The latest crop of automotive Garmin GPS devices integrate Microsoft's MSN Direct service which transmits data like traffic, weather, movie times, gas prices, news...etc. over FM waves. I've been using it around Seattle and it's pretty cool - for example with the traffic integration it warns me of heavy traffic ahead or an accident on the route I'm taking and asks whether I want to reroute. I've also used the gas prices feature and surprisingly the weather forecast. MSN Direct integration is only available on the higher end models from Garmin and you pay separately for the MSN Direct service.
However I feel the business model could use some tweaking as you have to pay for a more expensive hardware model to use more of the MSN Direct features even though you pay a separate fee to Microsoft for the MSN service that includes all the features. For example, Live Maps (http://maps.live.com) allows you to send a location to your GPS ("Send to GPS") but my MSN Direct enabled Nuvi 680 doesn't support this feature, labeled "Web Favorites" on Garmin's web site. I would have to buy the 780 (USD$857.13) or 880 (USD$1071.41) model to get this one feature which doesn't make sense. If I pay for a service then I expect the hardware to support it fully otherwise I am not getting all of what I paid for. I would like an update to be released for the 680 similar to how the Zune team updated the V1 Zunes with the new firmware when the V2 Zunes were released - that would make me a happy customer and Garmin fan.
Apart from that, the 680 works well and the voice navigation is well done, pronouncing street names and everything. I have found a couple of funny bugs though e.g. if you set the voice to an Australian persona, it will pronouce Washington State highways such as SR-520 as "Western Australia five hundred twenty" presumably because it sees the highway (520) in the state of Washington (WA) which for all you Australian readers will recognize as the same state abreviation for Western Australia. The local pronunciation is "five-twenty" or "state route five-twenty". Curiously other personas like the American and British voices don't have this problem which says to me that the selection of persona is also affecting local name pronunciation which it shouldn't. Similar with I-405, local pronunciation is i-four-oh-five but the Australian persona says i-four-hundred-and-five.
Today we launched Office Accounting 2008 for the US and UK markets. We are also releasing a US Spanish version. Similar to Office Accounting 2007, Office Accounting 2008 includes the free Express versions of the product.
As I blogged about previously, unlike most other products it isn't a matter of just localizing the text and releasing it in another country, the product has to be customized to a particular country's tax laws and accounting practices so it takes time to release a version for another country. Users outside of the US or UK may of course download the free Express version or a trial Professional version for a test drive.
Here are the press releases:
http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2007/nov07/11-14OANewEditionsPR.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2007/nov07/11-14officeaccounting.mspx
And here are the links to the product:
US English: http://www.ideawins.com
US Spanish: http://www.ideawins.com/espanol
UK: http://www.msofficeaccounting.co.uk
To download Express or a Pro trial navigate to the Product Overview section in the respective site.
I see questions about whether Office Accounting 2007 will be released outside the US on a daily basis (especially from my fellow countrymen in Australia, and from folks in Canada and the UK) so hopefully this will help set things straight.
Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 is currently available within the USA only. At this stage, no plans exist for international availability of the product, with the exception of the UK. In May 2006, Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 (UK version) entered Beta testing in the UK with a targeted set of customers and partners. Once Beta testing is completed and the results have been fully reviewed, further updates will become available on the UK product launch. We anticipate having these updates in the first half of calendar year 2007.
Unlike most other products it isn't a matter of just localizing the text and releasing it in another country, the product has to be customized to a particular country's tax laws and accounting practices or we could find ourselves in some legal hot water in that country. Having said that, you are of course free to download the US English version and try it out.
For the last three years I have been working on the Office Accounting team; specifically on the user interface. We shipped Office Small Business Accounting 2006 over a year ago and just shipped its successor: Office Accounting 2007 which now comes in Express and Professional SKUs. The Express version is free and I think people will be surprised how much value it contains. If you have a small business or you're thinking about starting one in the US, then download it now from http://ideawins.com. Check out the FAQ at http://ideawins.com/faq.html.
