shahine.com/omar/

Now this is something I was never expecting... Apple has released Safari on Windows. That is a seriously bold move.

Are cross platform applications back in? This brings the major list of Apple Windows apps to:

• iTunes
• QuickTime
• Safari
• AirPort

Should we expect more? Aperture, iPhoto and iMovie would be welcome additions (in that order).

I wonder what Apple is up to? Is this a ploy to increase web compatibility of sites rendered in Safari? Is this a ploy to make the web look good on iPhone? Who benefits from this the most?

update: just finished playing with Safari. This is 100% a Mac program. There are no Windows Controls or anything in the app. In fact it looks like it's running on top of an emulation stack if you ask me. Does Apple have a Mac OS X Emulator for Windows? It looks like it... down to the Font Rendering.

It's no secret that Windows Live Writer is simply the best blog authoring tool out there. What I love is how innovative that team is. Rather than being held hostage to the many blog APIs out there, they have defined awesome ways to provide extensibility and self description of blogging capabilities. From their support of RSD to the latest set of APIs, they keep pushing the envelope by keeping the product fresh and relevant to bloggers. Witness the fact that WordPress and Typepad both have support for this, as well as open source blogs like Subtext and dasBlog.

The best example of this is their recent API support that allows blogging engines like dasBlog to be much better integrated. Scott wrote about this on his blog, and I just updated my blog to take advantage of this. For any existing dasBlog users this is just a drop in upgrade.

Having said that there is one very important bug fix to the blog APIs in dasBlog to support the synchronization of posts to Live Writer. This will be in the upcoming 1.9 release.

BTW, my fav feature of WLW beta 2.... red squiglies. If your app ain't got background spell checking, then it's pretty useless to me. Why? Jeff Atwood says is best:

"People absolutely adore background spell checking. It's one of those rare "you'll get it from me when you pry it out of my dead, cold hands" features that users will switch applications over. Automatic background red-squiggly-underline spell checking in HTML forms is one of the marquee features of Firefox 2.0. In fact, it's feature number two on the feature page, right under tabbed browsing."

After going back to work from parental leave, I've had to carefully pick and chose the things I do that are not 1) work or 2) helping around the house or 3) taking care of a baby. Each have their ups and downs, but all three add up to 100% of my time.

It's been a lot more difficult than I thought. Many of my "side projects" or "hobbies" are progressing very slowly or not at all. However, now that Sarah is close to 7 months, and I'm getting a better handle on work, my energy levels are getting better. I don't feel the need to go to sleep at 9pm every night.

One side effect of this is that I was finally able to update my dasBlog theme. A while back I found a link to this amazing open source design site called Open Designs. I highly recommend them. My blog is now using the Ruby theme by Denise Mitchinson.

They have a lot of amazing stuff there.

A lot of time around here I get asked, how long should something take. In other words, what are the thresholds at which you should be thinking about application performance (web and client) and how to appropriately notify the user.

The good news is that Jakob Nielsen has a pretty good rule of thumb that he published a while ago. I have found it works in most cases.

• 0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result.
• 1.0 second is about the limit for the user's flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of operating directly on the data.
• 10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user's attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done. Feedback during the delay is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to expect.

A good way to think about this is, how long does something take before you hit Alt-Tab and do something else? I find this contributes to quite a bit of lost productivity as I start to fire off parallel multi tasking threads in my brain and then forget to finish doing the thing I started.

Or... how long do you want for a search result on google before you hit retry because it's taken longer than 1 second and you assume something is wrong (like maybe you lost your Internet connection?

The other day I was commenting at work about how difficult it is to read numbers without commas. I was looking at a bunch of stats that tell us things like how many users we have in hotmail in various countries, markets, and so on. These numbers are all in millions, tens of millions, hundreds of thousands and so on.

When you see a table like this:

and there are lots of numbers in a table can you get the info you need without counting from the right? I can't, or I'm too lazy to.

In Excel there is this nice handy button:

that will format any cell so you can get a table and make it look like this:

Now I can quickly asses the relative values of each row without thinking.

In C# this is stupid easy.

Just use String.Format("{0:n}", value)

Please help save unnecessary brain cycles.

Chris Saaca just detailed an account of how he saw a man get shot in front of his apartment (which by the way is about 2 blocks from my old apartment in San Francisco, and a path I walked every day for 4 years). I can't believe this happened so close to my old residence.

