Max

Max is a app that demonstrates WPF, as in Windows Presentation Foundation, now part of .Net 3.0. Originally (at least when I saw Max at PDC '05) Max was orientated at photo sharing and viewing, with some neat gallery style presentation modes (or Mantles). Now the Max team, have rolled out a version that supports news reading (RSS and Atom feeds) using a very nice dynamic document layout in the content rendering panes.

Here's a quick look at the m a n n i n g t r e e atom feed as rendered in Max...

max Hosted on Zooomr

and, while we're about it, here's some recent c r o s s o a k piccy's as displayed in the Max Mantle view.

max.mantle Hosted on Zooomr

 

You can download max from microsoft.com/max

 

Technorati tags: microsoft, max, news, reading, wpf, photo

Tao of backup

The tao of backup. Wonderful. Via Guy Kawasaki.

News

The news is out.

If you're quick you can still see my piccy on the company photo page. In case you're slow, here's a copy for posterity

ggphotos Hosted on Zooomr

 

Martin has taken over as CTO - which is great news for Global. As for me, I'm off to Microsoft, so I'll need to update the context blurb in the side panel...

 

Oh, and how odd that it should come out the same day as the news from James?

Another Backup Tale

Guy Kawasaki:

The first thing I’m going to do is change my backup strategy....

 

Technorati tags: backup, archive

News Reading

BBCRiver is a site that provides BBC news content optimised for mobile devices. Now while the camera on the T-Mobile SDA is nowhere near as good as on my old SonyEricsson K750, reading BBCRiver on the SDA is a real joy.

You win some, and you loose some.

Hola Flickr Geotagging, not.

So, finally flickr has added geotagging capabilities. I'm not really complaining about the lack of the feature - when I signed up for a pro account I did so because of the then feature set, not because of expectations or promises of stuff to come. It's more that the geobloggers site disappeared shortly after Dan got hired to flickr and, well, a flickr replacement has been a while coming. Some might say that potential competition from zooomr had a part in pushing things along, other's might say that these things just take time. I just say that there's been a certain amount of anticipation...

Anyway, Flickr now supports geotagging via the Flash-based organiser tool, and a very nice geotagging UI, and a very nice use of Flash, it is too. In fact I was just about to say how nice the UI was compared with Zooomr's similar feature when I realised how desolate the mapping is for bits of the UK. It might just be than Yahoo's mapping used in Flickr just had a bad day with Aylsham, and that this example is not indicative of the level of detail elsewhere. I would check, but Flickr is currently down for a massage (cue reminder to self: another advantage of living on GMT is that Flickr downtime is usually when I'm sparko).

Anyway, here's what I mean about Aylsham in Flickr's geotagging UI...

flickrgeotakuk Hosted on Zooomr

 

...there's not a lot there is there? And when I zoomed in further, I got the grey screen of, well, I don't know really. I guess with a GSOH they could have used 'Here be monsters'.

If you want to see what Zooomr's Google Maps-based detail is like, take a looksee at how the screen shot is geotagged on Zooomr.

And for completeness, here's Aylsham in live.local.com...

 

So I'm not altogether sure about Flickr's geotagging. First impression: nice feature, shame about the map set. Next steps, look some more at non-North American tags.

Footnote: I've just tried maps.yahoo.com and that only has US and Canada; maps.yahoo.co.uk redirects to maps.yahoo.net and, after jumping through Java applet hoops, throws up a more detailed map of Aylsham than Flickr has. Maybe Yahoo has different mapping data sets? I'm sure a search engine could tell me if I had the inclination to look.

Aside: I've just had an email from British Airways that redirects to a page promoting Google Earth.

Footnote: the comments on Mike's techcrunch post pretty much sum up the situation for non-North Americans.

Question: does this mean that Flickr should quit with the non-English greetings on the home page?

 

Technorati tags: flickr, zooomr, geotag, geotagging, yahoo, maps

How safe is your archive...

BBC World Service Radio have a weekly program about tech, it's called digital planet (and before that On Digital), and covers both the world of tech and, more interestingly, the impact of tech on people and their day to day lives. As you might expect from a World Service programme, it's very good at covering stuff outside the major western economies. Anyway, here's the link, it's recommended.

Last weeks podcast had an interesting aside. The programme was celebrating an anniversary and played a clip from the first On Digital broadcast, except they played a tape...

...the CD-R they had that archived the original wouldn't play, so they had to use the tape backup.

The archive was only 5 years old. How confident are you in your archive?

 

Technorati tags: archive, archiving, backup, BBC,