KludgeHack

Microsoft Works to become a ad-funded product
31 July 2007 in Microsoft & Software | Comments (2)

So, the next Microsoft small-business/home productivity suite is going to be free and ad-funded.

I don’t personally have anything against ad-funded products, mainly because I use some Google products daily, and I’m already used to this notion. I see this as a good way to Microsoft compete with web-based apps like the ones Google offers, with the big advantage of being a desktop application which provides hundreds more features.

MSN Messenger is a long time ad-funded desktop application, and never once I had any “problem” with that.

Microsoft Works 9.0 is now going to be the first productive application of maybe several other application using advertising. Can this type of free ad-funded products be better than the customer-paid versions?

(Original source: Mary Jo Foley – ZDNet)

Log Into Windows Using Facial Recognition Software
26 July 2007 in Software & Windows | Comments (0)

How cool is this? The BananaScreen software lets you login to your computer using facial recognition software.

All you need to use the software is a PC and a webcam. BanananScreen will lock your computer when you move away from it, and, when you return, BananaScreen unlocks the PC in less time than it would take you to enter a password. To use BananaScreen, there are 3 easy steps: download the software, create your face model, then login! Currently, BananaScreen works on Windows 2000 and XP. Vista support is not guaranteed at the moment, but daring users are reporting that it works for them. The site claims that a Mac version will also be available soon.

Its not entirely foolproof (still in beta) so I wouldn’t trust high secured workstations with this authentication method.

(Via makeusof)

Snooping WPF applications
17 July 2007 in Microsoft & Programming & Software | Comments (2)

Snoop is a great utility to explore running WPF applications. It displays the visual tree as well as properties and events.

It can be used to map UI elements to the underlying project classes.

This application is very similar to the famous Spy++, but for WPF applications. You can inspect the insides of any WPF application, including Microsoft Expression Blend (also a WPF application).

“Using such tool can help you climb the steep WPF learning curve.” – Matt Griffith

Some of his main features are:

• Browse the visual tree of running WPF applications.
• Inspect properties of elements at runtime.
• Edit properties of elements at runtime.
• Inspect RoutedEvents that are occurring, including the elements that handle them.
• Magnify sections of the UI.
• Find and debug binding errors.

The only problem I see with this tool is that only works with Windows applications, not Browser-based.

You can download it here and find its official website with the entire documentation here.

There’s also a Matt Griffith screencast that shows the simple use of IronPython and Snoop to explore the Windows Presentation Foundation.

After some use of the tool, I think is very weird they didn’t added this to the coming Visual Studio “Orcas”. Just the same way a web developer can watch its page DOM state at runtime, WPF apps aren’t any different.

Feed to Podcast - Simple Converter
13 July 2007 in Personal Experience & Programming & Software | Comments (2)

Just finished my simple application, named Feed to Podcast, that using a given RSS Feed address, converts the posts to Podcast audio files compatible with the most popular devices iPod, Zune, etc.

The application was built just for fun, leveraging the new APIs available in the .NET 3 (WPF and Speech).

The applications is mainly for Windows Vista users. Although it works on Windows XP, the voice available for default (Microsoft Sam) is really annoying on big texts. Microsoft Anna (Windows Vista default voice) is a step forward to voice improvement. It’s not natural human voice, but there have been improvements.

You can download the binaries here, but you will need the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Redistributable Package (not necessary for Windows Vista) and Windows Media Encoder 9 Series (to encode the audio files).

More information, including the source code can be found here. There’s also some known issues, and more likely some unknown. Please free to stress test the application.

I’m already beginning another WPF application. This time a more complex…