Shining Arcanine

scobleizer wrote:

3) Improve the Tablet and/or portable features. Why does it take five seconds or longer to start up off of sleep mode? Can you make boot times faster? Can you make the wireless features even nicer? Can you make battery life longer?

scobleizer said:

4) Can you improve the experience? Heck, I was at the San Francisco Apple Store today and overheard someone say "this [Macintosh OSX] looks so much cooler than Windows."

scobleizer said:

8) Bittorrent is changing how many of us can share files with others. I'd like to do that kind of thing with my friends safely and legally, especially since my camcorder's videos are too big to email or put up on most servers now.

scobleizer wrote:

If we did most of the above, would that be interesting to you?

scobleizer wrote:

If not, what would get you interested?

LarryOsterman wrote:

Manip2 wrote: I really want to know how you can ship a file-system after the fact. Really, can you imagine if NTFS had been shipped in Windows 2000 SP2.

First off: NT's had a robust IFS model since NT 3.1.  It was designed into the original product.  So there's no technical issue with shipping a filesystem after the product.  I believe that NT 3.1 filesystems still run on XP (they might not, don't quote me on this one).

Secondly: WinFS IS NOT A FILESYSTEM!!!  It's a storage system for file metadata.  The WINFS store is a file in a directory on an NTFS partition.  It's NOT a filesystem in its own right.  You don't put files in WinFS, you put file metadata in WinFS.

There's a BIG difference.

bonj wrote:

You can take the photo software I get with my MSN Premium 9 subscription (MS Picture It! Express 9 and MS Picture It! Library 9), give me the Media Browser.

Please!

bonj

w0rd-driven wrote:

I have no proof of what language it was in though C# makes a lot of sense. DirectX was definitely used which is apparent by the visual effects. Avalon has this power but evidence doesn't suggest this was done in Longhorn though the technology really does "fit" in the Longhorn space.

It was said that they developed it with Avalon in mind so I would think that it could ported to Avalon. And if in its current implementation it can't, there is always another way of coding things to accomplish the same task. ^_^

w0rd-driven wrote:

The things I consider basic and a necessity are as follows:
1) Categorization. This is a no-brainer and isn't present in XP to my knowledge in My Pictures"

There is a category view in Windows XP but it isn't this advanced. Right click>Arrange Icons By>Show in Groups

ericch1 wrote:

Shining Arcanine wrote: The entire reason why you're hovering over it is because you want a closer look at it, not because you're going through one photo at a time. I think that the automatic enlargement is an excellent feature. For people that don't, Microsoft could have an option that controls how big the photo gets and perhaps an option to turn it off.

Yes I agree the reason why you're hovering over a photo is because you want a closer look, but do you ever want to just look at a single picture? Typically, even in this app, pictures are grouped together because they are related somehow. It could be that they are related by date, or because they are pictures of the same trip. How do you know if you want a closer look at the next picture if you don't even know what the next one is?

Look at the current My Pictures implementation in XP, nothing is ever obscured. Look at the Filmstrip view of the pictures, the design puts the larger image above the smaller one, making sure the user can easily determine whether they want a larger view of the next one. Granted the current "My Pictures" implementation is not as "cool" as this one, it does get the job done simply and easily. If you have ever seen a non-techie use a computer, that's ALL they care about. They don't care about the flashy graphics or the smooth transitions, they only care that they can look at their pictures simply and quickly. Do you want to try to explain to your grandfather how the pictures map to surfaces of cubes that get translated and rotated at a certain angle then finally sheared to provide this perspective view?

I like this implementation. I like the fancy transitions and the nice 3d effects. I hope the scripting engine stays so I can write scripts to provide my own fancy layouts and transitions. But then I'm a developer like most people on this site. However, I have met too many non-tech people out there to know that they just don't care about all the fany features. They want something simple, quick, and in the end gets the job done. Anything beyond these goals just make the job more difficult and detracts from the overall experience.

bdelahunty wrote:

Wow. Now this is cool. Anybody have any idea when this app will be available?

scobleizer wrote:

I'm not saying that. Just that I don't know about the product plan for this either way (and, if I did, I don't want to set expectations that might not be met in the future -- remember 1994? That's when Bill Gates told me that VB4 would ship on the Macintosh. It never did. Ever since then I've learned not to set expectations about what might, or might not, ship in the future).

That said, I will confirm that 1+1 does appear to equal 2. Hint, hint. Wink, wink.

rhm wrote:

I like the way he answered the "what langauge did you use to develop this?" with "DirectX". That's a real manager's answer

scobleizer wrote:

This is a research project. The researchers come up with ideas. This isn't a finished product ready to go to market. They didn't know when the product teams would be ready to go to market, sorry.

I want it in the worst way too.

ericch1 wrote:

This app is very cool, but I am skeptical about how usable it is. I realize this is just a research app, but here's my opinions on its usability.

ericch1 said:

For example, when you hover over a photo, the photo highlights and gets bigger... but how about the photos next to it? The single huge picture obscures all the pictures around it! Typically when I look at a single picture, I also want to look at its surrounding pictures. Obscuring the surrounding pictures make it difficult for me to determine whether I care about the next picture to highlight it too or just to skip it. The current implementation would force me to highlight the next picture just to determine whether I care about it or not.

ericch1 wrote:

The transitions are very cool, nice work! However, I also hope there is a way to disable transitions. If I want to do something quick, transitions only make the process longer and more tedious.

ericch1 wrote:

Overall I think the app is cool and has potential. However more UI studies would make it even better imo. I have similar complaints about Picasa too, so it's not that I don't like this app, I just like better designed apps.