Microsoft acquired FolderShare and made it free. If you use multiple computers, you'll surely like this. It's a painless way to keep specific folders on your machines synchronized.

In addition, you can share the directory with invited friends if you want.

It doesn't have the deadbolt-security feeling of GoToMyPC. As such, it's even easier to use, though it might make people hesitate when they see how easy and fast it is for them to access their remote files.

Categories: Power Users

I must admit, I think I'm addicted to Sony Vegas.

No, Vegas has nothing to do with gambling. Vegas has everything to do with digital video editing. I had heard great things about Adobe Premiere and the state of digital video editing, but the mid-range software is far better than I expected. This weekend I tried out Sony Vegas (formerly Vegas Video by Sonic Foundry) and have fallen in love.

It shouldn't be surprising, but it still feels weird: if you spent ~$1,500 on video equipment today, you can do ten times more than you could with $25,000 ten years ago. I run into this sort of 'leap' a lot in software development, but it's rare that it hits home just how far we've come in other technology areas.

In high school, I was the lead video editor for our school's television studio. In order to create professional-looking video, it required all sorts of clever tricks and hours upon hours of your life. Now there are no such requirements. So much work is now done in software that near-professional-quality is just a few minutes away.

I can't wait to get home and play with it some more. 

Categories: Geekery

I'm creating this post from the blog editor provided in the pre-release version of Flock, a new browser that promises to revolutionize everything.

I'm not sure if it will do so, but it looks pretty snazzy so far.

Categories: Geekery

If you're looking for something to make you say 'Wow' today, take a look at Goowy. The email interface is beautiful, and it's all highly interactive.

Even if AJAX turns out not to work wonderfully for online Office tools, this shows that Flash has a lot of promise.

Categories: Power Users, Geekery

I just might have to buy a copy of c-jump some day. I'm not sure how useful it would be in teaching people to program, though.

Categories: Software Development

At the PDC, whenever a session is too full, they have overflow rooms where they beam the presentation and a video of the speaker. This is a wonderful idea and it's very useful for people who would miss their favorite session otherwise. It's almost as good as being there since most of the sessions you sit far back and see screens of the speaker anyway.

Even cooler, though, is that some creative folks began camping the overflow rooms. The idea being that the most interesting sessions (with some 'sleepers') will overflow and with only a few footsteps you can view the best sessions.

Personally, I love it because I actually stand outside the overflow rooms and peer/listen through the doors-- bouncing from session to session. I'm much more interested in getting breadth over the cool tidbits than getting a deep pull into any one thing (probably the story of my life). When you sit in a session, you're a captive audience and you watch every second of people navigating their IDEs/demos/technical probs/etc.

Just a moment ago I watched a session on Microsoft Research's thoughts for future synchronization/concurrent (e.g. RaceTrack, Cω, etc) while I also watched an interesting panel on the future of RSS (with Microsoft, Newsgator, etc).

Now I'm waiting for overflow sessions to start for the next block. There's always the possibility that no sessions will overflow this late in the conference, but that simply means I can go and get a seat in any of the other rooms of my choice.

I spent a long night talking to the Windows Installer and WiX development teams. More on all of this later.

Categories: Software Development, Geekery, Windows Installer, Conferences

Today is the first day of PDC 2005. I'm here in Los Angeles with thousands of other developers listening to Microsoft's encouragement to develop on their new platforms.

I'm taking some detailed notes with the free copy of OneNote they gave us. Kinda handy, but I'm not totally sold yet.

