Mark Johnston's Blog : Gadgets

My festive geek gift list

markjo — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:12:29 GMT

Everyone else does one of these, so I couldn’t resist throwing my gadget and geek desires onto HTML/RSS.

Flip Mino HD
This little beauty is an HD video recording device. It would be cool to start capturing more and more video moments both personally (family stuff to share with the folks back in NI) and professionally (events, demos) and upload them online.

Flip Mino HD

Gorilla Tripod
I’m going to Africa in 2009 and want to capture top notch snaps and need something to balance my SLR camera on. The gorilla pod provides that flexibility and won’t take up much of the15KG luggage weight limit for luggage on internal flights like a normal tripod.

Gorilla Tripod

Zune dock
The Zune software for me whips iTunes butt. When I work from home I have it running on my home PC in the study. What I really want is to have a Zune dock in the kitchen/bedroom hooked up to speakers and wirelessly sync content.

Zune Dock

HP MediaSmart Homeserver
My media collection is blossoming and with the NXE being my main channel for consuming digital content, I’m not so fussed on using MCE as my media interface. Having everything on a WHS gives me a scalable storage solution that can be stuck in a cupboard and serve the living room, study and personal machines. The BIG thing I’m excited about is having Live Mesh integration as discussed at PDC in October

HP MediaSmart Server

Sony Vaio TT with all the trimmings (SSD, WiMax, Bluray)
My next laptop has a couple of key requirements – smaller and lighter than my already small/light X61 Lenovo tablet, killer battery life and look good! I saw the new TT Vaio when I was going through Heathrow recently and it looks like it fits the bill.

Sony Vaio TT

HP Mini-Note

markjo — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 23:36:10 GMT

I blogged about this before here and now it has been released (in the US it seems).

In depth video from jkOntherun:

If there is anyone in HP UK marketing that wants to loan me one, I'll happily test it out! (I also know about 18,000 students who connect to our programs who might be interested) ;-)

Gadget rumour drool...

markjo — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:25:24 GMT

HP's UMPC 2133 to cost $630 when shipping in April-

If this is true then I'm so getting one of these?!?!

British Army use Xbox 360 controllers :-)

markjo — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 21:57:48 GMT

Was sitting with my future brother in-law who is in the RAF as an engineer. We were watching telly and this army jobs ad came on. He knows a few lads who work on UAVs which got us talking, and then I spotted the Xbox 360 controller they were using to drive it - sweet! Watch the video below:

ARMY VIDEO

Cool to see the men and women serving her majesty get the best toys to use for the job. I know Paul Foster in my group is into this stuff and might appreciate it :-)

Technorati Tags: armyjobs,xbox,uav

Vista Sidebar Gadget Resources from Conchango

markjo — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 21:09:00 GMT

As a nice follow on to my post yesterday about the Universal Music uMusic gadget I spotted on Rich Griffin's blog an excellent entry with a comprehensive set of resources on coding a gadget and deploying in a production environment:

Vista Sidebar Gadget Resources

Technorati tags: sidebar, conchango, gadget, richard griffin

Nice new gadget from Universal Music

markjo — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 07:18:12 GMT

If you are into music and want a minimalist way of playing your music collection on your Windows Vista PC, keep up to date with the latest music videos from major record label Universal Music then I know just the solution for you:

Download and Install the UMusic Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget

Technorati tags: windows vista, universal music, sidebar, gadget

WPF app - Yahoo Messenger looks amazing

markjo — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 12:48:52 GMT

With Vista general availability under 3 weeks away, there are more and more companies jumping on the WPF and great user experience bus. Yahoo has just announced its new Messenger applicatin which takes advantage of the .NET Fx 3 and more importantly WPF. The video demo and screenshot show what you can do:

It looks like the designers and devs over at Frog design were in on the action. Very cool. David Shadle recently visited them and stuck it up on10 - Frog Design extreme WPF/e makeover

My good friend Corey has an interesting take on it - he's never one to mince his words. Let's hope we'll so much more of this kind of stuff coming from the Live team in the next few months, maybe at Mix?

Technorati tags: wpf, yahoo, frog design

More gadget goodness from DPE Intern, Matt

markjo — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 14:47:33 GMT

Matt has been working away on gadgets for a while now, and is becoming a bit of a guru on developing gadgets. He's actually working on an internal tool for our group to help promote awareness of the various programs and teams in DPE.

Check out his latest installment on devloping Sidebar gadgets for Vista. I like the tack he took in taking an existing "out of the box" gadget like the CPU and broke it apart for people to learn from and how to build one from the ground up.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ukstudentzine/archive/2007/01/04/getting-gadgeting-the-usefulness-and-creation-of-windows-vista-sidebar-gadgets.aspx

The Panel - Creating front end experiences

markjo — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 13:04:00 GMT

The Panel is a new site/community/buzz thing all about stuff that you look at on Windows Vista and the web. It is going to be a 'place' for Microsoft to showcase interesting applications, websites, gadgets that take advantage of all the great new stuff we have in our OS and developer platform:

- Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
- Windows Live Services
- Sidebar Gadgets
- .NET Framework 3.0

And it will show you how it was done so that you can benefit from the knowledge and best of all for us is that you can develop using these technologies in your applications!

For starters, check out UniveRSS which uses the RSS store and then provides a very intuitive and interesting way of viewing your feeds using 3D in WPF. It also deploys via OneClick which makes things a whole lot easier to use.

Now check out this for a URL: https://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/thepanel/default.aspx - why can't we have shorter URLs!!! :-(

Now running Vista on all my work machines - including shiny Macbook Pro

markjo — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 21:37:59 GMT

Since RC1 has been released and reading around internally and externally about how stable the OS it was time to upgrade the shiny machine and the Tablet PC to Vista. And all I have to say, is that "Vista has arrived" for me :-)

I have now got two stable and one very fast machine running as my email/business box and a developer/presentation machine. There is one thing I just love (and you may start to notice my attraction to shiny electronic wizardry) about the Macbook and my BIG LCD monitor at home and that is the widescreen aspect. Having this aspect gives me that little extra room to have more stuff on the screen, like all my Sidebar gadgets constantly running and in view.

Go get Vista and then go stick some gadgets up there

More Gadget Goodness

markjo — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 12:48:16 GMT

The Sidebar gadget team are blogging - hopefully they will have much more insightful stuff than my hacking :)

http://blogs.msdn.com/sidebar/default.aspx

tags: vista, sidebar, gadgets