The world as frankps sees it!
Windows
Sooner or later we all have to work with it, even though some try to work against it.
Windows Phone 7 – Close to perfect!
31 year ago
Last Friday I got my HTC Mozart, a phone running Windows Phone 7. This article sums up my first impressions.
Windows Phone 7 has the WOW factor. It is elegant and incredibly intuitive.
For those of you who shrug when ever you hear Windows Mobile 6.5. Windows Phone 7 is nothing like it. The horrible Windows 3.11-like user interface is gone and the phone doesn’t seem stuffed up with functionality nobody seem to need. Windows Phone 7 is a fresh start, and the things it does, it does well — but the things that it doesn’t (yet), tend to stick out. These missing features include copy and paste, visual voicemail, multitasking of third-party apps, and the ability to do video calling and to use the phone to connect other devices to the Internet (tethering). Hopefully some of the functionality are just days away, as Microsoft is about to release the first update.
A few more things before we start reviewing. The Windows Phone 7 platform is not officially launched in Norway. The phones are imported from U.K, and they don’t have a Norwegian keyboard (æ, ø and å), nor a Norwegian spell checking, so I tend to write all messages in English. Further more the Marketplace is closed for us, we can’t even download free applications. There are ways to get access to the Marketplace, but you will have to find out yourself.
HTC Mozart - Running Windows Phone 7
The Interface
The user interface is nothing like you’ve seen before. As mentioned, gone is the Windows Mobile 6.5 interface, and Windows Phone 7 isn’t similar to iOS or Android. It is something completely new. The interface is a pretty huge jump from any mobile OS you have seen before it. The interface is built on some of the design theories Microsoft established with the Zune. I am impressed, it is the simplest approach to smartphones I’ve seen so far!
Why do I say this? Because I work with mobile phones at the University of Oslo. Part of the job is to test phones that we will recommend for our staff. I test 5-6 phones a year, plus ereaders and tablets. So you can imagine, it’s not often I get the WOW feeling. Last time was with the iPhone and I never got it with the Android. No Android phone or tablet have made me ever want to play with it. With the phone running Windows phone 7, HTC Mozart, I sat the whole Saturday morning, going through the interface, looking for applications that I have on the iPhone, simply to see if the phone could replace the iPhone.
Microsoft has done an incredible job with the visual interface. From the lock screen on down, they manage to simplify things down in a way that seems almost artistic.
The Start Screen
The main feature of Windows Phone 7 is the Start screen, which takes the form of a long vertical list of tiles that can represent either an app or a hub. The phones lack multiple home screens or traditional folders for grouping apps. Windows phones use large, dynamic tiles that can give you certain information, like your next appointment, at a glance. And it has special “hubs” for things like contacts and entertainment that use bold, attractive interfaces and offer personalized, updating information. But there is a downside to this clean, simple, different approach, so you “pin” your favorite apps, contacts, photos or Web sites to the Start screen, the list of tiles grows longer, and you have to scroll further and further to reach some.
The App List
The start screen is pushed to the left, when you push a little arrow at the top. A long – potentially very, very long – list of apps appears. Here, the icons are a reasonable size, but they’re simply laid out in a long list. No way to putting them into folders as on the iPhone, and there is no way to line them side by side. In its basic form, the list is fine. But as soon as you get a lot of apps installed, like I have on my iPhone, it’s going to start feeling untenable.
Physical Buttons
With Windows Phone 7 Microsoft has almost got rid of all the buttons on the phone. Only three important buttons are left: Back, Home and Search, in that order. Back always takes you back one screen (and it’s got a long memory – you can keep going back through all your actions), while Search will search within your app (say, email or maps). Home is always home. It’s a good, robust arrangement.
Notifications
On a smartphone there is a lot of small alerts popping up to tell you whats going on various services, such as an incoming SMS or an IM. Similar to how notifications are handled on the Android platform, notifications are placed in a small notification area on the top of the screen. This lets you continue with what you are doing on the phone. The iPhone, on the other hand, puts alert windows in front of you, interrupting whatever you’re doing! The notification system in WIndows Phone 7 is somewhere between the two. Notifications pop up at the top of the screen, appearing where the status bar usually sits. Tap the notification, and you’ll jump to the app that pushed it. The problem is that it only contains the last notification and it doesn’t let you manage recent notifications that you didn’t address as they came in!
