by Don Burnett
Wow it's been a wild week for new technology. Microsoft's Live initiatives is seeing some impressive results.. Let's get to these...
First look at this beautiful web browser, in of course the Apple iPhone... What's really cool about it is it's usability.. Content scrolls and zooms at your fingertips..
"42 Wallaby Way, Sidney.."
No it's not Finding Pixar/Disney's Nemo 2, but Microsoft Live Labs new Mobile web browser for Windows Mobile 5 and Above... DEEPFISH...
The nice thing about Windows Mobile based products is that you can just install new programs and upgrade your Windows Mobile's Installation. Unlike the Apple iPhone which Apple locks you out of installing new applications from third parties. Applications for the iPhone require web browser access at the moment for 3rd party content. Granted some Windows Mobile providers do the same thing, as a matter of security (which very few end users agree with) but the majority of Windows Mobile devices let you install new updates and 3rd party applications.
When the iPhone was released just about everyone agreed it has great web browser with scaling and zooming of web pages. Windows Mobile users felt left behind, until now.
Deepfish enhances existing mobile browsing technologies by displaying content in a view that is closer to the desktop experience. The zoom-able interface and cue map allow you to quickly access the information you care about over the web without ever losing track of where you are. Right now it's still in development, and they have been doing community technology previews, so keep an eye out for the next set of invites to betas if it interests you..
The scaling technology is pretty advanced and amazing. If you have looked at Microsoft's Photosynth you will see a familiar imaging engine, called SeaDragon. It also supports things like dynamic overlays, so you'll see some very exciting things in the future with content integration..
On10.net has some exclusive video if you are interested in seeing this cool new technology. Between this and Windows Mobile Live Search, my iPhone interest is beginning to wain. I will say I would think the design of the iPhone is cool, if they just supported more than AT&T as a carrier now and opened it truly up to 3rd party NON-WEB applications..
You say Taffy, I say Tafiti !
One of the coolest interfaces ever... Tafiti means "To Research.." Many other people have blogged about it here, but I am just going to say that this is the coolest interface to a search engine ever. It's done in Silverlight and gives you not only access to searching thru images, RSS feeds and the Web, as well as books and news. If you want to know what the web you work with will look like in the next few years, check out the richness of this application. I bet they have even Google salivating with such a great user experience.
Most search engines just display content and you have to capture the data yourself. With Tafiti everything is just like working with the physical content. You can pick up content (of any type) and drag and drop content on stacks while labeling it and storing it. The user experience value of this application is phenomenal and should revolutionize how we work with content when we research things on the web. The correlation between the User Interface and what you actually do when you research and organize that research is almost exactly one-to-one.. Another nice feature (but not sure how people will end up using it is a tree view). You can also store and return to individual searches as well as merging them.
This is a UI tour-de-force, and it's only a "demonstration"
Look up in the sky! It's Windows Live SkyDrive!
The competition for online storage of your files is heating up. Microsoft has a new release of Windows SkyDrive for online storage. If you use Windows Live for storage you'll find the great for situations where you want to share files over multiple computers.
SkyDrive is also giving Windows Live Writer an assist! There is a new plug-in that you can download to allow you to link content to your blogs/writing consumers to also access content saved to your SkyDrive folders inside of Windows Live Writer. Yeah file based content embedding finally! It even lets you put it in an iframe, just in case your provider doesn't like you linking up due to server restrictions.
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