Christmas 2010

This Christmas I got an Apple TV it is perfect for me as most of my media is in iTunes and it is simple to send to the TV and with the airflick application. I can send any thing thought when I want to watch a movie, I find I have to connect the two by Ethernet to stream but it is better then using hdmi. It is also great that when i am listening to a podcast i can just walk in turn on the TV and the podcast jump to the TV in a second. The only annoying thing is that when i use the remote my iPod in the dock starts to play music, my mac launches front row and starts to play videos and the apple TV does what i wanted. Over all though it is great if you use iTunes or have an iPod, iPhone or iPad, it is well worth the money

application sync

lately many people have been talking about chrome OS and what it can do but you can already do all of the cool things on mac OS x.
First is you want a light, thin and fast computer you can get the 11 inch mac book air for 999 EUROS https://www.amazon.co.uk/MacBook-Notebook-Storage-GeForce-Graphics/dp/B00486U20K/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1292600492&sr=8-7.Now I'm not saying this is cheap, i cant even afford one and if the chrome OS netbooks can me as less the 200 euros then it looks really good.

but just install chrome and you have a fast booting machine with instant on, bookmark preference and app sync.

know I'm not saying that web apps are for everyone and they are not perfect at this time as they don't have offline modes. But if you install dropbox on to the macbook and put an application folder in to it and move all of your applications there they will now be synced across all of your mac computers with dropbox. it is not perfect as the computer setting are not synced but it is good work around. as well once the mac app store in up and running it is believed that it will sync your applications across all of your mac computers now all apple has to do is create away to sync your settings across computer and they will have the best secondary computer(netbook, we know it is not one)

but if

windows phone 7

i got the chance to take a windows phone 7 phone home for a night yesterday.

First the name windows 7 phone would be better. but beside that at first glance the htc hd7 is a great phone. the ui was easy to get in to and looked great on the big screen. set up was a breeze and real quick. from there it was a simple jump to the market place, it still needs some apps like eirtext pro and skype but a good start. the game center was good and works well but you must down load another app to edit your avatar and profile. the built in htc app where really bad and did not work with the windows phone 7 (wp7) ui, i suggest you uninstall all but the hub and photo enhancer app and get the microsoft versions from the market place. wp7 was really good and i would love to get one and do some development. The hardware was really well built and fast, the camera was real good but i was a little annoyed that the only way to wake it was to click the really small power button at the top (i would prefer a physical start button). i did not miss thing like cut and paste and 3rd party background processing. i'm looking forward to see how the platform developes and changes and am hopeful for it (i prefer it to android for normal people and has an amazing interface)

tuesday at microsoft

Yesterday while i worked at microsoft i had a chance to try out kinect and found it really fun and a real work out. I think it is a really cool way to controle your console and a game but i dont think i will buy it untill they have the hybrid game of Controller with kinect where you play something like halo and instead of ducking by moving a joystick you might actually duck. we also had a chance to look a surface which was really cool and interesting and would love if someone would like to give me on for a try as it would be an amazing coffee table but untill they can make it a lot cheaper i dont think i will be getting one. we also saw some of the test windows phone 7 phone (not the best naming) and found the ui very intuitive and easy but i did not like it on the small screen i prefer it on a 4 inch screen. I also learnt that in the european offices developers manly check that the buttons work in different languages and still readable. i saw that is makeing Skripts to go through the program and take screen shots.

work experienvce at microsoft

This week i have been doing my work experience at microsoft. Yesterday i was working with a platform evangelist named craig o'conner he helped show how easy it was to develop for the windows phone 7. and it was i found it an amazingly easy platform. i also had a chance to try out a Phone running windows phone 7 and found it fast and intuitive, i think it is a real competion to android i found it easier to use. i aslo got to see the faciliteis such as the games room or the canteen. i think it would be really enjoyabul to work in microsoft.