Posts tagged as: live

Windows Live, part 2

I went back to the Windows Live website today to try out some of the user created gadgets and discovered that some of the sillier bugs have been fixed. Coincidence? I could hope that this is just the normal bug fixing process, but the bugs that were fixed had been there for at least two weeks before I wrote about them. Anyway, this was an encouraging sign, so I went on to look at what users had been able to contribute to Microsoft's collection of gadgets. It isn't fair to talk about bugs with these gadgets, since they are not produced by Microsoft, so I decided to see what type of apps were popular and how it felt running them on the Windows Live browser desktop.

Let me stop here for a second. What are we supposed to call the simulated desktop when it appears in a browser? The help file for Live refers to it as my "page." So I guess they are thinking of this as a home page builder, not a web based desktop. It would make sense for Microsoft to adopt this terminology, but I want to remember to track what Live's competitors call it. I can see how this is going to be confusing when this stuff gets rolled out to the general public. How do you parse statements like "Now you can move your desktop to a Web desktop."? A quick check of Technorati shows that bloggers are indeed trying to construct sentences like this. Thank God, I'm not still working in a dot-com. I can just imagine a meeting with marketing people trying to decide how to unravel this verbal knot we have tied around ourselves. Remind me to tell you someday about the time Andover.Net marketing people came up with the slogan "Fat and Sticky."

Can you tell I don't really want to get to these gadgets? OK. Let's talk about the great stuff people have built. One of the first things I liked is the use of a tag cloud to select gadgets. From the intro text it looks like they're pretty damn pleased with themselves about it too. Another cool thing is the fact that someone posted a Firefox download gadget two months ago, and its still there. It is also one of the most downloaded gadgets.

Alright, I'll admit that I can't find any really great gadgets. But there are some cute ones (click Install Gadget to view gadget):

• Financial Clock.
• Boise Traffic Map. Make up your own joke.
• Chord Finger.
• Live Math.

Overall, this system seems to hold some promise. If it can become cool to build gadgets, I think we might see some useful ones. I am surprised, however, that Microsoft hasn't appeared to commit any resources to developing killer gadgets of their own. Maybe they are waiting to see what users create first so they can copy them.

Web App or Web Farce?

If you are feeling blue and need a good laugh to brighten your day, try out the beta of Microsoft's Windows Live web-based desktop app. It goes beyond buggy, to a place that can only be called Web farce. Yes, I understand what Beta means, but check out the bugs I was able to find in just a few minutes:

• To test out Windows Live as an RSS reader I imported my feed list as an OPML file. This worked fairly well, except that many of the feeds showed up in the main menu without titles.
• I haven't been able to find any way to tell the system to reload feeds, or to show feeds with new posts.
• When you pull down the menu with the feed list, it covers up about 1/3 of the screen on the left for the menu, even though the menu items take up only half of this space.
• When you click on a feed, only the first 5 items appear, even when there are many more in the feed. The funny part is that the pull-down menu stays down, covering the blog headlines. The only way to clear the menu is to click "hide sidebar."
• Gadgets are supposed to be a big part of Windows Live. These are little tools that you can load onto the home page to display some specialized information. The current beta only lists 5 gadgets: mail, weather, horoscopes, ticking clock, and welcome.Ticking clock is just a text line with the current time, and Welcome is a one screen help page.
• I tried the Weather gadget and entered my city as Lexington, Mass. The gadget displayed the closest weather station in the town of Medford, (I actually thought it was in Bedford, but this is close), but showed the temperature as 17 degrees. A quick check of Weather.com gave the current weather as 27 degrees. Wait. I just reloaded the page again, and now the temperature says 32 degrees. Boston's weather fluctuates, but not that wildly.
• The town name of Medford, Mass. is a link to what I assumed was more details. Unfortunately, the details were about Australia. That's right here's the link.
• Along with gadgets you can also place RSS feeds onto the home page so they display all the time. I tried this with a pre-defined feed from Reuters. This one was really weird. If I continually reload the page, the contents of the feed alternate between today's news and items that are apparently from last summer. The lead headline is "Bush picks Roberts to succeed Rhenquist." Believe me, I'm not creative enough to make this stuff up.
• At the bottom of the screen there are a bunch of links, including Privacy, which has a nonsense link of "http://g.msn.com/0PR_/enau", and Legal, which seems to work,but also shows a confusion over whether I am in Australia. Here is its link: "http://www.live.com/loc/en/au/tou.asp."
• Finally, there is a settings menu item, which doesn't help me refresh the RSS feeds as I hoped, but does give me a choice of nine different languages, including "English (United States)," "English (United Kingdom)," and "English (Australia)." Right now I have it set to Australian English, but it hasn't called me mate yet, or offered to put another shrimp on the barbie, which is the full extent of my Australian English. Wait a minute. Maybe that's why the system thinks I am in Australia. OK. I've switched to good old USA English, and the weather gadget dissapeared. I reloaded it and again put in the city of Lexington, Mass. and this time the gadget can find it, only it is also displaying the weather report for "Novo Cruzeiro, BRA," where it is a delightful 88 degrees. The Lexington link now points to US weather. So it appears that setting the language tells the system to point to that country, which has a curious sort of logic.
• So what happens if I choose Spanish as my language? The weather gadget again clears, but when I enter Lexington, Mass. this time the system again thinks Medford is the closest weather station. Clicking the town name takes me to a weather map for Spain of course. I am speaking Spanish after all.

That's enough fun for now. Boy, it was great to do some Microsoft bashing for a change. I miss them. Next I'll try to find the rest of the Windows Live gadgets. I know there must be more, but I couldn't find any links in this system for them.