The Keyboard
The onscreen keyboard is on level with the on the iPhone. It is in other words really, really good. You get a QWERTY keyboard in portrait mode (are you listening, Nokia?), and multiple suggestions in a row above the keyboard as you type; the most likely word you’re typing is picked out in bold, and if you move on while that’s highlight it gets put in. I’m not often typing wrong, but I wonder how Microsoft will implement more letters for the markets here in Europe: The Scandinavian countries, Germany and Hungary. Will the keyboard remain just as good?
Microsoft also has a clever text cursor system, allowing you to quickly and accurately put the cursor wherever you want. Windows Phone 7 draws the cursor about 20 pixels above your thumb, and then moves it relative to where you drag.
The Hubs
The Hubs are really something that differs Windows Phone 7 from the other mobile operating systems. Hubs can best be explained as half apps, half folders.
Windows Phone 7 has 6 hubs: People, Pictures, Music + Videos, Marketplace, Office, and Games (connecting the phone brilliantly to the XBOX platform).
People is essentially your contacts list, with an added connection to Facebook. Your Facebook news feed is pulled into a “What’s new” view, and tapping on any contact lets you write on their wall or view their individual feed (in addition to calling them). It’s a nice gesture for those who just want the basics of Facebook — but most Facebook junkies will probably want to go for the dedicated application.
Pictures is where your pictures go. The Hub also automatically pulls down the pictures you or your contacts have published on Facebook.
Office is where Microsoft flexes their business muscle, allowing for the creation/handling of Excel, Word, and Powerpoint documents. This is also where the platform’s note taking application, OneNote, resides. All files can be synced back and forth to your Windows Live account.
Marketplace – Third Party Apps
Microsoft’s application store is nicely implemented. The applications are sorted in categories, and you can filter between free/paid applications, and top item tracking for each category. The selection of available applications is getting better every day that goes by, and many of my favourite applications on the iOS platform is already available on Windows Phone 7: Adobe Reader, Amazon Kindle, BBC News, Endomondo, Facebook, GReadr (a Google Reader), Guardian Newsreader, Last.fm, Share2Flickr (lets you upload your photos to Flickr), Shazam, Twitter and WordPress.
As on all mobile platforms, there are multiple apps that more or less do the same and they often have similar names. I would therefore have liked to that search results also showed the price, who made the app, or whether or not there’s a trial. Searching for “Google Reader” turns up several apps. How do you know which one’s free? How do you know which one is the one made by your favorite company or if it is the official one? If the icon/name isn’t enough for you, you get to click through every item to find what you’re looking for. Also, Microsoft has decided to intertwine music results amongst app/game search results, which turned search basically in to a mess!
Perhaps the best feature of all: if an app developer wants to give their users a taste before they buy, the marketplace supports it. Next to “Buy” will be a “Try” button. On the Windows Phone 7 platform there is no need for developers to make an annoying Lite version of the applications! It’s one of the things I hate with the iOS platform.
E-mail and Calendar
At work we don’t use Exchange, so high on the list was testing the IMAP implementation. And I am happy to report that Windows Phone 7 plays nicely with our email servers.
The OS also comes with simplefied setup of major free email providers, Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail. Private I use Gmail, and also this service works nicely on the phone. Sadly the email client lacks a unified inbox, so you have to clutter your Start screen with separate tiles for each account.
The calendar, which syncs with Exchange, Windows Live, or Google, can’t sync with Yahoo or MobileMe, and lacks a week view. At work we use Lotus Notes, and there is no support for this group client and I have no idea on IBM working on a Notes Traveler client for Windows Phone 7.
Surfing the Web
Microsoft has done a good job with the Web browser. It is as fast as the default browsers on iPhone and Android, and has more or less the same set of features, except for no HTML5 support. And of course, it also lacks support for showing Adobe Flash content. For YouTube viewing, you download an app from the Zune Marketplace.
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi works like a charm at home. I had no problem connecting it to my WPA Personal based access point. Nor did I have problem connecting it wirelessly at work. We use WPA Enterprise (802.1x). But before being able to connect I had to download and install a certificate. The whole process of getting connected got a lot more difficult then on iPhone and Android, but still way simpler then on a Nokia phone!
I hope and I am confident, that Microsoft will give their Wi-Fi implementation a lot of love in the time to come. This part stands out from the simplified interface that the rest of the OS have.
Syncronization
If you want to connect the phone to your PC, syncronization is done through Zune. I would have hoped that sync would have been done through Windows Mobile Device Center, but I guess Microsoft got tempted by Apple’s approach (locking the iPhone to iTunes).
I have not tested connecting the phone to a Mac, but there is a Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac in beta.
