Microsoft, the cool kid

Windows Phone 8 start screens

The title of this post is something I could not have imagined to say just few years back. But things change, and the technology sector for sure is constantly evolving. I believe things can change dramatically either by innovation or pressure from the competition. In Microsoft's case I think both are prominent.

In the last few years Apple has been growing so fast that everyone else seems to be the underdogs now.  Despite having a small share in the PC market throughout it's history, Apple now dominates the tablet market which many think is the way of the future, "post-PC era" as it's called. Apple's innovation (and overwhelming success) in the tablet and phone market has been the major wake up call for Microsoft.

The Surface tablet from Microsoft. Drool-worthy.

I think they've gotten the message and now, and are taking big and fast moves to change their own identity. With Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and the Surface tablets Microsoft is making their debut as the cool corporation, dumbing the boring, gray old face we've all gotten used to. There is doubt over how Windows 8 will succeed on the dektop/laptop market. But for tablets, it is fantastic. And by bringing their very own tablet to the game, Microsoft clearly states they are serious about it.

So, next fall will be interesting. With Windows products as cool and elegant as Apple's, will Microsoft be able to push it big time into the tablet and phone market? Hard to tell, but when I saw the Surface tablets with their bright, vibrant keyboards/covers, stylish metal chassis and Metro tiles running on it's screen, I was WOW and basically ready to buy. Quite an achievement for Microsoft, a company a regular Apple guy like me so much loathed not so long time ago.

Photosynth and Fhotoroom for WP7

This week was interesting on the mobile photography sector as I took two phone apps into use: Photosynth and Fhotoroom. Here's a quick look into them.

Photosynth


A photosynth I took from Kirjurinluoto recreational area in Pori, Finland. It's easy to embed these synths to your own website if you don't want to give just a link.

First up is something people (using Windows Phones) have eagerly been waiting for: Microsoft's Photosynth that allows full 360° panorama images of the environment. This way you can capture everything you see around you in a way no regular photo ever could. Photosynth has been available for iPhones for quite some time, but now it's finally released for WP7 as well.

Firstly the bad news: on my phone the app seems to crash from time to time, in some occasions right after taking the photos for stitching, losing all the work I've just done. Secondly, the image resolution isn't quite as impressive I had been hoping for. The former is probably caused by bugs, we're talking about 1.0 version after all. As to image resolution, I'm not sure if it's there to stay or might it be upgraded in the future, when phones with more processing power are out.

The good news is that the stitching works surprisingly well. I've used Photosynth on an iPad 2 and that version had serious problem getting things right, but this WP7 version creates full 360 circles and stitches images impressively well. I've only taken few panoramas with it, so this is just my first impression. But none the less, Photosynth is free and you can easily share and save the picture into different places and locations. You can also autosave the image to your camera roll. Oh, and I love the Metro user interface of the app, it's very clear and simple to use.

Download Photosynth from the Windows Phone Marketplace for free

Fhotoroom

A regular photo filtered into a vibrant and tilt-shift blurred image. Some of the available Fhotoroom effects on the right.

You've probably heard about Instaram, the super-popular iPhone (and now Android) app that makes your dull photos into cute and neat little pieces of art. That app is not available for Windows Phone as of now, but that's where Fhotoroom steps in. I find it an extremely good substitute, there's a great amount of nice filters, effects, frames etc. And it's free! On top of that, the user interface looks lovely and it's easy to use throughout (can't say the same about their website..).

Fhotoroom also shows popular and recent images from the Fhotoroom users (a lot of self-posing girls, don't know what's with that =D ). You can easily choose to upload your photos to many popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, but you can just save them to your phone or directly to SkyDrive if that suits you the best.

You can get Fhotoroom from Windows Phone Marketplace for free

Windows 8 on Mac Mini

Ever since I saw the first video clips from the upcoming Windows 8 sometime in 2011 I wanted to see it live and try it myself. The Metro UI was simply looking so fresh and cool, coming from Microsoft after all! Sometime afterwards I started using Windows Phone 7.5 on HTC Radar and Nokia Lumia 800. WP7 also features Metro-styled Live Tiles and UI in many of the apps so it's pretty close to the Windows 8 Metro user interface.

Even despite Windows 8 consumer preview being available to public, for free, I had a problem: I was using a Mac instead of a PC and wasn't planning on buying a PC in the near future. It wasn't until late May 2012 when I got tipped (Thanks to @gadgetero on Twitter!) that the Win8 preview can be run on a Mac with ease, using VirtualBox virtualization software, also available for free download.

So I went and downloaded the Windows 8 consumer preview from Microsoft and VirtualBox from Oracle. I recommend to follow the instructions on OS X Daily.