Highlights from the first half of Day 1 in no particular order:

• Sidebar and Auxiliary displays
  • Sidebar is back in Vista (probably beta 2)
  • They're hyping the auxiliary displays for laptops/PCs. These are little color LCD and buttons on the outside of your laptop that lets you quickly check appointment data, email, etc, while the machine is off.
  • People can write things for sidebar/aux by visiting microsoftgadgets.com
• They offered ~2000 very cool PDA phones which I was too late to buy. (cry)
• I really want to try Office 12 which they showed-off for the first time today.
  • Really like the new menuing plans, though screen real estate is eaten.
  • They're redoing UI because 9/10 of features requested for Microsoft Office already exist, but users can't find them.
  • Outlook emails now have a very easy way to mark them as things to handle later. I like how it works/looks, though it's a small gain. Still, I want it now.
  • Outlook can replace FeedDemon/NewsGator as it has a lot of new RSS support.
• From the what-in-the-world department, they showed-off somehow using USB Memory sticks as virtual memory expansion in Vista. Very very cool especially combined with their virtual memory optimization additions ("superfetch"), but I have so many questions about this. It doesn't make sense and seems like an easy feature to cut from release.
• I love LINQ/DLINQ/XLINQ/etc. Basically, they showed-off very cool .NET language constructs for doing queries in the language itself, without a need for SQL, etc. These can be off of a database or you can actually query any collection of objects. I can't wait to play with it. At the moment, I rate this as the most interesting announcement.
• We saw some really cool Avalon apps demo'd. One you can try yourself is Max, a photo sharing application. It was designed and managed by one of their Usability leads as a test of Avalon and XAML. I must say the application looks nice, but I can't try it because my laptop runs on Vista and it won't install. (They demo'd it on Vista, though.)

That covers most of the things I've seen thus far. I've been to a couple of sessions, but neither of them seem very impressive compared to the keynotes and the overall cool atmosphere.

More soon!

Categories: Software Development, Conferences

I spent nine of the last twenty-four hours playing Cashflow 101. If you're unfamiliar with it, this is the educational game based on Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad series of financial books.

The game definitely helps put certain things in perspective, but makes some of the investment options too easy. It's not difficult to get the 'gist' of the game, yet I can see how some people might try to take some of the game interactions as literal ways to behave in the real financial world. That seems a little dangerous to me.

At any rate, I began as the janitor last night. This profession has an incredible lack of expenses and it made winning fairly easy. The biggest trouble I had was landing on investment opportunities once I was out of the Rat Race. Indeed, it feels like the game is really 'won' by getting out of the Rat Race-- the ease of life afterwards is almost laughable. I'm sure this isn't accidental, since they want to convey that as the most important step.

For today's game, we decided to put our personal financial information onto the sheets to see how well things worked. My friend Scott won quickly, mostly because he has very low living expenses and it only took a handful of wise investments to get him to financial freedom. I was able to get out of the Rat Race soon after because my income was so much higher than my expenses and debt. As such, I was able to invest in large deals from the get-go and leapt into the Fast Track with far more money than we had seen previously (nearly half a million).

All in all, it's a neat game. It definitely has me thinking very much about my own finances and how I can make the most of my investable income. We'll see if I can carry that momentum forward.

Categories: Geekery

Ever since I first started playing with WMI, I've been meaning to delve into it more. It seems like a very handy interface for manipulating and querying Windows machines.

I just ran across the WMI Code Creator tool from Microsoft. This fellow will generate example code in C#/VB.NET/VBScript for all sorts of WMI tasks. It really demonstrates how easy it is to do powerful things with WMI. For instance, it takes only a click or two to create a VBScript that gets notified whenever a process is invoked. Here's code of a VBScript it generated for me:

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\CIMV2")
Set objEvents = objWMIService.ExecNotificationQuery _
("SELECT * FROM Win32_ProcessStartTrace WHERE ProcessName = 'notepad.exe'")
 
Wscript.Echo "Waiting for events ..."
Do While(True)
   Set objReceivedEvent = objEvents.NextEvent
 
   'report an event
   Wscript.Echo "Win32_ProcessStartTrace event has occurred."
 
Loop


This snippet will display "Win32_ProcessStartTrace event has occurred." whenever notepad.exe is invoked. This is only a small example of the easy demos you can put together with their code creator tool.

Categories: Software Development, Power Users

Earlier today I was thinking of writing a utility that monitors what applications you use regularly and lists them for others to see. Part of that would involve providing short descriptions and frequency of use into a socially-linked database.

Well, part of that is already here. Take a look at MyProgs.Net. It acts as a del.icio.us for cool and clever software utilities.

Categories: Power Users