Security – Client Certificate Support
Windows Phone 7 is marketed as a consumer oriented operating system, and unfortunately does not include all things certificate related:
- It supports using client certificates for Exchange ActiveSync authentication.
- No VPN support in general with or without certificates.
- No support using a certificate to authenticate to a web site.
- As mention, a not to good implementation of 802.1x.
In this area the iPhone is miles ahead of Windows Phone 7 (and also ahead of Android), and if these things are important for you, there is just one phone you should choose.
The public beta of Office 2010 is finally here
1I have had access to Microsoft Office 2010 through my TechNet subscription for 2-3 days now, and yesterday the technical preview of Office 2010 got released in a public beta. Anyone interested can now download it and take it for a spin. It’s available in seven languages – English, Spanish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Russian, French and German. The Office 2010 Mobile beta got released at more or less the same time, and can be downloaded from the Windows Marketplace for Mobile.
Office 2010 contains lots of improvements and new functionality, and Microsoft seems to have managed to redefine the game of office computing! Office 2010 is connected to Microsoft’s cloud services and is on it’s way to be connected to other cloud services. It’s funny to look back to pre-Internet times, when Microsoft Office was just four applications, with little integration between them and no use of the web for document authoring, collaboration and management. But when Microsoft bought Groove, perhaps the most important buy up Microsoft has done, things started changing.
Let us start with OneNote. In typical Microsoft style, they don’t succeed with their first and second attempt on creating new applications. So also with OneNote. In Office 2010 OneNote has finally gotten the attention it deserves. It is now part of the full Office suite, and not a separate purchase, and undergone many improvements. The biggest improvement is without doubt that OneNote has now become a collaboration platform with its new coauthoring feature. Have you ever liked doing project work on a wiki? Thought so, I’ve basically hated it myself. With coauthoring, a project team can share and collaborate on OneNote pages and notebooks. I started using OneNote frequently when I got introduced to Office 2007, and with Office 2010 I can definitely see myself making use of the coauthoring and collaboration tools for the research projects that I support.
A few words about Powerpoint 2010. I haven’t been able to play with it to much yet, but I see several news sites pointing out that the biggest news is that it enables you to edit video directly in the application, without the need for a third-party tool. I’m not a video person, even though I once in a while use iMovie on my Mac, but I can see that this will give videocasts of lectures a boost. I’m not sure that I would publish presentations online via SkyDrive, but I guess that SlideShare will come up with something here!
The first application that I tried after having installed the new office suite, was Outlook. Outlook has through the years gone from an email client to a conversation management tool. But to start with the e-mail first, Outlook 2010 comes with improved IMAP support. You can now also have your Trash folder on the IMAP server, but Drafts are still stored locally on the computer. I hope Microsoft improves the IMAP support even more before the finale release of 2010.
I mentioned Outlook as a conversation management tool. First of all, you can now see if the person you are about to write an e-mail to is online or not, and then rather then sending an e-mail start an IM conversation with the person. I started using Outlook, when I saw the great Xobni plugin (link to my blog entries about Xobni). And the biggest news in Outlook is the introduction of Outlook Social Connector (OSC), which appears to be a tool that ties into SharePoint 2010 and aggregates information on any user’s emails, phone conversations, and IM sessions with you. OSC will be your bridge in to into major social networks. Appearently LinkedIn is gonna be the first social network to be connected. This is a functionality that Lotus Notes has had for almost a year now.
Word seems to be feature complete these days, and no big news to report from this application. But I should mention the possibility to upload your documents to Microsoft’s SkyDrive. SkyDrive is 25 GB with free online storage, and something you should really consider using. Do you have a good enough backup solution in place for your personal files?
Excel 2010. I rarly use spreadsheets in my work, but my guess is that Excel, as Word, is more or less feature complete and no bigger new functionality is introduced in 2010.
Windows 7 and Search (Advanced Query Syntax)
0With Windows 7 search has finally gotten better. It has actually gotten so good, that it gives me flashbacks to the time when I was running BeOS as my main operating system. I wrote BeOS here, cause all Microsoft has done here, is catching up with what other operating systems have done for years. MacOS X has similar functionality with it’s Spotlight. In fact, the initial version of Spotlight was made by Dominic Giampaolo, who wrote the file system for BeOS.
Advanced Query Syntax
Microsoft calls it’s solution Advanced Query Syntax (AQS). Fear not, cause it is not difficult to use at all. AQS lets you quickly define and narrow your searches for even more targeted results. Do be able to do so, AQS make use of metadata. Metadata is data about the file and it’s content. If you have done some simple web publishing from time to time, you have probably had you sysadmin reminding you to not to forget filling out the metadata. The Internet search engines make use of the metadata, and Windows Search will do it in pretty much the same way.
