June 28
If you guys ever found it painful that your desktop gets cluttered with all kinds of junk, Magic folder is really the magic you need.
Magic Folder is a Sidebar Gadget for Vista written by DaveCra, which lets you select certain file types and their destination. Then all you need to do is drag and drop a file that has been littering your desktop and it will move to the appropriate folders.
I find this extremely useful, for Pictures, Music file and Downloaded file! Check it out. When a few picture files end up on my desktop, all I need to do is drag them to the magic folder and it will automagically move it to preset destination.
If you are shown a bunch pictures and you had to guess whether that person is a Designer or Developer how accurate would you be ? Want to know ? Check this site out.
The highlighted area shows my score. Clearly, I did pretty bad. May be that's because I do not judge people 
Its fun. Give it a shot.
via blognewschannel
June 22
The AchieveMax blog has a post on the lesser known facts about bill gates.
- William Henry Gates was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, USA. His father William was a corporate lawyer, and his mother Mary was a schoolteacher.
- By the age of 17, Gates had sold his first computer program, a time-tabling system for his high school, for $4,200.
- Gates scored 1590 on his SAT standardized test. The top score for the test is 1600.
- Gates told his university teachers he would be a millionaire by age 30. He became a billionaire at age 31.
- While at Harvard, Gates co-wrote Altair BASIC, which became Microsoft’s (then called Micro-Soft) first product.
- He met his wife, Melinda French, in 1987 at a Microsoft press event in Manhattan while she was a worker for the company. They would go on to get married on New Years Day in 1994.
- In 2002, Bill Gates was considered more idolized than Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tung in a poll of teenagers in Hong Kong and China. The survey was conducted by the City University of Hong Kong.
- In 2005, Gates was honored with the title Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II of England.
- As of the March 2007 issue of Forbes magazine, Bill Gates has been listed as Number 1 on “Forbes’ Richest People” list for 13 years in a row. His current net worth is about $56 billion.
- Gates has recently announced that he will be reducing his involvement at Microsoft and will be devoting more time to his charity work.
- He is currently having a building named after him at Carnegie Mellon University, called the Gates Building of Computer Science.
- Gates is the current owner of the Codex Leicester — a 72-page collection of Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific writings. The writings are a mixture of observations on water properties, astronomy, and rocks and fossils. Gates puts the Codex on public display once a year in a different city around the world.
- Bill Gates earns $250 every SECOND; that’s about $20 million a DAY and $7.8 billion a YEAR!
- If he drops a thousand-dollar bill, he needn’t even bother to pick it up because in the four seconds it would take him to pick it up, he would’ve already earned it back.
via achievemax
June 21
Microsoft announced a new ergonomic, fully backlit keyboard - Natural Ergonomic Desktop 7000. With some cool features.
1. 2.4 GHz Wireless Technology
2. Advanced Ergonomic Design
3. 4-Way Scrolling
4. Magnifier
5. Zoom
6. Battery Life Indicator
However what really got me excited is what's coming in September this year - A rechargeable backlit keyboard. Check out the demo
via bink
June 18
Microsoft announced then next generation IPTV at NXTComm which will be called Microsoft Mediaroom. Mediaroom is a multimedia software platform that enables service providers to deliver personalized TV and entertainment experience. Sounds boring ? Tell you what. Check out this interactive demo
Some cool features:
Multiview - Lets you see up to six different screens at one time on your television.
Instant Channel Zapping - Lets you change channels in the blink of the eye.
DVR - Digital video recorder
Live TV and VOD - With instant search.
Needless to say, photos, music and movies. MediaRoom will also be available through XBOX 360 soon :)
via www.microsoftmediaroom.com
June 09
I am writing a post after 8 days. Work has been keeping me very busy. Lots of things happened while, I was away. And I am debating whether to account each and everything or should I just summarize the favorite ones. I think, I will go with the latter. But I definitely want to talk about Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Writer.
What is Windows Live Mail ?
WL mail is a lot of things. It is the successor to Outlook Express on XP and Windows Mail on Vista. It is also a successor to Windows Live Mail Desktop. Besides all this, it is a very well done product. Still in beta, but well done!
LiveSide and others have the complete coverage on WL Mail. So I will stick to my favorite features.
3. User Interface
WLMail has a sleek look. I love the glass right from the splash screen.
2. View by Conversation.
WLMail has a "View by conversation" mode. Something that outlook has had for a long time.
1. New email setup.
Guess, what do you have to do if you want to set up a new mail account ? Nothing. All you need to do is. Just sign in. While, this one of the least used feature (we probably only use it ones or twice ) it is not an easy problem. Best of all you can have multiple accounts. Again, I would like to repeat! Adding an account is as easy as sign-in! No need to worry about pop/imap etc. No need to worry about things getting deleted on in your webmail. All happens "automagically".
It does a lot more! It has feeds and news groups. It integrates with messenger. It has active search. It also has fast email search which uses desktop search operators! But most importantly it makes your email experience totally seamless.
Next, I want to talk about the very application, I use to blog. Windows Live Writer.
What is Windows Live Writer ?
It is one of the best blogging tools, I know of. It works with multiple web-logging services such as WordPress, TypePad, Blogger and of course Windows Live Spaces!
Again, Writer Zone, the office WL Writer blog, has a comprehensive blog entry about their new features. I will stick to my favorites.
3. WYSIWYG.
Well this feature has always been there. But they have made it even better. Esp the "Provider Customization APIs" exposed by the Live Writer guys can be used by any blogging service to make the writer appear more and more close to the actual weblog.
2. Add a Plugin.
One of the most important things they have done, is make the "Add a Plugin" feature easier to locate. Besides the existing plugins such as "Insert Picture", "Insert Map" etc work really well.
1. Over all blogging experience.
I have to put this at number. There are so many small little things that make your life so much more better.
- Add link to glossary
- Include "Category" and "Date" right in the editor
- UI look and feel
- Ability to check the statistics from within the writer
- Picture management
- Insert tags.
On the other front, Live Search added more "instant answers". Now you traffic and map show up as instant answers. This feature has a long way to go but its good to see that things are moving.
That's it for now!
via LiveSide
via WriterZone
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