I have been wonder when technology like this would start to hit the market. The tablet PC was the first step to all this but this is really the future. I think the next 10 years will be a very interesting time for the computer UI.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/65

Now that the PDA has been integrated with the phone can we really handle the phone being integrated with the watch? There is no way I can do all three in one, but maybe the phone and the watch become one and the PDA becomes stand alone again.

Ok so keynote for PDC is over and I must say it was freaking cool. The next year of MS releases is going to rock. We got to see a few demos (All about Vista and Office 12). I am realy excited about getting into this stuff and getting chances to build apps with this framework. Here are some notes from the keynote: 

Vista features:

Alt + Tab (Tab preview) is great now. It has gone from being a second class feature to a prime time feature. You have Tab preview now that as you hit alt+tab it actually gives you a preview of all the open apps so you can see that app you are selecting. There are a few different view modes for this as well. Pretty cool.

Document explorer is pretty sweet now. It has WinFX not running on top of the NTFS file structure so you can have meta data for each file now. This makes searchs much nicer and faster. When you bring up docuemnt exploer you can do all your searches in it on all different types of meta data (You can actually do meta data seraches from anywhere inside Vista now). It also fives you a preview of each of the docs it finds (A very nice layout for actualy previewing and verify it is the doc you want).

Windows vista also has a nice side bar first class feature that comes with some nice built in gadgets that dock to it. You can easly undock it as well. This will be a very nice place for third part gadgets that will be build (keep in mind that the GUI for Vista is much better the XP and a must see).

An additional feature that I am very excited about but it is still a little unclear has to how well it will work and be integrated into web sites and all the programs on the system. The feature is basically parental ratings. It allows you too set on the users account level what type of content the user can access. This means that even though you have Battle Field 2 installed your 6 year old son cannot start it up because his user account cannot access adult content if you have his level set a child. Not sure how well this will integrate into everything (including the internet) but it has a lot of potential.

IE 7 as a lot of you already know has some greated added security features. The best of which I think is phishing. It helps block phishing sites and it also does a great job using the community to keep this database of sites up to date. It also gives you a preview ability for you to preview all the tabs you have open (pretty cool)

One of the best things is a feature called superfetch. Superfetch uses the useage history of your machine to determine what apps and dlls to keep in cache and virtual memeory. The killer part of this is that you can use an USB flash drive with it and SuperFetch will see that usb flash memeory and use it as virtual memory as well!! Now this just rocks! A great way to increase the performance of any machine if you have a USB flash drive. The data that gets put out there is encrypted so no one can steal your data either.

And at last the best part of the day. My $1000 phone for $160. I-mate JasJar MS decided to give a limited number of people a great deal on the phone. So I jumped on my Ipaq phone and got on line and bought it before it sold out (which was before the keynote was even out)!!!!!

For those of you that like having a VS.net command prompt handy all the time.

Copy the following into a text file and change the extention to .reg

Then right click on it and select install. This should make it so whenever you right click on a folder the context menu has a VS.net 2003 command prompt that you can select to open.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Directory\shell\Command Prompt (VS.NET 200&3)\Command]
@="cmd.exe /k \"C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\\Common7\\Tools\\vsvars32.bat\""

So I have started using a new Internet browser called Maxthon. I have always for the most part used IE as my Internet browser because it is more robust and does not crap out on the more complex web apps that I sometimes have to run. I have tried Firefox and Opera before and while I like the added functionality they gave me they would always bomb out on sites or web apps that are above standards. So far Maxthon has been near perfect for me. I gives me the ability to add plug-ins, skins and tabs. It has a great RSS plug in that works great and so far has really impressed me. The RoboForms plug-in has been especially nice because I work I have a number of web apps and test environments I have to log into numerous times though out the day. I think I may have finally found a winner.