If your business has a need for more advanced features like sales orders, purchase orders, jobs, classes, inventory items, kits, 1099 reports and multicurrency then the Professional version is the correct product. Express can be upgraded to Pro by just entering a new product key which will unlock the Professional features. Trial Professional keys may be obtained by clicking on one of the links in the product like on the "Enter Key" page of the upgrade wizard.
If you are a SBA 2006 user then you will want to upgrade to the Professional version when it is released to retail early next year because upgrading to Express will hide some features you may already be using.
We like to think that Office Accounting can help you turn your ideas into businesses so keep an eye on the http://ideawins.com site because the best idea will win... ;)
It's been a long while since I blogged so it's about time I pumped some life back into this thing. I was loading up the latest build of Vista on one of my machines recently and noticed that the Snipping Tool is now part of Vista. The OS version is feature-reduced compared to the original two versions for the Tablet PC built by myself and Shawn Van Ness but nonetheless it is there which was a nice surprise.
Now that SP2 has been released, you can finally download the Tablet PC SDK v1.7.
I thought this might be useful to people running XP or later. Every so often I need to know what process has locked a DLL because a delete or similar operation failed. In such cases I always turn to tasklist.exe, the command line version of the Windows Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc). It's not well known but it can be incredibly handy, especially the module switch. Just type: tasklist /m thelocked.dll and it will return all processes that have loaded that DLL!
With Sasser and friends out there, it seems like a chicken and egg scenario when trying to download patches for a vulnerable new system, if you're unlucky as Loren Heiny explains you'll be infected before you can even download and install the updates. A similar question was asked on an internal Microsoft forum a while back and so here's how to bring a new system online and patch it without being exposed:
- Disconnect machine from network
- Install the new system (if not installed)
- Enable firewall and do not allow inbound exceptions
- Connect machine to network
- Download and install required service packs and updates
- Download and install antivirus software
- Join machine to domain (if applicable)
As some of you may know I created the Snipping Tool power toy for the Tablet PC and an update is due to be released some time this summer (northern hemisphere).
Being so close to the release of XP SP2 and thus the free update to the Tablet operating system, I would like to add support for some new features of the OS and drop support for any pre-SP2 machines because I can't see anyone not upgrading; ....so is anyone not going to update their tablet to the 2005 Edition when SP2 is released?
If you develop for Windows XP and want to take advantage of Tablet PC specific features when your application is run on a tablet, there's a simple way to find out. Just call the Win32 API GetSystemMetrics with the magic number 86:
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
// System metric constant for Windows XP Tablet PC Edition
private const int SM_TABLETPC = 86;
public static bool IsTabletPC()
{
return (GetSystemMetrics(SM_TABLETPC) != 0);
}
DllImport("user32.dll")]
private static extern int GetSystemMetrics(int nIndex);
If you develop applications for Windows XP, you should be interested in developing for the Tablet PC since any application that runs on Windows XP Professional will run on a tablet.
With the release of the 2005 Edition of the Tablet PC OS and the associated 1.7 SDK coinciding with XP SP2, now is a great time to get a free introduction to developing for the Tablet PC and check out the cool new features coming. Go to http://www.tabletpctraining.com/microsoft/ for dates and cities. I will be teaching in Philadelphia on May 18 and Cleveland on June 8.
I just posted an article on how to combine Ink and GDI+ to create a fill effect for strokes.
http://weblogs.asp.net/winclient/articles/130165.aspx
I thought I'd give this blog thing a try.
I think I'll primarily talk about developing rich client software for Windows, concentrating on managed WinForms with a special focus on Tablet PC development. For the Tablet PC: I wrote the Microsoft Snipping Tool, Leszynski Tablet PC JumpStart for Visual Studio 2002, Leszynski inTegrate™ Tablet PC Extensions for Visual Studio 2003 and a bunch of custom controls including the InkToolBar control.
So... Hello Blogging World.