I hope I never see anyone get shot, but I'm glad Chris was able to get the plate numbers of the shooter which eventually let the cops to catching him.

I love how 911 gave him a busy signal though. I hope I never have to call 911 either.

Back when the internet was a luxury and broadband was something you had at work only many product sported an "Offline" mode. For browsers this was nothing more than turning off the attempt to talk to the network and using the cache. However, over time, offline has been denigrated to a fairly useless feature that doesn't work and the cache really is just a collection of images and stuff that doesn't work offline (because of Web 2.0 and AJAX). sidenote: I guess Google Gears fixes that.

There is only one application that I know of that truly handles offline well, and that's Outlook when running Exchange Cached mode. It's phenominal. You just unplug you computer and you have all your stuff there. Of course, Entourage has always had an Offline mode by default, where in Outlook it was a "feature" that became seamless in Outlook 2003.

Anyway, my FAV feature of my FAV RSS Aggregator is now Offline mode. I have generally found that I read RSS feeds on flights to and from Redmond. But feeds like Engadget that are very image heavy are useless on a plane w/o an internet connection.

Well Nick just finished up a killer Offline feature for FeedDemon 2.5. It works exactly how I'd expect... and this pretty much rounds out almost everything I ever wanted in an RSS Reader .

I ran across this post on the Humanized Weblog about the trends in the Software world. As a contributor to at least one open source project (dasBlog) and a employee at a company that professionally makes software and part of a team that does a "service" I can 100% relate to what he is saying .

"Making software easy to use is hard; and the people who make free software generally don't have much motivation to make it easy for anyone but themselves."

In many cases the most expensive and labor intensive part of making software are some of the more artistic aspects of making it usable. Some developers have very good intuition about what this is, and many do not. Many people I've worked with in my career had great intentions but were surprised when they saw the result of what they've built (including myself).

Now, I've seen(and use) a ton of fantastic, usable, popular "open source" and "free" software. But there is truth in the post referenced.

I really enjoyed watching the interview of Steve and Bill a the AllThingsD conference.

It's a great reminder of why I enjoy being a part of Microsoft, even if the legacy I'm helping to build pales in comparison to what the folks at Apple, Microsoft and other companies did when I was a kid. Microsoft is a special place to work, even with all the dysfunction that exists today.

I watched all 7 parts, but there is also a highlight reel.

are now listed http://get.live.com/betas. Of note are a new version of Windows Live Writer, Windows Live Messenger, and Windows Live Mail (desktop mail application).

If you are using Windows Live Writer with dasBlog you'll want to "update account configuration" so that you can create new categories from Writer in posts.

Mike recently lost his cell phone and talks about how easy and effective using Remote Wipe was.

Basically it works like this. You lose you phone with all your email, calendar, contacts on it. You are worried that this data may get into the wrong hands. You log onto OWA and select Wipe My Device and your device information is nuked from the phone.

This is a very cool feature of Windows Mobile 6 and Windows Mobile 5 with the Security and Push software.

I think this will be our next point and shoot camera, our first non-canon point and shoot camera.

Notable Features:

• Wide Angle (28mm)
• HD Video (1280 x 720) as well as Wide Screen Video (848 x 480)
• Image Stabilization
• 1920 x 1080 photo resolution

update: the actual model number if DMC-FX100K and DMC-FX-100S

This is cool. Bringo will take care of navigating a phone tree for you and then calling you when it has reached a human.

One of the reasons I love Lenovo is the fact that they blog. Not only do they blog, they make great laptops. And not only that but they come up with innovative solutions to problems that seemingly get no attention from any other OEMs. A few weeks ago I wrote about how they create a nice single application for downloading and installing all the drivers and such that a laptop needs to function. They also break things out by Critical/Recommended/Optional etc. Finally, the craplets that they do produce look like they are part of the Operating System, not some tumor that is just festering on your machine...

Well, their latest post about what the Thinkpad has in common with the Owl is a testament to what I've said above. They are looking at innovative solutions to a problem I hate... noise and heat on laptops. Kudos to them for doing this and letting us know.

Another plus is that Lenovo was recently rated as the Greenest of the laptop makers. I like that.

I wonder if other laptop makers will take notice and start to blog? To me the fact that Lenovo does such a good job blogging about their products is a reflection of how proud they are of their work and their desire to own their story.

This are freaking hilarious.

Suspicious Male

Reading Pane

Hot Male

Drag & Drop