The home for technology enthusiasts in the Microsoft stable (and my first home with the company), Channel 10, recently launched a beautiful site upgrade.

The revised site looks more polished and is easier to read than its previous incarnation. Duncan and the development team also included a shiny new media player with embed code for spreading your favourite videos far and wide.

In the last week, Laura has recommended a great video compression tool, Sarah found a very cool panoramic desktop viewer, and Max linked to a Media Center DVD library tutorial. Stop over and spend some time poking around 10, and don’t be afraid to feed them back ;)

Beginning tomorrow and running through the end of this month, Jonny Knoxville and the Jackass crew will be available online to entertain and gross out for the grand price of zero dollars (which could mean you’re theoretically being paid half a Euro to watch it). After the initial ad-supported run at Jackassworld, the film will be available for purchase online for the truly passionate fan of absurdity. Thank you Silverlight!

(Tim Sneath)

For those of us who have swallowed the blue pill and accepted Facebook as our online social aggregator, Adam Ostrow writes up a new IE Facebook toolbar for Mashable:

 

…Some third-party developers have built My FB Toolbar, a toolbar with much the same capabilities as the official one from Facebook for Firefox. With the toolbar, you receive alerts of new messages, wall posts, friend requests, and other notifications you would typically receive via email. There is also a Yahoo search box, which I presume is how the developers hope to make a little money from their endeavor.

(My FB Toolbar - Mashable)

Joshua Allen recently dug into the rumor that IdentityMine, one of Microsoft’s most valuable partners, uses Macs for their cross-platform interactive design work.

You can imagine my consternation when I visited the offices of such a great partner, and discovered a bunch of their developers and designers using Macintoshes! In this interview, I try to get to the bottom of things and find out why the heck they are using Macs.

Nathan Dunlap demos how he does his day-to-day work using Vista and Expression Blend on the Mac, talks about his favorite software packages, provides some tips and tricks, and more. Be sure to watch all the way through for a humorous anecdote about his Macintosh overheating and melting (I’m not kidding).

(Joshua Allen)

In the future I imagine we’ll have impossibly affordable teams of virtual architects and coders and testers to construct our flippant software ideas into living, breathing wetware. Until that warm and shiny Tuesday though, we have Angus.

I’m lucky enough to have quite a few developers at my disposal (yay!).

If you have a killer idea and want it built out in the form of a Windows Live Quick App (either new or enhancement to the existing ones) tell me!

Should the feature request make the grade; my developers can built it out and the code will be available in the Windows Live Platform Quick Apps in Codeplex.

Either log a job in Codeplex or leave a comment!

(Angus Logan)

Getting a shot at the GDC spotlight certainly sounds exciting. Unleashing the citizens of the Interweb on console gaming is going to be very interesting.

My man Michael Klucher ( who was up all night incidentally, as was Dean) has more of the info you need to know on the release of XNA Game Studio 2.0: http://blogs.msdn.com/xna/archive/2007/12/13/xna-game-studio-2-0-released.aspx

And once you’ve absorbed the new features of the framework and tools, put them to great use in the Dream Build Play contest! Finalists get cash, the chance to intern at Microsoft Research, Lionhead or Rare Game studios, the chance to show off your game at the Game Developers Conference (GDC).

I was so stoked to see the last finalists’ games. Even if you don’t want money, glory, or a new job related to games, make this little pm happy over here in the blogosphere. I loved what people came up with that no one ever expected. They were very addicting. :)_

Live it vivid!

(Betsy Aoki)

For those of you prepping to head out east for the Olympics next year. I don’t see China as an option in the Live Search for Mobile client yet, but then again my phone wouldn’t work over there.

We’ve launched our Live Search Maps site in Chinese ! Not only that but we have street data for China! The first public release supports most basic map and local search features across China with details for 114 cities, plus a Public Transit feature for 11 cities, but without Driving Directions and Public Collections; we will enable Public Collections in the QFE, and add Driving Directions in a future release. Enjoy! CP…(read more)

(Virtual Earth Blog)

Bill Crow comes through with fantastic news about HD Photo. I’ll be trying this plugin in conjunction with Adobe’s built-in support for RAW image processing.

