seattle Times Review.

I also want to call out the amazing work done by the iRiver America team.  The packaging is largely to their credit- we provided critical feedback and encouraged a new, more refined design based on existing packaging in Korea.  The iRiver team did all the heavy lifting and it shows.

At the end of the day, my job was two-fold: As UX (User Experience) PM, to play the part of the consumer end to end- to apply what I've learned working in this space for 7+ years and document our recommendations.  From there, we (the v-team as we called ourselves) agreed on relative priorities w/ iRiver up-front.  We acknowledged where we disagreed without ego or hubris, and worked together on a solution in the interest of the customer.  We were invited to provide input in every meeting on the UX, system flow and regular milestones on naming, branding, messaging, out of box experience and more.  

And then some comments on a big party Microsoft and iRiver had together.

In the end, it was a great party and a good time had by all end-capping over six months of hard work. Ironically, this is the same day that PC World named the Clix one of their Top 100 Products of the Year (Why in June?  Their year is a 12 month span; they used to announce these awards at PC Expo which no longer exists).  The criteria is highly subjective but hey, it ranked #90, with the Xbox 360 being #89 - not bad company.  Reportedly sales of the Clix have been brisk - a best-seller on their site at www.iriveramerica.com  and at least one online retailer sold out of their initial allotment very quickly.  All good to hear.  At least two more major retailers are in the process of receiving inventory so that you'll be able to go out and try one in person soon. ;)

Here are my thoughts. This doesn’t Scale. Microsoft doesn’t have any army of folks who can spend 6 months teaching every possible device maker how to create a device that comes close to matching the customer experience, out of box experience and device UX of an iPod. I’ve used iRiver products in the past, and was not happy at all with my experiences with the product or with the company.

So what next? We already have spent a few man years working on a great user experience… in the form of the Portable Media Center. But the adoption of that OS has been sad. v2, which is far superior to v1 has even fewer folks signed up to make devices than v1! And Toshiba, the single flagship partner to announce support for the PMC in the form of the Toshiba Gigabeat S took many months to get their product out there, way to long and way to late in my opinion.

Furthermore there are still problems with the device ecosystem that Michael Gartenberg is always good to point out.

So overall, how does WMP 11/URGE combo stack up against the iPod/iTunes? Well, if you're looking at it from the music store perspective, it's hard to see how this combination bests Apple in any way. While Microsoft talks about the value of the platform, most consumers are too busy listening to their iPods to listen to the message. In terms of a music subscription services, URGE shines. The onboard catalog of music, combined with great editorial content and new innovations like music feeds make this service really stand out from the pack. Add in a good portable device and you start to see how the market can potentially shift over time to a new model. Right now, a lot will come down to marketing. Microsoft still lacks a spokesperson who can deliver the message across and while URGE and WMP 11 are tightly integrated, there's still not a great story being told about device integration and branding. It may not be enough to remove Apple from king of the digital music world but it very well has the chance to expose the market to the benefits of subscription services and that in and of itself is a pretty big thing.

At the end of the day, I now have a ton of iPod accessories and a Car Integration kit that is simply unavailable for any other device. I can use my built in Steering Wheel and Radio controls in my Audi to control my iPod. Furthermore, my iPod comes on when I turn on the radio and turns off when the radio is shut off or the engine turned off. Now that’s a very subtle but very important feature to me and you can’t get that on any other device. The iPod dock connector is critical to the iPod, and until there is a big enough player on the PC with something like the dock connector, you’ll never have this with anything else.

In the end, I don’t think iRiver, Creative, Philips, Toshiba, Samsung or anyone else can create a lifestyle platform, complete with sneakers, than anyone else. I don’t think spending months of resources on feedback and design help is going to make any difference cause people are to busy listening to their 50 million iPods to notice that anything has changed.

I do think if there is any chance at all of competing with Apple’s Lifestyle platform it’s this. Michael is probably alluding to his top secret briefing about this.

I love this post by Brad Wilson on Scrummerfall.

The worst case scenario, in my experience, is embedding Waterfall inside of Scrum. This often manifests in what I call the One-Two-One pattern: one week of design, two weeks of coding, one week of test and integration. I've yet to see a team that was long term successful with such a system, especially if they are strongly rooted in historical Waterfall. As often as not, they will abandon Scrum after just a few sprints, claiming that it failed to provide anything but pain. Worse, that's often the extent of their foray into agile. They "tried that agile stuff" and failed, so they're sour on it.

I agree 100% with him here. When we set out to use Scrum for Windows Live Mail we were very conscious of avoiding this rather natural tendency. I say natural cause it’s easiest to satisfy the “detractors” from the new process by creating a hybrid of the old process and the new agile process. Don’t go there…

Another great post by Brad is about Canaries…

The idea is that there is usually someone in the group who is most likely to be the first to talk about the things that are going wrong in the group. They'll be the ones who complain when the code is not good, or the team isn't working together well, etc. They are your canary in the coal mine for the group, giving you early warning of problems. When things get really bad, your canary dies (er, it leaves the team).

I’ve never heard anyone describe things this way, but I also believe this… I have an idea of who they are on our team -

Movoto just sent me mail today saying that they now support searching and viewing the San Francisco Real Estate market (previously they only supported the bay area). This is great because the San Francisco MLS is no good (it's slow, doesn't offer a lot of data, and has a very cryptic search interface). The Bay Area MLS is half decent but is also light on meta data (where Movoto really shines).

Information that movoto offers:

• Great Maps support
• Customized searches
• Email updates for new listings
• Favorites for homes
• Comparable sales
• School data
• Days on Market (crucial info that SF MLS does not offer)

I used Movoto to find my house and could not be happier with all the features they offer, and the great maps integration with Google Maps and now Windows Live Local Bird's Eye View. I sent the link to a good friend of mine a few days after making an offer on our house and he was able to find a home a few days later. It's really great if you are interested in a specific neighborhood and want to use the map interface to show you homes both in your price range and with your options.

If you are looking for a home in the bay area, check them out. I don't think you'll find a better real-estate searching site (and I have nothing to do with them at all, just a really happy customer).

Yesterday Hotmail turned 10 years old! Let's see, when Hotmail launched I was a sophomore in College, and was still using Gopher before discovering Mosaic, a crazy new GUI for browsing the WWW. I didn't get my own Hotmail account till October 17, 1998 (you can find out when you registered by visiting http://account.live.com).

Anyway, a big happy b-day to Hotmail and here's to the next decade!

Years and years of prior art, and the recent Ford rental that I was driving in Redmond had this for a heating/cooling nob.

Tell me what this means? Basically you have two modes for AC and the one “off” location (that circle at the top) and the rest of the controls are for heat or air w/o AC.

Huh? How does that make any sense?

So far this year has been going great. I’ve almost forgotten the horrid Alaska delays of last year. In approximately 20 segments this year, Alaska has managed to depart within 30 minutes of the scheduled departure time for most of my flights. In fact, I’ve been flying so much this year that I did a Tier Match to get MVP status (Alaska will do a one time match of your FF status on another airline to MVP or MVP Gold). Why did I do this?

• Flying them a lot (and not flying American all that much)
• Want free First Class Upgrades (when available)
• Want selection of seats close to the front of the plane so I don’t have to bite my lip as I watch the dozens of people unload in the most inefficient manner possible while smiling the whole time (Dammit!)

Anyway, I get to the airport on time, and lo and behold my flight is delayed 7 mins. What airline delays flights such a short amount of time? 30 min later they delayed it 1.5 hours!!! That’s longer then my flying time. To make matters worse, the inbound plane is scheduled to arrive late, and the original time was already past our departure time…. which only leads me to believe that our original plane broke down.

Now you understand all the blog posts today.

I almost cried with joy when I read this:

Security in Outlook 2007 takes advantage of the status of antivirus software installed on a computer. This change represents a major departure from the way the Object Model Guard worked in the past. If Outlook is able to detect that antivirus software is running with an acceptable status, Outlook disables security warnings for the user. This allows external applications that previously had to resort to Extended MAPI or third-party libraries to avoid security prompts under the appropriate conditions. This new behavior helps keep Outlook secure without overwhelming the user with excessive warning messages.

Wow, no need to use Extended MAPI, Redemption or a host of other hacks to make the annoying dialog go away . Sweet. Another kudo for Office 2007.

[via Ryann Gregg]

Office 2007 is getting a lot of kudos today thanks to a post by Anil. When I first saw the ribbon I was like, Barf… however that was a long time ago, and it has improved a hell of a lot. In fact I'm surprised at the number of improvements they've continued to make during the “beta” period.

Today I find that the Ribbon really unlocks much of the hidden power of Office. It helps you make your documents really look professional, which was almost impossible to do before (unless you used Mac Office for charting and such). Of of my favorite features is just the fact that the WordMail toolbars don’t get screwed up any longer.

Anyhoo, one of the best things the team has done is the Send a Smile Tool. Every product should have a Send a Smile tool. I’ve started to use it whenever I find something I like or something that frustrates me. It’s a really amazing way of capturing user feedback without requiring the user to go to a web site and get lost in user feedback hell.

Jensen Harris also gets my vote for best MSFT blog. Back in the day, Jensen was actually the Lead PM for the Mac version of Outlook (when it was developed by the Outlook Team, and before there was Entourage or Exchange support in Entourage). It’s great to see the kind of positive impact he’s having on both the product and the image of Office.

Scott blogged about a few cool shortuct launchers for Windows. Personally I’ve used SlickRun the longest, followed by AppRocket and recently tried Colibri. Colibri is very slick but could use some features like Directory Browsing. AppRocket hasn’t been really updated in a while and could also use a few new features (like showing folder pathnames when multiple folder matches exist).

update: looks like Launchy is a good mix of Colibri and AppRocket with a really slick UX.