There's a whole lot of good stuff in Windows Live. adCentre, Search, Messenger, Single Signon (LiveID, formerly known as Passport), Spaces, Virtual Earth, Expo, Writer and a whole bunch of other technologies appearing weekly

And the great thing for developers is that they're not just "Microsoft Only" technologies... they all have open APIs for you to play with.

You can include functionality in your applications, you can extend functionality, you can integrate with one or more existing services, you can mash them up with other services from just about anywhere.

"How?", you ask. Well, the best place to start is with your imagination, an overview, and the SDKs....

I don't usually just link to someone else's post to say "read this" but Guy Kawasaki often hits the nail right on the head, and this list of ways companies can fail to engage was no exception.

Over the weekend I was reviewing the last few projects I'd worked on before joining Microsoft to make sure there's no lessons I've missed to take forward and it was quite amusing to come in and read a much better list this morning.

One one of the latest projects for instance, against my advice, the client failed on 3 of Guys 14 points. Funnily enough though traffic isn't too bad to the site engagement isn't as high as expected.

Paint.NET is free image editing and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

The 3.0 release introduces a new multi-document interface (MDI), availability in 8 languages, a highly-requested interactive gradient tool, four new effects, a user-definable color palette, lower disk space usage for scratch files, and a generally cleaner and improved user interface.

Paint.NET started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple tool for photo and image editing.

I've been using it for some time now. Photoshop was always cleverer than I was (and had so many options I get scared) - Paint.NET is a perfect fit for what I need day-to-day

"Are you sure you want to...." is the most annoying thing to see.

You don't think, you just click it.

And then think "Oh sh!t bother I didn't mean to do that" because it's the hundredth you've seen today and you've stopped thinking

As Antoine Valot points they don't have them when you want to fire a nuclear missile... and gives a great alternative solution to the problem...

Hope it catches on...

Okay, to be fair it's just the name that is finally dead.

A year or so ago Access Technology purchased PalmSource from Palm. Palm had decided to spin off their Operating System business so they could concentrate on making devices running both on their legacy OS and more advanced devices based on Windows Mobile.

Not much has been heard from the venerable old OS since then - after all, in the last couple of years before the sale they seem to have spent more time re-branding and re-structuring the company when perhaps they should actually have been focusing on their product.

Well finally with some fanfare the next generation of PalmOS has surfaced, and it's called GarnetOS (which if memory serves was the name of one of the forks of the development going on at PalmSource).

A couple of years ago I might have cared. I used a PalmOS powered device and even wrote some shareware apps for it. Sadly PalmOS failed to make ay real advances against the competition and newer, shinier Windows Mobile devices started appearing.

I made the switch, and haven't really looked back. Sure there's a huge number of PalmOS applications out there but with the advent of emulators like StyleTap and the growing Windows Mobile marketplace there's no reason to limit yourself to a PalmOS powered device any more.

Sure, I have fond memories of my Palm devices (original 3com Palm, Palm III and V, Clie NX70 and UX50) but I don't think Garnet will be shiny enough to tempt me back to the platform, despite it's new owners and new name.

One thing that's harder than it should be on the interweb (and especially when blogging) is citation (linking to a specific bit of text) in order to direct your reader to the source of the citation or the exact part of the product spec or simply the funny quote.

If the author has gone to the trouble of adding an anchor tag to the specific item you want to link to then the world is easy, you just link to http://some.url/page.html#the_anchor and the world is good and you can cite content from the site to your hearts content, but if it's a random extract that page author had no way of knowing that you'd care about then it's a lot harder (also if it's a site that for some reason doesn't think people will ever cite it can be difficult).

Luckily CiteBite has the answer. Simply select the text you want to highlight on the page, the URL and give then to CiteBite (they have a bookmarklet and a Firefox extension to make that easier) and it generates a URL for you that you use instead of the direct link (similar to TinyURL and other services).

When a user follows the CiteBite URL they get taken to the destination page with the selected text highlighted so it's really easy to find. Apart from a discrete "shade" at the top of the page telling you that you were linked via CiteBite there's no interference with the result.

To see it in operation, follow this link....