Installing VirtualBox was very easy as was setting up the virtual machine and it's options. Really nice software! When I was a kid, virtual PC emulators for Mac cost a lot of money so it's cool you can nowadays get such quality stuff for free. Next up was the installation of Windows 8. It crashed during the installation once, but I think it was due to me being away from the computer (Win8 installed faster than I thought!). Despite the crash, I could finish the installation right after reboot with no further problems. Afterwards the VirtualBox Win8 always got stuck in the start up screen, but I could bypass this bug by changing the virtual machine boot order from the settings (Hard Disk as #1 boot drive).

 Windows 8 with Metro UI running on VirtualBox on my Mac Mini.

So what do I think about Windows 8 now that I've gotten the chance to try it? I think it's really great! Instead of the half-empty desktop and static icons I've used to, the Live tiles were truly alive, telling me info without opening the actual app. The ones that were immediately working for me were the E-mail and Weather (after set-up) tiles, but I can only imagine how cool it will be once all kinds of apps are built to utilize the Metro stuff to the max. Many have argued that the big tiles are not suitable for a mouse use on a big desktop computer screen, but I found them rather easy to use with a mouse too and I do love simplistic design. You can get a lot of info just looking at the tiles, plus to me it's like the quick place to launch any of my favorite apps, especially if I see there's some interesting new stuff going on in it. I don't need a gazillion icons (they tend to pile up on my desktop anyways). Of course it's not going to be an optimal start up view for everyone, but you can get to the old style Windows desktop and resource managing with one single click.

I love the vibrant colors, nice little animations and clear, fresh, neat interface Metro has to offer. Time will tell if I feel like that after months of using it, but the first impression is good! I can imagine Windows 8 will rock on a tablet since mobile devices are the ones where Metro is really meant to shine after all.

I have to admit the built-in preview apps themselves were quite buggy and crashed many times. Also my Mac Mini isn't the most powerful machine on Earth so e.g. games were so laggy they were impossible to use. But the basic Metro desktop etc. worked pretty smoothly, albeit not in full screen. But no matter if you're using a Mac or PC right now, you should give Windows 8 Consumer Preview a try, there's no complete escape from it anyway once it starts shipping later this year!

PS. thanks to @gadgetero again for the social links code on the right menu =)

Stockholm in pictures (taken with Lumia 800)

Greetings from Stockholm, the 'capital of Scandinavia'! =) Indeed, this beautiful capital of Sweden can rightfully claim to that title as it is a city with such a long and interesting history. In the 17th century it was the center of one of the most powerful empires in all Europe.

The city has a lot to offer, let it be historical sites, shopping or just the beautiful scenery - the city is located on many island in a spot where Mälaren lake connects to the Baltic Sea. If you're ever traveling there for a couple of days, you should get a Stockholm card to enjoy vast amount of museums and attractions for free! And it works as an unlimited ticket to the public transit too.

This was the one of the first times I left my DSLR camera behind when traveling as I didn't feel like carrying it around anymore and wanted to test if I could capture the memories just with my phone (Nokia Lumia 800). As a result I took over a 100 shots and put them to a gallery for all of you to view (I'll add captions later on). Most of the pics are completely unedited and the panorama shots were taken on-phone with Creative Studio, a free app available for the Lumia phones. Click the link below to view the gallery.

Stockholm travel pictures gallery

Steve Jobs biography

I'm not a bookworm sort of guy at all. In fact, I rarely read any printed material, but the official biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson was something I absolutely had to read. It took me some while to read this massive book, but it was totally worth it.

I must say the first half of the book was far more interesting than the second half. I think this is because of two things: firstly, in the beginning Steve Jobs, Wozniak, Gates and all the other legends of Silicon Valley were inventing the 21st century. It felt to me that so much more exciting stuff happened in the first decades of Apple. Second reason is that I simply remembered some of the stuff in the latter part of the book (I've been Apple user since 1991). Of course the extra details from more recent Apple history were interesting, but still, it's more about the development process of some of Apple's core products of today, rather than the birth of the characters or the tech sector as a whole.

The book didn't reveal anything extremely surprising about Jobs, I knew he was a really, REALLY difficult person. But a genius. Many mock Apple and Jobs, saying that he didn't invent anything since the technical innovations were already existing. But the book depicts well how Jobs visioned HOW the technology should be used in convenient way for the users. Perhaps the biggest news from the book for me was the bizarre diets and other obsessions Jobs had.

I am no book critic, but f you are even a bit interested in technology and IT-history, Jobs, Woz, Gates, Microsoft, Google, Apple or anything related, I think you should read this book!

