Trade Me Gadget Launched

nparker — Mon, 07 May 2007 04:31:00 GMT

If you are a keen Trade Me seller and a Windows Vista user take a trip over to Rowan's blog to get the inside word.

Paul Reynolds and the Gadget Show

nparker — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 07:09:00 GMT

I flew back into NZ on Tuesday morning suffering badly from food poisoning, it hit me just after I lay down to sleep on the flight home. I don't know where I got it from but it really hit me for 6 I am only just now recovering! I chose to stay home Tuesday and did not attend an "Adobe Tricks of the Trade Workshop" that I was planning to go to in Auckland that morning.

My wife was watching breakfast and she saw a piece come up on gadgets so she swiftly hit record on the remote so that I could watch it later in the day.

I have had many conversations with Paul Reynolds and I find him a very insightful and engaing person. In December last year I organised a meeting with him where I introduced him to some key Microsoft guys from the US. Paul left his mark on them with his profound knowledge of folksonomies and his ambitious project "The Fitch" which is a web based, library desk-top tool which gives libraians a chance to take the deep seeded knowledge of community and reference infomation that exists mostly in their heads and capture it in an electronic forum that can be shared broadly to gain a snapshot of a community consciousness outside of the media or on blogs that catch that sort of localised information today (phew... is that close Paul?).

In the video it is funny to hear the widget v gadget (mac fanboy) comment... "The Mac guys will tell you that we've had our version of this for sometime...", Paul Henry's stereotypical response "Mac have everything first and PC make money out of it!"

For those of you not up with the play...

This battle started back in 1981 with Desk Ornaments with the original Macintosh

Longhorn build 3683 (build date of September 23, 2002) was leaked on October 20, 2002, and was the first Longhorn build leaked to the Internet.

A new "Sidebar" was also present, which contained many of the gadgets that would much later be seen in Windows Sidebar, such as an analog clock, slide show, and search capability.

Konfabulator came on the scene February 10, 2003.

There was an argument between apple and konfabulator about who innovated first.

Then Apple accused Microsoft of copying them in their advertising smear campaign of 2005. As an aside it is great to see this week that the Mac ads have finally made it to TV in NZ... this must have been provoked by all those new Vista PC sales in the market ;)

I have enjoyed working with the TVNZ, NZ Herald, Shift and ASB gadget developers and yes Paul, Trade Me is thinking about writing one as well. As a side note - Rowan (Trade Me) commented on the Anderson Switch and I think that idea comes into play here as well.

Not wanting to come of sounding too arrogant I like this (unprovoked) quote from Maitland in an article due out in the National Business Review this month.... "What Apple did for postcasting and YouTube did for online video, Vista will do for Gadgets times 1000."

I'm not sure this is exactly true and we do have a way to go with tooling support but the best part is that you can pull down anyones gadget just like a webpage and change the .gadget extension to .zip and see how it was written with html css and jscript.

If you are running Vista check out http://gallery.live.com if you are not check out a screen cast I did for the launch here. For an up to date list of some of the NZ gadgets being created check out http://www.microsoft.co.nz/gadgets.

P.S. Just reading Paul's blog post on Foo... caught this comment "First, software; lots of open source conversations, some of which didn't so much pass me by, as occur in a different time/space continuum."

Like myself Paul's company develops on Windows and .NET and he was one of the few running Vista at Foo.

I missed a lot of the follow on from foo as I was in Seattle last week but I did catch this piece of the Chris DiBona roadshow. All I can say is thanks for teaching me warewolf Chris :)

But just so we don't close one down here is another asb business video for you all ;)

GA Vista Launch!

nparker — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 12:52:00 GMT

Wow... what a ride!

Darryl and I have been humming and we got there with some kick ass sidebar gadgets for NZ!

Thanks to everyone involved.

If you have Vista try them for yourself if not check back soon and I'll post a video that I have put together.

ENJOY

Coverage so far today...

Peter Griffen - Breakfast

Brent Colbert, Mauricio Freitas - 3 News

Brett Roberts, Mark Bishop, Rob O'Neill - Close Up

And Tomorrow...

Keep your eyes on Campbell Live, they cover the New York Launch, have an exclusive look at the digital home in Wellington and interview my friends at Right Hemisphere on the exiting new Vista versions of their products.

Right Now I'm off to midnight madness...

Nigel Parker's Outside Line : gadgets

Trade Me Gadget Launched

Paul Reynolds and the Gadget Show

GA Vista Launch!