New mobile hotmail website

I have been a hotmail user for more than 10 years now. My first email account was actually a mailcity.com account which later became lycos.com. Not many people know about this but there is a mobile version of hotmail website which was specifically designed for small screens and cHTML/xHTML compliant browsers. Since iPhone came out, hotmail users have been asking for a mobile site which would better utilize the capabilities of new generation mobile browsers such as mobile Safari, Opera, Nokia Series 60 devices and future Windows phones. Anyways, over the last eight months my team worked on building the new version of mobile hotmail website and now I am happy to say that it is available to all hotmail users 🙂

Just point your browser to http://m.mail.live.com and experience the new and much improved mobile hotmail.

Note:liveside.net now has an article about this: http://liveside.net/main/archive/2009/02/22/introducing-the-new-windows-live-hotmail-mobile-beta.aspx

 

Perf tuning

Wright has a cool analogy for software performance tuning and also simple suggestions – not your run of the mill ProfileIt,  CacheIt…

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/eric_brechner/archive/2007/11/01/software-performance-what-are-you-waiting-for.aspx

 

 

MyNetflix

I came across this cool Netflix plugin for Windows Media Center. Still in beta but allows you to add movies to your Netflix queue and also watch movies online. Definitely worth a try if you are Windows user and Netflix subscriber.

Yahoo Messenger for Vista…WOW !!!

I recently saw the new Yahoo Messenger demo for vista. If you haven’t seen this, I highly recommend you check it out.
Yahoo has done a good job of showcasing some of the features offered by Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) which comes standard with Vista. WPF looks very promising and I can’t wait to see a bunch of new and creative user interfaces developed using WPF.

Yahoo Messenger is just a beginning. The "Wow" definitely starts now. Wonder how long we will have to wait till WLMessenger starts using WPF…

Java goes Open Source

Today Sun Microsystems announced that it is going to open source its implementation of Java platform as free software. Hats off to Sun Microsystems for taking this bold step. I think this will help the overall Java community. I have spent a better half of my professional career doing Java development. There were times when I was stuck debugging issues which eventually turned out to be runtime issues.

Java platform grew so rapidly, especially server side Java, that it became extremely difficult for Sun Microsystems to stay on top of things. They couldn’t fix all the bugs in time and started lagging in innovation compared to Microsoft .NET. It will be interesting to see how things fold out for Java.

My first feature is live !!!

Yes, thats correct. Yesterday, we released a new version of mobile web and my first feature, which I worked on after joining Microsoft, is now live. woo hoo !!! Can’t you tell I am excited? 🙂

I know it is a very trivial feature – multiple select and move/or delete – but it has been one of the most requested features from our beta customers. Since data plans are still quite expensive, every byte counts on mobile devices so I guess it makes sense to let users apply common actions on more than one item in the Inbox.

You can read more about it here or better yet try it out yourself on your cell phone. Just point your browser to http://mobile.live.com/ and check out all the cool services we now offer.

My personal favorites are local search and the mobile live.com portal. I have customized my live.com web page (PC experience) to aggregate all the feeds, stock quotes, mail and other misc info that I am usually interested in. With Mobile live.com, I can access all of that on my Pocket PC. Neat isn’t? 🙂

TiVo for Radio

Anyone tried Real Player 10.5 lately?  I have had it installed for sometime now but only recently I discovered its "PerfectPlay" feature.
It allows you to tune into your favorite shoutcast radio station and pause or seek within the clip based on your settings which can be set to a maximum of 12 hours.

RealPlayer does it by storing the streaming audio clip onto the hard drive in its proprietary file format. When you close realplayer it erases the stored clip. I tried copying over the clip to a different directory and then tried to open it using realplayer and windows media player but it didn’t work. I need to learn more about .r1m file format…or may be I should find/build a plugin for Windows Media Player so that it can play .pls streaming audio files.

I can open a .pls file in notepad and copy the underlying http url and then play it using windows media player. The sad part is that if I do that it fails to recognize song/artist information from the stream.

Given that .pls is such a basic file format and is based on windows .ini format, I am surprised why it is not natively supported in media player. For now I am happy with RealPlayer’s PerfectPlay 🙂