The season for Flues and Colds is here again and I just had to share this:

My Moo MiniCards finally arrived!
The Moo MiniCards are like a ‘hip’ little full color business cards that can also teach us a lesson in product innovation – mutating a standard product we all know by changing some of its properties to make it unique.
By making they’re card about half the size of a standard business card and featuring a a full-color picture Moo turned their product from the same old business card everyone is making to a unique and interesting product that creates a buzz (and a brand).

Designing these little cards is a simple process as Moo connects to your Flickr account and provides an simple interface to select and manipulate the pictures you want printed.
On the back side you can put a thumbnail and some text. I decided to go with the ‘modern’ look with just my name and my homepage address.

Now I need to start passing them along… Maybe TechEd

Oh, and you can also turn them into small magnet cards… Nice…

Some more pictures on my Flickr set….

Tags: Flickr, Innovation, MiniCards, Moo, Moo Cards

When I came to the office today I had a package waiting on my desk with its content marked as “crystal cube”.
I was surprised to open it and find a “Thank You” note and a crystal cube from the Visual Studio 2008 team for “lasting contribution you made to Microsoft Visual Studio”

I wonder what exactly did I do to deserve this “Ship-It” award…

Here are some pictures:

Tags: Microsoft, Visual Studio 2008

I wish I had a PhD in guitar acoustics like Dr Mark Lewney…

I have two monitors. I want to open two PowerPoint presentation, place each one on a different screen and then easily edit and copy paste from one to the other. That’s what multiple monitors are for…

I remember this was possible in previous versions but it seems but it seems the new Office 2007 doesn’t like multiple screen users.
It seems PowerPoint 2007 (and the rest of the Office applications too) only allows a single program window which hosts the different presentations inside it.
The only solution I could find was to stretch the window over both screens and then use the Arrange All button under the View tab.

Anyone has a better solution?

Ayelet asks Which Is Your Favorite Social Network and Why?

I think a more interesting question is to which suck social networks site people are willing to pay for use or for access to extra features.

The two social network sites I mostly use are Flickr and LinkedIn.
I Flickr Pro account. Why? Because its very very cheap and I’m willing to spend such a cost to gain all new features a Pro account has to offer (all pictures are visible, unlimited storage and upload bandwidth…)

I’m not paying on my LinkedIn account. Their cheapest plan is 20$ a month and for what?! So I could use “Who’s View My Profile”?
I don’t feel like LinkedIn is giving any value for the money they ask. At least not for me… (I guess its more useful to recruiters, HR, etc.)

So you pay to any of the social network sites you’re using?

The Windows Media Player team announced a new plugin that enabled watching Windows Media Player content on Firefox:

Have you been itching to enjoy your media content on Firefox?  The Windows Media Player team put a lot of work into evolving media playback on Windows Vista through the new Media Foundation pipeline, and has also been actively monitoring feedback on WMP and playback in general.  While commentary has been mainly positive for Web playback through IE, we’ve noticed that there’s still work to be done to make Firefox users able to enjoy their media content on Windows…

Links:

• Full announcement post
• Plugin download page

• Here is an interesting list of 30 Lessons From an Early-Stage Startup. I fond the following gem kinda funny:

  4. Do understand that brilliant programmers are never on the job market. They are here, here, and unfortunately here.

• Adobe released Actobat® 8.
• In a rather obscure announcement, Microsoft Max closed its doors. I wonder what happened that got this project canceled in such a sudden way and if Microsoft will at list release the source codes as sample.
• S. Somasegar writes about Office 2007 development tools and also mentions Duet (“Microsoft Duet” ?!). The following quote is a bit misleading:
  
  

  Microsoft Duet is a prime example of an Office business application, as it demonstrates how the 2007 Office system can be used to surface and work with SAP data.

  Duet does not support Office 2007 (yet…) but it does serve as a fine example on how Microsoft’s Office system can be used as a frontend for business applications. Office 2007 exposes new APIs that allows better integration than its predecessors and hopefully it’ll be easier to work with…

• XamlPadX – Lester wrote an extended XamlPad with new features that include:
  

  1> 3 additional toolbar buttons (with some color )
  2> A xaml writer which parses the object back into xaml and vice versa
  3> Simple command interpreter with limited intellisense (please look at help window for limitations)..
  The interpreter can use either the Name given to the control (<TextBox Name=”tb”/>) or if the name is not provided in xaml then the object can be passed to the interpreter through the VisualTreeExplorer context menu (see image)
  4>Possibility to add custom snippets through a xml file (currently only 3 categories/ main nodes are read and the structure should be as followed in the attached xml file. Only one level of nestedness is supported which is actually more than sufficient)
  5>Viewer of default styles
  6>Color pallette – color chosen depends on mouse movement. Once color is decided perform a mouse click to finalize… Its also possible to chose from the different shades of a particular color (2nd box) . again a mouse click finalises the color in this box. The third box shows the color chosen
  7> Find/Replace/Goto commands in the xaml editor

  You can check it out on these posts:

• • XamlPadX (extended)
  • XamlPadX (update)

• What did we learn from Windows Vista?
  MJF sits down with Jim Allchin to find out and we get a very open, honest and frank insight in to the building of Vista.
• Jeffrey Stewart lists180 Useful Questions for Launching a Business
• I’ve posted before about the fact that layered windows are rendered via software on Windows XP.
  This post at MSDN explains some more on the subject and shows that software rendering, in some cases, can be faster than hardware…
• S. Somasegar posted about WPF and the Vista user experience comparing the work on a successful software application to the work on the Taj Mahal.
• Windows Desktop Search (WDS) 3.0 has been released to the web. You can download it from one of the following links (depending on your OS version):
• • Windows Desktop Search 3.0 RTW for Windows XP (KB917013)
  • Windows Desktop Search 3.0 RTW for Windows XP x64 Edition (KB917013)
  • Windows Desktop Search 3.0 RTW for Windows Server 2003 (KB917013)
  • Windows Desktop Search 3.0 RTW for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (KB917013)

• The Vista Shell Blog publishes a list of keyboard shortcuts for Vista.
• Roman published a very comprehensive list of WPF bloggers.
• csharpformat is a site with a script that generates Html for C#\Xml\etc. code snippets. Very useful for blogging…
• There are some updates on Google Finance. There are now comparison charts, new chart settings and features, more market data, and the ability to import portfolios from other sites.
  I only wish it had information from Tev Aviv’s stock market, or that one of the Israeli finance sites (globes? themarker?) would provide us such user experience.
  Yahoo! Finance also has added new features as well…

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