The Windows Live Search has gotten another overhaul now, and they’ve taken a little bit of a different slant on what their home page looks like as you can see from the screen shot.

Along with a new background, which I’ve yet to figure out if you can change it to something else you would like. If you hover over certain sections Microsoft kinds of leads you on the types of information you can search for and use with Live Search.

Most of the settings you’ve come to expect from customizing your search experience is available: filtering, language, number of results, etc.

One pretty neat feature of the new search results is that the video search results allow you to play the video preview by just hovering your mouse over the results instead of waiting to click on each video and let it load to start playing.

Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet has more information about what’s happening with Microsoft Live Search and their Live Mesh application. The article also quickly let me know that the search background picture changes and highlights more vertical search results related to the photo that was set as the background.

Post from: EveryJoe

Microsoft Live Search Gets Rebirth Design

How this will work is that the processor will slow down when it’s not needed to do what processors do. To me this is just obvious and doesn’t take much thought but I’m sure there were technical reasons on why this is a big deal. For me it’s like saying, “You know you’d save more gas if you didn’t keep your engine at 4000RPM’s at the stoplight.”

But with all this talk about being green, does it really impact your opinion or perception of Microsoft? Don’t get me wrong, I think they should pursue this type of stuff by default, but I also wonder what other areas of the environment they impact as an organization that might have more impact.

What do you think?

Post from: EveryJoe

Does Microsoft Being “Green” Mean Anything to You?

Okay, I must be really out of touch or this stuff just isn’t hitting my radar screen as something that’s going to immediately impact my life. Have you heard of Microsoft’s PlayTable?

As usual Mary Jo Foley gets me the scoop on this bit of information.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates also provided a PlayTable-related technology demo during his Consumer Electronics Show (CES) keynote address in 2006, when he placed a cell phone containing digital photos on a tabletop device and all the pictures “flew out of it” and could be manipulated by touch and gestures. Microsoft has shown similar surface-computing-type demos at a handful of other conferences and events.

Okay, that sounds pretty cool, but someone explain to me the “flew out of it” part. Are we talking 3-D holograms here? It appears that’s somewhat of exactly what we’re talking about as well as it coming from the same folks who work on the Xbox and Zune. I’ve got to tell you, that makes me feel better because I have been pleased with those two devices.

“PlayTable” seems to have evolved from two other technologies that Microsoft has been working on called Touchlight and PlayAnywhere.

I’m imagining Touchlight as the technology behind what we appeared to have seen in Minority Report and other similar movies where data is being manipulated in a 3-D space on screen via a glove attached to the user. I’m guessing the PlayAnywhere is more like the little holographic game of chess that Chewbacca was playing on the Millenium Falcon in Star Wars.

PlayAnywhere is, according to Microsoft’s description, a “compact interactive tabletop projection-vision system.” Microsoft’s PlayAnywhere prototype includes a projector, camera with infrared pass filter and infred LED device. Microsoft showed off a PlayAnywhere-type demo during a keynote by Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles in mid-May 2007.

But all of that brings us back to my original question, why haven’t I heard of this before? It could just be that I’m out of the loop on where these things were brought up or I was asleep at the wheel that day or just busy head down working in Microsoft Office or Visual Web Developer Express. It sounds good and all, but I don’t foresee me using any real-world application of this stuff for a number of years, and by then I’ll probably have to have my son explain it to me.

Photo Credit: Technovelgy – where science meets fiction

Post from: EveryJoe

Microsoft PlayTable Expected Soon

Microsoft has now released their own version of the ability to develop your own mash-ups and they’ve called it Microsoft Popfly, now in alpha. It was originally codenamed “Springfield”.

According to Mary Jo Foley, the biggest difference between the two, and it’s a huge one, is that Microsoft Pipes seems to be much easier to use.

Popfly, Microsoft’s newest Web mash-up development tool that the company released in alpha form on May 18, isn’t really like Yahoo Pipes. It’s more like Yahoo Pipes for mere mortals.

Sounds good to me. Now, as with anything else, I’ve just got to find the time and opportunity to play around with it myself. Looks like it could really come in handy in a couple of different areas with a variety of my website clients. As well as the ability to integrate some nice new features into some client applications I’m working on now.

Post from: EveryJoe

Microsoft Popfly

The topic of discussion is what we may have to look forward to in IE8. From the looks of it, it appears that most of the changes are going to be under the hood and focused more towards the development community.

Microsoft may be looking for developers to “opt-in” for a more standards compliant development plan using IE. More support for CSS 2.1, more open API’s for new extensions from the community.

The other topic of discussion was how long we may have to wait for the next iteration of the world’s most popular browser. Many people would like for IE to be updated through rolling updates as ongoing patches and deployment releases. Microsoft would prefer to stick to a 12-24 month release schedule as anything more frequent would make it too much of a “moving target”.

Hmmm, moving target? Seems to me that might be a better avenue to go down if people are always wanting to take a shot at you?

Post from: EveryJoe

Begin Exploring Internet Explorer 8

Mary Jo is probably most known for her work on Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley.

Mary Jo talks about her move personally here, Greetings, Microsoft Watchers!

Post from: EveryJoe

Mary Jo Foley Leaves ZDNet