I've noticed one or two pages suffer some slight CSS related interference when linked via CiteBite, but nothing really ugly so far (mostly positioning getting shifted by a couple of pixels) and clicking the "Turn CiteBite Shade Off" removes any interference.

I hope they don't need to go down the route of interstitial advertising, banner ads on the shade or anything naughty (like rewriting the destination page with their own ads) but I can't see how as this service becomes more popular they'll be able to sustain the service outside donations and/or a paid premium service

It's a little thing, but it bugs me every time it happens. I go somewhere that I have a WiFi account with (eg t-mobile at Borders), power up my laptop or pull out my WiFi enabled cellphone and expect to surf the airwaves...

But no.

Even if all I want to do is sync my Outlook I still have to go into my web browser and fill in some extra credentials on their web form before I'm authenticated on the connection.

At Tullys I can't even complete the form in PocketIE so I can't make use of their WiFi with my phone.

At least on the corporate network I get a prompt from the WiFi connection to enter my username and password (but I wish it remembered them, rather than asked me every time).

Would it be so hard to set these hotspots up so that however it needs to work I can store the relevant credentials in the same way I can store the SSID and my WPA2 password?

WiFi may well becoming more ubiquitous but until I can use it everywhere without worrying about roaming, who I have an account with and what credentials I need to log on (and how to do that for each particular service) it's not going to become an invisible technology.

Heck, I often find myself using the EDGE/GPRS data connection on my phone to sync Outlook because it's quicker and easier (I do have a flat rate data plan luckily)

Anyone got any suggestions, tips or handy tools to make this easier?

Update: Excellent news for Vista users... it appears for the first 90 days after the Jan 30th launch Vista mobile users will have free access to t-mobile hotspots ;)

Before the iPhone launch with all it's associated oh's and ah's including the much touted Visual Voicemail there was already a better way to deal with voicemail on your cellphone.

GotVoice is a free application which can connect to your cellphone providers voicemail system, download your messages and deliver them as MP3s to your email. It doesn't quite give you the same in-phone experience as offered by the iPhone experience but for some it would provide a very convenient platform. It would be very cool if it could include some smart metadata with the audio file to make it easier to call the person back or pass details on - a small Outlook plug-in to react to that data would be cool. As an extension a Windows Mobile or J2ME app that can also collect the message and let you listen / manage them on your smartphone would be a logical extension - especially if they can get it to market before the iPhone ships (network locked, so anything delivering this to customers of other networks will have a market).

Before that though Avaya had a product - also called Visual Voicemail that provides the same capabilities for your office voicemail on your cellphone.

Given that these technologies already exist in the marketplace I wonder how many of Apples 200 patent applications will be rejected as obvious or covered by prior art.

What I'd love to see if a truly integrated solution that takes what integrated communications does for me in the office today and through whatever combination of magic is required consolidates email, office phone, IM (Windows Live Messenger and Communicator) and my mobile and make sure I have access to what matters to me, where I need it, when I want it - without worrying about physically where the call came in or where the email was routed.

Not that I'm a communications addict ;)

Well, try spending time in First Life (FL) ... it's even more realistic and can be even more disorientating than the Linden Labs artificial reality that is Second Life (SL).

There are a number of advantages that FL has over SL - no server lag (unless you're hung over) high resolution imagery with no performance cost, a client you can use everywhere (even when there is no 'net access) and no need to log out when it's time to eat.

Try it today.

In many of Microsoft's products - Windows Live Messenger; Windows Media Player; Visual Studio, SQL Server; Office and even Vista there's a small checkbox hidden away that lets up opt-in to the various Customer Experience Improvement Programs.

These collect some pretty generic, high level data about what's going on when you use the products and feeds it back to the relevant labs to help them identify functional or workflow products and improve them in later versions. In the case of "live" products they can also help to track down and fix service quality products.

A good example of why you should always make that little effort to turn it ON is outlined in this tale from Wendy the Mighty (one of the testers on the WLM team).

Slightly less entertaining, but nevertheless valuable is this outline of what CEIP is and how you can help. It's not so MS can grab all your personal information, spam you or target you with customized advertising. It's about how you can help improve the products and services you use every day