Personalized Pages

I’m a big fan of Personalized Pages, which I use to subscribe to feeds from all around the Web, and view them in one single Web page, which is a pretty convenient way to allow me to keep myself updated with recent news.

But when using Firefox 3.0, the Personalized Page service I was currently using, Windows Live Personalized Experience, wouldn’t work nicely. Some of the feeds couldn’t be loaded and I am no longer able to navigate to the various tabs I have.

Thus, I went and tested out the various Personalized Page services like iGoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes and Pageflakes, to decide which service to migrate to, and these are my thoughts.

iGoogle

Pros:

• Google Reader as RSS reader
• Loads of widgets available
• Able to view feeds contents directly by clicking the + beside the listed titles
• Close integration with other Google services (Gmail, etc)

Cons:

• Ugly GUI
• Unable to customize layout (Fixed number of columns)
• lack of beautiful theme choices
• Search bar taking up loads of screen space, (I can Google stuff with my Web browser)
• adding stuff is troublesome
• No OPML import or export (containing all my feeds)
• Unable to drag and rearrange order of tabs.

Virtual Earth Map Control for VS 208

Imagine, just drag-n-drop from your toolbox onto a Web form, set a few properties, without requiring a single line of JavaScript, and you have yourself Virtual Earth on your ASP.NET Web application, with full support of stuff like zooming, panning, AJAX and everything to fulfill…your “mapping” needs.

 

Introducing the Virtual Earth Map Control for Visual Studio 2008, which was unveiled at Remix Australia by Angus Logan in his Windows Live session.

For more information, check out LiveSide.net’s report on it, and the Virtual Earth site. Definitely looking forward to the release!

Event: Remix Essential 2008

Just got news from my MSP manager that Remix Essentials 08 will be held at:

Date	:	27th May 2008
Time	:	9.00am – 1.00pm
Venue	:	Lim Kok Wing University, Cyberjaya

I’ve been hearing “rumours” that Remix 08 will be held at  soon, and I was really looking forward to it.

There will be sessions on stuff like Expression Studio, Windows Live, Silverlight, WPF, and UX. The speakers of these sessions are awesome guys like Leon Brown, Arturo Toledo, Angus Logan, and our resident Silverlight guy, Rohan Thomas.

Unlike the Remix or Mix events of other countries, Remix Essentials 08 is totally free!

On top of that, attendees stand a chance to win a full copy of Expression Studio 2! The seats are limited to a first come first served basis, you’ll definitely not want to miss out, so register right now!

faceOut

Today, I dropped by Silverlight.net and saw faceOut being featured on the right column of the front page.

faceOut is a demonstration application by Infragistics, that is created using the Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 controls included in their NetAdvantage for Silverlight control set, to build a rich interactive, enterprise quality mashup utilizing Windows Live Services.

For more information on faceOut, check it out here. Infragistics have also shared the source code to the mashup, packaged along with the NetAdvantage by Silverlight.

You could also experience faceOut here.

Tafiti, Silverlight & Live powered Searching

Microsoft has just released Tafiti, a mashup utilizing the capabilities of both Windows Live Search and Silverlight search engine, the name “Tafiti” means “do search” from Swahili.

News about Tafiti is HOT around the web, EVERYONE is talking about it! Check out Channel 10, TechCrunch, All About Microsoft, The Universal Desktop, etc.

Animations are sleek, but some of them looks “laggy” (Set Ease In and Out to 100%?), switching search options to different mediums (Web, Images, RSS, Books, News), is great, and its noticeable that there isn’t any page refresh, which makes the application feel much more like a desktop application, thanks to ASP.NET AJAX.

Windows Live Search still ain’t as powerful as Google or Yahoo, thus the results are still not that relevant, but it could all change if Microsoft moves in to buy Yahoo (Seriously?).

The overall effects and feel is still pretty much lacking, and like pointed out by Ryan, the tree view feature (that looks far too cluttered), its a very very viable, and potential feature, and it has been used before, where? WPF News readers, eg: The New York Times Reader, to find out more, check out Tim Sneath’s post on it.

Also, like Ryan Stewart noticed, its very similar to another search engine powered by Live Search, Ms.Dewey, and its absolutely GREAT to see that web search applications would evolve to RIAs, which will definitely will happen in the near future.

The idea of being able to save you’re search results in a side pane is absolutely great, something I’ve never thought of, but always needed. But still, the search result is cluttered, and too much graphics and effects are distracting, unless they come out with something much more simpler (yes, still with animations etc, but simpler), with better functions, nobody is going to use it.

But I don’t think it’ll be an issue, as most of the articles pointed out, the Tafiti project is most probably a test subject….for a much, much better search engine this.

PS: the logo reminds me of Six Feet Under, LOL

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer Beta was released a few weeks ago, and I’ve never really bothered to download it, but after seeing the great comments by lots of people, I gave it a try, and installed it.

It was easy to setup, all I did was install it, and then enter my blog URL, username and password, and VIOLA! Its done, and I could start posting stuff on my blog directly! From the comfort of my desktop! Without needing to use WordPress’s Text Editor! COOOL!

Not only is it easy to setup, its like a free Microsoft Word, and probably better than the blog posting feature of Microsoft Word itself! Why do I say so? Well I’ll list down some cool stuff I’ve noticed: