Posts Tagged Microsoft
Photosynth gone live
Posted by Thomas in Computer Interfaces on August 25th, 2008
A few months ago I had blogged about PhotoSynth, an application whose most salient features is that has the ability to reconstruct spatial relations from a set of pictures. In essence it’s photo stitching software but smarter. At the time the product was buried somewhere in the Miscrosoft Labs. That’s no longer the case. PhotoSynth has finally graduated and is now available to the public at large.
As could be expected of such an intriguing piece of software it had a bit of a rocky launch. The public’s enthusiasm overwhelmed the servers and Microsoft had to shut down part of the service to add some more capacity.
At any rate. I’m sure I’ll be testing it out, as soon as they release a Mac version.
Zooming page navigation
Posted by Thomas in Computer Interfaces on September 25th, 2007
Let’s be honest. I’m not the biggest of fans of Microsoft. Their commercial software is bloated, slow and suffers from severe featuritis.
That being said, not everything they do is bad. Their Labs work has, on occasion, peaked my interest. Unfortunately most of what I like is not likely to turn into a commercially viable (and affordable) product for some time.
A while ago I came across a demo of PhotoSynth an offshoot of research by Noah Snavely (UW), Steve Seitz (UW), and Richard Szeliski (Microsoft Research). The main commercial appeal of the application is its ability to reconstruct spatial relations from a set of pictures. What peaked my interest however was its ability to infinitely zoom in, something it inherited from SeaDragon. This aspect is beautifully demonstrated in the demo.
The ability to navigate information by visually zooming in and out of it has always had a certain appeal to me. Two aspects of this are particularly inviting: loose understanding of hierarchy; visual representation of the information being accessed. Personally I’ve always had issues with constrained navigation.
Text based, hierarchical menus provide little insight as to what is actually “beyond” what’s being displayed. These types of navigation schemes emphasize “reading” and “understanding” rather than “context” and “impression”. Both schemes have their applications and will work better under certain circumstances. I won’t even pretend to know which applies best where. What I have noticed is that web design sites (amongst others) tend stand out by their innovative navigation schemes.
One of the sites with a novel navigation schema is schematic.com. Their navigation scheme applies some of the concepts I found so appealing in PhotoSynth while retaining hierarchical understanding. Zooming in and out of individual pages, while at the same time still retaining the visual impression of all the pages in the site was a wonderful user experience.
Hopefully there will be more such sites in the future.
M$ 0 - One man company 1
Posted by Thomas in Reflexive blurbs on November 14th, 2003
Oh this is just too hilarious not to make a note of.
In August, Eolas (a one man company) won a $US521 million ($736 million) judgment against Microsoft for allegedly infringing US patent ‘906 covering technology that allows interactive applications - plug-ins and applets - to be embedded in web pages.
Now if we are to believe this is ruling is going to be upheld through the various appeals Ms. will no doubtedly throw at this, users all over the web may have to recode some of their web pages. To put it plainly, ActiveX controls that reference external data are affected by the patent and should therefore be recoded to “avoid” the patent issue.
Meanwhile Microsoft has announced changes to IE that will “eliminate the impact of the ruling”. There is also a “work-around” to avoid the issue which would have a web developer dynamically writing the object tags using JavaScript Document.Write statements.
Needless to say quite a few people have their shorts in a tangle over this one. Even the W3C has stepped up to the plate and asked the US Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property to review the decision. Lets wait and see…
For more information on this try a Google Search on U.S. Patent 5,838,906.
M$ Office Tetris
Posted by Thomas in Reflexive blurbs on August 7th, 2003
Following a funny but ill advisable article from Kuro5hin I stumbled across a link on how to play Tetris with M$ Excel. Yeah you read that right, Tetris in Excel. And it’s not an easter egg either. Someone actually went through the trouble of coding a game into a spreadsheet app!
Unfortunately, being at the office, in a controlled environment I wouldn’t dream of downloading the game. Perhaps I’ll DL it tonight from home. What am I saying, I’ll be playing Ultima, who needs Tetris!