Random Rants & Raves

Well, the new search engine from Microsoft is now “live” – ummm, no I mean “bing” - “bing” is now “live”, ugh. “bing” is the new “live” and is “live”.

Ok, ok, what I mean is that www.bing.com is the successor to the www.live.com and is now active. Browsing to Live redirects to Bing and so do the Internet searches from Internet Explorer and Windows. Bing has a ton of new features that you can find out more about.

The only problem is that this is currently available only if your settings are for United States – English. If not, you see a bunch of different things. For instance, take a look at the screens below.

 
This is the Bing home page with “India” settings. As you can see, the auto suggest works quite well.

 
This is the Bing home page with US settings. Not just do you get an additional menu on the left, you also get hot spots on the image background with interesting information and ability to browse backgrounds!

 
A search result with India settings shows the information as well as a “News” link on the left.

 
The same search with US settings – notice the whole new set of filters on the left – Map, Hotel, Airport, etc. Clicking on any filters results to what you need as below:

 
The filtered search – quickly get where you want to go!

So if you want all the features of Bing, you need to set it to the US – English setting by clicking the language on the top of the screen and selecting it. Hopefully, the other settings will also get these features soon.

Live mesh is a great service that lets you sync devices or store it online from where you can access them from anywhere. It’s currently available as a tech preview and if you’re signed up you can sync multiple devices across.

Finally, the team has released Live Mesh for mobiles as well. Currently it support Windows Mobile 6.x. However you will not be able to access this from the usual places – that is, by either going to http://m.mesh.com or by logging into your Mesh Desktop and trying to add a device. You need to go to https://www.mesh.com/Web/MobileDownload.aspx and follow the onscreen instructions to download the installer (.CAB). You can then connect your WM device and install the software through ActiveSync/WMDC.

I always found the Apple "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" ads funny when I saw them - but not for the reasons that Apple thought. Their claims were fairly weird considering > 95% of the world uses PCs with Windows. and not only that, the PCs come in a gazillion different combinations with another gazillion types of hardware and software setups. Whereas Apple has complete control over the hardware and the software that gets installed on their machines - so making their systems work is the least they can do.

 The PC (and by this I mean the generic PC combination whether it be desktops or notebooks + Windows) is a much, much more versatile device and can do so much more. And finally Microsoft is showing people the true story with their new ads. The video ads show people from normal walks of life and some celebrities - all who use PCs for a huge number of varied tasks - showing the true power of the PC. And combined with the Windows Mobile platform (for PDA/SmartPhones) and Windows Live (for services on the 'Net), the PC is at a much more powerful stage than it ever was.

The best part is that you can upload your own videos as well to say how you have been using your PC and how it has affected your life, work and personal way of working. Think of this as a way to show your appreciation for this system.

If you've ever used the Google "office" applications - Google Spreadsheet, Google Docs, etc., you'd have known that saving and using files over the Internet has it's advantages. However, the Google office has some stuff that you can't really do - and that is work with your documents offline and having richer edit capabilities. Imagine being stuck in a long flight without having the documents you need with you on your notebook or a time when you need to create a richer document - with maybe a fancy table of contents, cover page etc.

This is where MS Office really shines. You get extremely rich editing capabilities within it. To those who call Office "Bloatware" and say that 90% of the users use only 10% of the features that Word, Excel and PowerPoint have, all I have to say to them is this: if you ever reach that time when you want more than that standard 10% you use, you'll be extremely glad to find that Office already has it and can ease your burden of doing it considerably.

You can now get the best of both worlds by signing up into the Office Live Workspace for free. It allows you to store, view and edit documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) as well as share and collaborate with others. You can also create lists like Tasks, Contacts, and Events here and store them in specific workspaces. If you've never used SharePoint earlier, this is a good first step to seeing the stuff you can do.

The best part is that the site can get fully integrated with your Office product by simply installing the Office Live Add-in available on the site. (Note: If you're on Vista, you also need to install this update and reboot before using the add-in). Once ready, you can save and open files directly from the Live workspace from within the Office applications. This also gives you offline capability to allow you to work with the documents when not connected to the Internet and then syncing them back to the workspace when you are connected.

There are only two small downsides to this stuff:

1. If you've already worked with SharePoint (WSS or MOSS), you'll find that a lot of features are missing from this hosted version. This is however a good thing so as not to confuse or frighten most people who've never worked on SharePoint before.
2. There is no in-place editing of documents inside the Web browser like in the Google apps. I however prefer editing with all the rich capabilities of Office, but it might be a small deterrent to some.

The Windows Live team has recently taken SkyDrive out of beta and released it officially. This service lets you sign up using a Live ID and gives you 5 GB of free space that you can use to store your files and share it with others - to specific friends or publicly. Overall sounds like a great idea. However, I find that SkyDrive has a number of glaring shortcomings:

1. There is no option to sync files from my machine. This means that I cannot use SkyDrive as a place where I can keep important documents, edit them from another machine and have it sync back to my main machine automatically. I should have been able to say "Sync my Documents folder with the SkyDrive Documents folder every week" or something like that. The Windows Vista Sync Center should have been able to do this as well.
2. I do not get WebDav or FTP access to my space. Which means that there is no way that I can access it without going into the Web site - not something that I'd always want to do - especially if I'm on a low speed or mobile phone Internet connection.
3. The multi-file upload tool that gets installed is pretty useless as well - it cannot upload folders. So if I drop a folder called "Official" which in turn has tens of folders inside it, SkyDrive can't upload it. It expects me to actually create each (sub)folder manually and then upload files into each folder separately.

I guess till these features come up, I'm going to use SkyDrive only as a tool to dump files I want to share with others and don't want to email it to them.

PS. Yes, I know about FolderShare as well - but I have an even longer list of rants against that. :)