With Windows 7 I guess we can say that Windows Search is now totally integrated with the OS. If you are still using Windows Vista (or XP), Windows Search can be downloaded and installed.
Where is my Word document?
It’s becoming more and more of a problem. Many of use have been using computers for years, and we have now gotten ourselves both internal and external harddisks in TB sizes. And as we never throw things away, the harddisks are pretty full as well, with tons of pictures, music, videos, emails and documents.
How many of us haven’t been thinking (or screamed out loud), now where did I put that file? I wrote that document a month ago! With Office 2007 we got a new Save file panel.
Are you using Office 2007? Good, and have you ever taken the time to add tags to the document before saving it? Shame on you! To be able to use AQS successfully, you will have to take the time to add metadata your documents. I know for myself, that I have not taken the time to do so on all of my documents, but I can promise you that, that after I started learning about the powers of AQS, I have become a lot better in adding metadata!
Now go to the Seach field in the Start menu and do a search on aqs, and within a split of a second you will see the results. It found the document(s) based on the tag(s) you have added to it. The precise AQS term for this search is tags:[aqs].
Finding Music with AQS
Explaining this metadata and AQS can be done a lot simpler with music files. Have you ever ripped a CD? Oh, you’ve rip several. Have you ever ripped a CD without Internet connection? And last question, have you bought music on iTunes Music Store (iTMS)?
When you hare ripping a CD, you are first of all compressing wav files to MP3, but you are also connecting to an Internet Service that provides you with metadata for the album you are ripping. If you buy MP3s online, the music store will already have tagged the music that you are downloading. In general we can say that these files are rich on metadata.
The metadata container most commonly used in conjunction with audio files is ID3. It allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number, and other information about the file to be stored in the file itself.
You see from the screenshots that the search for the artists amiina brings up the same songs. The search syntax is artists:amiina, in this case I could have done album:”Kurr” and come up with the same songs. If I only wanted to listen to the song Boga, I would have used the syntax title:”Boga” (or since it’s just one word title:Boga). A search on Genre in this case would not have worked, the syntax for that is genre:electronica.
Find pictures when you want them
Similar to music there excists a standard metadata container for pictures, called EXIF. But there is a big difference. A lot of the metadata is automatically added by the camera as you take the pictures, but the metadata you would use for search is not among them. These data you will in most cases have to add yourself manually.
Microsoft provides an excellent application for keeping track of your photos, Windows Live Photo Gallery. I am using it almost every day. This application devides the metadata in to two categories: Information (Date taken, Camera, Exposure, Aperture, Focal length, ISO) and Descriptive tags. Adding descriptive tags is what will make it easier for you to find back to the picture when you need it or want to show it to others. For this night photo, I added three tags: E6 (the name of the highway), Helsfyr (name of the place) and nightphoto. Through the years I can have taken lots of photos, so the tag Helsfyr alone could be useless. But what if I used combinations of tags? Using tags:[Helsfyr AND nightphoto] or tags:[Helsfyr AND E6] would most likely exclude a lot of photos.
Finding e-mails on the fly!
Outlook’s inbuilt search is painfully slow, so I often use Xobni or Windows Search to look for e-mails. Some search syntaxes you should learn at once are: to:”frankps@domain.com”, to:”Frank Paul Silye”, from:”frankps@domain.com” and from:”Frank Paul Silye”. The search result will also list attachments.
Some finale words
I hope this introduction to Advanced Query Syntax gets you started. You can read a lot more about it on Microsoft’s Windows Search pages, available syntaxes can be found under Technical Resources. I have not covered searches with operators (<, >, <=, >=, ..) and wildcards (?, *), and not much about searches with multiple criteria (AND, OR, NOT).
Xobni with Twitter support
0
As you might have noticed, my favourite plugin for Outlook is Xobni. It is actually the reason why I migrated from Thunderbird to Outlook, and why I for now don’t want to go back to Thunderbird.
Today I updated Xobni to v1.8, which gives me Twitter support in Outlook. Great functionality, I can know have a quick look on what people who are sending me e-mails are Twittering about and can reply them directly on Twitter if the topic is the same! You can actually reply, retweet, follow, view that contact’s Twitter profile, or even post a new tweet.
The new version fixes several reported bugs, and more important the incredible search speed increased dramatically again. Xobni is now also fully compatible with the upcoming Windows 7.
I must admit, it is very tempting to pay the US $ 29.95 and get access to Xobni Plus.