Craig Bailey on Microsoft

Adobe has been experimenting with it’s own image navigation & stitching together technology, and Infinite Images is the latest demonstration of it (see here for the ReadWriteWeb article).

You, me and every other Microsoft watcher will immediately see shades of Deep Zoom and perhaps a little Photosynth in this.

What’s cool about the the Adobe system is how it uses tagging (based on characteristics of the images) to provide an endless linkage between them. It’s pretty cool, and you probably need to see the video to understand what I’m talking about. The main difference between this and say Photosynth is that with Photosynth you provide the images and tell it which ones to stitch together, whereas with Infinite Images it looks at all your photos and works out which ones to stitch together. At least that’s what it seemed like from the demo.

But it also reminds me of other uses. It’s kind of like how when you link an endless supply of, say, map images together with geo-tagging and then enable them to seamlessly blend into each other! Amazing. It’s called DeepEarth, and it’s on CodePlex now. John O’Brien (and the gang) has been working hard (check out his sample site here).

Oh, and speaking of Deep Zoom, there’s a new Deep Zoom composer that’s just been released.

I think it’s interesting that the Live Mesh team decided to put their upcoming release on hold (as announced at the start of this month). Here’s their reasoning:

UPDATE: In the world of services, we have blackout periods where no updates are allowed. This is to ensure stability during, e.g., the holiday season when use of a product goes up and the availability of employees to fix issues goes down. The Live Mesh team entered this blackout period before the final testing of our next Live Mesh client for Windows was completed. Thus, we're holding this update until after the holidays - look for more news in early January. (Source: Live Mesh blog)

It’s difficult to disagree with this decision, and is indicative of the general attitude at Microsoft of late. There seems to be a much higher priority being placed on quality, than there is on just getting updates out. This is surely a good thing.

It continues on with the ASP.NET MVC team, with Phil Haack reporting on Friday that they aren’t going to get the previously hoped for Release Candidate out this year. Why? Because it isn’t ready. For the interim we have to make do with Scott’s post about some of the new bits (in his typical brief form :-).

You know, I think I read Sarah Perez’s blog before just about anyone’s these days. She’s even ahead of Mary-Jo, Long Zheng, Steve Clayton, and *gasp*, TechCrunch.

Why? Take today’s post on Live Sync for example. Informative (she explains that Windows Live Sync is the new FolderShare), clarifying (she explains the difference between Live Sync and Live Mesh), pithy (with a simple list of the main features) and link laden (with links to the team for submitting bugs). Nice bite size factoids I can use.

Live Sync is available in both Windows and Mac client versions. It’s actually pretty cool. 

Yes, it’s still a beta, but they’re looking good. Microsoft has released the latest version of their Live Essentials pack, including Messenger, Mail, Writer, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Family Safety, Toolbar and more. Get them here.

My main interest was Windows Live Writer, which is one of my must have applications that just keeps getting better and better (which I may have mentioned before). But this time I actually download some of the other parts to see whether they are up to scratch. My opinion: none too shabby. The Live toolbar is moderately useful, and I use Mail for syncing up my News feeds. I have to say that Photo Gallery is average though, and Movie Maker seems to have gone from mildy functional to almost single-functional. I know people ask for simplicity, but I’ll be interested to see whether the feedback Microsoft gets on this one indicates they’ve taken the concept just a little too far.

Here’s my obligatory Live Writer screenshot – I just love this program.

Another brain expanding day! I was so impressed with the event that I checked my impressions with a few other attendees – I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just a case of me being so naive about this stuff, that any new information was a revelation :-) But no, there were many others in the same boat.

Day 2 was a little different. Where as yesterday focussed on what is possible now (with all the Live Services stuff) today focussed more on what is coming, with a particular interest in the Live Mesh framework.

As we were reminded, it’s important to consider Mesh as a framework that you can build upon, as opposed to it being just an online file storage mechanism (since storage is only a small subset of the functionality).

James and Neil delivered the content again, and I caught up with Finula Crowe and Nick Hodge from Microsoft as well as a bunch of developers I’ve met at various user groups including Nick Rayner, Michael Nemtsev, Paul Sorauer, Mark Wallis and Drew Shobbrook.

I think the best recommendation for an event I can give is when I come out inspired. And today I left dreaming up all kinds of cool ideas for how to put Live Services to business use.

If Microsoft run the Live Services Jumpstart again, I strongly recommend you attend.

There’s only a few spots left for the Live Services Jumpstart in Sydney.

It’s an intensive technical training session on Microsoft’s consumer web platform technologies. It’s being run by James McCutcheon and Dr Neil Roodyn (two of my new work colleagues at nsquared) and covers more than 20 technical sessions, hands-on labs and the opportunity to chat with numerous Live Services dudes.

Sign up here.