Although Microsoft is no stranger to banner ads, they appear to have taken quite the bold step to start building publicity for the Internet Explorer 9 beta (emphasis on the beta) launch event next week dubbed “Beauty of the web” as I spotted this ad on TechCrunch today.
The ad begins with a couple of quotes about Internet Explorer 9 from the press and partners (I saw a few variations) and ends with “Beautiful is feeling the love”, “get ready for a more beautiful web” and “9.15.10″ – the date of the launch.
It’s also interesting to note some resemblance of the style and colors of all the IE9 marketing material up until now with the trademark purple and swoosh of Visual Studio 2010 and the aesthetics of Zune.
Even though a screenshot of what might be the IE9 UI has leaked (although I have my doubts it is the final look and feel), the fact that the beta launch event is so elaborate makes me wonder if Microsoft has a few tricks up its sleeve.
Disclosure: I will be attending the San Francisco IE9 beta launch event as a guest of Microsoft.
The third and finale concept video in the Microsoft XUI series, “Play”, has now been officially published online by Invivia, the makers of the video. In contrast to the previous “Home” and “Work” videos released over a year ago, it is by far the most bizarre and incoherent of them all.
Although August de los Reyes screened this during his NUI session at TechEd Australia 2010 last week, I thought by looking at it a second time in full fidelity I would have a better understanding of what the hell is going on. That’s not the case.
Fortunately there is an official description that gives some insight into its intended effect.
The XUI series is a poetic exploration of how technology might invisibly integrate into our daily lives.
…
XUI Play, the third video, is a hyper-real portrayal of a dinner party where differing points-of-view create a complex array of conflicting interactions. The physical constraints of dining at a table can hold together conflicting opinions and desires inside of a singular activity. We are using this metaphor of a dinner party as an analog for collaborative computing. This video also investigates the cause and effect of small gestural interactions on an urban scale via the digital cloud. Here, analog devices behave in extraordinary ways with the hidden aid of technology.
Bringing multi-touch technology to the desktop mice might seem trivial but Microsoft Research doesn’t just want to stop at a couple gestures. A group of researchers there have been thinking of new ways to redefine the dated but familiar traditional mice interaction model with new multi-touch-enabled ones.
Using the prototype hardware they built, they designed four interaction models around an interesting idea that not only would the cursor be displayed on screen but also multi-touch visualizers that showed the fingers activity on the sensor, including if they were “activated” and how they are positioned. This also allowed the “hand” position of the cursor to be separated from the “finger” interaction controls in a graphical user interface.
Unfortunately their experiments with a dozen participants concluded all of their proposed models were slower than using a multi-touch screen or a three-buttoned mouse, but their findings establishes some groundwork for future research and development in the area.
During my last day at TechEd Australia 2010, I spotted this interesting image flashed briefly on one of the promotional video loops for Windows Phone 7 at the Microsoft booth. On closer inspection, it appears to be a screenshot of the upcoming MyPhone portal on Windows Live for Windows Phone 7.
Although it’s fairly hard to see exactly what type of features are offered by the site, it’s obvious the top blue bar is the Windows Live website header and you’ll be at least able to organize your contacts and photos, much like you can do today with MyPhone for Windows Mobile 6.5 but presented elegantly in the Metro style rather than a generic tabular format.
For a platform which promotes cloud services so heavily, it’s finally good to see light of its own cloud management service. As elegant and lightweight as the Zune software is, not being tied to a computer to manage their phone will be a huge plus over its competitors.
At TechEd Australia this week, Microsoft’s Peter Torr suggested that the Windows Phone team will ship more sample code after the final release of the Windows Phone 7 SDK to close the last few inches between first-party and third-party applications.
Unlike the panoramic and pivot controls which are coming to complete the core SDK, an example of the extra code Microsoft will be publishing is the tilt effect. Today, this effect are exclusive to Microsoft’s own Start tiles and application controls which all have a subtle but delightful distortion when pressed, as if they were floating in 3D space.
Some third parties have since tried to emulate the effect with their own implementation with results that are similar but not quite the same – an issue that would have only caused frustration over time considering the emphasis on consistency in the platform. More recently, Peter has published some code on his blog that third parties can easily utilize to achieve a consistent results (using the official algorithms) in their own applications.
Code samples like the tilt plus others including but not limited to the “swoosh” animation (ex. in the mail app) will be making their way to MSDN to form the official documentation for third party developers to implement, if they wish.
In the same spirit of helping developers, it’s also highly likely Microsoft will be publishing the complete source code for some of their out-of-box applications (ex. Weather, Stocks, Shopping List) so that third parties can understand how applications are “intended” to be built. Very helpful indeed.
During August de los Reyes‘ presentation on natural user interfaces at TechEd Australia 2010 today, he showed off a really interesting video produced internally at Microsoft for the purpose of demonstration a natural user interface prototype with nothing but paper sketches and stop-motion animation.
August who references Microsoft Research’s Bill Buxton, the fidelity of prototypes should reflect the stage of refinement, indicates that paper sketches and rough cuts not only reduces the effort required to produce the prototype but also is consistent with how early the idea is.
Of note in the prototypes are some interesting ideas, for example, using a chain of tags to present an list of options that can be expanded and collapsed easily, integrating help and “how to” into the experience instead of a separate view, using a rotary wheel for context-sensitive options and full-hand gestures instead of finger-based gestures.