HD Photo plug-ins for Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 and CS3 have been officially released for both Windows and OSX. They’re available now from the Microsoft Download Center.

Here are the separate downloads for Windows and OSX.

The Windows version is supported on Windows XP and Windows Vista, and works with Photoshop CS2 and CS3. While not officially supported, it will also work with limited features with older versions of Photoshop and with Photoshop Elements. The included README file has details.

The OSX version works with both 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard), and supports Photoshop CS2 and CS3.

The features supported on Windows and OSX are identical. The files created with either version are fully compatible with each other and with Windows Vista, Windows Live Photo Gallery, the HD Photo Device Porting Kit, and several other applications that support HD Photo.

I previously posted information about the features provided in the plug-in and an overview of the encoder parameters and what they do. Take a look at previous blog entries here and here. I also gave a presentation at WinHEC 2007 about HD Photo Best Practices. While targeted primarily for hardware developers, the presentation contains a lot of information that may be useful for Photoshop users that want to best optimize their encoder parameters. You can find a copy of the presentation here: WinHEC 2007: HD Photo Implementation Guidelines.

If you’ve been using the beta version released last summer, you won’t find anything new here (other than the removal of the expiration date and the absence of BETA in the name.) All the changes we’ve made since the last beta are under the covers, fixing a couple minor bugs, addressing several theoretical security vulnerabilities and generally bringing the code up to current Microsoft standards for released software. But on the surface, the released plug-ins look and act identical to the most recent betas. Don’t forget that the BETA versions will expire on December 31st, so you should definitely download and install these new released versions.

Once again, I’d like to acknowledge and thank Pegasus Imaging Systems for their participation in the development of these plug-ins.

This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

(Bill Crow)

If the launch of Office 2007 was a new day at the office, is today only your second day on the job?

Here’s the official blurb…

“Wehave managed to complete the engineering work slightly earlier than we anticipated and are making the download available from OfficeOnline.

What can you expect in Service Pack 1?

SP1 focuses on the issues that matter most to our customers based on direct customer feedback and error reporting tools. You can expect:

• Stability.Using data from the Dr. Watson bug-reporting system, we’ve fixed the top software issues for each application in the 2007 Office system. The 2007 Office system SP1 also improves the stability of server components in the 2007 Office system and delivers compatibility with Windows Server® 2008, so you can confidently plan for future upgrades.
• Performance. The 2007 Office system SP1 improves performance in applications and servers. Performance improvements can be found in Microsoft Office Excel® 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007, and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.
• Security. By incorporating incremental advances in security and results from application testing, the 2007 Office system SP1 offers home and office users better protection against malicious software and potential threats to privacy.

Fora full list of improvements in SP1, download the Service Pack 1 whitepaper.

What does SP1 mean for you?

Service Pack 1 eliminates distractions and performance issues that disrupt workflow, allowing employees to be more productive in the work that they do. SP1 is also an important milestone for deploying the 2007 Office system, making it easy to deploy the most secure and reliable version of Office to date.

How do you get it?

Initially, SP1 will be available as a free download from OfficeOnline. SP1 will be made available via Automatic Update in the next 3-6 months, and we’ll issue 30 day advance notice prior to delivering SP1 via automatic update.”

(Mark Bower)

Looks like PDC will be coming back with a vengeance in 2008. The City of Angels will never be the same:

2008 will be a PDC ( Professional Developers Conference ) year. This means that it is going to be pretty exciting time if you are an evangelist at Microsoft, as there are a number of really new things that we are starting to work on that we want to share.

Like with every other PDC ( I feel I have ever known ) this is going to be at the Los Angeles Convention Center again.

So, what are you going to do? Mark your calendars and save the date.

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October 27–30, 2008
Pre-conference October 26, 2008
Los Angeles, California

(Neil Hutson)