Storage in the Cloud

These days when Internet connections are fast and everywhere, saving data on local hard drive is rapidly becoming obsolete. Many applications are already running on external servers rather than on the user's computer as well. It's a very fascinating scene - it gives the freedom to save data/apps in one place but use it anywhere, on multiple devices from desktop computers to phones.

"Cloud" services as such aren't entirely a new thing, however. I'd imagine e.g. Picasa Web Albums can be counted as one and I've been using it for years. But it's been a very specific service. Today, there are fully functional web-apps, vast amount of services but also plain and simple cloud storages, They've been around for some time too, but now their use among regular users are exploding, thanks to the extremely user-friendly interfaces (e.g. Dropbox) and system level integration in Mac OS X (iCloud) and upcoming Windows 8 OSes (SkyDrive).

I don't have experience from iCloud (even though I use a Mac), but I've been getting familiar with SkyDrive since I use it a lot on my phone. In fact, I am slowly moving away from physically connecting the phone to my Mac to transfer images and videos, I simply save them from my phone to my SkyDrive folders and they're safe there even if something happened to my phone. SkyDrive actually has automatic image back-up from the phone, but I don't use that (I want to trash bad pics immediately). Same functionality is in iCloud backing up your docs, apps, music, pics etc. automatically. So even if your back-up hard drive was destroyer along with your device, the stuff will still be safe on servers far away, and you can fetch the stuff back. Pretty cool!

Left: SkyDrive app on Windows Phone 7.5. Right: Dropbox icon in Mac OS X.

My version of OS X cannot run SkyDrive application so I can't tell about that, but browsing through the files and folders and uploading stuff is pretty convenient through web browser as well. Dropbox, on the other hand is fantastically integrated into OS X desktop itself, it appears as if it was a local folder. Just drag and drop files and they'll synch into cloud! Ready for you to use on different platforms whenever necessary.

So if you're thinking about getting a back-up hard drive or a new USB-memory stick, think again, they might not be necessary at all! Most of the big players in tech industry are now offering some sort of cloud storages/services, mostly for free! You should check them out.

Update: Google Drive went official today so it joins the competition of the largest Cloud storages. Engadget has put up a nice comparison table
 

Links:

SkyDrive from Microsoft
Dropbox
iCloud from Apple
Google Drive from Google

Titanic - A Night to Remember

April 14th-15th 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the tragedy of Titanic. The world's most luxurious ship sank after hitting an iceberg on it's maiden voyage taking over a thousand lives to a chilling grave. Still today, the story of the "unsinkable" ship remains perhaps the most notorius in naval history. I want to commemorate the occasion as I have always been keen on history and the Titanic disaster became familiar to me after seeing James Cameron's Titanic and reading the book "A Night to Remember"by Walter Lord.

First off I want to give big credit for Cameron and his grande movie. It is a true masterpiece of motion picture. Honestly, I didn't fancy the teen love story in it as I'm not much into romantic movies. To many, just mentioning the movie brings fanatic emotions either for or against Leonardo DiCaprio. To me, the movie was much more important as a whole than just pondering if Leo is an annoying brat or not. I think the setting is perfect for a love tragedy because there was so much tragedy altogether; the plain bad luck that the ship had, the lack of lifeboats, the class distinction and so forth. Just looking at the list of survivors tell you the sad story of how badly 3rd class passengers where treated and I think all that was well told in the movie.

I like it how the movie combines historical drama, action and even some humor. Some times the mix seems to be a little too "Hollywoodish", but mostly I think Cameron handled the story with a great respect to the real events. I must recommend reading the fantastic 1955 book "A Night to Remember" by Walter Lord. It tells the story of the Titanic based on the survivors' stories and strictly based on fact. No additional drama is needed, I might add. Titanic had real-life heroes and real-life villains (or cowards to say the least) and what I really like about the movie is how well they and their deeds are represented. I did a school study about the movie and researched the backgrounds of the people in the small side roles in the movie and they are very recognizable, they even look like their real-life models!

So if you are planning on going to see the Titanic 3D version or just play it from your old DVD, read the book first! It makes the movie much more interesting and (if possible) even more tragic as you know that some of the good people in the movie were real and did their best till the very end.

I recently read how James Cameron changed the starry sky in the movie to match the actual sky on that fateful night at the place of the sinking after having a note from astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think that just shows what kind of a perfectionist Cameron was with this movie project. No regular viewer will even notice the stars have changed places, but as a gesture it's awesome.

May the story of Titanic live on, it truly is a night to remember. Safe journeys.

Image: Paramount Pictures/AP Photo